WRITERS ON NOT WRITING

 

     Here are two pieces about the subject of writers not writing.   Both are interesting to me. One is by my friend and colleague, coach, social worker, writer, Bob Vance and the other is by the writer, Franklin Abbott, who is a friend of Bob’s. Both are used with permission of the authors.

 

     I admit that since I began writing at the age of maybe three, while sitting at my sister Carol’s side and insisting that she type every utterance on her trusty old Remington Rand, I have not had too many occasions when I was “blocked”, except perhaps the day that I needed to consume two bottles of Citrate of Magnesia on advice of my doctor. That’s another tale, though, and probably not one you have the slightest interest in hearing…..I have grappled over the decades with whether or not anyone cared about the new words that struggled out of my soul. I questioned whether  they would have meaning and purpose beyond the white page being turned, or the lone excited voice daring its way into a poetry reading.

 

     I remember when I lived in another time dimension. I used to sit in my pink and grey adolescent’s room with photos of friends, letters and poems of writers I “worshipped” crowding my bulletin board, in a messy arrangement that resembled my brain. Often my beloved, ancient Remington Rand (the very one that was first my sister’s) would wobble on my knees as I typed away and responded to the shouted internal messages and commands of ideas that marched into my head from some parallel world and demanded to be let out.  I would neglect schoolwork and even friends, and certainly my parents’ lists of chores that were their priorities, but not my own.  I would awaken at dusk when most of New York City was rubbing sleep from its eyes. Only the City garbage trucks groaned and screeched and sad dogs barked in the distance. These noises would join in a symphony with my rumbling stomach, as I forgot that any needs existed but finding a way to pull the mysterious words and images out of black holes and into daylight. Sometimes my mother would open my door and peek in to ensure that I was still alive, or that I had not sneaked out to join friends on a rebellious adventure. She would speak to me and offer me enticements from the kitchen to get me to emerge into what she considered a normal world.  I would not hear her. Then the  ”normal” world  and my own sequestered, creative one blurred their boundaries.  I began to take test flights out into a more demanding life that comes with growing into an adult. That was when I faced the realities that sometimes thwarted my writing.

 

     For me, not writing had more to do with responsibilities taking precedence over something I  needed to do in order to live, almost like breathing but just wasn’t “evolved” enough to know it at the time. Not writing usually had to do with being the overtired caretaker of my four kids and my ill family members. It had to do with a career that was all about creating, building and expanding (families) and celebrating life (adoption) but that somehow, in its intensity and with its time demands managed to impede my creative energy.   Not writing had to do with stress, multiple losses, grief, and often with depression that left me brimming over with huge emotions and a powerful need to concretize and memorialize my lost loved ones in a way I was yearning to do, but that somehow seemed too large and looming a task for me. I was often just too stuck in my darkest personal spaces.  So, I waited until the need became at times a physical pain that burst forth in rushes and with an energy that was outside of myself.  I attempted to resist at times, but for most of my life, have been more or less powerless to resist this force. So, as Bob advises Franklin to do, I kept picking up my poet’s hat, no matter how often I dropped it or thought I had misplaced it.  At this phase of life in which I reluctantly but also proudly find myself,  I am focusing on doing less resisting and more flowing and tapping into the energy that is tired of being held back, I think.

 

ON NOT WRITING –Franklin Abbott- Talk for the First Existentialist

Congregation of Atlanta

                                                          

September 29, 2002

 

     Among the hazards of any occupation are the questions one

gets asked about it.  There are questions for accountants, questions

for lawyers and high school students, questions for cooks, questions for

writers.  “What are you writing about?” seems fair, innocent,

interested without being intrusive.  Unless, of course, the writer

isn’t writing about anything.  As a writer who isn’t writing about

anything and hasn’t for awhile I am often at a loss when the question is

posed. There are no good excuses or alibis really. 

 

What can I say to avoid seeming lazy, burned out or worse, blocked. 

And if I tell the truth, that I am not writing about anything, I

disappoint.  So I mumble my reply telling the truth but adding a

hopeful amendment like I plan to take a few weeks off in the near future

. . . or  I am waiting (and waiting) for my muse to start singing

again or how some ordinary dilemma like moving or allergies or the

holidays have preoccupied me.  Still  the truth is I am not writing

about anything.

