Kathleen McCoy : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Like most writers I know, I find revision quickening, life-affirming, and submission grueling, enervating. Reworking a poem is both physical and metaphysical for me, by which I mean I taste the words, play with line breaks, make substitutions, rearrangements, enlargements, and condensations. That process is exciting, like working bread dough--you feel the warm pliability of it, the forgiveness, and the point past which you must not go lest your bread-poem become too difficult to chew. 

Submission, on the other hand, feels like a hamster's wheel. You jump in, cycle around, cycle around again and again and sometimes have to jump off before you lose your lunch. It can be dispiriting. I tend to get a lot of "almost" rejection letters, where I'm dubbed a semi-finalist or finalist in a contest or submissions round. It's enough to keep me going, but it takes a push to jump back into the wheel and go around some more. So many have said this, but it's true--you keep at it for love. Nothing less, nothing more. If your love fades, you should get out of the game. If your love persists, nothing can stop you. Stall you, yes, but not stop you.

Another difficulty for me is physical. Anyone who has spent adulthood trying to balance family, work, and writing knows that this is enough, and when you add chronic illness(es) to that mix, the balance is easier to throw off. I've learned to give myself permission to take my time, to get it right, to take time off for self-nurturing when I need to. I don't buy the old saw that you have to write every day to call yourself a writer. Martin Espada says he writes in spurts sometimes; at least he did when his son was very young. Any family woman/poet I know who is still teaching also expresses this frustration/need to alternate energies, to spend some periods on work or self/family nurture and others on nurturing the craft. I comfort myself in the knowledge that ideas are always brimming in my subconscious, even when I'm not hitting the page as regularly as I would like. 

It helps that I always try to write when my students are writing, too. I often give a ten- to twenty-minute writing prompt for idea generation in creative writing classes, so I practice my craft along with my students. While this practice rarely produces finished work, it often spearheads a new piece, or gives me lines or images for work already in progress.