9 Surely writing is fun, though.
“Fun” is a fairly new word that was coined to describe commercial activities which promised immediate gratification. A pinball machine is fun, but writing is not a pinball machine. Writing is closer to inventing a pinball machine in that you have to fumble with pieces and make countless mistakes before arriving at a point where something happens. It takes time for months of labor to become visible.
Do we write because it is fun? Surely the word for “fun” would have come into language long ago if writers depended on it to write. Surely a writer would have coined that word to explain to their friends why they would be missing the party in order to finish the book again.
Marguerite Duras couldn’t remember when she started to write, but she recalled that having a child stopped her from writing. Writing, for Duras, was her natural state, and having a child was the “unnatural” act.
Writing is irresistible. The writer’s gaze is covetous: it takes what it sees and alters it. Pliny the Elder said painting began with the “act of tracing an outline around a man’s shadow.” The writer uses words rather than paint. Artistic creation is the only activity that requires you to imagine the X’s, to solve for X and expand the realm of possibility. There is an element of desire in writing. And there is also a willingness to be consumed by what one is imagining.
Desire transforms us. Desire demands both tears and transformation. Every time I sit down with a poem in my mouth, it is the first lover—it demands the same thrall and humility, the same abandon, the same compulsion to escape the parts of myself that prevent me from meeting it. The urge for the poem never fails to stoke a pyre in my imagination, and then to withdraw, to leave me nothing except a heap of ash.
How do you title an ash heap? What is an appropriate way to name the thing that comes from permitting oneself to imagine the world differently?
When watching black and white movies, I study their compositional strategies. Poets can learn from the heavy parchment of silence, the insinuations of suspense, the demanding use of white space and jazz to carry dialogue and character.[1]
The word “insinuation” could not exist without that monosyllable of “sin” hidden inside it.
Writing is exciting, wild, outrageous, horrifying, disgusting, playful, dangerous, illicit, self-annihilating, laborious, difficult, ecstatic—but writing is not “fun” to me. Ultimately, it is a labor that combines passion, commitment, desire, and obsession. This labor is made more challenging by a tension between the writer and the text: the urge to consume and the urge to be consumed by words.
There is still something missing, and maybe the thing that is missing is peculiar to poetry. Poets have a vision problem. We see things we hope won’t be true. Because we can’t stop thinking about what we’ve seen—we wrestle with it on the page. We poem those fears and tears with the worry of finding our words prophetic.
There are poems I won’t write out of concern they might happen. There are fragments I refuse to piece together because doing so might make them feel real to me. A poem is not a wish, but it is a way of seeing things, and much of what we see is not paradise.[2]
- The absolute faux pas of a cigarette. Do people smoke in books or poems anymore? Is a jazz song the last location of a slow-burning cigarette? ↵
- Haven't we always been a little afraid that we see more than those around us? That we see deeper, truer, closer somehow to the marrow? Isn't this another way of avoiding the problem of existence faced by every human being: how can we talk about death? How can I come to terms with something that resembles an ending? It's easier when you're very young, this vision problem. The child-poet silences trepidation with the delight of new belief, the wonder of the world laid bare, the fascination of what might yet happen. To be young is to have something little at stake. ↵