Morning Pages and poetry

For a few days now, I’ve been on the Morning Pages train—something I’d heard a lot of writer friends talking about, so I thought it might be worth a try.

Morning Pages (which, by the way, I always find myself capitalizing, even in my own Morning Pages!) are a method devised by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way as a way to overcome obstacles to creativity. It all comes down to filling three full handwritten pages first thing in the morning with whatever material comes to mind. An essayist friend swears by them, and I’ve seen them touted by business people and efficiency experts, too.

As a poet, I’m on the fence about Morning Pages. My sense is that they are a great tool for prose writers, but not necessarily a good idea for poets.

Psychologically speaking, I’m all for Morning Pages. I find that I’m foregrounding my emotions and understanding them a bit better. Feelings I ordinarily try to squelch, like anger, are there on the page, like a frog splayed out and pinned to a dissection pan. I can poke around in my anger—cut my way unevenly in, locate and nick its spleen—and then I’m done dealing with it. If I were a florist or a hedge fund manager or a barista, I’m sure I’d be a much better one for the experience.

For a writer, Morning Pages can be a chance to suss out ideas. Through this morning writing, I’ve generated several essay ideas and blog post topics. (This year, I’m focusing on the creative process here, and my Morning Pages are full of ideas on that subject.) What the practice does, as I see it, is un-muddle my thinking and offer more focus and clarity.

But that’s sort of the problem, from a poetry standpoint. Poems—or maybe I should specify my poems?—rely on the muddle. They start with it, much like a good Bourbon Old Fashioned, with its first step of muddling sugar and bitters. If I achieve clarity through my Morning Pages, what am I left with when I sit down to write? The answer might be … nothing. I’m new enough at the practice that I’m just not sure.

Morning Pages allow me to take a thread and follow it into the center of a knot, or trace a pen stroke to the heart of a scribble. But for me, at least, that’s what a poem does. I go to the page with nothing in mind, just the mess I carry with me, and with pen in hand, I am able to resolve some small thing, at least for a short time. The poem remains as an artifact of that struggle.

It used to be that writers were told they had to live interesting lives to find their subject matter. Be Ernest Hemingway! We later decided that adventures weren’t necessary, and that everyone carries inside all the material she’ll ever need. As a result, I’m afraid we’ve ended up with a lot of stories about the life of a grad student, or the minor agonies of a twenty-something in a nowhere job. Be Janet Strugglingwriter! I feel like there is some middle ground between the two extremes.

And this has relevance to my uncertainty about Morning Pages. They’re tremendously clarifying, and they’re probably very good for my mental health—but I think the act of writing them short-changes me when I come to the poetry page. I think I get a glimpse how the motel housekeeper felt when she came to our room when I was a kid on vacation, and she found that my mother had already cleaned the place and tidied the beds. The difference? The housekeeper probably didn’t really want to make the bed. I, though, would genuinely like to write a poem.