Why poetry? It's how we deal with the blob

This morning my son asked me why I write poetry.

I wasn’t actually aware that Keats (yes, I named my son after the Romantic poet) even knew I wrote poetry, or had much of a sense of what poetry is. He’s six, so he’s exposed to more poetry than he will be as he grows older — Dr. Seuss and other picture books, the little songs we sing.

I was surprised to be asked this question, and gratified, too. He sees me living and moving through a slightly separate world than his own. I’m not sure if I thought of my own mother in terms outside of myself at this age, even though I saw her in her nurse’s uniform every night as she walked out the door to care for patients in the cardiac unit.

It’s good to be seen by the people who love us.

It’s hard to answer this question for someone so young, and I had to take a moment to think of what I wanted to say.

“Remember that dream you had the other day?” I asked him.

He had told me about a dream where he was in a building and a big blob was taking it over, inflating into the hallways and bulging out of doors and windows.

“You thought about that for a long time,” I reminded him. “You wondered what the blob was and how it got there.”

He remembered. The dream both scared and fascinated him, and it clearly stuck with him. He asked me about it more than once. Where did the blob come from? Would it come back to another dream?

My poetry is just a written version of his thoughts about the blob, I explained. Sometimes our thoughts take over, and we work hard to make sense of them. For me, the words that I attach to this process are not rooted in regular syntax. I don’t think about big truths in grammatical sentences, and neither does he. Instead, words and images come, and I find myself trying to make connections.

What I said to him simplified this idea a bit.

“I write poetry because my thoughts are too big for regular words,” I said.

He nodded. He knew just what I meant and was satisfied.

Making the most of pockets of time

I’m finding myself pressed for time these days—and “pressed” is a perfect word for it. When you press down hard on something, something has to give. Something goops out the side. When the hours of my day are packed full, what goops out for me is my writing.

Why writing? I think it may be because it’s something I’m not rewarded for, and no one is depending on it. There’s no paycheck linked to my completion of a sonnet. My short stories don’t need homework help. I’m not married to my essays.

And there’s another, bigger reason, too: Writing is hard. It has its technical challenges, obviously, but I’m talking about something a little different here. Good writing, even if it’s the wildest, most impersonal fiction, gets down into our messy inner places. If it’s good, it digs into us, and that’s uncomfortable—even painful at times.

It becomes easy to avoid our writing when our time is limited. We may continue to make time for social media or TV shows, but isn’t it true that writing well requires more time than that? We can passively poke around the digital world while doing other things, but writing requires our whole selves, and it’s not something we can easily hop in and out of.

In most days, I find that I have brief windows of time that no one has a claim on. I’m talking about the ten minutes in the school pickup line or the five minutes on hold with the cable company. As an instructor, maybe it’s the fifteen minutes of in-class writing time I assign my students, or five minutes in the parking lot after work.

These windows aren’t enough for me to write something. Even a small poem requires time for reflection; I’m not just putting down words. But they are useful for keeping the pump primed, the flow going. Lately, I’ve been trying to make the most of my pockets of time, so that when I do have an hour or more of writing time, I’m not empty. There’s something right there at the surface I can draw on to begin.

For those in the same position I am, here are a few five-minute jump-starts I’ve found useful:

Listing. Listing is such a powerful creative technique. A quickly generated list is weird and associative, and it’s practically self-propelling. One item flows into the next. When our inner censor is turned off, we can make surprising connections—the same kinds of connections I love to make in poetry. A journaling type of list is one possibility (“Ways to make more of my time”), but we can also go in a more creative direction (“Ten things I didn’t expect to find on Mars,” or “Reasons I choke on water”). The more fanciful, the more I like them.

Character sketches. This seems like a fiction exercise, but writers in any genre can stay limber by writing a character sketch, or even a description of a real person. I wrote a poem not long ago about my junior high government teacher, who sexually harassed me and treated me very cruelly (#MeToo). Before I wrote about him, I worked to remember him—the sheen of sweat on his upper lip, his nipple-high trousers. My character sketch didn’t end up in my poem, but the vivid memory of this man prepared me to tell my (tardy) truth.

