on “Poems Not Written”
When I was small, I identified a new way to eat popcorn. I was sitting with my best friend in the 90-degree turn of her sofa — the upholstery resembled pastel nonpareils.
The process was simple. I would pile handfuls of popcorn into my mouth, chew, and before swallowing, reach for more, chew, and reach for more again until I could no longer repeat these first two steps, at which point I would direct the mass onward. This repellent method pleased me; while horrible in recollection, at the time I thought I had re-discovered the moon. I remember it felt efficient, sly, and not at all disordered.
Sometime this year, when trying to answer a question about creative process, this popcorn method appeared in anecdotal form, before dear Charles North and a Zoom full of college students. In response to questions about how I write, I said that I wasn’t writing, and not because I had writers’ block so much as I was choosing not to write.
Stints of not-writing are just as memorable and important as times when I am writing. In 2010 and 2011, I remember writing very little while recovering from surgery, even though I had all the time in the world. I remember not writing when I first moved to CA (depression). In the summer of 2012, I remember driving back from a wedding in Colorado and seeing the sign for Emigrant Gap on the highway and, soon after, writing a poem called that, a poem that surprised me, and I remember committing to the idea of trying to surprise myself again.
After finishing manuscripts during the last ten years, I’ve adhered to a creative mindset that connects back to this popcorn practice: I simply don’t stop to write things down. I let the lines accumulate in the back of my mind, forgotten, revised, dismissed, pickling, they sit there, thinking about what they’ve done, unadulterated by documentation.
When they accumulate in my mind, before being (or never) etched on the page, I imagine the lines transforming into other lines that I may or may not meet. (“The Blue Bird” was a favorite film when I was little. I found sadness and solace when Shirley Temple meets the babies who haven’t yet come to earth. Lines that haven’t been written.) When I’m ready to write, I go rummaging in my brain and sometimes return with odd objects and sentences I don’t always understand. It makes me feel free from my original senses of what poetry was and could be. It makes me feel free, period.
I remember almost a year of not-writing between 2014 and 2015. When I began writing again, I noticed that the things I was saying (to myself, to the page) were entirely new. New sentences, memories I hadn’t remembered before, a different sense of propulsion. I credit this newness to the rest. We have to be okay with letting our writing rest. My friend reminds me that if poetry makes nothing happen, as Auden said, not-writing poetry has quite the opposite effect.
Around the 2016 election, I’d just finished a manuscript but my writing stopped in a supplementary way: I wasn’t resting so much as wondering, in the face of our country’s racial and political and decency reckonings, what my White, Jewish, insular funny sad uncertain poems might have to contribute to a world in need of such repair. I didn’t know how to write for several years but listening remained an active practice.
In listening, I heard ways to connect a creative writing practice with tools for a community building practice. I saw how poetry reminds us of ways to be together by mapping unexpected connections, paying careful attention, being comfortable with doubt and uncertainty, and trading in curiosity and awe.
Creativity is a means toward understanding one another. Empathy is a pre-condition for some of the harder conversations so many of us are trying to have, or need to have, or want to learn how to have. Claudia Rankine’s astonishing experiments with difficult conversations — particularly with White men in airports and on airplanes — demonstrate the courage I didn’t know I needed to locate in order to ask my neighbors if they wanted to gather to talk about race and class and difference in the weeks after the Memorial Day when George Floyd was murdered and Amy Cooper called the cops on Christian Cooper. Since that June, a dozen or more of us gather every few weeks, bringing our chairs into a circle-shaped yard to build trust and community. This enduring practice feels essential to my weeks and days; it’s hard to imagine a time when people on this street didn’t know one another in this profound way.
Not writing doesn’t mean I’m not seeing poems every day, that I’m not thinking of forms or lines, or hearing them in headlines, or in my parents’ sentences, or in the aisles of the supermarket where I used to do some of my best thinking. Just because it’s invisible doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful, active, alive.
Not writing opens up the spaces where we might see or hear new forms existing. Moments in our commutes, or in the lopsided forms of our shared and divergent pandemic. Or the day I mis-read the calendar in a doctor’s office as a book-length form of stanza assignments. Or how I heard music in the dental hygienist’s exam of my gums (3,2,3; 3,2,2) and saw greater forms in the printed chart: part data set, part tooth cartoon, part sheet music.
Not writing made space for me to start teaching creativity classes at my nonprofit workplace, and at other workplaces, which led to recognizing the similarities between poetic forms and facilitation, which made me think about building new kinds of jobs for poets.
Poetry is a form of noticing and we depend on these forms of listening when we write and just as much when we don’t; we depend on life’s erratic song. Integrating such an awareness practice over the last 20 years of days has changed my life more than publishing any particular collection or poem has. It’s made me a more observant person, at times a better friend and family member, more nimble, more comfortable naming the elephants in a room, it has made me more brave.
I wonder what your anchor to being a poet is. I wonder what you’d hear if you let it free. I don’t believe we’re not writers when we’re not writing. Maybe we’re just taking care with time or ourselves or people we love. Thinking is being a writer, as is reading. When it’s necessary, or inviting, I’ve always been able to open the cupboard on writing. (Ashbery snipping lines out of the ether makes sense to me, as does Duncan’s vision of Grand Collage.)
Imagine if we could be more comfortable valuing one another for the possibility of, or our proximity to, poetry rather than units of poems or books themselves. How might it look to appreciate our less visible work, the work of giving our lives and poems the time they need to grow? Being a person and a community member is an endless, creative act.