Since handing over my manuscript to my mentor for reading, I've taken a kind of pause from writing. I have more time now, to read, to exercise, to stay up late, to sleep in, to go out, to stay in... It’s been about four weeks now, and I admit, it wasn’t easy to take a break. I felt guilt for not writing. And a certain emptiness, too, for being so creatively idle.
It’s taken me some time to learn to fill that space, to appreciate that even if I’m not working on my memoir, I can still be creative, though. I can still use this time to look at the world creatively, perhaps even write something else (who was it that said being a writer is having homework your whole life and then you die?)
A note on poetry—and a poem
I have never considered myself a poet. I don't understand poetic technique, how to study it, how to elevate scrambles of lyrical text into “a good poem.” Not really. I do enjoy the accessibility of it though and it’s what I like to do during these pauses from my memoir.
I feel free to just write (freewrite!), as if I’m being pulled by an invisible beat; then, after a quick pass, sometimes two, I allow myself to just let it go. There just comes a time when I start to feel I've given it everything I have (or want to give).
Like this:
What makes a poem?
Is it the line break—
a dent in the line?
Its shape on the page?
Or is it its cluster selection of words
and that lightening bolt instinct that says, “This must be a poem!”
as an obscure speaker comes into existence, the images flowing
out of her fingertips like droplets of rain
on grey granite steps under a thin moonlight?Yes, this must be a poem. What, with its itsy bitsy verses, and stanzas made of lemme-see Lego language, like careful cobblestones in a patched-up promenade. . . a middle path to somewhere. . . ahead.
And like everything complete, it must have its end, too.
But how to know it is finished,
that it is in fact a poem and not just a pretty line or five?
Where does it close its seams,
this writing of infinite measure and form,
that can fill up a book with XXI Parts,
or cover just a single page,
or post-it,
or screen,
—of any size—
with thoughts, dots. . .questionsand spaces
that all lead us, together up The Great Hill of Hubris,
to a citadel, where a bell sounds a beginning—Can you hear it?—and where
its farewell is marked by an echo
of vanishing footsteps
hurrying away.
On a good day, as I write, even if I can’t quite name it, I feel its heartbeat, the truth of something coming clearer into view. I feel myself getting at the thing. But with time, I start to doubt myself, think that maybe I can’t do it at all, I feel paralyzed by the idea that I might not even know what the thing is…
It’s strange. Like trying to find your way in the dark but what you’re actually trying to find your way to is yourself.
As you know, it’s been a long road with my memoir (3.5 years and counting). I recall an instructor at The Writer’s Studio telling the class that the average book gets published by an alum about five years after finishing the program. As my number grows, I feel a deadline looming, a sort of target goal but also like a ticking time bomb. If I push too far past that average, what will it mean for me?
Writing is like sitting in meditation
I like to console my writerly self by attempting poetry. It’s gentler perhaps because the scope of a poem is more contained, its scale smaller, something I can see in one frame, if you will (it’s hard to wrap one’s head around the shape that a 380-page manuscript makes…as I’m sure you can appreciate). Thus, I’m much easier on myself with poetry—it’s okay if it only feels good enough (or even bad). Perhaps it doesn’t have to be anything—it just has to be.
Writing is a lot like meditation to me—I have to just watch myself do it. By writing, I find out what I’m trying to say, and in trying to say, I find out what I’m thinking and feeling. And sometimes in all honestly, I just need a break. Like with sitting meditation: Eventually you have to get up and walk around, stretch your back. I guess poetry is my walking; Substack, my stretching routine.
Thanks for the break and being here. I’ll confess, my heart sinks a bit every time I hit publish on something, whether it be a few lines, a poem, or a lengthier chunk of prose, because I know there is always more to be done… better that I could make it.
Yet, I admit my heart also lifts, because as soon as it’s out there, it’s not longer mine.
I can go create something else then… or go do something else. And that thing for me tomorrow is a visit to Birken Monastery. I’ll be taking a personal retreat there, not to write—truly—but to meditate and find simpler parts of myself in the dark. My breaks indeed will be walks and stretches.
Till then,
xx
Vish