Word associations. This is just what it sounds like. I start with a word, and then I write a new word that the first word calls to mind. I try to avoid forming any kind of narrative; writing in columns down the page instead of in paragraph form is a helpful strategy. I think it must be a characteristic of our minds that we try to make meaning and build associations. What looks like a list of words often tells a secret story, usually about ourselves.

Haiku. If we wanted to write a worthy haiku, we would need much more than a brief window of time in which to do it. This is far from a throwaway form, and I have a great deal of respect for it. But when we’ve pulled forward at the fast-food drive-thru to wait for our fries, we can bust out a quick three lines based on whatever is visible through our windshield. Not everything we write is for posterity, or even for publication, and a pocket-of-time haiku keeps our observational powers honed.

Create a prompt. This idea comes from fiction writer Michael Czyzniejewski, who says he often uses moments when he’s on the run, walking from here to there or standing in the grocery line, to think of a way he can be creative later. When writing time becomes available and we hit the page with a prompt in mind, we save some time that we might otherwise spend trying to decide what to write about.

Envision a revision. I suspect all writers have memories of good ideas that didn’t take off, or any number of failed drafts. Why not take five minutes to apply a new perspective to those pieces? I’ve always found time and distance useful to solving my composition problems.

Read. We can always benefit by sticking a book in our bag to provide inspiration. I also love reading short pieces online. A great place to read the best flash fiction around is SmokeLong Quarterly, and for nonfiction, I love the essays and brief craft pieces in Brevity. I also like to read a poem and noodle over it for a bit, just to see where it might transport me.

Give a lecture. This is embarrassing, OK, but I’m going to put it out there. Sometimes I like to give little lectures to imaginary classrooms about some aspect of writing. It’s just a thing I do when I’m by myself, maybe driving a long distance. The thing about lecturing is that the lecturer is forced to clarify her own thoughts before communicating them with others. The faux lecture, an apparent act of foolishness, can actually be very instructive.

Even the busiest person can eventually carve out an hour or two. These five-minute exercises can keep us limber enough to make the most of our time when our lives allow it.

A Writer's Spirit Prompt #7

I seem to remember that as a child, I spent a lot of time in proto-science activities—splitting the stalk of a dandelion with my thumbnail to see the milk inside, watching the weird slow-fast morph of clouds, looking for the source of the birdsong. I remember the simple amazement of dirt, and how black it was beneath the surface, and what little things were in it--bugs and stones and tiny snails.

In keeping with yesterday's prompt, engage in a little proto-science today. Recapture that feeling of having a child's sharp senses, and explore anything handy—what’s in the dark recess under the porch, what the inside of rock looks like if you break it, what the cat's footprint looks like. Just look and wonder. And as always, write if you want.

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A Writer's Spirit Prompt #6

Set aside some time today to recapture a memory of your distant past. I just did this myself. I went to the school playground all by myself and I picked out a swing. Remember that? You’d go to the swing set and look for one that was just the right height, and you’d settle in and kick off—feet pointed forward for coming and knees bent for going.

I lost some time swinging. I tried to recapture the pure memory of the motion while I forgot everything about my actual day. It worked, too. It took very few backs and forths before my musculature took over. My quadriceps remembered; my gluteus maximus; my hamstrings; my Achilles tendon. And my mind cleared itself of minutiae, and when I was done I was ready to do a writer’s work.

There are plenty of ways to reconnect to that child self, it occurs to me. I could finger paint or make cookies; I could record my height on the jamb of the door. Choose a physical action from your childhood and give yourself over to it. Afterwards, if writing comes ... let it. Maybe your child self has something to say.

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I hope you’re enjoying this series of prompts, which are not for poems, but rather for fostering a poetic mindset, without the pressure a poem-per-day prompt set sometimes carries. Please consider subscribing to this blog so you don't miss a prompt—offered every day in April, National Poetry Month.

A Writer’s Spirit Prompt #5

Today, we kick out the stool.

Remember yesterday’s prompt? You recorded your habits, preferences, and rituals, as if you were an anthropologist, studying a culture. Today, you mess with that culture. Did your subject (you) require morning writing time? Write in the evening. Did you require a computer? Use pen and paper; use crayon to really shake things up. Change your place, your time, your tools, your habits of mind. And do some gentle writing—no expectations. What happens? Does the writing change?

