Writer's Block? The Problem May Be Your Butt

            I really don’t believe in writer’s block.

            For three days, I’ve been trying to think of something to write a poem about, and for three days, I’ve come up empty. No blue bolt of inspiration has struck me in the brow and set my pen moving. I haven’t snagged an intriguing phrase from the ether. There’s been nothing—nothing at all.

            What I haven’t done, though, is find the time to deploy the surefire cure for a lack of poetry: my butt.

            By some accident of fate or scheduling, my butt has never been oiled up and photographed for magazine covers, à la Kim Kardashian, and so far no songs have been written about it (that I know of). To look at it, it’s actually an unremarkable—if big and squishy—backside.

            But it’s not specifically my butt that holds the solution to writer’s block. In fact, it only works its magic for me, and, I like to think, for anyone who happens to be behind me on the dance floor.

            Inspiration is overvalued. Too often, writers try to court it. We have countless historical examples of writers who sought it through pharmaceutical sources or through risk-taking behaviors. And actually, I don’t knock the strategy. Taking risks of any kind can yield subject matter, and that’s a portion of what a writer needs. I hopped a train once, and I try to write about it every so often. The thrill of that risk has never left me. I haven’t had much success in writing about it, but I hold out hope that one day I will.

            But some of the poems I like best are about incredibly small moments—sometimes the subjects amount to even less than a moment. I’ve always loved the William Stafford poem “The Little Girl by the Fence at School.” It’s about wind rippling the grass—period. Oh, and someone is dead. But the poem is about something anyone can see from the window. I’ll put it here.

The Little Girl by the Fence at School 

Grass that was moving found all shades of brown, 

moved them along, flowed autumn away 

galloping southward where summer had gone. 

And that was the morning someone’s heart stopped 

and all became still. A girl said, “Forever?”

And the grass. “Yes. Forever.” While the sky—

The sky—the sky—the sky.

The way the grass moves. Our mortality. These ideas are more than enough for a poem, no hallucinogens or freight trains required.

            One of my favorite books of poetry to come out in recent years is the 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds. The title poem offers another example of inspiration from a nearby source. Here are the first several lines:

Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine

looks like my husband, casting himself off a

cliff in his fervor to get free of me.

His fur is rough and cozy, his face

placid, tranced, ruminant,

the bough of each furculum reaches back

to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up

and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,

unwieldy. …

Olds got the inspiration for this poem from a wine label. I picture her casting her eyes around the room for an object to serve as a linchpin for her ideas about love and loss. Maybe when there is something that needs to be said, anything will serve as the vehicle.

            But poems don’t just happen. They need to be invited in. Sometimes we get lucky and they come easily, but very often we have to move our fingers and see what magic comes out of them.

            The most important tool in our utility belt is located just under our utility belt. Every poem in us demands that we stop and sit. Anything we spy out the window or on the table or in the mind’s eye can serve as a subject, but poems aren’t about their subjects; it is the tenor, not the vehicle. I think poems may actually be about words and the connections between them, and the connections they make in the reader. I don’t care especially about plums, but I take pleasure in considering forgiveness for their eater.

            Given enough time at the desk, words will come. There’s a good chance they will be terrible words, unmusical words, words that refuse to play together. The words might be in the wrong order. They might even be the wrong words.

            But give yourself time to sit. Eventually, they’ll straighten themselves out.

Woman Overboard

            A sailor was washed overboard in the nineteenth century at the Cape of Good Hope. Many were, actually, and plenty of ships were lost, too. The coast at the Cape is jagged; the water, gelid.

It’s a treacherous place to sail. The Cape of Good Hope is near where the waters of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet, and the waves of merging waters slam into one another ceaselessly. One of the fastest currents in the world is located at the Cape, and more often than not, the prevailing winds move against it. Rogue waves are common. I’m a lifelong landlubber, but the literature makes it clear; these are dangerous waters.

But the sailor I mentioned—the thing about him is that instead of being sucked down into the waters beneath the continental shelf, he was lifted up again. One of those wild, unpredictable waves took hold of him and threw him back onto the deck of his ship.

I learned recently that my position was eliminated. I teach English to international students at a small liberal arts college, and I love the work—it’s nothing short of exhilarating to see the progress the students make in such a short time. I can take a bit of the credit, but really, these are courageous students, who come from as far away as South Korea and Saudi Arabia and Kenya and Poland and Japan, and who do pretty well just by navigating the waters and talking to people, and even by half-listening to those commercials that would have them believe we all give each other beribboned Lexuses for Christmas.

I have another semester in front of me before I need to hunt for a job, and I plan to really treasure my students in the time I have left with them. It just about sinks me to know that I’ll be leaving the classroom soon, and that the day may come when I won’t be able to share in students’ growth and help them to overcome obstacles. Sometimes I try to imagine what the future might hold, and I feel numb and breathless—exactly like someone who is sinking.

