I have not written a (good) poem in months. Not one. Enough is enough.
After months, I’m picking up poetry again. Not because I feel ready, but because I must. No poems means no emotional processing, and for any poet, that is dire. I’ve felt the negative effects firsthand. No more. I’m looking for poems everywhere. I’m taking them in, and I’m writing them down.
Creative “blocks” are most artists’ greatest fear. Sometimes in periods of inspiration I scribble down feverishly as many words as I can. After all, at any moment writer’s block could strike its thunderbolt into my brain and fry all my ideas.
But writer’s blocks are like the seasons. They will happen. Creative drought is a natural occurrence of a broken world, a byproduct of our humanity.
What has changed for me is not my situation, but my mindset. I used to look at writer’s block as a setback. But now I view it as an opportunity.
Mary Oliver writes in Felicity that “poems arrive ready to begin. / Poets are only the transportation.” Truth exists, ready to be plucked from the air and placed into verse. If there is a problem with transcription, it is typically with the poet and not poetry.
But the problem is surmountable. I will explain below my own process of managing writer’s block.
1. If you cannot write, learn.
This semester I enrolled in a Modern Poetry course. I bought an overpriced textbook anthology set, which I will treasure forever. Seeing the familiar names of poets in the table of contents is like greeting old friends. My class has started the unit on late modernists—Cummings and Auden—and on Friday I’m lecturing on Ted Hughes. Already I can feel inspiration on the tips of my fingers.
One thing that has surprised me throughout the course is how enjoyable I find each poet. Even poets I detested or found tedious before—Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Hardy—I now love. This is a testament to refraining from making a judgment call before understanding an artist and his comprehensive body of work. As a baseball fan, I find that most people who dislike baseball simply don’t understand the intricacies. It’s the same with poetry.
After all, why does anyone like anything? For the people involved. We get attached to personalities on television, characters in books, players on teams. We follow authors, athletes, celebrities, and influencers because they are people we admire.
Poets not only provide insight into the world; they do it through a very specific lens—theirs! Readers become an audience to the personal aspects of their humanity. What a rare and lovely thing. Poets write the same poem over and over, after all. And if we read a body of work closely enough, we find the poet himself.
My own spirit rallied behind the Irish nationalists after reading Yeats’s odes to his oppressed homeland. Dickinson’s lonely exploration of eternity connected all her poems together in a symphony that broke my heart. Whitman’s elegies are sprawling, untamable, and emotion-ridden—but that is the truest nature of grief. And Hardy, for all his God-directed anger, is so like myself—too cynical for his own good. I wonder whether our similarities are a main reason I disliked him.
But I love these poets now. I have studied them. This course taught me never to judge a poet by the first poem—or even the first five poems—I read.
And the poets I love—Eliot, Hopkins, Pound—I now love even more for having studied them in depth. After an extensive dive into The Wasteland, I have an answer for every disgruntled April baby who exclaims, “Why would Eliot call April the cruelest month?” In Hopkins I found not only a master of sound devices, but an earnest, humble Catholic who took seriously the call to draw nigh to God. And Pound, despite his political leanings, penned some of the world’s most insightful lines of verse, which reformed the entire course of poetry.
This is the lesson: Writers have no excuse. No more lounging about and crying, “What can be done about my creative dry spell?” There is always something you can do.
If you are unable to write, get educated. Sit at the feet of the master writers. Even if you dislike them, there is always something to glean, and you may find that your initial assessment of them was wrong.
And what a delightful thing, to be wrong. How terrible the world would be if we knew everything. Put aside your pride. Be drawn into the kingdom of discovery. You might be surprised at how humility can lead to inspiration.
2. If you cannot write, read.
I recently subscribed to Poets & Writers magazine, because the staff are marketing geniuses who sent me a letter in which they called me a professional poet.
“You’re a serious writer who’s serious about your work,” the letter said. That much is true. This year I had six poems accepted for publication. Last August I read my work to a public audience for the first time. I’m applying for my MFA this winter.
But even these small feats would not have been possible if I was not an avid reader of poetry. Literary citizenship is crucial. Good reading must precede good writing.
For poets, two things constitute good reading: read the master poets, and read modern poets. Understand the foundation of poetry, and then understand the contemporary landscape. I own a multitude of anthologies and am also subscribed to the following journals:
Poets & Writers — A magazine that deals with the modern publishing scene, particularly for poets.
Image Journal — A publication which features works by writers of Christian, Jewish, or Muslim faith.
Windhover — A university literary magazine by and for writers of Christian faith.
Poetry Magazine — The English-speaking world’s oldest poetry monthly, founded in 1912. (Poetry is responsible for T. S. Eliot’s first published poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which launched Eliot’s career.)
Poet Lore — The nation’s oldest poetry journal, founded in 1889.
Equally (if not more) important is hearing poetry. Robert Frost maintains that “the surest way to reach the heart is through the ear.” He’s right. Even bad poets can write hard-hitting lines. But better poets write hard-hitting lines that sound delicious. Good lines employ sound devices with the intent of embodying them. They make us think, “There is no fuller way to have worded that.”
The way to write these lines is to train your ear. Attend local readings. Read out loud poems that have withstood the test of time. If you are given the chance to hear a well-known poet read, take it. The Academy of American Poets hosts numerous virtual readings each year, many of which are free.
If you cannot write, and thereby cannot speak, do the opposite. Read, and listen.
3. If you cannot write, write anyway.
If you remember none of my words, remember these: The best thing to do in a poetic drought is to sit down and write a bunch of poems that are very, very, very bad—what I call the “Kurt Vonnegut approach.” Vonnegut admonishes young writers to write something that is their own—then to rip it up, burn it, banish it to the landfill—but to make it for themselves and only themselves. My recent poems have been shoddy craftsmanship. But they’re mine.
A rut doesn’t mean I will never recover. It means I’m human. Someday I will write something good again, and I will reread the Vonnegut-esque compositions of mine and smile.
Richard Hugo writes in his essay “The Triggering Town” that hours of work spent on one bad poem pave the way for good poems to arrive effortlessly. “The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second,” he says. He’s right: “If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.”
I’ve picked up my pen again, and I will not stop writing. If you are a writer, you must do the same. If you feel you will die if you don’t begin writing, good. The way to start living again is to start writing again. So write, and write poorly. The good, true, and beautiful words will follow suit.
In the words of one of my unfinished poems,
My voice is broken, But I am ready to sing again.
Upcoming Posts
(Not necessarily in chronological order)
Film Commentary: Charles M. Schulz’s A Charlie Brown Christmas
Film Review: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch
Book Review: Christian Wiman’s Every Riven Thing
Reflections on enjoying Walt Whitman for the first time
How creative outlets make us human
How artists never truly grow up and the effects of childhood on their art