Poem-A-Day #141 : Study on Rain #2

After I finished my undergrad I had a long period of time without writing. I worried on this for months. I began to stare at objects and write all the angles I could to fill up pages. Out of that, a series of 'studies' emerged. This is part of one on rain.


Study on Rain #2 (7/19/04)

The road
becomes alive
after a rain storm

The black
a deep well
with an awkward pulse

Dialated
eyes blinded
by moonlight

In Santa Fe
there are no drains
the water pools

Or runs
into little mouths
so that the street's history
can be hissed

Lying-ass Song

 ...Some things in this world
Do not depend on speech to be felt.

That is how Terrance Hayes new book, How to Be Drawn*, ends. The lines seem to both soothe and to warn. They are almost a hex.

There is a listlessness in the end of winter. It's like the final days of illness when you are feeling better, have an appetite, even energy. But you are still hacking up phlegm and oozing from your nose. You may go back to work/school/etc. but you will be coughing like death for a few more days.

You might lose your voice.

How does one get back their lost voice?

Hook up a battery to it and jump?

Mid-semester and I am not writing. I'm editing, which is great, let's not get hysterical about this. But I am not producing new. It is easy to blame this on teaching. That I am spending a lot of brain-space on being creative in a different way.

The reality is that I get tired too easily.

I have very specific spaces that I am able to get creative work done in.

Mental and physical.

I need to be rested, but not too rested. Awake, but not over energized that I can't sit. Distracted by my surroundings just enough to go to that imagination place to make weird connections, but not too distracted that I start transcribing the lyrics tot he song playing or start live tweeting the conversations at the next table.

I need to have a jolt of creation, but not a jolt of someone else's energy.

If this all sounds like excuses. Well. It feels that way to me too. But these are the rules that my brain has given for the 'work' to commence.

Lately. It just hasn't.

That isn't to say I am out of ideas. I have mapped out a series of linked short stories. I've reworked bits of the novel-in-never-ending-progress. I organized a chapbook and printed a bunch of poems to try and pin together a manuscript. I even wrote a new poem the other day.

But it doesn't FEEL. And maybe this is a limit of that word. Or of the word 'work' or 'creativity' or or or or or.

I keep waiting to feel like I've turned a corner, or the ball is rolling, or something akin to that absolutely not able to be defined thing.

Maybe I'm waiting to be an 'adult'. Or a 'professional'. Or.

The Hayes quote above ends with this:

Remember too that the eyes are not flesh,
That crisis is initiated by the absence of witness,

That Orpheus, in time, became nothing
But a lying-ass song
Sung for the woman he failed.

It isn't that I am waiting.
It is that I am not sure I ever learned how to feel it when it gets here.


* How to Be Drawn is out March 31 2015 from Penguin

Want To Have To

I am feeling a bit uninspired. When I was working on Poem-A-Day I frequently bumped against this problem. Then I would just write something flippant and move on.

That is my reaction to feeling a 'have' to write. Not that this blog is a 'have to'. It is and will hopefully always remain a 'want to'. But sometimes you feel like you have to do something. Even if you set up the situation and control it 100%. Even then, sometimes, you feel it. That pressure. The school work pressure. The deadline pressure.

When I first graduated from college I didn't write for 6 months. 6 very long months where I worried that I would never write again, where I stared at blank pages and dreamed of them drowning me.

I broke out of that period of not writing by forcing myself to write long studies of individual objects. I would stare at something and force the words out. I modeled myself on Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons or Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

In both of those instances the poets took everyday objects and tilted them slightly. They looked until they no longer seemed every day. My poems looked more like Stevens. They sprawled on the page and meandered from their original intents.

But I was writing again.

Right now I am at a point where I am writing a decent amount. I am sending to journals. But I have started a new job and live in a new house in a new state. I am still working out what that means. I am inspired to think about being inspired.

A scene from Midsomer Murders in 2012.

I am thinking about thinking about.

Eventually I will have to look at things again. Begin to dissect again. And I look forward to that. I may wake up tomorrow and be inspired to write 100 pages. I may wake tomorrow and want to watch Midsomer Murders and knit.

And that would be ok too. Unlike me from when I stopped writing after college. Me now is ok with taking breaks. I know it will come back. It always comes back.