Sitting on the sofa with my second cup of coffee for the morning, I began to read poems from a stack of books on the table beside me. The dog lets out the most annoying half whine with each breath. He’s bored, and it’s all I can do to not yell at him to go find something to do – which of course he wouldn’t understand. When he settles in his bed and puts his head down on his blanket, I feel bad for being frustrated with him. I’m trying to focus and think and the whines are a constant reminder (projection) of how much of a disappointment I am to him, of how his needs aren’t being met, of how I’m about to lose my temper because in this moment he seems relentlessly demanding in the most passive-aggressive way. If I could finish my coffee, which I admit I’m nursing, I would take him out, but he’s impatient in his little dog mind and his non-whine whine. The books… the poems – that’s where I was initially focused. The few I read today – two or three each from two or three different authors didn’t do anything for me. There was an occasional line here and there, but nothing stood out. I wasn’t feeling moved or dazzled or surprised. I wasn’t hearing the music of language or seeing the trickery of unexpected turns. And I looked at the stack and thought about the difference between good poetry and bad poetry and the volumes of in between. So many pages of the inconsequential (to me). And it was hard not to think of my own writing… which sits unpublished on a laptop hard drive. It doesn’t get more inconsequential than that. I separated the books into two stacks. The good and the other. One stack I seem to savor. One stack I seem to want to get through and finish and maybe find some redemption. Someone once told me that what motivates artists is seeing or reading or hearing something and quietly saying, “oh, I can do that.” The physicality of these books and the absence of my own suggests otherwise. Can I? Really? Perhaps, like Dr. Bluespire’s ape, I should try writing something.
… and then I pick up a poem, “Siberia,” from a more established poet, Tony Hoagland. It’s good. It does the things I was hoping to see – it spreads imagination’s wings. It knocks me back a bit. I turn to the blurbs on the back cover to remind myself with other people’s words why I like Hoagland: “Never sentimental, often fond, and always accurate, his lines cut through to the essence of experience. Yet they are leavened by tenderness and longing, a wry acceptance of the human condition.” This is why he’s in the good stack. This is why I keep him around.
That’s the pin drop on the map of my discomfort: my craft, a rustic barn on a rural road between the small town of “I can do that” and the glistening city of “man, I wish I could do that.”