I've still been thinking about some of the things Terrance Hayes said regarding practice versus exercise in the life of a professional writer. I use the word professional guardedly here. I'm not implying that, as a professional, one needs to be widely published, or even published at all. Of course Emily Dickinson was a professional writer. But to be a professional, rather than an apprentice or an amateur, I think one needs to be writing consistently (that is, writing regularly every day or almost every day) and with purposeful self-discipline (attending closely to one's own work, devising ways to change and grow, no longer depending primarily on exterior teachers to guide or inspire you).

In Hayes's terms, practice is the everyday writing habit and exercise is the specific task we set ourselves to push our work into the complex and the unexpected. What is my practice? Well, this blog is a big part of my practice: every single morning I write you a letter about whatever flies into my head. I also keep a daily dream diary, in which I record whatever scraps I can recall from my very colorful dreams--not to analyze them but because recording my dream imagination is a useful aid to stretching my poetic imagination. Also, I read a book during every interstice of my life. Thus, even if I don't actually work on a poem during a given day, I am steadily practicing poems.

So what am I doing for exercise? I have always set myself tasks, and some of them have been vast. Copying out all of Paradise Lost and simultaneously writing essays about the project was an exercise. So was writing hundreds of poems based on primary sources from the history of Appalachian Pennsylvania. But most of my self-imposed tasks are smaller: write a sonnet that exactly replicates the meter of my favorite George Herbert sonnet; start every stanza of a poem about ancient Greece using contemporary business-memo jargon. Sometimes these exercises lead me straight to the dump; sometimes they don't. The point is that they push me out of my cozy shoot-a-few-hoops relationship with my familiar style and voice. They challenge me; they make me uncomfortable; they make me solve problems; they make me tumble into the private unknown; and over time they make me better at my job.

My Thursday night writing group is a weekly collaborative exercise: we all write first drafts to unexpected prompts. But I continue to follow my own exercise regimen as well. Currently, I am immersed in a project that involves using adages, philosophical claims, lines from old poets, etc., as the skeleton frame for my own new drafts. For instance, I might choose Plato's statement "Everything that deceives may be said to enchant." On a page I arrange the statement like this:

Everything

that

deceives

may

be

said

to

enchant

Now I have to write a draft in which each line starts with the given word. Thus, the left margin is rigidly proscribed but the right margin is ragged and loose. I have been doing this exercise over and over again, with lines from Plato, Virgil, Shakespeare, and on and on. Each poem is constrained by the left margin; each poem is careening crazily on the right margin; but the results have been exciting and new and fascinating to me, and I am learning so much.

How does this exercise help me? I tend to be rigidly controlled by sound, and this exercise forces me to override my classically trained ear. I tend to gravitate to formal stanzas, and this exercise pushes me to create long lines and harsh line breaks. I have a tendency to carve out dramatic endings. This exercise requires me to make the best of where I end up.

This is the draft I came up with from that exercise. It is not a great poem, but it is an interesting poem to me, as the practitioner, as the exerciser. Maybe you can see how the exercise is making me step into mudholes I ordinarily avoid, how it's pushing me to recognize that those mudholes are portals into new experiences: awkwardness, chaos, clangor, emotional confusion. (I reduced the size of the font so that you can see how long the lines are.)

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant

Everything flies away in this cold wind—dead leaves, tattered flags, my amour propre,

that old liar, that old cheat, that greedy faker, who ten months out of the year

deceives me into thinking I have a purpose on this high-falutin planet (“why, you

may learn a thing or two”) until a March gale rolls me some side eye and sniggers,

“Be real.” Today I walked down the sidewalk at 8 a.m. and a mincing snowdrop

said, “Stop staring.” Now I don’t know where to put my sadness.

To live is to forget how. It’s not even lunchtime yet. Oh, toiling heart,

enchant me, enchant me . . . then do it again.

Tomorrow I might write a bit about the sonnet thoughts that Hayes shared. But I guess for now one thing I want to implore of you, dear fellow strivers, is to take a look at your practice and your exercise. If you write the same neat tiny poems day after day, if your habit is to edit yourself down into exquisiteness, invent a project that pushes you to fill long lines with mess, and see what you find, where you go. If every draft involves an "I" taking a brief trip into memory and then coming to a deft conclusion, challenge yourself to write ten third-person poems filled with lies.

Lord knows, I'm not trying to set myself up as a guru or an egomaniac. I am a chump at heart. But I'm a chump with a mulish streak, and I have to make the best of what I've got to work with. My point is: if we keep standing at the free throw line and shooting one tidy basket after another, we're missing a world of three-pointers and goofy spin shots. Yes, we reveal our weakness. But we also might get a lot better at our art.