Category — Commentary

So, I have been giving this some thought lately. I don’t mean it facetiously. How does one write the perfect poem?

What is the perfect poem?

Who decides what a poem is?

Who decides what perfect is?

Does that matter?

Here’s what I’ve got:

• There is such a thing as a perfect poem, but it’s super-duper ultra secret and I can’t tell you what it is.

and

• The first step in writing the perfect poem – or the perfect anything for that matter – is to have an incredibly brilliant, startling, completely true and utterly amazing  thought.

Barring that kind of thought, the perfection of your poem is pretty limited, so you should give up on perfect and just aim for amazing or brilliant.

Anyone have more insight on this? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

I have a lot of friends who suffer from writer’s block. I won’t lie and say I’ve never experienced it, but I have some strategies I’ve been using for a long time that have made it pretty rare for me. The best book I ever read that delved into this subject was called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The advice there was “Look Closer” break things down into smaller bites and if it’s not small enough, then go smaller and closer.

This is the first thing way I avoid blockage, but I also sidestep it by avoiding the desire or inclination to create anything of any quality. Fear of not living up to one’s own expectations or the expectations of others is a huge mental block.

So this is what I’ve come up with so far, usually, blockage is caused by one of avery few causes.

1. You want to create something amazing and you’re afraid of creating something crappy.
2. Your mind is all over the place and you can’t figure out specifically what you want to do.
3. Nothing ‘feels’ interesting or worth the time to create. aka “a lack of inspiration”
4. Completely focused one on project and stuck with it.

Fear is difficult to overcome, but in that case, creating ANYTHING is better than nothing. So if you feel like you’re trying to create soemthing AWESOME, but everything is coming out crap, then create MORE. Much more.  The frustration of creating nothing is much greater than the frustration of creating something average or sub-par. Also, the sub-par materials you create can be edited and used later.

Now, if you feel scattered, the best solution is simply to be more specific. When you start to write about ‘love’ and you’ve got nothing, write about romantic love. When you can’t write about Romantic love, write about your worst romantic love, when you can’t write about your worst romantic love, write about your worst romantic love’s bad breath. Eventually, you’ll find that a thousand words are written, and it’s hard to claim that your’e blocked once you’ve produced like that.

Now the last problem, that one is probably the one that  tough. But if that’s where you are, if you don’t “Feel” anything. Try to pick one thing, any one thing, and look at it through a prism of experience and emotion. For example… take a duck. Look at it first as a chinese meal, then as a duckling in a pond, then as a collection of feathers, then as a verb.. find 20 ways to look at it. Sketch each, write a haiku about each, do anything you can imagine with each and then see how they relate together. Don’t worry what you feel, complete it like an intellectual exercise.  Sometimes, you have to do an end-round the emotion to find the way back to it.

Now the last one, the over-focused on a single project that you’re stuck on. That one is interesting. I get that way a bit, but I usually just set things aside. The problem with doing that is that projects languish. I’m not sure I can recommend constantly setting them aside.  I think maybe, a more productive approach might be to allow yourself to digress. If your’e working on a project, a poem, – anything – and you find yourself at an impasse, just let go. Don’t worry if the next thing you write ‘fits’ just roll with it. Expand on something that requires no expansion, give yourself permission to play with it. See if you can find the joy in what you’re doing.

Finally, the other thing you can do when you get ‘stuck’ is talk about it with smart people. NO offense intended to stupid people, but they won’t be as helpful. Explain what you’re doing to a really smart person, tell them what you’re thinking about when you do it. And when they start to ask you questions, answer them as in depth as you can.

This can really help you find ways around the obstacles.

I have many other strategies around blocks in creativity, feel free to ask me for more details.

Today, my friend Christy Wells wrote to me in a little conversation we had, ” a demanding reader is an opportunity for a writer to rise to the occasion of improvement.” This idea is truly how I hope I always look at my audience, whether it’s visual or written.

She also said, “The most engaged and appreciable reader is too (wonderfully) selfish to care about what I want as a writer. That reader is my target audience.”

Now, like I told her, I don’t know if I share her target audience precisely, but in a broad general sort of way I agree with a lot of those concepts.

I think, the addendum that I might put on that target might be that while they don’t care what I want to accomplish they are receptive to whatever is put in front of them. They are willing to try to perceive what I might be trying to do, whether they care or not is somewhat irrelevant.

