[first published in the Sewanee Review, winter 2012]
According to Henry David Thoreau,
“the art of life, of a poet’s life, is, not having anything to do.” W. H. Auden
quoted this line just before launching into “Making, Knowing and Judging,” an
essay based on a lecture he delivered after he was named Oxford Professor of
Poetry and which he opened by querying the very terms of that distinguished
position: “Even the greatest of that long line of scholars and poets who have
held this chair before me . . . must have asked themselves: ‘What is a Professor of Poetry? How can Poetry be professed?’”
This isn’t a
question that many people ask nowadays. As recently as 1948, Robert Graves was
still declaring, “Though recognized as a learned profession [poetry] is the
only one for the study of which no academies are open and in which there is no
yard-stick, however crude, by which technical proficiency is considered
measurable.” Tragically, however, that long tradition has
vanished. Today, poetry has become a career rather than a vocation; and at
least in the United States, poets who refuse to buy a degree for the sake of a
job (or, more often, the shadowy dream of a job) are generally ignored as
serious artists, at least by the collegiate elite.
Yet Thoreau had it
right: art doesn’t require a certificate of proficiency. It requires long
stretches of emptiness, not only so that artists have spans of time to produce
new work but, more importantly, so that they can attend to the plain routines
of living. Great art grows from the intensity of an artist’s interaction with
her own life. I don’t mean to imply that her life has to be dramatic or even
all that interesting. But the artist must make long acquaintance with her
days—days that are rarely trancelike but that plod through the seasons: that
strip the beds and ream out the barns and trudge through the snow to the
insurance office. In this sense, then, to “profess poetry,” a writer simply
needs to pay attention to her hours, read the words of people who paid attention
to their hours, now and then follow an urge to hammer those hours and words
into her own poem, and occasionally be willing to talk about that task. As
Auden said, “There is nothing a would-be poet knows he has to know. He is at
the mercy of the immediate moment because he has no concrete reason for not
yielding to its demands.” In other words, he is merely awake
and alive.
There are days when I believe that
being awake and alive is the only thing I’ve managed to accomplish with my
life. Accidentally I seem to have followed Thoreau’s instructions to avoid
“having anything to do.” Instead, I’ve spent, or squandered, most of my career
years in being a cook, a laundress, and an underemployed, mostly self-educated,
reader and writer of small obscure books. Talking about his trajectory as a
novelist, John Fowles said, “I had been deliberately living in the wilderness;
that is, doing work I could never really love, precisely because I was afraid I
might fall in love with my work and then forever afterwards be one of those
sad, faded myriads among the intelligentsia who have always had vague literary
ambitions but have never quite made it.” My actions have been
neither so ascetic nor so ruthless. Nonetheless, there’s a selfishness about a
life spent doing nothing, especially when one has growing children and a tired
husband. Twenty years of well-cooked meals and clean socks are not substitutes
for a paycheck.
This tradeoff
seems even worse when I’m struggling to write, as I have been during the past
few months. If I’m not managing to do anything remunerative, shouldn’t I at
least be writing? In truth, however, my problem is not “not writing” per se.
Clearly, at this very moment, I’m writing this essay. Almost every morning I
write a longish blog post about reading and writing. I read seriously every
day, I’ve been steadily revising a poetry manuscript, and I’ve even composed a
few decent poems. I’ve finished a memoir and written the text of a magazine
photo-essay. When I stand back and look at my output, I do see that I have no
right to complain about not writing. Nonetheless, something is amiss: I’m not,
to borrow my friend Baron’s terminology, “in the zone,” and I haven’t been in
the zone for what feels like a very long time.
Being in the zone
is rather like writing under the influence of a writing-specific drug: every
step of the task vibrates with meaning, and the work seems to take charge of
itself. Fowles said, “I know when I am writing well that I am writing with more
than the sum of my acquired knowledge, skill, and experience; with something
from outside myself.” When I’m in the zone, I still produce words and
revise, produce words and revise; but somehow my decision making feels sharper
and more incisive. I don’t plod through time, dragging at words like I’m
yanking an obstinate goat up a mountain path. Weightless, I fly.
Yet being in the
zone does not guarantee that what I produce is any good. As Auden pointed out,
poets “cannot claim oracular immunity.” The writing trance may
be an intoxication, but the art that results is not dependable. Auden’s example
was Coleridge’s famous fragment “Kubla Khan,” composed, according to the
author, during an opium dream in a “lonely farm-house.”
The Author
continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external
senses, during which he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have
composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be
called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent
expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.
Despite historical
precedent, one is not required to take laudanum or drink whiskey for breakfast in
order to work in the writing zone. But drugs do add their own je ne sais
quoi to the situation; and thus Coleridge’s
opium-induced zone cannot really parallel my own non-opium-induced haze. Yet
his description of the experience is nonetheless familiar. “All the images rose
up before him as things”—yes, I,
too, recognize those moments, breathtaking, yet also as simple as water, when
the abstractions of thought assume a swift and automatic solidity. “With a parallel production of the
correspondent expressions,” the words for those images appear under my
fingers—easily, exactly, “without any sensation or consciousness of effort.”