But then I think of the sailor. I don’t know his name or the specifics; he’s someone I read or heard about, and he stayed with me. I can’t even find him in the endless ocean of Google, where there be dragons and Kardashian sex tapes and kitten after kitten after kitten. Maybe I made him up, but I don’t think I did. I think he’s real. Those waves certainly are. Even at this moment moment, they’re pounding into one another like watery crash cymbals, as I imagine it—although a friend's Merchant Marine husband clarifies that the sound of great waves coming together is more similar to a deep growl or a train.

I was in a ferry in dangerous waters once off the Massachusetts coast. Because waves are, well, waves, and arrive with regularity one after another, I experienced the same thing time and time again. The ferry plowed up a wave and launched off of it, just like your car might do on a dip in a country road. We went airborne and then belly-flopped into the trough before rising onto the next crest. With regularity, from Cape Cod to Boston, that ship launched itself into nothingness and then slammed into the water below. I understood it had been as bad as it seemed when numb passengers exited and the owner of the ferry line himself apologized to each of us for the frightening waters, the ferocity of which had taken the crew by surprise.

And that was just the Massachusetts Bay—the site of many shipwrecks, to be sure, but pretty safe for a twenty-first century traveler on a good-sized vessel. The terror of passage on a turbulent Cape of Good Hope—originally called the Cape of Storms—is beyond my imagining.

It must have been agonizing to slip into the salty drink of Western Africa. Finding oneself slammed back onto the deck would seem like a dubious blessing—to lie there stunned and breathless as fellow seafarers grabbed you, pulled you in, secured you while you recovered.

I hardly dare to hope for this sort of mercy, but I have to admit that I want it. I want to be pulled back in, where I can move and breathe and eventually be a productive, contributing part of a team once again.

And there’s always the chance that the sea won’t take me anyhow.

Moon Landings: Poetry Has Value

Poet-pal Jessica Piazza is exploring the value of poetry in a yearlong project. Check out Poetry Has Value to see what she's up to!

The Busy Life as a Writing Life

Several years ago, I took a long break from writing. There were a lot of reasons—I was busy, I was experiencing post-MFA burnout, someone said something that shook me. I came back, though, and it was surprising. Writing is very forgiving. While the people in our lives may reach a breaking point with us, writing will always welcome us back. Show up with a bouquet and make a little effort, and bam—you’re in. It’s like you never left, except for the fact that you have a lot of new subjects to write about.

            I’m grateful to language—I’m grateful to words for the way they line up for me and wait more or less patiently for me to pin them down on paper. The poem words slide down my pen. The essay words tap out on my keyboard like salt from a shaker. As long as I keep pen or fingers moving, they keep coming. They don’t hold grudges. (Sometimes they’re terrible, but that’s really a different matter—maybe one to take up here later.)

            To show my gratitude, I try to keep limber. I always have a writing project in mind, and I tease out new ones every chance I get. The words may be patient, but I don’t like to leave them waiting.

            The problem is that I’m very busy with teaching and family and all of the other things that occupy our lives. Here, then, are seven strategies I’ve used to keep myself writing—to stave off the next involuntary hiatus.

Keep yourself limber. During a lecture or a meeting, our minds sometimes wander. Let yours wander toward words! I like to await a juicy noun, and then craft it into a metaphor. How, exactly, can love be a ____? (Syllabus, algorithm, budget cut ….)

Make a time picture. It’s a common organizational strategy: write down everything you do for a day, and then reflect upon how you spend your time. Throughout the day, there are pockets of time that can be rearranged—for more work, for focused relaxation, or, for us, for art! Most successful writers work daily on their writing. Before you can build that good habit, you need to find a time that you can dedicate to it.

Take a writing retreat. Try taking turns with your partner and find each other a place and a time to focus on what you care about. While you’re there, you can let the other business of life fade into the background. My favorite place to go on a writing retreat is in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, at the Hidden Springs Bed &Breakfast. One of the proprietors has a doctorate in English. He gets it. Sometimes we need to be alone with our words.

Sit your butt down. I like to say that there is no such thing as writers’ block. Occasionally we suffer from “brilliance block,” but as long as we sit down and keep our pens moving, we’re writing. Making ourselves sit down and write will ensure that words find the page. Something good is bound to show up eventually, if only by accident.

Have a long-term writing project. A lot of our desk time is spent coming up with an idea. If you have a project that you can come back to again and again, you can jump right in, rather than waiting for inspiration. I have a few examples from my own writing life: a set of persona poems, a group of poems about a particular item I carried with me for a period of time, and a long poem in parts, each of which corresponds to a part of the body. With each poem in all of these series, I was able to begin immediately when an opportunity to write came around.

