Christian Wiman, in Poetry June 2003, writes about, among other things, an inability to write. Nothing comes, or something comes and it’s nothing, he writes. It’s like a drought – and Texas needs rain. I’m there right now, and have pretty much been barren since the first of the year. I’m still being published; old work polished a bit and edited. But I’ve written few fresh poems. I turned to prose thinking that if poems won’t come maybe fiction will. No luck. I’ve considered creative non-fiction, but same result. Nothing comes. Wiman also writes about turning to old work, which had seemed so good and now seems shot through with empty spaces. I’ve wanted to blast some old, published work with buckshot, too.
In 2007 I began to develop motor problems. I played the guitar and sang – John Prine, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker stuff mostly – until the fingers on my right hand couldn’t pick anymore. My voice got shaky and weak. I had trouble walking. After two MRIs, blood tests, and poking and prodding by a neurologist the medical profession can’t tell me what I have. At least the experts could tell me what I don’t have, and that’s something at least. Nothing comes, or something comes and it’s nothing.
What I had to learn was patience. Patience with experts who weren’t; patience in speaking, eating, walking; patience with myself. I’ve slowly gotten better, but at the pace I’m improving I’ll be able to finger-pick my guitar about when our economy improves. That long? Yeah. I expect for poems to flow again before either my picking or the economy improves. Poems will come again.
Tony Hoagland in his book of essays on poetic craft, Real Sofistikashun, discusses how some poets transform their style and some become trapped in a particular style. When I think of poets who seem trapped in a style I think of Kay Ryan, or John Updike. I love reading both and can read their work over and again. I bring this up not to judge poets who don‘t transform their styles, or to belittle Ryan and Updike as intransigent. In struggling with my not-writing I wondered if I needed to change the way I write.
Look around this site – tumble-down poems ala Kay Ryan; prose poems; “Brautigans”; lyrics; narratives. I don’t need to change styles, maybe I need to settle on a style. When I write, I often start with a line that’s stuck in my head. It leads me into a style by which I complete the poem. Hence, the eclecticism of my style. Sometimes I’ll pick a subject then write about it, but that’s the exception not the rule. My best poems come all of a piece, then I begin to edit during which work I settle on the style. If I can’t complete it when I first start writing it doesn’t get written. My notebook is full of incomplete poems, line, and ideas.
To unstick myself from the mudhole of not-writing I’m beginning at the beginning. When I first started writing poetry I wrote in forms. Let’s see…think I’ll write a villanelle. I switched to free verse when I couldn’t get published. I’m not going back to formal verse, but I’m picking a type and delving in…narratives, or prose poems. Also, I’m reading poetry again. I’d stopped and when I read poetry I write poetry. Time will tell if it works and I’ve become a patient man. But, like Hemingway, when I don’t write, I feel like shit.
