When the poems don't come

Lately, I’ve been finding it hard to write poems.

With a second full-length collection coming out this summer, I should be hitting my poetic stride. Yet I can’t shake the sense that each time I write, I’m writing the very same poem—and that I’ve written the same poem over and over for years.

Sure, I alter bits—focus, diction, syntax, rhetoric, form—but what drives each poem feels inalterably the same. Each one stands as its own tiny chapter in an ongoing treatise on loss.

Poetry is my preferred genre—my “genre of choice” is another way of phrasing it, although poetry seems to have chosen me, rather than the other way around. I write what demands to be written, even if sometimes I first try to chase it away, like skunks from a garbage can, with noise and blue light. 

I find—I’ve always found—that I get very little pleasure from writing poems. I like it when they’re done—I’m proud of the artifacts—but pushing them out into the world is hard and painful work. When the writing isn’t hard, what comes out tends to be something other than a poem, or at least something besides a good one.

I’m decades in to being a poet, but it continues to hurt to write them. On those occasions when they don’t hurt, they read to me as either slick or incomplete. Maybe it’s that I have no skin in the game. Maybe I’m operating from the surface, the top of the head, rather than deeper down inside.

That’s a really apt metaphor, by the way. The intellect operates in a place beyond hurt. Things that come into poems as the product of active reasoning have little capacity for aching. Stitching together a logical if-then series of arguments isn’t a bruising strategy. Even the physical manifestations of mental gymnastics are mild. Maybe we squint a little.

In writing these deeper poems I’m referring to, I’ve found myself doubled over, rocking, clutching my gut. There can be physical pain with deep revelation. When the poetry is good, I’m convinced a higher power is talking to and through me. The only catch is that God speaks in a language of acid.

Let’s be clear: As I stated, this is, in fact, a metaphor. All thinking comes from the brain; we have no other organ with the capacity to reason or even to feel. We think we feel gravel with our feet until we sever our spine and feel nothing.

So this gut talk? That’s still referencing a cerebral process—but as is so often the case, the metaphor feels truer than anything we know about physiology. It is at once physiologically nonsensical and absolutely true that good poetry comes from the gut, and almost anyone who writes understands this to be true.

Throw in some spiritual talk about connecting with a higher intelligence (a god, a muse, the collective unconscious) to get at the heart of a poem, and you’re proving yourself to be willfully ignorant and beyond help—but there’s the voice again, teaching me things I didn’t consciously know.

If we concede that writing must go deeper than the intellect to reach the truths we’re hoping to find (and there’s no reason to believe this—I know plenty of poets who are heady and marvelous), and if we concede that going deep is generally painful, it’s clear why it’s so hard to sit at the writing desk some days.

I have a few methods I use to sneak up on myself, poetically, intellectually, and spiritually:

• Writing upon waking. When we write while fresh out of bed, we’re closer to that storehouse of dream images, and to that profound intelligence that visits us when we sleep. Making writing the first thing we do provides a welcome shortcut into the mystical woods.

• Relying on chance. Most insight I have comes when two unrelated things are ratcheted and bound together. These “things” can be images that play together in a fascinating, new way, or they can be words that I hadn’t associated with one another previously. Which cards does the fortune-teller throw down, order and direction random? Which words does the thesaurus pull up? (Fortune-teller, soothsayer, augur, diviner, clairvoyant ….)

• Chanting. There are a lot of online videos of people chanting, including those offered in long syllables or those in different languages, like Latin or Sanskrit. I find that using my actual voice to chant warms up my poetic voice so that I’m more ready to meet the page.

• Walking. In “On Walking,” Henry David Thoreau wrote of the value of walking in the wilderness, an activity he called sauntering, for shaking off the village and its cares. “What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” he penned. I benefit greatly from being in the woods, and my writing thrives on the storehouse of images I see on even a short walk.

• Taking political action. There’s a lot to contend with in the world, and thoughts of the environment being harmed, or of people being subjected to pain, can keep me from wanting to focus on my (selfish) thoughts. But a writer has to be self-ish. The self is the one who does the work, and it must be given rein. I find that if I spend a little time involved in action—letters to legislators, since writing is the way I know to have an impact on the world—I can give myself permission to do my private musing. One caveat: I wouldn’t write a letter to a senator immediately before writing. That’s pointing our consciousness in the wrong direction.

