Because a writer who is not writing is a lunatic
I was tempted to have this introduction be simply this cut-you-to-the-quick 10 word quote from
, who for my money is one of the very best poets currently operating on Substack, if not everywhere.But just a tiny little bit more needs to be said before I leave you to what I hope is a fun and restorative weekend. See what James has produced here is a true and honest snapshot of the creative process from the inside. Not the guarded, self-congratulatory day in the life of a Content Creator but a glimpse at how things work when you are truly challenging yourself with your creative endeavours while also dealing with real life.
This is an excellent read.
Enjoy.
TJB.
Hold on just one second while I tell you a story.
On the last day of January, I pressed print on a 76-page PDF, the first time I had done so in almost 10 years.
The printer settings were set to draft: two-sided, black ink. The printer did not ponder over the pages, but sent them rocketing from its belly. The pages had a title page, an epigraph, and 35 poems broken up into 7 sections. Only 5 poems had a first draft date within the last 10 years — one poem is old enough to vote. Maybe half of them have been printed in journals, some online and lucky if the website is still active. The language used in these poems seems archaic now — pronouns such as “Abu Graib” and “Petraeus”, and catchwords like “surge”.
The epigraph is the same. Three lines from Henry IV part 1:
Come wilt thou see me ride?
And when I am on horseback I will swear
I love thee infinitely.
sets the tone of a manuscript I had first completed in 2012, which I dubbed American Step & Wave, based off one of the longer lodestone poems that was published by the New Orleans Review in 2015. The title has the bombast of a young poet handed his M.F.A. and only partly deserving it. It had no sections, and more poems. The poems were put together in a theme involving appropriation, odyssey, and home. This new draft does not have that title.
When I pressed print, almost a month ago now, I tried to recall what feelings I might have had when I had first printed it, almost twelve years ago, in preparation for my thesis defense. Likely a smug satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment. This time, there wasn’t so much satisfaction as there was amazement.
I would like to tell you about that AMAZEMENT.
What we have here is a failure to communicate
The short story between those two printings is tediously long, and so very common. I leave it as lacuna.
How I come to AMAZEMENT is first through total ignorance, and twelve years ago I was too full of myself to consider myself ignorant. But between 2012 and 2020 I lost my ability to think of poems as a collection. I won’t get into it, other than to say it involved publishing a chapbook-length poem, and the rigamarole I learned about publishing and publishers. It involved how much the MS I had printed out as my thesis took on dust while I casually threw it at submission managers, helping fill the coffers of literary presses by paying the fees for numerous book awards. Every so often I would try to work on the MS anew, but the structure of it began to dissolve. I didn’t know where to start. By 2016 — especially 2016 — the themes felt archaic. I began to wonder how you even MAKE a collection.
Think about it : you take a poem and you set it beside another poem. One piece of prosody up against another. Perhaps they have a similar image, or even a word. Perhaps their form is the same. Perhaps they are blisteringly different — so different that the shock between the two has a dissonance that becomes entrancing. Then you set a third poem down, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth — you get the idea. Throughout this consecutive gathering of poems the dissonance or the continuity remains, or the themes falter and new themes arise. Suddenly every image in a fourteen-line poem could be associated with a single image in a slew of others. Add in politics, add place, put in the experience of family, religion, aesthetics, form.
Then, recall the reader. Remember that a collection of poems isn’t just for you, but for some Other that will either pick up what you’re putting down, or just put down the poems. How do you get the reader from the beginning of a book to the end of it, to realize the experience from cover to cover? Dan Beachy-Quick touches on that from his opening lines of Spell —
Sir, turn This page and the thick door opens By growing thinner, ever thinner, Until the last page turns and is turned Into air.
The work I had to do for my little failure of a chapbook had jaded me hard, I couldn’t see how to put two poems together, meaningfully, how to move ideas from one side of the door to the other. And without the end product — a book — in mind, I found it impossible to write. Mornings went by as I stared mournfully at a blank page, and the printed pages cluttering my desk became just that.
What became rebuilding
In 2021 I began running a sonnet series on Substack that is now nearing its 100th sonnet. I began it because I wanted to stop writing into a vacuum. Because a writer who is not writing is a lunatic. Because I didn’t have to think about continuity, which was good since I had lost my ability to think of my poems as connected toward something like a collection. There’s something to self-publishing : not a means to an end but an outlet for work to be produced and forgotten. Many times it was noted I was building a collection I could one day publish as a whole, but I knew better. I had read Terrance Hayes and Diane Seuss, hell I had read William Shakespeare. I knew a collection of sonnets was not a collection so much as a long-form poem. That was not what my sonnets were.
