Category: Inspiration

So I re-started a practice I used to do: write a poem every night, before sleep. It’s the time when I’m most relaxed, and least coherent. I have no to-do list. I have no expectations. Most nights it’s hard going. I have a habit of trying to explain everything, describe it to death. I’m pedantic, dry, scholarly. I keep banging away at an idea, but there’s no magic. The results are deadly.

But some nights, I’m lucky. Some nights a good line will just arrive. As Mark Doty puts it in The Art of Description:

It’s a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.

More and more, I’m looking forward to this exercise, maybe forty minutes in all, when I write down, “Write a poem. What poem?” and then just begin. What am I going to write about? I might come with an idea – write about camellias, how they bloom in December; or write about the ragged ear of a friend’s tomcat – but I almost never get anything out of these mental notes. No. It’s the thing I don’t want to write about that owns all the energy in the room. While discoursing on the cool and scentless camellia blossoms, some complaint will come up, a statement of longing or loathing. If I’m smart, I’ll willingly go off on that tangent.

I suffer occasionally from a whole night’s worth of insomnia – it was on one of those nights, in a state of exhaustion and gloom, that I wrote – “the blue soak of dawnlight” – and in that phrase was a strangeness and an energy. Something melancholy and synesthetic. The draft took on momentum from there.

“The writing of poems is wrestling with a question that is irresolvable and the poem is finished when you reach a stasis … Reading a poem is an act of faith and that involves abandoning oneself to something irresolvable.”

– Carl Phillips

Shell beads made 75,000 years ago

In Blombos Cave on the rocky coast of South Africa, archaeologists have been carefully excavating the earliest known examples of human art and jewelry – carved pieces of ochre and shells with holes drilled in them. It’s humbling to realize that we are heirs to an art-making legacy 75,000 years old.

For me, what is really important is here, for the first time really ever, we have evidence that people can store information outside of the human brain.

– Archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, NOVA: Becoming Human

I love the way Henshilwood articulates it, that art is most essentially this: information stored outside the human brain. Art makes the inner life tangible in the outer world.

I don’t like keeping a journal because I like having things be fuzzy. – a writer friend

Whenever you begin with I remember, you retrieve a world. But how much precision do you owe the past? Artists who use their lives as inspiration must make decisions about how much to nail down the facts of their lives and how much to let the details remain vague, filtered, and even false. Science has shown that we can indeed form memory as early as two years of age; this will not come as a shock to most of us. But I find myself deeply reluctant to write down moments from that age, those priceless memories that have floated up from before my adult comprehension of time. Putting the whole-body experience of those memories in words is disquieting; it catches the experience in a net, pins it irrevocably to the graph of circumstance and later reconstruction. It paradoxically makes what felt real seem unreal.

Exactitude is at odds with memory’s talismanic power, and its shifting, felt nature. Memory is not fact, and does not want to be fact. Memory is, rather, a composition, a composite. Memory is experience and emotion together. This is why hearing someone else relate your history to a third party is disconcerting; the facts may all be in the right places, but the feeling is wrong. And just as concrete details can prove to be untrustworthy and amorphous over the years, so too does the emotional weight and meaning of memory change. It evolves as our emotional intelligence evolves.

In poems, this frangible world of memory is safe, because poetry is also felt, evocative, and not to be trusted with facts. A poem also lives in our emotional center, shifting its weight and its shape over time.

Early memories present like the koi in a leaf-filled pond. Not clear. More about movement than anatomical exactness. At their own pace, with a shape that is sensed and felt, but not caught. Poetry presents itself the same way, sometimes full-faced, more often gibbous.

9) When you first do something, you don’t have to be able to articulate why you are doing it.

10) For an avid reader, reading can become a substitute for doing.

11) Promote yourself. It feels super-awkward, but do it anyway.

12) Doubts don’t help you; they only undermine you. So, radically, quit indulging in them.

13) When I don’t write in my journal, I don’t write at all.

14) Not writing for even a day leaves me depressed.

I’m back. Where the hell have I been? In limbo. The let-down after finishing one stage of a large project left me non-functional. Kaput. Tapped out. Confidence-less. (And tangentially, TV-addicted.) It’s been awful trying to start up again. And no kidding, this is what separates the real writers from the wannabes: how fast you pick yourself back up. Right now I’m definitely on the “not-a-real-writer” side of that line.

It’s a big deal, how fast you recover from a knock-down, whether it’s from outside you or of your own making. How do you do it?

What’s been helping me in little ways: reading just a couple of poems; giving myself permission to write these uninspired posts. Being outside, where life has more of a chance to surprise you. Practicing the trance of wildlife watching. There are small rewards for patience, like the white undersides of a bird’s wings, in a flash before she retreats into a tree.