 

     I don’t feel blocked.  A blank white sheet of paper

doesn’t frighten me.  I write lots of emails and even an occassional

letter.  I write reports for insurance companies for my psychotherapy

practice but not too often.  I can’t say that because of all the

technical writing I do at work I have no energy to be creative.  I

have ample access to my emotions.  I admit I’m a little depressed

about politics but that seems normal.  I routinely laugh, cry, get

pissed off, feel joy and wonder and tenderness.  I remember my dreams

and they are as bizarre and compelling as ever before.  Maybe I’m

kidding myself, maybe more I’m confounding my therapist as well but i

don’t think so.  She is “as wise as a tree full of owls” and the lies

I tell myself, whose fooling who?

 

     Writing about poets and poetry the late Kenneth Koch penned

these lines:

      

    If half the poets in the world stopped writing, there would

still be

               the same amount of poetry.

          If ninety-nine percent of the poets in the

world stopped writing,

               there would still be the same

amount of poetry.  Going beyond

                    ninety-nine

percent might limit production.

 

     I do not feel that there is a deficiency of poetry in the

world that I am moved to fill, nor a dearth of prose.  Sometimes it

seems we are drowning in a sea of words to say nothing of all the trees

sacrificed to human blather.  If I never write another poem or essay

there will be uncountable numbers of poems and essays written, the

majority of which will be forgettable, of little merit or

consequence.  Still if only one in a hundred shines, there will be

more than anyone could read in a lifetime.

 

    Writing mostly poetry I find there is no financial

incentive.  A long time ago I figured out that counting future

royalties is like counting eggs before they are laid much less

hatched.  Future taxes yes but the profit of writing like the wheel of

fortune spins and spins.  Dollar for dollar I do better clipping

coupons.

 

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m spent with language.  I don’t  stumble

over many new words that excite me, at least not in English.  If I

were a scholar perhaps I would learn an endangered language.  Every

year languages die when their last native speaker dies and no one is

left to pronounce the old syllables.  I think a little piece of human

understanding, something that can’t be translated directly into English

or Spanish or French, is lost to the ages.  There are things we cannot

name anymore, mysteries too elusive to render into vocabulary.  What

does a writer do in that uncharted territory?  What if there is no

word for what you mean?

 

     Novelist Anne Lamott in her wonderful book on writing, BIRD

BY BIRD, suggests writers stop writing when they don’t have anything to

write about, like a well gone dry and waiting for rain, writers run out

of experience and need time for new adventures.  Maybe it is psychic

constipation or maybe I’m just out of water; have I been a sleeping poet

lost in dreaming I can’t describe?  Am I a prisoner of my native

tongue unable to articulate anything new and bored with repitition? 

In writing about not writing I am acting out all of these

contradictions.  I am also writing and if anybody asks what I am

writing about I can tell them I am writing about not writing.

 

 

                                                          

  

*********

 

 

Bob Vance’s Response to Franklin Abbott

 

Constantly the question of why I write percolates to the surface. When I

am not actively suppressing it, for fear it will send me into a spiral

of loss and doubt, I am satisfied with the fact that, in the end, I

write for myself, for completion, for a wholeness I do not often feel

otherwise in the world… I speak particularly about poems, which offer

me the closest thing to religion I care to admit to.

 

Also, there is so much self absorbed, belly button staring, mere word

play, that has emerged as the going concern in, particularly American,

poetry today. I was listening to a poet on Prairie Home Companion

yesterday (I cannot remember his name, does that tell you anything?) and

I swear there was nothing there but cleverness. No wonder we as

Americans find ourselves blinded to the impact we have in the world,

blinded enough to go to war to protect our superficial thirst for

Things, when even the supposedly best poets cannot write anything more

universally engaging beyond a first humorous reading… its the same

problem with much of our most popular theatre and film.

 

I urge you to pick up the poets hat again.. just because I believe that

we need good poets to challenge the current vacuous and empty habits of

our currently most published poets.

 

And I am not talking about writing about politics (although I, for the

life of me, cannot understand the current aversion to such themes when

the history of great poems is full of such writing) but more about the

poem that dares to speak clearly and deftly about love and loving, about

the absolute necessity for a reverence toward nature and the curious

nature of human relationship to our world, each other, and our dreams…

as well as to ourselves as individuals.

 

To do this beyond banal cleverness and gross simple minded fondness for

the sounds of one’s own ability to fashion tricky but music-less lines;

to attempt it in a way that might even move the world is a poet’s real

job in the world. Trying to do it is at least a more honorable

occupation than settling for what is empty and easily forgotten even if

it results in an initial sigh that recognizes what is really only

cuteness.

 

My Love

Bob