At ReadWritePoem, Robert Peake How do you be a poet every day?
With finite time and all the competition and difficulty, interior and exterior, how to juggle the habit? If you are so bent, can you afford not to? Maybe you only make widgets and never assemble to sound or page, but your brain tinkers. Why stop yourself from some completed form? He answers in part,
poetry is very rightly done on a dare. It is a dare against reductionism in our relationship to language, and therefore our world. I dare to explore the complex and often contradictory states of human awareness through poetry because they are there, undeniably, in my art and in my life. That is not to say my art can justify any amount of neglect in my life. I believe in Flaubert’s credo: “Be steady and well-ordered in your life, that you may be fierce and original in your work.”
He mentions the lesson of quantity making quality. Whether photography, pottery or words, with attention to improvement, a mindfulness, the percentage of time you get lucky yields goes up.
Magma asked “Do Poets improve with age?” which some interpreted as a question about chronological age versus chronological youth. And perhaps also muddling enthusiasm with skill.
People sometimes jump the shark, writing even with nothing left to say that they need to share, and experience can jade and lead to echoship rather than spark, but still not all do. Some move from muddle to clarity or skill at conveying confusion and complexity in aesthetics that transfer well.
Does time matter? How it’s used does. One can becomes a progressively sloppier craftman or one with finer discrimination and more tuned mind and hands.
Why write? Mantra from every direction say is that it must be an inner drive. That does not mean one should not be prompted from outside nor eschew exercises as fakery. One must keep oneself sharp and in shape for whenever one does need to express oneself over some mountain.
If one speaks or writes for the sake of speaking or writing without really wanting to or caring about results, one goes on too long to too little advantage. Mechanical doodling that is dawdling is like meditating thru the motions without seeking clarity. One can’t expect clarity. One can expect monkey-mind, unrewarding process but maintain a vigilance.
That which you say for reciprocity needs continuous effort against momentum and is needy, wanting feedback. That which you need to say and say for your own sake is a rapidly disappearing horizon you don’t look back to for results or not. The leverage of the process itself is its own gain. That which you say for passion takes no effort. As Confucius said, choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Absorbed in play is fine on paper, but how to put bread to table when the economy is in such a place that it doesn’t reward sustainably. People fit a lot in around the edges of their lives. Solid f/t makes headway faster against a calendar. But then some people are better at maintaining “tone”. More like never forgetting to ride a bicycle when it comes to poetry. Poetry, like any other (pre)occupation is always in search mode for new particles like coral, always wanting to grab another particle to sustain and build up the hard structures.
Can one choose not write or is one always accumulating, the unconscious tumbling the riverstones smooth. (Arg. Metaphor of rocks in the head but the state of not-writing is frustration for maybe it fits.)
One is never stationary and never not going somewhere, changing somehow. As a friend answered me years ago saying, “not making a choice is still making a choice.” One can’t step out of behaving. As much as brain wants to hold the presses until the whole story is in, the rest of staff hasn’t been lolling around. All kinds of understandings keep going. So long as life does not stop, the composition will happen. If the stops aren’t frequent, the sequences don’t have the linear progression but more like stars than watercolor drawing of constellation.
You can decide explicitly to do poetry f/t and some parts of the higher brain can direct activities to that end, and its views might even be taken under advisement by body, but the intuition has already constantly been working at deciding, reacting, adjusting by what it loves to do and the unconscious will subvert trajectory to what it calls more critical, working out some answer it needs, thru poetry if need be the question of choice is partly moot.
To a degree when you’re a poet, aka, a hammer, the world is comprised of nails, or not nails. That sounds more like beaver with penchant for damming any sound of running water, doesn’t it?
At the same to choose between poems p/t and total devotion 24/7, if not a false conundrum, seems skewed, since life pressed into options for spending time on poetry. If one could manage it wouldn’t it lead to one note chorus of poetry?
It is thick complex data that can inform a rich poetry. One can live and breathe poetry, make it the primary filter and point of reference for all things, the way of new parent makes everything feed back into reminder or aspect of the child, or else is discarded as irrelevant in a glance.
If you drift from poetry too far for too long falling into other obsessions, you may not come back or when you do come back with your landmarks and its landmarks changed by all the revolutions that have happened subsequent to your journeys.
