For the Birds: This one's about the seasons of writing

& the glory of dirt

Note: A slightly modified and shortened version of this essay appears on my website.

Poem as expedition

Some poets sit down and write a poem like this: they take their chunk of clay and, having decided what they’d like to build, mold and bend and dent and shape their material into a poem. The poem.

Most of the time when I sit down to make a poem, I’m inside the clay. I’m digging my way out of something. It’s less about building and more about excavating. Yes, there are images along the way. Yes, there is “meaning.” Yes: I have things to say, a desire to say them prettily or with wit. But I’m learning what those things are—what images, what meaning, what cleverness—and the only way to do so, in my experience, is to write the poem. A poem.

In this realm—the realm of poetry as expedition—you write a poem so that the poem can guide you in the general direction of what it has to say. As the poet, there’s very little instruction involved. It’s 85% listening on your part. And this relationship, in turn, gets carried through to the reader. Picture it: poems and poetry lovers, writers and readers, all listening to each other closely to see what shows up next.

Poems that instruct too much, that are stamped at every edge with the authority of here’s exactly what I mean, bore me. A poem shouldn’t answer all our questions, it should make us have more of them. It might set things in close proximity to each other with intention, but it should let the reader take it from there.

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“One of the dangers of overworking something is that it can come to feel, well…overworked: the reader/viewer may feel left out of the process, as if the artist was performing for himself or herself only. The reader/viewer may feel that the creator is so obsessed with asserting artistic control (with efficiency, with clarity, with cause-and-effect) that this sort of control has become the work’s whole reason for existence - a rather condescending stance, that is more about power and less about communication.”

~George Saunders, pretty much saying what I’m saying, too

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Show us what it looks like to listen more closely, Poem!

Pull me out of the clay. Pull me up from the dirt. Or put some dirt on my head so that I might feel grounded for once. Bury something in the dirt on top of my head and walk away tout de suite, because you’re a poem, Poem, and you don’t wait around for proof of what you are. You’re a poem that tills and sows and buries, and you don’t confuse labor with result, and you don’t get all buffaloed when sprouts don’t sprout on time. You know there’s always so many other things happening in the ground, so much context, and that you can’t always see the reason behind everything that occurs. This is why you spend so much time revering the underground, Poem. This is why you throw so much dirt everywhere.

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There are lots of different ways to pull something out of the ground, even when that something is yourself, even when the ground happens to also be yourself.

It isn’t all just zombie arms shooting out before the tombstone & graveyard robbery. You can till and tend your underground self for a long, long time—years even—genuflecting over soil, and eventually be met with something deeply vibrant, more full of life than ever. Which includes, by the way, dirt in the first place.

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The seasons of writing

Speaking of soil, I think one of the biggest sources of frustration for writers is having expectations of ourselves based on a season we’re not currently in.

It’s frustrating to be in shorts on a blustery near-winter day. It’s frustrating to insist on a parka during 95 degree heat.

If you expect yourself to be writing every day but you’re currently in a period of hibernation, you’re going to be frustrated with yourself. What if it’s okay to not write sometimes? What if your voice, and all your future creative projects, depend on this time of rest and word-silence? What if your creative self needs you to pursue other creative outlets at this time—gardening, painting, learning a new technique in the kitchen, things that don’t involve writing words down—so that you may return to the page reinvigorated, broadened by a new medium or skill?

If you expect yourself to be writing everyday but you’re currently in the season of curation—organizing and building and editing—you’re going to be frustrated with yourself. Returning to old work after a period of fruitful distance and making sense out of what it needs is itself a creative act. You work, time passes, and then you return to what you’ve made, able to look at it as something existing outside of you. What if this boring work of revisiting and revising, of editing and putting together submissions and ordering the poems in your chapbook like a mixtape is precisely the work that this season caters to best?

It’s just as important, in the season of fruitfulness when you are writing, to not get caught up in what you’re doing or why: to get out of your own way and “keep the channel open,” as Martha Graham wrote. Don’t assess. Don’t define. When the words show up, give them your undivided present-moment manic attention; they need you to fully divest from all tendencies to determine quality or meaning, to categorize or name what you’re doing. If you must ask questions, point them at the world or at yourself, not the work. If you point the questions at yourself, make sure you’re excavating, not qualifying.

You are a writer: you are an explorer. Questions are vital so long as they are leading you forward, making the space (the page) bigger, not stopping you dead in your tracks.

You are a writer: you are a gardener. You’re planting something, yes, and you may wish for a garden someday, but you know anything pretty starts with you putting your hands directly in the dirt, and you know that “pretty” isn’t the only way to grow something.

Writing is important. Curation and organization and editing are important. Hibernation is important, too. “Writer’s block” is just a tool of capitalism getting between you and rest, keeping your creativity thin and competitive.

Consider this permission to be an anti-capitalist writer who trades her economic framework for an environmental one; who syncs up not with competition but climate and context. Who knows the value of dirt, regardless of what is or isn’t happening right above it.

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Suggested homework

• Map out your seasons of writing: Start with the four common ones, or incorporate the wheel of the year if you’re feeling extra motivated, and pull one metaphor from each. What state of writing are you in when the sun is at its strongest? As the veil thins, what does your creative self need the most? When red leaves are covering the sidewalk and getting crunched beneath feet, what is your writing self up to?

• Alternatively, you can start with the three seasons I described above—writing (fruitfulness), not writing (hibernation), curating (editing & organizing)—and do some journaling around what these seasons look and feel like for you. Are there any others?

• Bonus points if you get really witchy/creative and incorporate moon phases!

Share your creative results with me!

• On the site: Hit the “comment” button to share publicly.

• By email: Hit “reply” to keep the conversation one-on-one.

Announcements

• Three of my poem-charts were published earlier this month in The Art of Everyone. Check those out here and see a glimpse of how my poetry-brain sometimes moves across the page.

• “Uncommon Sense,” my Neon Door column, has now been officially introduced.