It is important to me that I respect the fact that they cared enough to read what I wrote, or view what I created, and they are not so hostile to my intent that they immediately reject it without any consideration. A sort of apathy towards my intent is absolutely fine, but it shouldn’t be an active obstacle either.

I love the point that selfishness is definitely wonderful in its way, but I do want the allowance that, if I’ve written what I’ve written well, regardless the myriad ways an audience might embrace or reject it, it will have the opportunity to have effect I intended. Perhaps it succeeds, perhaps it doesn’t, but I want an audience that approaches it with an honest indifference.

In that way, I like the idea of an audience and a writer that are only aware of each other in the broadest sense. The writer is often not writing ‘for’ them and the reader is not reading ‘for’ the author. They each have their own agenda and each is perfectly legitimate and acceptable.

I guess, in my mind, the great writer allows the audience to read the work as they wish, and the audience accepts that the writer meant something whether it is relevant to them or not.

Over the years I’ve been a part of many writing communities and they’ve had varying affects on me and my writing. One of my favorite writing community experiences was “The Department of Modern Verse” it was a site built  on the pathetic.org code that I worked on with my friend Steve Podielsky. We had it going for a tiny bit more than a year and had fairly close to 1000 members when we shut it down.

In some ways I regret shutting it down, not only because so many of the members never fully forgave me after, but also because I had so much fun with it. I made tons of friends and they were all so genuinely supportive about my writing. But there was a dark under-side to that whole thing that was very difficult for me to really understand a the time.

The saddest part of it was the way it became a baby-sitting gig. Constantly being the diplomat to prevent blow-ups between different people on the site. Ensuring that the environment remained good for people to join and grow and write became a harder and harder job over time. That devolved rather quickly into a sort of resentment inside of me that made me hate the place more and more – not only the place bu the people who were making my life hellish.

The lessons I learned as I took it down really stick with me to this day, and have probably held me back in some ways, but in others they’ve really helped me maintain a high level of productivity.

I thought about this a little as I was walking about through doors open Lowell today. Whether it’s in writing or in life, our community is both a huge blessing and an invisible barrier, and we must embrace both parts of that.

To the degree that a community offers opportunity to connect and share in all of the best things in life, there is absolutely nothing more important and vibrant. As an artist, I would be nothing without those connections, the hands shaken, the smiles collected, the hugs stolen on a truly bad day – these are the things that lift me up and carry me through. They’re the brilliant and wonderful moments that inspire me to write, to paint, to imagine a better world. So yay for that.

But there is also the other part of community, the part that leads to shame and guilt. There is the shame from the people that are upset when you don’t make their event, or the guilt from the ones that look at your askance because they don’t approve what you’re doing – all of that uncomfortable awkwardness that is built by the pillars of the community that just don’t like you becomes an enormous barrier to sharing and creating work.

It’s easy to say, “Hey, if they don’t like what I’m doing, screw’em.” Easy to say, hard to do.

But then, I walk around on a day like today. I walk into buildings that have been re-claimed from the jaws of demolition and find beautiful inspiring places that were recently just the dreams of men and women at drafting tables. I bump into acquaintances and share smiles and laughs with strangers, and I feel ashamed that I ever let the little bumps and barriers hold me back at all.

I admit, I am a bit of a bull when it comes to creating things every day, so maybe I’m not the best one to go on about the problems of being blocked and uninspired. Still, I can say this, there are a lot of opportunities in any given day to connect with the world around you and it is on you to make that happen – the world won’t do anything for you.

I think there are three keys to writing great poetry, give or take a dozen. I don’t want to really pretend like I have all the answers, even if I do have all the answers. It just seems sort of pompous. Besides that, I’m sure a dozen very learned professors have already said whatever I should actually say, and will shake their heads sadly at my ignorance.

That said, I really do think there are three keys, and I’d like to hear you’re thoughts on them. If you disagree, please let me know.

Key #1: Read Poetry
If you want to write great poetry, you have to read great poetry. To me, this is the most important thing of all. It’s a matter of knowing what has gone on before you, what has been said, how it has been said, why it was said in it’s time, and why it was said where it was said.

If you want to get out there and produce writing that is interesting, that is witty and deep and worth the investment of time that someone will have to make to read it, then you have to know what they may or may not have read. And you have to have an actual experiential knowledge of the art.