Use calls for submissions as prompts. One of my favorite resources is CRWROPPS—the Creative Writing Opportunities mailing list. (To subscribe, write to crwropps-b@yahoogroups.com.) When I see that a magazine I love has an open reading period or that an anthology is looking for poems on a special topic, I always use that as a catalyst or prompt for my own writing. Recently I wrote an essay in response to a call for submissions in Real Simple magazine (which I subscribe to). Even if I don’t win the contest, I ended up with a piece of writing that I loved.

Carry a topical notebook. When I’ve been away from poetry for a while, I often carry a small pocket notebook to write down thoughts on a particular topic as they occur to me throughout the day. A notebook is especially effective if it focuses on a broad theme—like “water” or “mother” or “love”—and all of the ideas I jot down throughout the day respond to that theme. It’s simple to craft these into a poem later.

Most importantly, be sure to forgive yourself when you fall short of your goals, and remember that time spent away from actively writing can be very powerful. You’re gathering material, and when you put it on the page later, it’s going to blow you away.

Moon Landings: Fear of a Ghost Planet

My pal Paul Arrand Rodgers provides blogspiration at Fear of a Ghost Planet, where he deals with movies and wrestling and video games—but I mostly go there to get to his wonderful Tumblrs Date With a Wrestler and Heathcliff Explained, which are ... well, you just have to see.

The View From the Car Line

            Something needs to be said about the car line. With as much time as it occupies in elementary parents’ lives on any given day, it’s strange to me that hardly anyone talks or writes about this model of democracy and cooperation. There is no other part of my life that illustrates quite as fully the principle that we’re all in this together.

            I am a regular in the car line at my son’s school, Rountree Elementary. I know its rhythms—how it is longer and slower on very cold days, how my son’s teacher will generously bend my ear with a progress report if he is that week’s traffic monitor, how some people lose track of where they are and let two, three, five car lengths open up before they jerk to attention and move forward.

            I am typically the mom with the book. Sometimes I’m the mom listening to NPR and staring into some middle distance. Lately I’ve been the mom playing Trivia Crack, which has also made me the mom of the five-car-lengths jerk.

            Our school is a lovely public school in a quiet neighborhood, and many of the people in front of and behind me are friends who didn’t have time to walk or who are taking cover in a 250 horsepower umbrella. We feel guilty, but there we are, united by our environmental guilt and our love of wearing pajamas all day. And there we are, too, all of us dreading the teacher who approaches the car and says, “Would you mind coming in for a moment?”

            My friends know two things about me for certain: my own “two things” are not stuffed into a bra unless I have a formal appointment, and I find pants cumbersome and optional. I know I’m an outlier in the car line, but I don’t think I’m alone—still in my pajamas at 3:45, or in a nightgown halfway tucked into some hastily donned sweat pants.

            I have a good but energetic son about whom there is much to be said. Last year’s teacher, Mrs. S, had a habit of running out of the building to wave me over and tell me what wild shenanigans he had gotten into that day. I got into the bra-and-pants habit then, I assure you; there are only so many conversations one can have with one’s arms crossed the entire time. This year’s teacher, Mr. W, is more merciful. Maybe one encounter with me in my invisible straitjacket got the message across. Or maybe he’s just as eager to get home as my son and I are. We stick to through-the-window conferences in a catch-as-catch-can sort of way.

Three years ago my son went to a private school that is nearly as close to home as our public school is. It was snooty as could be, or what passes for snooty here in the Ozarks, and while we were all in it together there, too, it didn’t feel that way. Most people were all in it several feet above our Honda Civic in their luxury SUVs. And there was the strange one-upmanship of parents who dressed to the nines to pick up their spawn—heels, jewelry, Estee Lauder, the whole shebang. One felt … well, sort of eyeballed in that private school car line. The fact that everyone was quite literally looking down at us (from a Cadillac Escalade) may have been a factor.

While I tried to be friendly and helpful at that school—and while I always wore a bra—my overtures were never successful. At the public school, on the other hand, if you volunteer once, you’re roped in for the duration, and you are expected and even needed at every event that follows. At the snooty school, I don’t know how many times I offered to do this or that, only to learn that it was covered, thankyouverymuch. And as hard as it was to be a parent there, the classroom experience was worse—bullying, bragging, with a first-grade caste system that assigned a permanent spot in the pecking order to every young scholar.

Needless to say, we got the heck out of there and into the public school system. Our beloved neighborhood school has provided a better environment for my son, a better education, and even a better place for my, er, girls, who can stay warm and dry in their nightgown, in their car, where all of the people around us are too busy and too pajama-clad themselves to notice.

It really is true: We are all in this together.