But I was starting from scratch. Without a book to think about, I focused on writing a sonnet every week — not an easy task. I read poetry collections and marveled at how they were structured. I let the ground shift beneath me.
I carried on in this manner for two whole years. I built up a community of friends online, I started following other very talented poets and writers. I searched for inspiration, and went back to the essays I had only casually read in college. There were critical pathways I had never considered, I began taking them. I discovered a crown of sonnets in my memory that became my obsession for about half a year. Then, only then, did I begin to see how I could start on a manuscript again.
Last year I opened a new file tree1 and began collecting poems. I nixed the old title of the MS and kept it blank, waiting to hear it call out.
The first problem was of the past. A collection of poems needs to withstand the years. In my earlier MS, the political catchphrases were accepted as cachet, but ten years had gone by (and more).
I began with a single poem, chosen to be the first poem. It was chosen for its archaisms, and I sculpted it around the other themes I had in mind for the book. This was the beginning of my AMAZEMENT, since the poem had never been a particular favorite and certainly never felt like an opener. But it anchored the collection. It drew a line where the other poems stood. It was in the style of the Montana poet Richard Hugo ( the title itself references a book of his ) and declared itself in that style that a structure is instantly created. That poem became the door that opens.
Once the first poem was decided on, gathering the other poems into place was an easier task. I put them all into the file free and began sorting through. At first I was indulgent, reading many ( many! ) old poems and liberal about including them. I overwhelmed the collection with sluff, poems that had nothing in common with my themes, poems that had been given one draft and forgotten, poems that sucked. Then I started sorting through them, feeling how they worked together from the anchor-piece, dropping them up and down the file tree, or removing them entirely. This took days. It felt homebrewed, like I was creating a recipe for this obsession. It also was hopeful, since the poems that stayed were mostly the poems that had been in the MS for the last ten years, which proved I had been on the right track. One poem I removed I was shocked to do so. It had been my anchor-poem for the MS since 2012, and one of my favorites. Yet I found it didn’t fit if it wasn’t the opening poem, and it wasn’t strong enough to hold all the themes I wanted. So out it went.
Then I sorted the poems into sections. These sections served a purpose of separating the past into eras. Sections are crude, and you have to work within them. I went from the first section (containing only one poem) to the last (six), adding/removing poems, then working on the poems individually. It felt as if I was taking a wrinkled linen sheet and smoothing it out with an iron, inch by inch. The months went by as I worked my way down the file tree, sometimes turning back and reworking. My AMAZEMENT continued. Whatever the cost of it, it felt like the best work I had ever done. It felt mature, purposeful. I kept at it, disregarding my other projects and at the expense of my sonnet series ( oh how the quality has suffered! ).
I made it to the last poem in mid-January of this year. I had begun reworking the MS seven months before. Some poems needed no work at all, some had to be rewritten in a completely new direction. I had to eke out a sestina ( there are so many ways I hate sestinas ) because as Stephen Sondheim said, “content dictates form”. One morning I looked at the file tree, and I flipped through each poem, making notes and adjustments, and I said to myself, This is it. PRINT.
So here I am.
Years and years ago, a friend of mine said laughingly, “picture it, James. I am writing the most important work that has ever been written in the history of literature. So I believe. And there you are, writing the most important work that has ever been written in the history of literature. So you believe. And we are all here, us writers, swept up in our obsessions, our biggest fans, knowing that we are working on something invaluable. We have the best work we know, now if only the rest of the world take a beat fucking notice.” He howled over the irony, and left me chagrined.
The only real thing we have is our obsession. We may have an audience, we might even have awards and incomes, grants, fellowships. We might find our writing “successful”. But it means nothing without that first obsession, if we don’t place the work on the altar and bow to it, sacrificing the hours of our lives to it. And I don’t believe it is easy. Because obsession wanes, subject matter changes, we change. What I printed out I want to be done with. I want it published so I can move on. But it won’t be published if I am careless about that process. The poems that make up this new manuscript are as a house of cards, and a slip will bring them back to meaninglessness. I’ll have to carefully set them down to the proper publisher, get them into the right hands. Once there, I can start building on my next obsession. So I can continue this crazy work we call WRITING.
Thank you for your time.
I want to note that I use Scrivener, a licensed software made for writers. I would credit that this software has done wonders for helping me structure and order the MS, and I’d recommend it wholly to other writers.