Poetry is absolutely necessary for my mental health.
Growing up, we never talked about well-being in my family– that is, directly. While my mother was easier to talk to, as she’s very open about what makes her happy and what does not, that kind of talk never came easy with my father.
Not that it has always been easy with my mother– her well-being is dependent upon her children doing well. She likes to ask me questions about my work; she likes to hear what I’m doing next. Bear in mind, this wasn’t always the case; I’ve written before that there was a long period in which I wasn’t publishing, that I wasn’t “visible” in writing. It was a tough time for me, but it was even tougher for her; I realize that now. For all the hours I was losing sleep, she always lost more. It’s not a contest. It’s just the way things were. In hindsight, she’s slowly coming around as to why those years were good for me to go through; she listens without interrupting me, which is new for us. She never responds to such talk, directly, though. I’ve had to accept that. Because just as she values my mental health, I find I must value hers.
My father, though, is another matter.
Over the years, any talk surrounding his well-being has become shrouded in a heavy silence.
So his silence has become a way for him to talk.
And to talk to, to care for, my father’s silence is one of the most difficult challenges I’ve ever faced.
While I don’t know if such silence is good for his well-being or not, I have to respect it. I don’t know if he’s stewing over past regrets or angers. I don’t want to ask at this point in our lives. My greater aim is finding some way to continue to bond and look forward with my father; for a while, it was studying the Minhat Yehuda together, but these days, it’s poetry. Not just the poetry I write. I mean the poetry you, reader, have probably also read, or perhaps even wrote. Poems that I take a photo of, out of a book, and text him, or send a link to work online through an email. I think about all the ways we as poets, writers and readers, could otherwise be faceless and vaguely anonymous to each other as people, and then how we share creation of all multitudes through a computer network that too is often faceless and vaguely anonymous. It’s mind-blowing, the easiness of that kind of communication, which also can be quite overwhelming at times. My father still lives in a world in which he doesn’t spend a lot of time on the internet; so when I send him things, he reads them as if he’s reading a letter I’ve written to him, by hand. Sharing poetry with him retains a significant past personal. It’s a strange but beautiful reminder of how poetry once solely moved in our now heavily-connected world.
If you’re curious, here are some poems that I recently shared with my father: a performance of her poem “Rat Ode” by Elizabeth Acevedo (read it here); “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?” by Aimee Nezhukmatathil; “We Are Not Responsible” by Harryette Mullen; “National Security Advisory” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha; and “On Trans” by Miller Oberman. I’ve also recently taught these very poems in a workshop class; I’ve shared several of them with non-poet friends when they claim they “just don’t get” poetry.
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Below you will find Part 2 of the “On Writing, Workshop & Mental Health: A Roundtable” in which the poets and writers answer questions on mental health and well-being. I’m grateful for their honesty. I know they weren’t easy questions to answer.
For my own well-being I try not to think about time these days, or how short life really is. In writing poetry, and the sharing of poetry, I can exist in some future present that is constantly being reshaped by many a hand and belief and vision. I get dizzy at times, and giddy and stunned, made uncomfortable, made new, made fireclay up looking directly at ungentle suns. Every year, rhetoric like the dominant discourse loses its hold on the lines it’s drawn around this world. Such lines bend. They tremble.They snap. I feel the release.
And while my father still won’t directly about well-being, I think about how poetry has transformed his silence. I don’t think poetry’s a mere distraction, or a way for him to ignore larger existing problems, the way it draws my father out of his silence, not always to speak, but often just to listen to me read him these poems over the phone. I listen to him breathe. I hear him listening.
How his silence shifts, is shifted, by each new possible future being presented, that which simultaneously has already been created.
–Rosebud Ben-Oni
Rosebud Ben-Oni: How do you deal with the highs and lows that the writing life brings?
Emma Bolden: Thanks to the afore-mentioned turtle shell, I can handle a lot of rejections. But when it’s just rejection after rejection after rejection, or when a low in my writing life coincides with a low in another part of my life, I just feel like a failure, like my career as a writer is over, like I’ll never write a good thing again. When I went through this in college, my don (faculty advisor) reminded me that poetry isn’t on a time clock. If you take the time you need to grieve and heal and process — and, most importantly, live, and live fully — it doesn’t mean you’re deserting poetry. Far from it: you are helping poetry. You are doing what you need to do, which means you are doing what poetry needs you to do.