On revision: When enough is enough

Gustave Flaubert, nearly done

“A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.” Poet and essayist Paul Valéry wrote this, and it’s often quoted—but I don’t buy it.

I’ve finished hundreds of poems. A whole bunch of them, maybe most of them, stink up the joint and aren’t worth reading, but they’re done, and I’m fine with that. They’ve been fully worked over to the best of my ability. 

I have some good poems, too, and I’m pretty sure my poetic failures were part of the cost of those. A lot of being a poet is just showing up at the desk—working the seemingly malfunctioning pen until the ink starts to flow. 

There are days the idea never gels and the inspiration never strikes. Poetry is made of both of these—an intellect that puzzles and proposes, and a genial spirit that visits with gifts. I’m of the opinion that fascinating poems can come from either source—the thoughtful mind or the flash of inspiration. But my favorite poems are a true mix. There are long stretches of days where I labor over my writing and try to get the ideas down just right, and then, finally, I take a look back and see … something other, something I didn’t put there.

I don’t think it’s magic. It’s not the automatic writing or psychography of nineteenth century spiritualists. I’m not channeling spirits; my page has not turned Ouija. What I think might happen is that total concentration on my rhetoric distracted me from something fascinating that happened with the much more basic interplay of words. The brain is wired to make connections, and while I’m shoring up a irrefutable rebuttal with my conscious mind, another part of me is building something beautiful.

Nevertheless, on the page, it looks a lot like grace.

I’m having a hard time tracking down the definitive word on this—I don’t think it exists—but I’ve  read that something like 70 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriages, most before the pregnancy is even detected. That’s a wiggly statistic, but a good comparison to what happens in poetry. A zygote could divide and grow and manifest and save us all, or we could flush it down the drain, never knowing it was there. All the potential in the world may go unrealized.

In that same way, I’ve had some really wonderful ideas for poems while buying apples, or in a student conference, or while stuck in the car line at school. Sometimes there’s a scrap of paper to save it on, but so often we return to our desks and don’t even remember we have a purse full of scraps. Should we pull one out, it probably wouldn’t make sense to us anyway. That handful of quick words wasn’t the idea—that wasn’t the gift. When ideas come to us and we’re not in the receiving position, often, they fly onward. They tend not to revisit us after they found us unready.

A friend asked me how to tell when a piece has been over-revised. I think we have to gauge its energy. Have we sanded every corner of it? I hope not, because a poem or essay or story needs some splinters, doesn’t it? We even talk about how a particular writer might get under our skin—how her words might needle us.

A piece is overworked when it lacks danger. There is a difference between offering all the information a piece needs and in shutting down every potential question. I find it useful to remember that a poem is only partly mine. It belongs, too, to the reader, who can’t half-create a fully finished piece.

Work is over-revised when it lacks an edge. There really does come a time when a poem (or any other literary work) is finished. Ideally, this time is just before the time when the next one is to begin.

Why we edit: Literary citizenship and the litmag

For me, one of the highlights of 2016 was being invited to serve as keynote speaker at the annual FUSE Conference—that’s the Forum for Undergraduate Student Editors, and its conference was held during Winter Wheat: The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing, which I helped to found, and where I was a featured reader in 2016. Here is the text of my remarks, which are about editing and literary citizenship.

            Hello, editors! It’s so nice to be here among my people—people who spend their time—without the benefit of pay, in most cases—putting other writers’ work in front of the public, either digitally or in print. It’s important work. Sometimes it feels like holy work, or a calling. And you’re doing the work, and if you’re like me, you’re learning so much about writing in the process. There is no creative writing class you can take that offers quite as effective a lesson in where you can go wrong in a poem, essay, or story. I’m still learning these lessons through my own editing practices, every single day.

            And it’s especially nice to have an opportunity to talk about literary citizenship, a topic that is close to my heart. I was among the group of editors who created this festival, the Winter Wheat Festival of Writing, sixteen years ago, and it’s my own greatest contribution to the literary community. I’m intensely proud of it—how it provides a chance for all kinds of writers, students, faculty, and people from the region, beginner or advanced, published or unpublished—to come together and talk about something so essential to our very selves. Our writing is so often an artifact of the spirit, a product of effort and hope, a reflection of our deepest selves. We all have that in common. Writing matters to all of us who engage in it, whether we’ve never published a thing or we have ten of our own books on our shelves. Look around. These are your fellow adventurers—people who dive into murky and dangerous waters and come up with the occasional pearl.

