i want to know how to write a poem.
“put pen to paper or yer fingertips to the keyboard. no sweat. poetry is all around you.”
- Raegan Butcher
you make it look easy, to write a poem:
take notice of your surroundings, what
goes on around you & all the things, oh
but that’s bullshit. we both know it is a
lot harder than that to write something
decent - a poem that speaks/talks back
a poem that you think about later on in
the dark or when you’re washing dishes
or some other lonely job in real life living
a poem that doesn’t feel forced or looks
down on you as though it’s beyond your
understanding but there - under & inside
a poem that
means something
even when you don’t.
- adp, 19 March 2013 @ 6:16am
source: amber dawn’s non-paper journal.
Hitting the backspace key a lot tonight. Delete, delete, delete. If I wrote when the interesting thoughts come at me throughout the day, I’d have a lot to write about and I wouldn’t be sitting here struggling to force what is essentially nothing out. I am almost blank at this point because of the things I refuse to write about and the late night zoning out that my brain wants to do because it doesn’t seem like I should bother doing this if I’m not going to give ‘er. What’s the point of writing any amount of words if you’ve got nothing to say - or worse, you refuse to write the stuff you’ve got inside you? I’m wasting my time and anyone who is bothering to read this. I’m not even trying to reach my potential. This is why I’m not a real writer.
It doesn’t matter that these are journal entries. That’s not what’s stopping me from being a writer. It’s the fact that I’m holding back. I’m not writing what is on my mind. I’m not telling you what happened today. The facts or the emotional conflicts of daily life. My perspective on the life only I can give because it’s me that’s living it. I’m not even sharing my opinion on the news of the day. I’m typing one word after another as if this is some boring homework assignment - but it’s not - it’s my life.
I’m writing because I want to put myself out there. Yet, I’m holding out on myself. I’ve got myself reigned in for what? For who? Why? What good is it doing me? I’m frustrated as fuck. I’m supposed to be writing like I know what I’m doing by now. It’s not supposed to feel like this, like I haven’t done it before. I have to figure out how to get far enough away from whatever is causing me to shut down on myself so that I can let myself write my words.
When the way we let others treat us became how we treat ourselves. How we have to change that before we run out of time. How we don’t know how.
a journal entry
Monday, August 11th, 2014.
5:15pm I want to write poetry but I don’t believe in myself.
10:10pm That is not a good enough excuse anymore.
“At the Public Library at Forty-second Street I saw the room of manuscripts. It looked like a jail cell. It was locked, and not only locked but it had a heavy iron-grille door like that of a prison. It was more terrible to me, this burying of manuscripts, than the burial of a body in the earth. Perhaps because I have been tormented by the ethical conflict of the diary. Should I destroy it for the sake of human beings it might wound, or keep it because it has value for human beings. I received my life from books. So I would be killing a life-giving creation, to save a few from the truth. But who saved me from the truth? No one ever spared me that. The world needs the truth. No matter how painful. Because when people bury the truth it festers. The grilled, locked room of the Public Library is also the tomb in which we lock the dangerous truths.
I cannot imagine my diaries there. Read in gloom and darkness, not in the sun and by the sea.”
- Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume Five 1947-1955
The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.
- Sylvia Plath, 1954, from ‘Letters Home’