• Jotting. Sometimes I like to write Jane Austen style—quickly jotting a few notes to chew on and then hiding them from view when someone enters the room. It’s a skill any parent-writer develops naturally, but it’s an excellent way to keep the consciousness alert and ready for when it’s time to approach the page.

Another good strategy is to write a blog post, I think—so now I’m off to write. We’ll see how it goes.

Writing will always take you back

Antony Gormley, Feeling Material II (2003)

I have a thing I say to myself, and to writers I know who have hit a dry spell that they can’t seem to emerge from, and it is this: Poetry will always take you back.

When one has been a long time away from writing, the blank page is daunting. There’s just too much white. Every mark we put down seems to stain it.

I remember a Christmas day a few decades back. I’d walked behind my house through a stubbled, harvested farm field toward the railroad track that formed its border a few hundred yards away. It wasn’t particularly cold; I wore shorts and a light jacket.

And then the snow came. It came sudden and hard, and I was blinded by it. My only course of action was put my head down, turn around, and follow the direction of the empty furrows back to my far-off home.

I trusted those grooves to get me back, just as I trust my lines of writing to get me somewhere. If we lower ourselves to the page, it meets us back, and it becomes a field where anything can happen.

A lot of people have advice on how to get the words going again. (I’m one of them, actually—I’ve written many posts containing writing prompts.) But starting to write again is a simple matter, if not an easy one. We just have to write.

I like to draft longhand, so for me, it’s literally a matter of moving my hand and arm over the page. Ink comes out; the page is defaced, so just like that, a source of consternation is behind me. At first my motions are mechanical and forced, my letters crabby and precise. I have a habit of crossing out those first sputters of language, and not just drawing a line through them, but obliterating them—scribbling over the offensively bad writing until not even the merest tittle shows. This is part of it, though—scribbling just another way of moving the pen.

That’s the trick, see—it’s not to be brilliant, but it’s to allow something to come through. After weeks or months away from writing, whatever presence is on the other side of that pen, looking up through the still pond of the page, has stepped away. The sound of our scratching beckons it back, and eventually, if our heart is pure, it offers us a crumb—a good word, a phrase, an image. 

And then we’re off.

Put in more practical terms, we have to write in order to write. Writing isn’t magic; it’s just slapping down some words. Most good writing happens in its revision anyway, but we can’t revise nothing. Moving the pen, or moving our fingers on the keyboard, gives us something. And we go from there.

For me, it really is as simple as this. The way to get back to writing is merely to write. After a few dusty gerunds or infinitives shake out, the pump begins to prime, and whoosh—out comes a lovely noun, and it’s one you hadn’t thought of in a while, one with the perfect sound. Tuba. Crypt. Syzygy. You hook your wagon to that word and it carries you … somewhere. And wherever it is, it’s always somewhere new.

I think we imbue writing with the wrong kind of voodoo. It isn’t fickle; it doesn’t leave us. It really does reside in us, always, and it can emerge if we make a path for it. The real magic is that writing begets more writing. The main thing that keeps it from happening is that we can’t easily find the time and the solitude to let it flow. 

Once we do find ourselves in the position to receive, we sometimes make one of two mistakes: Either we take an agenda to the page, and our plans don’t compel us, or we sit down and file through our mental Rolodex of potential subjects, and nothing there demands to be written about.

I like to rely on chance when I’m writing. A phrase here, a word there—these can lead to some surprising conjunctions, and the interest generated by an unexpected melding of ideas takes me past my panic and into … a poem. Or a proto-poem? 

At any rate, it’s a start.

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Writer's block and protest signs

Springfield, Missouri: The Women's March (photo by Gerard Nadeau)

I write a blog post every day—twice. I also write creatively every day. I journal every day. I teach online, so I write online lectures and comments almost every day. I post a dozen Facebook updates and dash off a few tweets every day. And I’m currently writing a textbook, which I work on—every day.

But today, equipped with a small piece of poster board, some fat Sharpies, and even some glitter glue, I couldn’t think of anything to write. I couldn’t even think of a picture to draw. 

That’s how I ended up at my local Women’s March in Springfield, Missouri, empty handed—just me, standing for something with my body and not my words.

