The Practice of Poetry

Hello, If you are interested in this blog, it has been reinvented on Blogger. You can find my new poetry contemplations here:
Practice & Craft at http://practiceandcraft.blogspot.com/

Thanks for reading,
H.K.H

Recently, my partner read a poem I have coming out in the new issue of Aquila Review titled, “After Losing My Eyeglasses.” It happened that he hadn’t read this poem before. He read it while I made dinner, and as we sat down to eat, he said, “I wish I could have dinner with the person who wrote this poem.” Ah, there’s the rub. For better or worse, I am a poet and a workhorse. When responsibilities build, I get lost behind the obstructions; bills, chores, meetings and deadlines muddle my senses and make me forget everything else. The absence of poetry can be deadening. It’s tax season. Does anyone dream up poems in the middle of tax season?

I’ve grown accustomed to periods of quietness from my own poetic voice. I’m avoiding the cliché of calling this phenomenon “writer’s block.” The term entails too many caricatures of writers to use it seriously. This isn’t about staring at a wall and chain-smoking all day only to write a sentence and then delete it. This isn’t about doing battle with the Void. This is about knowing how to dowse for water with a tree branch. It is about walking slowly and patiently through a field until you feel the sure tug as the switch dips between your hands.

In the essay, “Education of the Poet” Louise Gluck claims, “When the aim of the work is spiritual insight, it seems absurd to expect fluency. A metaphor for such a work is the oracle, which needed to be fed questions. In practical terms, this means that the writer who means to outlive the useful rages and despairs of youth must somehow learn to endure the desert” (15-16). So how does one go about overcoming those dry territories? Gluck implies that it is different for each person: we must have our own techniques.

This week, Gary Snyder read at the Lunch Poems series on the UC Berkeley campus. One of the audience members asked, “Do you have any advice for new poets?” Snyder advised the young woman to read all the poems in the English language. Then learn other languages. It is good, basic advice: read. If one is reading Jane Austen or Toni Morrison, or anyone else in the literary canon, one is unequivocally engaged. At the point of engagement, it might not matter if you are creating your own poems—because the synapses are firing in the old gray matter, and the poems you want to write will (eventually) come.

Other than reading, the frustrated writer in me likes to edit. When a friend sends me a piece they have been writing and asks for comments, I’m always glad to respond. It is neighborly work, even if we don’t have addresses on the same block. We are sharing our common work in exchange for a little conversation and perhaps a small gift of something homemade. Jars of jam, loaves of home-baked bread, and poems are all the modest tradable stuff of life. It also happens that when I see my friends’ writing and witness their work in the act of creation, it often reminds me of where I left off with my own work.

I don’t believe that writer’s block, or bouts of poetic absence, is a bad thing. The silence is an opportunity to pay attention to what is going on unnoticed beneath the clamor of the daily grind. And if you aren’t talking about your poems at the dinner table, well, why not?