Dear Reader,
At this point, it’s an obsession. I wake up, make coffee, and sit down with pen in hand, hoping to write something decent. I scratch away until my fingers are stained with ink, and the page is covered in questionable lines of poetic sludge. It’s like panning for gold. You must crawl through the muck and the current if you ever hope to strike it rich. The poet understands that inspiration is fickle. What you need is an obsession, that self-denial that says, “I will not leave this desk until a decent line is penned.”
The myth that poetry happens that it stumbles upon you unannounced is the great myth that prevents many new writers from writing. They read about writing, talk about writing, and podcast about writing, but when faced with a blank page and a full pen, they say things like, “I’m waiting for inspiration” or “this environment isn’t conducive to my process.”
In his poem New Moon, the late, great Jim Harrison writes,
“The poet, though, ignores the sacraments of destiny
and only wants a poem to sing the liquid gift of night.”
The poet only wants one thing, a poem, and cares little for anything else. The poet talks little about poetry or process. The poet writes. It doesn’t matter where or when. The poet can write at a desk, in a diner, out in the wild, or in a crowded city subway. There are no ideal conditions. There is no goldilocks zone. Only the harsh reality of the blank page staring up at the poet like St. George’s dragon, offering itself up to be slain.
Without obsession, the poet is just another mortal, those better people who busy themselves with the worthwhile endeavors of the world. Those mortals make the world go round, and in their pursuits of medicine, law, education, craft, and agriculture, they do every day what the poet wishes: they turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. That is the great irony of the poetic obsession. In seeking to leave mortality behind to pursue greatness, the poet confuses those “sacraments of destiny” with what really matters, the poem, the stanza, the line, and the words.
The best poets don’t seek to be great. They reject the trappings of sainthood. They have only one concern—the poem—everything else, success, greatness, fame, applause, is a distraction. The poet only wants one thing, and one thing only, “to sing the liquid gift of night” in hopes that someone else might learn to sing too.
PS
As you wrap up your holiday shopping consider giving the gift of poetry. My first collection For Those Wandering Along the Way and my new collection Skipping Stones are available wherever books are sold. If you do buy books as gifts consider buying from Bookshop. They have raised over 23 million dollars for local bookstores.
Lastly, if you enjoyed either of my collections please leave a review on Amazon, Good Reads, etc. These reviews help trick our mathematical overlords into promoting these books and nowadays writers depend on readers to review in order to push past the slush of competing content online.
As always, thank you for reading and supporting my work. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays!
-Ryan