Apparently, I need at least the length of a blog post to get my thoughts out. 

The funny thing is, if I knew someone who was struggling to make a sign, I’m sure I could think of a great slogan. Several. 

When the sign represents oneself, though, and one is a writer, that white space can be daunting.

What do I care about? Lots. What do I care most about? Which of my concerns do I want to publicly declare as I participate in an historic event? It’s something I mulled over while marching this morning. 

One thing I felt very deeply was how much I cared about all of those women marching around me, stretching for blocks in both directions. My favorite sign I saw today had at its center that familiar election slogan, “I’M WITH HER,” but emanating from it were a dozen arrows, pointing at women all around—pointing at me. And I don’t know that woman, but I was with her, and I am with her, and I will be with her. We are sisters.

An elderly man, very tall, walked beside me, his steps short and careful, and his sign articulated a fear I share: “This administration has alarming ties to Russia.” The man had printed out this straightforward phrase and taped it to a poster board, and he held it up, black and white, very frank. What probably felt like a large font on his computer looked small in the context of a protest.

Here was a guy who had a fear (which I share), and he put it in plain words. Why didn’t I do that? Too many fears, I guess, and not enough good ways to say them.

I saw a lot of one-word signs that said things like “RESIST” and “LOVE,” and signs with familiar political slogans, like “FIRED UP” and “YES WE CAN.” I could have done that, too, but it didn’t feel like enough.

Yesterday, an expatriate writer friend, Shannon Cain, posted a video of herself at her home in Paris, where she was making a sign. Shannon is one of my favorite writers, and unlike our new president’s bold brag, she actually does know all of the best words. But in her video—a closeup of her sign under construction, the audio on but her actions silent—Shannon had painted the name of the president, and through it she slowly and deliberately painted the center stroke of a bright red prohibition symbol, also known as the universal no.

Watching Shannon’s sign construction was, as one of her friends posted, cathartic, as something unspeakably wrong was happening across the globe in our nation’s capital. I watched her slow, gentle stoke, obliterating that corrupt and self-serving name, and I felt soothed. It was right to call out evil. The point was never to say something clever. It was always to say something right.

I could have put anything on my sign, or I could have chosen to bring my fierce and determined self and walk with empty hands and occasional raised fists. Either way helps the cause. That’s how a movement works. You contribute what you can. You take turns filling the needs you see. If words fail you, someone else will speak up. The people we march with have each other’s backs. We even rally for the good of onlookers and counter-protesters, even if those people don’t allow themselves to see it.

So these are my words. I guess I needed space to get them out, and when I look back now, I see they don’t convey all I’m feeling. There aren’t enough signboards in the world.

Words sometimes fail us—all of us. It’s another important reason to come together—to share the load.

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.

Using the Archipelagos

            It’s a new month, and a short one—a perfect time to embark on a poetry project.

            I’ve mentioned before that I like working in projects, as doing so eliminates the need to spend time pondering over a subject or messing around with a false start.

            This month, I’m sort of feeling my age—not my physical age, which seems to range from twelve to about eighty, but my poetry age. I’m late getting a full-length book published, and it sometimes feels as though time is passing me by. I’m twenty-one years older than John Keats when he died, and, come to think of it, thirteen years past Jesus. It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that anyone will ever name a city after me, or even, for that matter, a dog.

            So no fiddle-farting around for me—I am feeling an urgent need to make my writing count, and a poetry project results in poems of greater depth, or at least greater breadth (a good fake for depth). Good poetry requires good thinking, and I find it mighty hard to think on most days. If I set the alarm to get up early so I can stare off into space, chances are good that a kid will get up, too, and thinking time becomes breakfast time. If I stay up late (not my best time for functioning, as a morning person), chances are good that someone, somewhere, will barf—probably on me.

            A few times a year I take a writing retreat—I have one coming up in a few weeks, in fact—and those long weekends out of town—and alone—have proven to be critically important to my progress as a poet. Keats didn’t have kids. Neither, for that matter, did Jesus, although he was more a storyteller than a writer.

            On my writing retreats, I write poems, but I do other things, too, like shuffle the manuscript around and spend long, fuzzy moments over a cup of tea. It’s all part of the work of poetry.