Though it’s tough to tamp down the “you are a failure” chorus in my head, these fallow moments of not-writing are often the most productive times of growth as a writer. They grant me the perspective to reflect on my work with — well, perspective. I’ve just gone through one of those agonizing periods, and I realized that I was submitting poems before they were ready, that I haven’t been sitting down and giving each word the attention it deserves. For me, that’s the right kind of writing: giving each word the attention it deserves. And while I adore Poetry Twitter (and Facebook, and Instagram), for me, social networking exacerbates the problem. We don’t show each other the lows. We just show each other the highs. If you see this enough, even though you rationally recognize that it’s totally not true at all, it can be easy to get trapped into thinking that the writers who are (rightfully!) celebrating their achievements online don’t have lows, don’t have rejections, don’t have that chorus shouting the word “failure” in the back of their minds, and that can make things even worse. When I’m at a low, I try to pull back a little, but I also try to tap into what makes Poetry Twitter (and Facebook, and Instagram) truly and sometimes literally life-saving: it’s a place where people who are daily engaged with this struggle gather to hold up each other’s words and works, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Jarvis Slacks: I don’t think I deal with the lows very well. There are times where I get very depressed. I am mostly disappointed with myself and the lack of writing that I produce. When I feel this way, I tend to try and read as much as I can. Reading gives me some inspiration. Reading also allows me to gain perspective. Writing is difficult and very few people do it well. I don’t think I appreciate the “highs” very often. Any success as a writer can make you feel like you are on some sort of drug. If I were to get a work published, I think that my failures will humble me enough that I wouldn’t take success for granted. I hope so, at least.
Sarah Fonseca: I allow myself to experience jealousy and anger. I’ll shit-talk an editor or a writer I feel is over-esteemed with a friend. I let myself realize that the time I’ve spent being contrarian is time I could’ve been working on my own essays. I get back to work. It’s not the most noble coping mechanism, but it does the trick.
Anthony Frame: I don’t! Ha! Or rather, I try to deflect from my own career highs and lows. My press gives me a lot of opportunities to focus on the successes of others, which can distract me from my own most recent rejection letters and can give me an excuse not to make too big of a deal about my own recent successes. Promoting my successes can be a bit embarrassing for me – maybe it’s impostor syndrome, maybe it’s the knowledge that I don’t have the training and deep craft knowledge that others have so I feel weird about pointing towards the work I’ve done. So, mostly I celebrate the work of others, which always keeps me feeling positive, helps to keep me in the space of the highs of this writing life. And, I’m lucky (and grateful) to have a wife who loves to praise my successes while also keeping me very humble.
RB: How you do take care of your mental health as poet and/or writer?
JS: I don’t think I do a very good job at it. Recently, I’ve made the decision to write and read more often and spend less time online. The internet causes me to have some anxiety, mainly because of the state of our politics. The internet also forces me to see my friends and confront their own happiness. My friends might not be happy, but they act like it online. That makes me feel as if I’m the only one that’s suffering. I also have many friends who discuss writing online. This short spate of masturbation on their part annoys me. How do they write so much and I never can? The answer is that they aren’t writing that much. They are acting like they are.
I fully realize that this my problem, not my friend’s. They should be successful and they should be happy with the work they are doing. My inability to be happy for them is a weakness of my character that I am struggling with right now. Removing myself from internet social networks has made me feel more introspective and present in the moment. There are many writers that can be very engaged on Twitter or Facebook. That engagement helps them promote their work and seek our different opportunities. Social networks online haven’t been very healthy for me and I am slowly trying to figure out the best way for me to interact with people online.
Teaching also helps with my mental health. My job allows me to constantly engage with young people. It’s soothing to spend time with people that have no preconceived notions and can look at the world with raw possibility.
