What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
I’m going to try to take this down a different road than just saying ‘writing is the most difficult part of writing’ because you can just scroll down your twitter timeline and see a million tweets a day affirming that. Instead, I’ll try to talk about what made it difficult for me. I used to be prolific in my youth. It’s a good thing I’m not anymore because I was also, generally, bad. But rattling off those easy things was probably good for me. Now, of course, the challenge is beginning: getting up the nerve to tackle the vision you have for what the idea should be and the prophetic certainty that your mortal coil will only be able to shuffle off a debased version of the ideal. See? The problem is that: nihilism precedes the opening, so the beginning never begins. If you have no hope that you can measure up to what Time demands, your despair will lead you to oblivion’s plate, and the insatiable emptiness will collect you as it does all. Then you counter yourself: if it collects all, better to be collected with a long trail behind you of artefacts rather than a deep inwardness of unsubstantiated ideas- and yet… Nothing reigns. This can become especially prominent once you shift from the private, youthful scribbles, or the private scribbles that predate the consciousness that you’re in the literary world into the conscious striving to set up a prominent place in the literary market- and you meet denial, rejection, muted or negative reactions when you only ever encountered praise in your little world. And digging out of the hole that is the comparing world of literature, submitting for publication, the measurements of publication, where the locations of the published pieces are ranked by prestige, all this then becomes part of your poetic psyche, and your writing is no longer about transcribing an ideal into a form but now about doing so in a way that pleases or defeats those who have hurt you, to join the crowd you’re outcast from. Maybe some people escape this or do better with it. But the real trial becomes: how are you able to get back to the place where writing poetry is about writing poetry and not about the game? The game presents a major obstacle, one which you, the writer, typically exaggerates to your own doom. Life builds walls enough: finding time to think and work in the midst of life. That’s the bulk of the difficulty there: the external hindrances that life thrusts upon us all- how do we overcome these sufficiently to work? Some can compartmentalize better than others: when they arrive home, they can cast aside the day’s drudgery; others take longer to decompress to get into the state they need to be in to let themselves feel what they need to feel to think. Finding your own groove is one of the difficulties. Sometimes your groove changes on you, and you need to reestablish how you overcome. Basically, life is determined to make writing poetry difficult. But sometimes it comes easy. Some poems flood out, and those are beautiful. Sometimes routine, by this I mean a work routine- maybe a job where the duties are fairly rote, or more physical and you feel you have your entire mental side to yourself- puts us in a position to work better. For me, it doesn’t. I’m a baby. I’m overwhelmed easily, and the slightest draught displaces me. I’ll cry that the world is set against me and wallow. Life is conspiring against my work. No one cares. Only me. In that reality, the only way out is through- a saying that may be cliché, but which helps me step on a plane and endure. Write or die. Obviously, I don’t want anyone to adopt that. I’ve adopted it because I hold myself to harsher and more merciless standards than I apply to others, but even hyperbolically, the point holds: work or don’t, but the suffering of not working will eventually outweigh the suffering of working.
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