            If you’ll look around, too, you’ll see a bunch of people whose role it is to hold a jeweler’s loop up to some reasonably well-formed pearls and still say, “Nope.” What we bring up from deep inside of us is always worthy, always important, but it’s not always enough, from a literary standpoint, to justify publication. And so we reject people we know to be our fellow sufferers, not because their deepest truths are insufficient, but because there’s another part of the equation: the writing has to be impeccable. We look at work and we judge its form, its language, its rhetoric, its syntax, and if it misses on any level, we send a rejection—kindly worded, I hope, with the compassion the offering of an artifact of the spirit requires.

This is a key point. If we are rejecting writers and we don’t have in the back of our minds their vulnerability—their risk and exposure—we are doing them a disservice. I hate to say it, but I was at my worst when I was on the staff of my own undergraduate literary journal. Work came in and we judged it with names removed, and saying no to it felt empowering. I looked at poems and stories that weren’t working, and sometimes I knew I was a better writer, and that realization gave me a charge and affirmed me in my path.

But I didn’t always look on the rejected work with compassion. I sometimes rolled my eyes. I sometimes shared a funny passage with the other editors gathered around the table. We had a lot of good laughs in those days—laughs garnered at the expense of people who had, mind you, sent us what they regarded as their best work, work that they would have been proud to share with the readers of our magazine. Those writers didn’t picture their work being mocked by a circle of editors, but we did it, and at the time doing so felt cathartic—but it was wrong. (I should note that it was also completely contrary to the example of our adviser.)

I’d venture to guess that I’m not the only one here who has done this. Maybe others in this room have read comically bad excerpts aloud, or at least others have laughed when their fellow editors have done so. I hope I’m not alone in this, on one level, although I also kind of hope I am. I value literary community, and that community benefits if I’m the only jerk in the room. I’m a jerk who is mostly reformed, with a few lapses from time to time, but I’d be willing to be the only one. I’d be happy to bear that burden—the label of editor-jerk, which I’ve earned from past misdeeds.

But we’re all jerks sometimes. This work is hard and our decisions have the power to hurt people. A good laugh can release some pressure and give us the will to stay on task. Sometimes a writer’s missteps are, frankly, hilarious. Sometimes our own goofs as writers are equally hilarious—but because we’ve learned so much from the act of editing, we very seldom send the funny stuff out.

But some things feel much better than writing. When you engage in the kinds of literary citizenship we witnessed here at this conference today—walk-in workshops, guerrilla poetry posting, community zine-making—you’re contributing to community, and it feels amazing, and much more enduring than a laugh. For me, Winter Wheat feels very good. I don’t get to come every year anymore, but I like knowing that it continues, and year after year, writers have a chance to get together and celebrate words, while also learning ways to make their own words line up a little bit better.

We started Winter Wheat when I was first out of grad school, but I also had a hand in founding a similar festival when I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s. Remarkably, it also endures in a different form. For the Spring Arts Festival at Morehead State, we gathered everyone who did any art at all and we roped them in to contribute to our effort. The theater department had mimes giving out invisible flowers on the streets. The fraternities and sororities chalked the sidewalks. People from the art department put up installations. Ensembles from the music department set up on the lawn outside the student union. And traditional artists from the surrounding Appalachian Mountains came and demonstrated weaving and other crafts. We showed art films. We tried building with clay. And we had readings and open mics, putting literature at the core of an arts event. That was very empowering.

Laughing together over funny moments in submissions builds a small community. The dozen people on your staff have a better time doing the work they’ve volunteered to do. But it is incomparably great—and my experience suggests that it is much more enduring—to build community and to nurture and support writers.

So, here’s the key question that we must keep asking ourselves: Why do we edit literary journals?

Obviously, we edit to gain experience and understanding. Through our discussions, we learn to articulate our aesthetic judgment, and as writers ourselves, usually, we also build empathy and understanding for the people on the other side of the transom. Those are some of the chief personal benefits, and they are great.

