I’m having another morning in which I’m stalled out and convinced that I don’t know how to write or what to write about. I tried to work on a poem about breaking a plate and the connection to feeling sorry for my elderly neighbor below. Earlier, while putting things away, I had dropped a plate (it fell from the drying rack) and it shattered on the floor with a loud for any hour and certainly loud for 7am crash. It wasn’t much of a poem.
Prior to writing, I read several poems that all seemed to touch on my difficulties with writing. They touched on where I’m stuck – somewhere between real life, long-form narration (mini essays about tech and AI and the awfulness of the world) and wanting something softer and more poetic.
One poem, “The Same Thing” by Ada Limón, begins with the line, “There’s an awful story in the news.” The poem proceeds to talk about normal everyday occurrences – going to work, passing store windows, buying gifts. “This is how your life will go, you know that. Day after day. // Awful acceptance: the soft life of your footprints.” Sometimes, I feel that I read too much news to be of any use as a poet. My online reading life is full of anger and frustration at the constant and very intentional dishonesty in our increasingly digital world and the rampant unfairness of capitalism. My offline life (pubs, and benches, and walks in the sunshine, or books of poetry) is far more joyous. I can’t seem to reconcile the two. An awful story in the news, a normal day in the park.
The other poems “The Land of Is” and “Postcard from Tortola” by Stephen Dunn were about the writer’s dance between autobiography and fiction. After a scene on a train in which the speaker and a woman on a train fall asleep in each other’s arms he writes, “or was this an episode partially lived, / partially dreamed?” “Postcard from Tortola” begins, “I’ve never been to Tortola, / though many times I’ve drifted / to the vast principality of elsewhere.” I seldom give myself the freedom to bend the truth, to drift to vast principalities of elsewhere and give it a real name. Or to put it slightly differently, I’ll add fiction into my writing and then feel guilt or shame about the lie. I feel equally guilty if I’m too honest or confessional in my poetry.
Despite knowing that the speaker is not the author, I, as a reader, tend to think the speaker is the author. When I read about someone’s ’73 Ford LTD, I assume they had a ’73 Ford LTD. Were I to write about driving in my ’73 Ford, say in the summer of long goodbyes, one in which we spent Sundays at the quarry, where we squeezed through the rusted chain-link fence, drank beer, and jumped off the rocks into the blue water below, I’d know it was all a lie and that I couldn’t possibly pull it off. I might give myself permission to write it, but would feel like a phony and would quickly dismiss it.
There are, of course, worse things than being stalled in one’s own thinking and writing. Maybe the answer is to try a little and then go about the day. Take that walk, sit on a bench, watch the starling hop along the sandy path by the Bay. From the ending of “The Same Thing”:
… the weather is nice, California nice.
You sing a little, call your family, you think, things aren’t so bad.
You say you love the world, so love the world.
Maybe you don’t even say it for yourself,
maybe you move your mouth like everyone
moves their mouth. Maybe your mouth is the same
mouth as everyone’s, all trying to say the same thing.