How and why I write

This is how and why I write poetry.

Something is going on.

I'm pacing the room.

Or flat on my back staring at the ceiling.

Or trying to solve something by thinking it through, but finding that thinking it through doesn't solve anything.

When I am lucky, in one of those moments I remember that what I need is to find the current. And I remember that this is how and why I write poetry.

In those moments - of pacing or staring or solving - the thing that plagues me is that there is some tension that I don't know what to do with. And, when I am lucky, I remember that the tension that I don't know what to do with is what poetry is made of. The unwritten poem is just waiting to be fed some tension. Like a loom waiting for thread.

If I wanted to write a poem and couldn't lay my hands on some tension I didn't know what to do with, then there would be no poem to write.

So, in those moments, where there is tension and I am fortunate enough to remember, this is what I do. 

I listen for a clue. 

I listen for the line or the word that 
- found -
might let the tension know
it has been heard.

I imagine it is like a painter looking at a lake then looking down at a board of oils and looking for just the shade of blue that matches and - finding it - relaxes knowing that that patch is taken care of.

I am trying to capture an inner landscape, looking for the words that will match it, piece by piece.

-

When you go fishing, there is a long stretch of time where to anyone passing it might look like you are doing nothing. And you are. But it's a doing nothing that allows for just enough listening so that in the moment where hook and fish meet, you are ready. Knowing you might have to sit for hours, you sit with a kind of quiet, wide alertness that is still and simple enough that you could sit there and listen almost forever if it were needed. But in the moment where the line comes alive, you change. No longer the can-keep-going-forever spacious listening. Now you must become one with the line and the movement coming through it. There is no world but the eye of your mind and this movement and this line. There is no space for any gap between the moment when you feel the twitch of life in the line and the moment you move to respond. It is the dance of two lives meeting.

To find the first clue, you become the fisher by the river. You can’t go looking for it. You can’t jam your head under the water and take a look around. You can’t plan a journey to get there. Can’t furiously swim towards it. No.

Only when you stop.

You can hear

what you need to hear

only when you stop.

Finding the first clue means dropping everything except a single commitment to listening for what is here. What is here now. Listening. Still.

The mind that plans is split between here and some imagined other place. The mind that regrets is split between here and somewhere that has passed. So you can plan, you can regret, but you can’t plan or regret and really listen for what is here. You will half-listen at best.

Only here. Only now. The mind stills.

Even if you have some thought of what you might find, even just that thought stands in the way of listening well. It’s like trying to take in the vast expanse of the horizon by looking through a funnel.

The mind stills and opens. Eyes closed, you are floating in space. No intention. No direction. Only here. Only now. And open to hear what may come.

In that emptiness it is as if the wild seething nest of tension pauses just long enough that it turns from a ceaseless blur into something you might be able to bring into focus. As if its chaos is no match for your stillness. Even in its relentless movement it reveals something of itself if you are still enough to see it.

Hold me like a wave

A shred of what is here reveals itself. As if the tension calls out. Calls out with what it longs for. Says its name. Asks for what it needs.

Hold me like a wave

And in the moment it reveals itself I know it is true and, feeling that it has been heard, a little piece of me relaxes.

When I am crashing

That moment - of finding the first clue - is the moment where the fisher turns from being a waiter to being a dancer. It is no longer my job to float in space and listen in every direction for everything. My job is to know that I have found the thread and to follow it.

When I am crashing

then I need you

Because those first true words have a quality that the feeling alone does not have. They are true to the feeling - but they are fixed. Like a stake in the ground.

Hold me like a wave

Every time I hear or read the words they bring to life again the feeling they were born from. They give me a way to return again and again to the thread of feeling. My job is to follow the thread all the way to the end. All I have to do is keep returning, keep listening and keep going until the feeling has revealed itself fully and, being fully expressed, lets me rest.

When I am crashing

then I need you

to hold me

This is the work of concentration in the face of distraction. There is a subtle feeling - this tension that I can’t make sense of - but there is also the world. Everything is an invitation to distraction. To put down the pen. To go outside. To get out of the rain. To get a drink. To make a sandwich. To think about something else. To finish it off later.

To stay with the subtle feeling is to say no to rest of the world.

It seems to me the poems only come when the tension deserves a poem. Some small irritation or curiosity might for a moment feel like it has something to say - only to reveal itself to be barely there at all. No. It’s when the feeling is vast and untameable - or subtle and vital - that it can become something.

Keep returning. Keep listening. Keep going.

There is a quality to concentration. Now not floating in space, but rather standing in the middle of a busy market undistracted by every passing sight entirely focused on the task in hand. If the quality of concentration wanes, the quality of listening falls and the quality of the poem crashes. I have killed good poems by not listening.

A line that is true leads you to the next line that is true. So, if you write a line that is true, then you have a chance that the next line will be too. But often - and especially when the concentration dips - the mind will offer up lines that are near enough. Where they sound good. Or they make sense. Or they’re neat or clever. But the line that sounds good and makes sense and is neat and clever is nothing if it is not true. If it is not the line that perfectly captures the next little patch of feeling that needs to be captured, then it is a line that is not doing its job.

My job is to keep on saying no to lines that are near enough and to accept nothing less than lines that are true to the feeling they promise to capture. Until there is in front of me a poem that says all that needed to be said.

This is how and why I write poetry. Taking the tension that, because it is not seen, is making life harder and illuminating it, so that the the life that is in the tension can be seen and can be lived. Weaving the chaos of life into a fabric. Not for the sake of the poem - not to make it beautiful - but, in the making and reading of the poem, to listen in a way that helps to make the fabric of this life itself more beautiful.

Hold me like a wave

When I am crashing

then I need you

to hold me

like a wave

holds a rider

lifting me 
on the thundering rise
to show me the horizon

that I might vanish 
in the gift 
of great distance

and then 
when I surrender 
to this open, wide awareness
give way and let me go 
and show me 
I don’t need 
to be carried

I need to be thrown
to be shown
I can stand up
and fall down

on my own.