Recently, I got into a discussion with a friend who felt discouraged by the poetry he felt he should be writing, but could not write. He asked me what I do in this case. I’ll share my answer here, in the hopes of that it might help someone:
Write from what and where you ache.
Put a pin in what you think you should be writing, and focus on the ache.
Write from sheer feeling first: the origin of the ache, the flow of the ache, its change of seasons and shifting landscapes.
So what is it, my friends? What is your ache or aches? Is it the desire for more time for yourself in a new place where no one knows you? What would that feel like?
Or is it a temporary solitude away from the rest of the world? Is it lovesickness? The every day habits of an old lover that used to annoy you, or something more sweeping: a year in your life that was mostly discovery? Is it more physical— a pain moving up and down your spine with an ever-changing epicenter, a coldness in your gums, a bout of forgetfulness? Do you ache for someone to see you? Do you ache for a train less crowded on the morning commute, or one door in particular to open? Do you ache for someone who’s gone into the afterworld, and whom you still talk to, when you think no one’s listening?
All of these things— what do they feel like?
You don’t have to write them in attempt to quell or cure them, to get them out of your system, although you can try. Just know the ache might persist, its vibrations growing louder and hungrier, once you open up to them. I highly recommend making a list if there’s a multitude of images that come flooding into you. I highly recommend making one in any case. You don’t have to show anyone this list, or what comes as a result of it. You can keep it private it if you need to. Know that a future poem will most likely spring from this opening of yourself. That this future poem might not look anything like the aches that inspired it.
I told my fellow poet friend that there was a time in which I wanted to write more poems rooted in empowerment, for my niece in particular, to create a part of that better world I’d like her to inherit. All that time, I was feeling anything but empowered. I felt very physically sick and uncertain about the future in general because I was very physically sick and uncertain about my own future specifically. It wasn’t until I began to delve with more candor into my physical and spiritual aches that I began writing the poems I wanted to write, not those I felt I should be writing.
(This is not to knock anyone at all who writes about empowerment because those poems of empowerment have kept me alive and given me strength. Rather, I’m talking about the moments where the ache is so overpowering that it’s better to acknowledge and speak with them.)
I hope this helps someone. I hope that these questions I’ve asked and the ones that follow can pull you out if you are stuck: What is it exactly that whips around your chest late at night, keeping you from sleep, and often has no answer? What would otherwise distract you from pressing deadlines rooted in more reachable, concrete goals? What imprecise and smeared feelings reveal vulnerabilities and revelations that cannot exist openly, in your own language, elsewhere other than poetry?