I would like to also add that I used the words ‘great poetry’ on purpose, even though it’s impossible to define. To my thinking, “great poetry” means poetry that has survived over a long stretch of time, or has been vetted by the masses and found interesting and good enough to buy and share extensively. I know there is a lot of great poetry on the internet, but it is very hard to be sure what is good and what is not, particularly if you haven’t read a lot of poetry. So, I tend to go back to the classics and the ‘big names’ and start there.

So there there is my number one. Read the damned poetry.

Write Regularly

If you want to write poetry, you have to write poetry. That means that you have to actually do it, not just think about it, or occasionally toss one off for all to ogle and marvel at.

The truth is, if you just write once in a while, the ogling and marveling will be quite limited. You need to really write often, not only to generate sufficient volume to give you a ‘productive feeling’ but more importantly to hone your skills. Writing is definitely an art that improves with practice.

Talking about writing. Thinking about writing. Imagining writing. These are all fun, but really they’re not that productive. The second key to being a great writer is to write.

So, write.

Think Differently

This is the most complicated of all the keys I think, but every bit as important. People want to read interesting things. They want to read thoughts that they’ve never thought, and be spurred on to imagine things they’ve never imagined. As a writer, a person has the responsibility to do that for them.

Great writing takes complicated or important ideas and connects them to grand or small ideas. Understanding that concept of connection is huge, but it’s only the first step to thinking differently. The next step is connecting things that are not easily connected – logically or illogically.

In the case of prose a writer can take a little story about something very mundane and connect it to the audience because everyone knows someone in that particular situation, or they’ve been in that situation, they make the story interesting by adding little twists, whether they’re internal/dialog twists, or external forces acting upon them, and the story is only as engaging as it is unpredictable.  The reader does not want to KNOW the ending, they want to be brought there and have it revealed to them. In situations where people know how the story ends (particularly non-fiction) they want to see how the characters  will move forward after the events.

Poetry is really the same as that. Readers are looking to be taken through a thought and arriving somewhere they didn’t expect, or, if they get where they expected, they want to see some glimpse at a new future or thought that never occurred to them.

This imagining is not easy. And while I do think there are techniques that can help a person see the world in a different way, I believe everyone has to find their own unique way by themselves.

If I could give any advice here, I think it would be this – be a prism for ideas.  Take disparate thoughts, and splash them together to see the patterns that arise where they intersect, or the shapes of the spaces between them when they do not. Prose or poetry, non-fiction or fiction, take every idea and divide into as many parts as you can, look at every part from every angle, and then take another idea or image or sense, and divide and reconnect them together.

I’m very abstract there, which might not be helpful, so let me be more specific.

Take a spider.
The spider is an idea.
It is also a thing.
A spider has eight legs.

Look at the spider from the end of each leg. Look at the spider from above from the side, from below.

A chair is an idea.
It is ALSO a thing.

The spider and the chair have no immediate relationship.

However, if you look at the spider from some angles, they are proximate or not. The chair is an obstacle or a danger for the spider. The chair means nothing to a spider. The chair, if moved, might mean death to the spider.

The chair has half as many legs as a spider.
The person has half as many legs as a chair.
The legs define each of them.

The spider means nothing to the chair.

The chair is to the spider
as a building is to a human

The chair is to the spider
as the skyline is to a human.

…

continue on. Break it down. These ideas are still mundane, but if you keep abstracting it, if you keep putting the prism to the two ideas, and consider how they intersect, how they relate to each other, how they relate to us – eventually, you find something interesting to write about.  Eventually you find that you are thinking about things differently than everyone, anyone else. THEN you can write great things.

He is, you say, you say he is
and I see hard black coal teeth
biting the rage of hearth-embraced fire.

A fuel, a heat, a statement of need.
He is, I tell you, but you say,
No, no. The earth rent, he is revealed.

A casino of black smoke bets on the breeze.
I ask, Is he, is he? You think he is
Bethlehem.

A void phlegm hangs on a cough
thin compensation for every last breath – so
double down and let it ride.

He is not my concern, he is the sugar coat
the teacher of value as he bites,
as he is consumed.

As the turbine turns
the electricity between us
becomes us.

I profess a candle, I profess again
to your charming silence. Questions build
like a Tower of Babel. I understand

less and less. I imagine only daisies
growing in that fast coal-less hole.

When it rains, when the cash is collected,
when the grit of that long grift grows
into a deep icy pool.

He is you say, you say he is. That romantic
and you dance, kissless
and wanting to watch him burn
for you.