By 8am, I had all but given up on myself. The few lines I had written felt uninspired and the old poems I revisited with the thought of revising were boring and unpalatable. This was clear proof that wanting something doesn’t make it so.
Looking for inspiration from other writers, I finished a series of poems by Stephen Dunn called the Mrs. Cavendish poems. They are twenty-five poems that tell a life-long love story between the speaker and Rachel, who having married someone else becomes Mrs. Cavendish. Shortly after the two reconnect, the husband dies. Throughout much of the series, the relationship seems aloof and distant yet intellectually intimate and physically tense. This strange “arm’s length” distance between the two is maintained through Dunn’s consistent use of the formal Mrs. Cavendish. I sat with the poems for a bit, then turned to another writer, Kim Addonizio. Her poem “Candy Heart Valentine” begins, “In the story of the three little words, things turn out badly: / one is washed overboard, another ends up trapped under a machine / drinking and dialing, the third is still apologizing to some rocks.” I love the futility and humor in “still apologizing to some rocks.” A few lines later, the poem continues “… You were someone to me once, but now I’ve razored / through most of the frames.”
Instead of being inspired, my mild ambitions to write something, a little anything, were shot and left limping along through the morning. My imagination doesn’t work that way – though I wish it would. I don’t know how “true” any of these poems are, but when I had revisited my own work, I found too much truth in them. They didn’t stretch the way I would like them to. As for the lines I had written this morning – they were little more than a weather report for December second: yellowing sky, blackbird flying, alliterative grocery list of lemons and laundry detergent.
By 8:30am, I was convinced that I would need the entire day to get “there” with any type of writing. I’d need to take a walk, probably read some more, stare out the window. I cleared my table of distractions (more like pushed them to the side), turned the phone upside-down, and opened the notebook. I wrote the date and nothing else. I returned to the Addonizio book. Two or three poems later, she begins her poem “Florida” with the line, “And then there was the man who said “You look fatter / with your clothes off.”
I gave up. I don’t have that type of honesty in me. I can say things simply, but not with great effect. Maybe I’ll try again later.