What I’m Thinking About
I’m sick. [Sadface emoji.] Feels like the wrong way to start the year. Likely some works will be gummed up. But maybe there’s something in that — the recognition that you don’t get to choose your starting conditions, only whether you start at all. One foot in front of the other, even when one foot is heavier than it should be. How do I begin from wherever I actually am, not from where I wish I was? Not just the new year — though that’s part of it — but anything: a poem, a paragraph, a conversation, a walk. Maybe sometimes it has to be okay to start in the middle, to start late — already in motion, already compromised, already carrying something a little heavier than I can comfortably carry. Maybe sometimes, starting from such a place is the best thing that could happen to me? Possibly so. We’ll see.
What I’m Reading
- Bluets by Maggie Nelson. This one took me a while to get into. Not because it’s bad. Because there’s a lot of suffering here, and underneath it — or maybe powering it — is this prodigious, associative intellect that makes me feel two things at once: envious and triggered. But that discomfort might be the point. It’s making me reconsider what essays can do, what it means to follow an obsession all the way down, and whether I’m brave enough to do that myself. Jury’s still out on that. Verdict’s way in on Nelson: she is.
- Widening Spell of the Leaves by Larry Levis. I first read Levis in grad school and actively tried to emulate him then — something about the visceral, human quality of what he observes paired with this intense erudition and capacity for abstract thought. Coming back to him now, I’m floating on the language, awestruck at his imagination and vocabulary. The poems here don’t arrive at conclusions so much as they deepen into their own questions.
Reading both of these writers, at this very moment, has me thinking about influence and comparison in uncomfortable ways. I came to know Levis’s work when I was an apprentice writer; Nelson must have “apprenticed” around the same time, and I have come to know her work only recently. One a standard-bearer from the generation before me; the other a contemporary who’s become that (a standard-bearer) for the generation after ours. With both of them, it’s easy to celebrate what they do will, but it’s far easier to see the ways I don’t measure up. The trick, I guess, is to let their influence be generative rather than restrictive. To read with admiration instead of envy. Easier said than done sometimes.
Seven Invitations
The goal here is always GENERATIVE, never prescriptive. These are invitations, not assignments.
1. Write a list of 30 beginnings. First lines of abandoned projects. Opening scenes from dreams. The moment you realized something. Don’t finish any of them — just collect the thresholds.
2. Read one poem out loud every morning for a week. The same poem, seven times. Notice what changes in your mouth, your understanding, your body.
3. Take a walk and count blue things. Then write about one of them for exactly ten minutes. Don’t worry about making it good. Just follow the blue.
4. Write a letter to someone you’ll never send it to. Be honest in ways you can’t be in person. Then decide whether to send it anyway.
5. Make something with your hands that isn’t writing. Bread, a drawing, a shelf, a garden bed. Pay attention to what this kind of making teaches you about the other kind.
6. Sit with discomfort for five minutes. Physical, emotional, creative — whatever’s present. Don’t fix it. Just notice where it lives in your body and what it wants to tell you. Write about it (or not).
7. Write about winter without using the word “cold.” Give yourself 250 words to capture what this season actually feels like in your specific life, your specific landscape.