But editing is also a service. We do it to serve several other constituencies: our staff members, our readers, and our writers—three communities that overlap in many ways. This is actually a crisis in our field; very few people read journals unless they’re in them or trying to be. I don’t know anyone, aside from the occasional student intern with an interest in publishing, who messes around with litmags but isn’t a writer.

This sounds like a digression, but hear me out. I was recently at a Cracker Barrel restaurant with its kind of cheesy, fun gift shop. They had this toy, and I don’t know what you call it, but if you hold it in one hand it doesn’t do anything. (Not a great toy, seemingly!) But, here’s the thing—if you hold it in two hands, it lights up and plays holiday songs.

I wish I had this toy here today, because it would be fun to show you an experiment. I could hold this toy in my one hand and then grab the hand of the person closest to me, who could grab another hand and so on in a circle, and as long as we were to complete the connection, we would get the lightshow and the music. (Maybe there’s a limit to how many people could be in this theoretical circle for the toy to work, but in the metaphor I’m about to slap you upside the head with, the number is limitless.)

This little toy is an excellent metaphor for editing. As editors, we act as conduits for a very significant spark.

There is electricity in the creative act. In writing, we usually sit alone somewhere—at a desk, maybe—and we forge a connection with something. This idea of connection is very key to my creative process. Art comes from my intellect, clearly, but there is also a source. Jung called it the collective unconscious. Yeats referred to it as the Spiritus Mundi—the spirit of the world. For the Romantics, this spark was found in nature, and the ancient Greeks attributed it to actual gods, the Muses, who visited them with inspiration.

I guess we all have our own ideas about where art comes from, but I credit  divine source that matches up with my construction of God—a river of everything, of cosmic memory and intelligence. This source accounts for those pinnacle moments when we look closely at an emerging draft and we see something unexpected, like a system of imagery we didn’t intend, or a shift that occurred unplanned, but that adds a layer of meaning.

If you believe in electricity as an impetus for art—even if it’s an electrical synapse firing in the brain—the toy metaphor I offered earlier becomes especially relevant to a room full of editors. It is our job, after all, to transfer that divine spark from that very private place and moment in time to the readers. We close the circuit from the writer’s desk or corner table in a coffee shop (or, at least once for me, a bare leg and a Sharpie!), and in doing so we move along the energy from the writer into the world.

I guess it’s appropriate that I’m giving this talk in a chapel! I don’t necessarily think we need to regard this as a spiritual concept; it still works to think of our work pragmatically, or even capitalistically. A writer makes a thing, and we distribute it. I have a terrible time thinking of it so starkly, though, because the “thing” might change a reader’s life, or even save it. I know I’ve been transformed and saved by poetry many times, and it’s a solemn duty to be entrusted with something so, well, electric.

Editing for me has never been about making a journal. That is a truly challenging, enjoyable part of the job, but for me, editing is mostly about this connection.

In editing, I try to connect with submitters, even those whose work is not chosen. I always thank them, and I try, too, to have predictable policies for them (e.g., I would never close a reading period unannounced; most journals get a lot of submissions, and it’s important to work through them while putting the needs of the submitters before the needs of the editors). Additionally, I never play favorites. I may on rare occasions solicit work to try to improve diversity or to raise the cachet of the journal, but generally, every submitter is read the same way, and no invitations are offered casually.

Back when we read paper submissions, I was famous for my smileys. It’s a strange thing to be known for, isn’t it? But I’d put a note of personal thanks and a smiley face on every rejection—and that grin was certainly not a symbol of mockery, but one of friendship and esprit de corps; we’re all, as writers and readers, in this endeavor together. When I’m at a writing event, such as the AWP Conference, people still come up to me all the time and thank me for my smiling rejections (and occasional acceptances). They appreciated that I made things personal. It took away the sting and offered encouragement.

As an editor, I also try to connect with readers. At the last journal I served as editor-in-chief—and it was a large national journal—most issues that we distributed were in envelopes my own hand had actually touched. I was usually the one who made the labels, stamped on the return addresses, sorted out the recipients who had perished since the last mailing, inserted a discounted subscription offer (since editors are honor bound to always try to build audiences). If you subscribed during those years, I may have licked your envelope. Real editorial DNA with every issue!