SF: I’m an independent film writer and book critic, which means I’m at the mercy of editors’ timelines more than I’d like to be; that’s the stressful nature of any freelance work, writing-related or not. While I regularly disavow it, the holy trinity–exercise, proper meals, and eight hours of sleep–has worked best.
I’ve always struggled with being a writer and having a body at the same time. The introspection the craft requires is my social anxiety’s favorite breeding ground. After my laptop is put away, I struggle to complete the most basic of social tasks like buying groceries or going to the gym. In fact, I’ve used writing to avoid those responsibilities to my body. And is there a writer who hasn’t used their work to flake on plans? I call it the ‘deadline and dash.’
I’m constantly struggling with this. I try to remind myself that so much of writing requires an experiential touch and that it’s important to let myself live a little. It helps to map out my day in Google Calendar, hour-by-hour after I wake up in the mornings. An hour of writing or leaving my apartment isn’t as emotionally-loaded when it’s depicted by a little blue block on my phone.
AF: Yeah, this is the toughest part of being a writer for me. For me, it comes down to balance and to giving myself permission not to be a perfect writer. We talk a lot about not having to get the poem right on the first draft (Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts”) but we don’t talk much about not always getting it right as an active writer. This can be especially important for folks who are active on social media who see other writers publishing a lot (which implies that they write a lot and write successfully a lot). So, I have to give myself permission to be the writer I am. And that means it is okay to be a slow writer. It’s okay to not “write” (actively compose poems) every day. It’s okay to not do anything writing related some days – because, while it’s important to keep the writer muscles active, it’s also important to refresh yourself and to engage with the world, which, hopefully, fuels the writing. And these breaks can allow me the opportunity to reapproach my writing, the process, the voice, the style, the content, everything, from a fresh perspective that I can’t get when I am digging deep in my poems every single day.
I’m constantly trying to find balance. Between my writing, my reading (which is as important, if not more important, than my writing), my work as an editor, my job as a pest control technician, and my personal life. Honestly, my work as an editor is probably the best part of my writing balance. It forces me to break from my own writing and, though it probably makes me an even slower writer, I think there’s benefit to the patience I’m learning to have in regards to the work I’m working on. It also exposes me to new writing/writers and new styles. And it offers me a bit of a look behind the curtain of other writers’ processes. I’ve always been insecure about the fact that I don’t churn out poem after poem after poem, that I don’t generate dozens or hundreds of poems a year. But talking with other writers, famous and successful writers, and hearing them say that they don’t write as quickly as their very recent publication history suggests, well, it’s been a strong validation of my process and of the balance I’m trying to find. And of the permission I’m trying to give myself to do my poetry in my own way and at the pace that is right for me and my work.
EB: I try to remind myself why I started writing: because the process of writing brings me joy. Through writing, I discover; I order and make sense of my world and even if my world had no sensible order, I can still create something. Sometimes, creation is its own sense and order. Too often, though, I get hung-up on the product (or rather, the publication of the product). When this happens, I like to do experiments (OuLiPo’s language games, sonnets, erasures) to help myself return to myself.
However, sometimes the process of writing itself is terribly difficult in ways that, as I’m writing this now, I’m not sure I’ve fully discussed with anyone. It means reliving the most traumatic moments of one’s life in the vividly visceral manner necessary to put that moment into words. It means constantly confronting the self and its shortcomings, its poor decisions, its abuse and fears and hates and hopes and loves — and yes, sometimes those last two are the most painful. I’ve been working on a memoir about my botched hysterectomy for years, and the people who love me sometimes don’t quite understand why it isn’t finished. Grappling with the literal and figurative pain that’s followed the hysterectomy is difficult. But revisiting the hope I felt before my hysterectomy — both when I thought there was a possibility, dim though it may be, that I’d have children, and when I thought the hysterectomy would let me live a normal life — is excruciating. I have to give myself the time and space I need to do this work. I’ve felt much healthier since I gave myself permission to slow down, to spend time not just on my work but on what keeps me sane through the work (crochet, reading, and Dateline reruns, mostly).
This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on writing, the workshop experience and mental health. Read the introduction to the series & Part 1 here.