Against dailiness: Time and attention in poetry

Lately, I’ve been trying to make some changes.

I’m trying to be kinder. Trying to watch less news. Trying to be more giving, more contemplative, more focused. Trying to soften.

I’m also trying to change the way I write, and to be gentle with myself as I do. I recently lost my friend and mentor Michelle Boisseau, a superb poet and an incomparable teacher of poetry. I was lucky enough to have her in my life for almost three decades, having met her when I was an undergraduate at Morehead State University. The first poem I handed her then was about rainbows. She handed back instruction in how to be deeply authentic—to live observantly well below any rainbow—and I was instantly hooked. That was how I began my life as a poet.

Michelle’s last advice to me had to do with my habit of writing daily poems—a practice that has been important to me, almost like meditation, for years. But a few months ago, she asked me why I was so keen on poem-a-day projects. Why didn’t I invest more time—go further in?

It had been years since my mentor had offered direction about my poems, and I wasn’t sure what to do with this guidance. Daily writing was how I worked. I specialized in small poems, sonnet-sized or below, and I labored over the page, putting hours into crafting each piece. There was nothing light about my labor, nothing throwaway about my poems, and I stand by the work. Still, I couldn’t deny it—there was something to what Michelle was telling me.

I’m realizing more and more that I have trained myself to pay big attention to small things—status updates and tweets. Magazine articles. Songs and sitcoms. Nothing in my daily life prepares me for sustained thought, and very seldom do I return today to an idea that was percolating yesterday. Each day brings some new cynosure.

Of course, we can think of many important poems that were substantively completed in a day. The Romantics offer plenty of examples. Think of William Wordsworth, practically running as he approached his door after a ramble, “Tintern Abbey” ready to spill from his head. Or think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, frantic to record “Kubla Khan” in the moments between waking from an opium-enhanced dream and the unfortunate knock on the door by that damnable Porlockian.

But my little poems about my life aren’t the same as these. Maybe they have more in common with Emily Dickinson’s work—her poems born complete on the back flaps of envelopes. I know I flatter myself with any of these comparisons, but I’m thinking about process as much as product, and of that part of writing that occurs far from the page, as we noodle and observe.

I should note that I see my friend’s advice as very targeted—a suggestion meant specifically for me, a midlife poet with a book under her belt and another on the way. This probably isn’t something she would have said to a beginner, for whom experimentation and variety can be richly instructive and rewarding. I think she was offering particular advice from a mature poet to a maturing one, and it had to do with allowing myself to follow my thoughts well into their depths, rather than staying at or near the surface.

When I first knew Michelle, she advised our university literary journal, called Inscape. It is not lost on me that the concept of inscape, that term coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is in back of her suggestion. I don’t think Michelle was telling me to labor more over prosody (although that’s not a bad idea, either). I think she was seeing the potential in me to explore the inscape of me and everything around me, and she was giving me permission, in a life built of student compositions and editing projects and PTA meetings, to probe the thingness of things, the instress.

It feels incomparably fine to be recognized as someone whose insights might matter. When I sit at my desk, though, this new challenge is a bit of a burden. I’d like to tell you the astonishing thing my young son said in his sleep, or maybe describe what the sun did to the remnants of the ice storm in the trees. These are not new thoughts, but they’re beautiful ones, and I’d like to nudge them around a bit, see where they take me. But I have something big to say, and I can’t be sure that ice-coated branches will get me there.

Of course they can. What I mean is that I’m not sure how to get to a big there from my very modest here. There’s no map, and the way is not direct. And that’s the real poetic challenge, and one I hope I’m up to—my new job is to lay down that path.

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A Writer's Spirit Prompt #8

You’ve probably been informed that there are things you can’t do. Center a poem. Start a poem with a definition. Start with waking or end with sleeping.

But don’t some poems demand to be written in a way the workshop hates? And isn’t that the pure pleasure of leaving the workshop behind? The people who told you that there couldn't be a good essay on ___, or that no one needs another ___ story, or that there are too many poems about ___—they’re off somewhere, not writing about whatever it is they prohibit, and here we are, left to our devices, free to write about sex or motherhood or cancer or all three at the same time.

Your challenge today—again, a contemplative challenge instead of a poetry challenge—is to write down every rule anyone has ever tried to give you for your poetry. That includes anything you’ve heard outlawed or mocked by professors, classmates, or editors, and it also includes anything you’ve been telling yourself.

Read over your list when you’re done with it. Such a constipated way of thinking about poetry is at least worth a good laugh. Maybe, too, there’s a prompt in it. You could write a poem right now that is centered, or that has a single obvious rhyme, or that contains an obvious bookend, or that uses the word “love” like it’s your turf or something.

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That daily poem is not your symphony

The daily poem is a staple of National Poetry Month. Practically every poet I know is part of an April 30/30 project, cranking out a poem each day, offering and receiving instant feedback, responding to prompts or forging ahead on their own projects.

I often work in projects, and particularly daily projects, throughout the year. It doesn’t have to be April for me to be working on a new poem each day. I have meditation-related projects, where I think intently on a subject and write about it in a discrete poem every day; I also sometimes observe seasons—liturgical, hemispheric … even sports seasons.

It’s a lively way to operate as a writer, and when the theme of the project is constant, it’s one way of going deep the limited time available in a busy life. I like the energy of this kind of challenge, and it’s sort of fun to see the poems pile up. Obviously, some of them are no good, but some have life beyond the challenge, and these seem to make the whole exercise worthwhile.

Recently, though, a mentor said something rather thought-provoking to me. We were enjoying a rare in-person visit, and she pulled me aside to tell me, “You know, I don’t really understand this poem-a-day thing. To what point?”

No one had ever really put that question to me before, and it’s rather substantial one—why do you operate the way you do? And while there was an element of real curiosity in my mentor’s question, the gentle critique was there, too. Is a poem the product of an available hour? Or should poetry do something more substantial?

Most of my favorite poems were the product of longer contemplation. Maybe an exception can be found among the Romantics, who took long walks or did copious amounts of drugs and then wrote like the wind, with a draft in a single sitting (or, in the case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” a partial draft, lost when that single sitting was interrupted). But then there’s William Wordsworth, rewriting The Prelude his whole life (when he should have quit while he was ahead).

The contemporary lifestyle doesn’t allow for long, focused contemplation. We have work and family—not always the case for writers through the ages—and we have huge houses (and no staff). What we don’t have is quiet—Xbox or the big game in the next room, playdates and ringing phones, projects after the work day, pets.

There have always been distractions. I’m just not sure we’ve ever known our current level of distraction, or that we’ve ever had quite as much vying for our mental energy.

But what if we did devote more focused attention to a single poem, instead of one a day? What if all of April’s writing activity resulted in only one poem—and not even a long poem, but a fine one, the poem that makes all other poems seem a little less necessary?

What if we cultivated a contemplative spirit instead of a quick one? What if we toyed with the idea of a masterpiece, instead of a lot of minor pieces?

I was talking about this today, and a musical analogy occurred to me. These daily poems play an interesting role in the life of a poet. They keep us limber, and they train us to think like a poet does—a little obsessively, prying beneath the surface of things. They hone our skills, much like finger exercises keep a musician limber.

But where’s my symphony? Or where’s my concerto, at least?

Maybe I’m squandering my poetic life on arpeggios. And maybe for me it’s time to think past the daily poem.

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