Of course, in the daily work of putting together a litmag, we also work with our fellow staff members, and it has been an incredibly gratifying part of my professional life to work hard with so many people on a shared mission. Sometimes when the work takes place online, we don’t even know our fellow editors’ faces—these may be people we’ve passed in airports, completely oblivious to the fact that a good friend was near. But we are committed to the same goals—to passing along the spark, and to getting as many readers as we can for the writers whose work is entrusted to us.

Editing a journal is all about building community—a community of a staff with a shared mission, a community of writers, and a community of readers. As I leave you today, I encourage you to ask yourselves what you might do to create and nurture community.

The questions we must ask are these: How can I encourage and support writers? How can I forge lasting relationships with my fellow editors? How can I reach the maximum number of readers? And most importantly, how can I share the discovery and the magic and the deeply felt meaning of the written word?

How can I pass the spark, keep it moving, and thus electrify the world?

A time to dance

Yesterday was magical—one of those perfect late-summer days in the Ozarks, the sun not too hot, a bit of a breeze to boot. My family went apple picking; we had fun at the playground and on walking trails. And at the end of the day, I went to a class at the local holistic life center.

The class was described as a chakra dance class—in fact, it was “Chakradance,” a trademarked name for a holistic practice—but I have to admit, I thought the dance part was a metaphor. I guess it was the poet in me, but I pictured myself meditating, focusing on my chakras, thinking about dancing in a very figurative way.

The way the class works, though, or at least this installment of it, is that participants spread out in a dark room and they close their eyes. In just that way—all attention directed inward, no sense of what others are doing—we moved our bodies while focusing on each chakra in turn, root to crown.

I’m not disciplined enough to follow the rules precisely. I had to peek out between my lashes a few times, just to make sure the others were still there, that they were moving in similar ways, that they weren’t just lined up against a wall and silently laughing at my gyrations. You can’t be too careful, right?

But they weren’t. My lashy perspective revealed that they, too, were swinging their arms and swiveling their hips and moving their shoulders from side to side. And their eyes were shut, so they had me beat in that regard—not that it’s a competition.

I’ve been engaging with my spiritual self in a more focused way recently. I see it as a writerly practice—going inward to find both my inspiration and my discipline. Both are necessary to be a serious writer. Inspiration is no good if it never sits down; discipline does little without an occasional shove from the spirit.

Today I’ll go to church, and it will provide another chance for me to drill down into my core. No matter what my minister says—and she always says valuable things—the point is my taking the time to sit still and think about my spirit. Often I adopt an affirmation for the week—words that will take me instantly inward without a lot of preamble.

I don’t think it’s necessary to be religious to be a good writer. No one I know really thinks of me as religious, and my church—a Christian denomination, but one that encourages a personal approach and has no central shared theology—is looked at askance by many in my Bible belt city. Instead of church, I’m advocating a habit of mind—of deep exploration that doesn’t ignore the spirit, and that consults the center.

Writing is partly about good habits, i.e., going to the writing place (desk, chair, bed, floor) and, you know, writing—setting down some words. It is partly about the intellect, too—about thinking things up (and through) and being clever. I think the best writing transports the reader, though; a reader can feel connection sometimes not because the writer is a genius, but because you’re both tapping into something universal—the collective unconscious, the monomyth, the Godmind, or what have you. You don’t get to that place accidentally; you have to cultivate an awareness somehow. You can probably get there by reading Walt Whitman or by listening to jazz flute. Whatever works, right?

And that’s why I tried the chakra class, and it’s what had me spinning and waving my hula arms and doing a few seconds of the Twist—in the blissful and experiment-friendly dark, glimpsed, if glimpsed at all, through a forgiving veil of lashes.

Try new things in life and maybe you’ll try new things on the page. It’s not a bad plan—not a bad way to move through the world.

Blocked? Sort out your files. Buy some pens.

If you’re not a writer, why do you have so many pens?

Writers I know often talk about experiencing block—a concept I’m not sure I fully endorse. But when I worked in hospice, the governing philosophy was that the patient was the expert on pain, and reports of pain were never to be questioned. Likewise, the writer is the expert on this very particular type of pain—the anguish of not being able to produce. It would be insensitive and maybe even ableist, in some cases, to suggest it’s not happening.

