Poetry’s mysterious. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you have a theme or a throughline that you can pick up on and keep going in the direction you were headed. Most of the time you’re starting from scratch. I’ve been intensely aware of the process lately, since my mind is sitting stubbornly at the level of grocery lists. Has the poetry fairy flitted off into the mountains? Am I done? Finis? Are you sick of hearing this from me?
When I quit whining comes the hard work. The sitting at the keyboard going on with something, anything. It’s not the words I’m struggling with. It’s my mind. If you’re a runner, a violinist, a meditator, you understand this. Discipline. Discipline is when you feel you have nothing left, nothing to give anymore, and you keep on. You don’t know why you keep on. You’re past your edge. You’re out here, wherever here is. You’ve lost all sense of purpose, of direction. It’s as if you exist in a vacuum.
Sometimes I get energy and interesting words from other people’s poetry. I jot things down. All the world is making stunning poems with those words. How does it work, this poetry thing? What made me think I could do this?
On a day that isn’t gray. Who could possibly complain?
This isn’t a poem, here; it’s a letter to you. Presumably you’re following the life of a writer, and I’m sorry to say, this is part of it. This part of it is another gray day here in Northern Michigan. We’re into that time of year. For all the glorious beauty of this region—the hundreds of lakes, the bay, the rivers—winter is gray. A lot. There used to be heaps and heaps of snow to brighten it. These days the snow comes and goes, not the bright long-lasting heaps.
What started me with this poetry thing, anyway? The poems I wrote in sixth grade, ninth grade, that were so much fun/pleasure for me, I guess. Where did they come from? I had a feel for it. I loved watching words go down on paper. I loved playing with the shapes they could make, the line breaks. I loved the the sounds. I would say the poem to myself. I would re-write it. Something about rhythm, something about making my own way, my own voice. Something made for an audience. A little dance on a little stage. Not “look at me,” but “let’s dance.” You wouldn’t know there was dancing going on at first listen, but when the lines break, when the words bend in unusual ways, when there’s an unexpected downbeat, you realize you’re in motion.
I’ve always been a Gerard. Manley Hopkins fan. I think of his poems, for all their religious angst, as jazz. I’ve gotten more interested in jazz lately. It’s the improvisation. Like Mozart, you don’t find the same notes played the same twice. There’s really good jazz in Traverse City.
So if I love NOT knowing what’s coming next, why am I so bent out of shape when the writing isn’t going well? What is “well”? What’s “next”? It’s never been easy and I’ve seldom been satisfied. Poetry is an out of control lurching, if you ask me. It has always been thus.
You go flying through the air, you land flat footed, you plod and then you catch the wind again. It is all you, but it’s not you at all. I dunno. It’s something else.
CODA: How the hell can I can do this work while the children are dying, buildings crashing to the ground? I wonder if suffering can be so extreme that all music would be gone from the world. I suppose, though, the keening of a mother over her dead child is a kind of music. And when there’s nothing but rubble left, someone has to do the work of bringing back whatever broken song is possible, to honor the dead and to remind us that the work of the living is to be glad to be alive. To write and to sing, to make life worthwhile.