Category: writing

Via Kelli Russell Agodon, the Tin House blog has a post about the habits of highly effective writers (Kelli also did a similar post of her own). It’s pretty interesting to see how different people work. I’m currently not writing full-time. But even though writing doesn’t happen at all hours of the day for me, I’m still very aware of the habits of my writing life:

1. I write every day.
2. Except when I don’t. Sometimes, you really do need to let your brain just rest a bit. I didn’t write for about for days after I came back from Round Top. I spent so much time getting inspired and being around brilliant people, my brain needed a couple of days to settle. But then I drafted three new pieces yesterday, after things had coalesced. So, in general, write every day. Just learn how to tell when you need a break.
3. During the weekdays, writing happens on my lunch break. This is pretty much just enough time to get down the first draft of a poem, sometimes two.
4. On Saturdays, Jon works, and unless I’m traveling, I have the whole day to myself. This is pretty much when my revision happens. I like to read poems aloud, but I prefer to do that in isolation. It’s kind of nerve-wracking to attempt to read an unfinished poem to hear where the problems are, and know that someone is listening. No, I don’t spend the entire eight-hour day revising, but usually 3-4 hours of my Saturday are spent honing poems.
5. When I revise, I usually have a cup of tea or glass of water, but otherwise, I don’t need anything else. Sometimes, I want silence. Sometimes, I want music, and that music is almost always Patti Smith, Dessa, or The Mountain Goats. Other than that, I pretty much just need my chair, my laptop, and electricity.
6. On Sundays, I usually draft a poem or two early in the morning, but in general, that’s my worst day of the week for getting work done. Sunday is almost always a day for getting outside, or going to movies, or generally anything other than sitting and working.

That’s about it. I feel pretty lucky. As far as writing habits go, I feel like I have it pretty easy. Even at my busiest, I can usually find 30 minutes, a notebook, and a pen.

Over at Harriet, Rachel Zucker wrote a post noting that it’s important for poets to define the kind of poetry we write. She then did a two-part post (Part One here; Part Two here) in which various poets described (or attempted to describe, because it’s difficult) their kind of poetry. Because I believe this is a fruitful exercise, I decided to try to define my own work, and I’ve been pondering it all weekend.

First, I started with what I don’t write about: current events and politics. Which, admittedly, I sometimes feel guilty about. Why aren’t I using my words as sources of protest, to inspire change? Should my work be so disconnected from the world. Except that I’m not an especially political person. Whatever activist impulses I have, I’d rather not channel them through poetry. If I did, poetry would become less enjoyable for me. Also, although I have been dancing for twenty years (longer than I’ve been writing!), for whatever reason, I don’t write poems about dance. I really don’t know why.

From there, it was pretty easy to come up with the themes that recur in my poems: landscape and geography (especially Texas); travel (related to landscape and geography, but different enough that I consider it a separate theme); the interplay between agápe, éros, and philia (I distinguish between these three words because I think the term “love” is too generic and ambiguous); and family (both biological and chosen). I’ve also been writing poems about math and physics lately, but it’s too soon to tell whether these will become enduring themes. I’d say of the themes, travel is the most common, though the others definitely pull their weight.

But I also wanted to see if I could condense it further. And after much consideration, I think the kind of poetry I write is poetry of ambivalence. Even when I’m writing about things I love, ambivalence and conflict show up. I was at a reading in Houston in September, and realized that none of the poems I considered my best were unilaterally unambivalent. I’ve written reams about Texas, a state I adore, but nothing completely flattering. The one love poem that made it into my chapbook manuscript has enough juxtaposition in it that there are undercurrents of ambivalence. And ultimately, that’s because I don’t like writing poems that are simply positive or negative. That’s not as fun. That’s not as challenging. I can write a sonnet skewering something that annoys me, or I can write a laudatory ode, but as a poet, I prefer to write pieces that can’t help but find the negative and positive coexisting. I like to write poems that can’t have blinders.

It will be interesting to revisit this idea every couple of years. The poetry I write now isn’t necessarily going to be the same ten years down the line. These themes and ideas seem very essential to me now, but I imagine that sooner or later, I might be done talking about them. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.