Still, I go through dry spells, some of them long ones, so even if I’m not using the same nomenclature, I’m facing the same issue. And it feels awful—whether a busy worklife is keeping me from the page, or whether I’m in front of the screen and can’t think of a thing to put on it.

I tend to think that if I sit down long enough and manipulate the tools—the pen or the keyboard—the writing will come. This philosophy has never failed me. Sometimes the stupidest things scritch out of my pencil—embarrassing things, things I can’t obliterate quickly enough—but if I keep at it, there will be the glint of something: a nugget, a gem. And that something can become the basis of something bigger, or it can be its own thing.

If a million monkeys on keyboards for an infinite amount of time can produce King Lear, this simian surely has a couplet in her. And a couplet is half a quatrain, and one-seventh of a sonnet. Just sitting and working will yield something every time, and even if it’s awful, it’s not … nothing. That’s a start.

Sometimes I tease myself back toward creativity by doing the butt-tinglingly dull administrative work that accompanies the creative life. Just having my hands on my poetry or fiction or nonfiction sort of gives me the itch to do something new.

If you can’t write, you might try this trick. Here are some of the administrative things you can turn your attention to while you wait for ideas:

·      Clean up your files. My laptop files are a mess. Naming is inconsistent; all genres are jumbled together; published stuff looks the same as unpublished. Imposing order on electronic files sometimes has the effect of clearing mental clutter (while reminding us of what we’re capable of).

·      Do select revision work. I know I’m bad at titles, and sometimes I slap a label-type title on top of a poem, with the idea that I’ll return later and make it something brilliant. That poem you labeled “Water” may have a new life as, say, “What Wetness the Stream Can Offer” or some such thing. It may even be more publishable. In lieu of titles, you might comb through your linebreaks or your starts and stops, just to see what kind of improvements you can make.

·      Research markets. There are a lot of good markets out there; see where your favorite writers are publishing, and check out those journals that are new to you. Make notes about submission windows, policies, fees, and the like.

·      Prepare submission packets. Determine what poems or flashes work well together and group them accordingly. Combine them into one file for submission. Do this as you research new markets—or after.

·      Go back-to-school shopping. Hit the office supply store and buy some notebooks, pens, printer paper, tape, toner—anything you need to make the magic happen. This is psychologically reassuring. If you’re not a writer, why do you have all of those pens?

·      Look into grants and residencies. Creative visualization is powerful, no matter one’s field. You can picture yourself at work on your writing in a residency environment, or you can imagine what you would do with the benison of some extra cash. Spend some time looking up these sorts of opportunities, and let your imagination fly.

·      Work on tracking old submissions. Maybe you never heard back from a specific journal, or maybe your records are a bit of a mess. Follow up; organize. Make sure you’re ready if you need to make an acknowledgements page in the future.

·      Put a new manuscript together. You might be far from having a manuscript that’s ready to send out, but if you read your unattached work, or print it out and move it around, you can start to see patterns and themes; what’s more, you can start to see gaps—places where some new creative effort could do some good.

When I tackle the mindless paper-shuffling tasks, what inevitably happens is that I get very sick of them—and I can’t wait to get back to the pure act of writing. Sometimes I use my energy on a different genre to help ease myself back into the flow, and sometimes I assign myself a project or a specific challenge, so that the intellectual aspects of writing temporarily take precedence over what for me is a spiritual practice.

I’ve mentioned it here before, but I have a daily contemplative project that contains a writing component—daily haiku-length poems on gun deaths. Some days I don’t write anything else, but this project is roughly equivalent to turning over the engine on that sports car under a tarp in the garage. You have to move the oil from the pan; you have to crank up the battery. Otherwise, it may not be drivable in the future without serious work.

As a bonus, I never have to say I have writer’s block. I write every day, even when it’s vexing and feels more like math. A journal, as discussed yesterday, can serve the same purpose.

If something has taken you away from writing, I hope you find your way back, and I hope you find your break restorative. Sometimes we quit writing temporarily because we’re gathering instead of producing. Thinking is part of the writing process, even when we’re not spitting out words.