But
trouble always looms. Waking from his dream, Coleridge “instantly and eagerly
wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At that moment he was
unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock . . . and all the
rest [of the dream poem] passed away like the images on the surface of a stream
into which a stone has been cast.”
Oh,
that aggravating person from Porlock! How well I know him. He has been sitting
on the other side of my desk for about six months now, kicking the table leg,
snapping his gum, and trying to interest me in political candidates and asphalt
shingles. He is the anti-zone, and he interrupts every single word I write.
Sometimes I manage to soldier on in spite of him, but sometimes I just give up
and take him out for coffee. Coleridge, however, was unable to persevere
against distraction. Daily life intruded on the trance, and “Kubla Khan”
remains unfinished and unrevised. Though the author did publish the fragment,
he did so only “at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord
Byron], and, as far as the Author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a
psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.”
Despite
the poet’s disclaimer, the fragment is, in truth, a wondrous piece of work; yet
as Auden noted, “Coleridge was not being falsely modest. He saw, I think, as a
reader can see, that even the fragment that exists is disjointed and would have
had to be worked on if he ever completed the poem, and his critical conscience
felt on its honor to admit this.” In other words, “Kubla Khan”
is a lovely scrap, but it could have been a polished work of art if the poet
had been able to step outside the trance zone into the lumpish everyday world
of banging words together and taking them apart, banging words together and
taking them apart—a quotidian job that is rather like trying to assemble a
mechanical device that seems to be missing various indispensable gears. There’s
nothing particularly joyous or intoxicating about the project, but it’s the job
that gets the work done—and a job that Coleridge knew very well he had once
been able to do.
Yet
there’s another side to this quotidian writing story. What about the reams of
work that people produce by means of prompts and
“write-a-poem-every-day-for-a-month” challenges? Aren’t such assignments a way
to keep the juices flowing during those long tranceless droughts? Aren’t these
efforts both a form of education and a way of professing poetry?
To me, such
force-fed production is almost too distasteful to contemplate. I don’t want to
write, as one poetry blog suggests, “a
love poem in the form of a traffic ticket” or, worse yet, a “blitz poem,” which
is, according to another poetry blog, “a 50-line poem of short phrases and images” compiled according to
specific rules:
Line 1 should be
one short phrase or image (like “build a boat”)
Line 2 should be
another short phrase or image using the same first word as the first word in
Line 1 (something like “build a house”)
Lines 3 and 4
should be short phrases or images using the last word of Line 2 as their first
words (so Line 3 might be “house for sale” and Line 4 might be “house for
rent”)
Lines 5 and 6
should be short phrases or images using the last word of Line 4 as their first
words, and so on until you've made it through 48 lines
Line 49 should be
the last word of Line 48
Line 50 should be
the last word of Line 47
The title of the
poem should be three words long and follow this format: (first word of Line 3)
(preposition or conjunction) (first word of line 47)
There should be no
punctuation
The blog assures me that this is “a
pretty simple and fun poem to write once you get the hang of it.” Ugh.
The prompt
approach pretends that writing poetry is a pleasant activity analogous to
solving a New York Times crossword. It
lays out the structure: all the pencil-holder does is fill in the blanks.
There’s no real labor involved, no hard-won synthesis of emotion and diction,
grammar and imagination, sound and intellect. Nonetheless, a person can sit
down at her desk every day and fool herself into believing she’s producing a
body of work.
These kinds of
writing gimmicks infuriate me. Since when is poetry supposed to be “pretty
simple and fun”? Yet out there in the world today, thousands of people may be
writing their so-called poems as I sit here not writing any poem at all.
Without sweat or inspiration, they are nonetheless making something; and we’ve
all been taught to believe that doing something is better than doing nothing.
Which brings me
back to Thoreau. If “the art . . . of a poet’s life, is, not having anything to
do,” then I think that perhaps we, as writers, need to negotiate better terms
with nothing. In Iris Murdoch’s novel The
Black Prince, the character Bradley
Pearson, a novelist who rarely writes anything, comments on “how much I was
dominated during this time by an increasingly powerful sense of the imminence
in my life of a great work of art.” At the time he had no idea what his
imaginary book would contain, but he felt it as “a great dark wonderful something nearby in the future, magnetically connected with
me: connected with my mind, connected with my body.” Bradley is an unreliable
narrator, yet his thoughts about the sensation of “not writing”—perhaps I
should say the sensation of “not writing yet”—remind me that the trance and the labor, the mind
and the body, cannot be divorced. But neither can they be impelled. As Bradley
explains, “an artist in a state of power has a serene relationship to time. Fruition
is simply a matter of waiting.”