            But in the mean time, I have to make my spots of time work—the minutes that open up between feeding and playing and cleaning and paper-grading. There are actually a lot of free minutes in the day, if we’re being honest about it (thank you, Xbox); they’re just not contiguous. A poetry project makes it easier to get down to business in those archipelagos of time we do have.

            Throughout February, I’ll be operating from a word bank that I’m still finalizing. This means that each poem will contain words from a list—not all of the words, but some. The trick is to pick interesting words—words that aren’t obvious, but that still evoke some kind of response when I look at them. One of my February words is “litter.” I like how it suggests things—anything—strewn across my path, and I like the sound of it, like dried leaves skittering across the bricks. I don’t know where “litter” is going to take me, but I’m eager to find out.

            My word bank, ultimately, will have twelve to twenty words that anchor my thinking. I have no other plans in mind; it is my hope (and my experience) that the words I choose will want to play together, and that each day they will suggest a subject for rumination.

            I’ll let you know how it goes.

Standing at the Intersection of Art and Grace

            Someone was mean to me once, and it threw me ten years off course.

            It is sobering to look around in my mid-forties and realize that I’ve squandered some important creative years, all because I took to heart some freakishly harsh criticism from a person I loved, a person who should have done better by me.

            The “who” doesn’t matter. What happened is this: I was in the middle of a creative project that thrilled me, and I talked about it to one of the people I cared most about. This person sat me down and told me all of the things that were wrong with me. I felt I was better than everybody else. I lorded my accomplishments over others. I flaunted my education. I refused to speak normally, and instead used big words and complicated constructions to say basic things.

            This were personal criticisms, not poetic ones, but they rose from my attempt to express that moment of artistic glee—I had a project that was changing my creative life and making me feel like I had real potential as a poet.

            By the end of that conversation, I had put my pen in a drawer, figuratively speaking, and it stayed there for a decade.

            The other day, a friend mentioned that she was worried about sharing her work with her loved ones. Other friends piped in with advice. The work is important, they said; the loved ones need to hear it and support it, or they are not worth loving at all.

            Sharing work with special people is tricky. I’m always hearing artists talk about the fear that accompanies a family member reading their poetry or seeing their visual art in a gallery. And it may not be worth the trouble. When loved ones are also artists, it’s easier; they know how to honor the humanity within the work yet separate the product from the creator. Loved ones who aren’t artists may look for themselves in work; they may psychoanalyze the creator or see something unhealthy about the way we work through things on page or canvas.

            It seems like the best move may be to go ahead and keep work and loved ones separate, unless family, friends, or lovers seek it out on their own, or otherwise show readiness for confronting the artist through the work. I certainly experienced no profit from excitedly talking about my life-changing project with someone who didn’t know or care what it meant to me.

Art, including literary art, can be regarded sort of like, say, gardening is. It’s lovely to hear that someone has planted dahlias in the side yard; we can hear about the bold blossoms, maybe glance at them and appreciate their beauty and the fact that someone has cultivated it. We don’t need to investigate the roots and stalk. We don’t need to count the petals. Seeing the happiness of the gardener is sufficient. That person—and maybe any person who increases, rather than decreases, the beauty in the world—should be congratulated, cheered on.

            It is tempting to be angry with the person behind this moment that never stops being horrible. (I go back to the conversation from time to time, and it hurts just as much after all this time as it did at the moment it was happening.) The fact that this person made the wrong call doesn’t even factor in. An MFA in creative writing is not the kind of education one flaunts. A non-tenure-track job, lowest rank in the institution, is not an accomplishment to be lorded. Being awkward and stilted in conversation is not a source of pride. The poetry, though? That’s a very reasonable source of delight. A professor I had once told me that there are two kinds of poetry: good poetry and great poetry. The act of making art is, in itself, ennobling, whatever the product.

            I think the rightful focus of anger is obvious. It’s me. Most people are nice and supportive—even strangers hold doors and spare a smile. We run into stinkers from time to time, though, and from time to time, we are the stinkers. The only unforgivable act in this scenario is not reporting for duty—not answering the call of those poems that tried to find their way into being during that empty decade. Who knows what words might have visited me, had I been in position and ready to accept them?

            The unkindness of others shouldn’t change me, and I won’t let it change me again. Whatever the actions of people around me, I choose, forever after, to be a loving person and a gracious host.