Writing Material(s)

My brother-in-law recently asked if I like to write in a certain kind of notebook. And I did I ever have a specific answer! I write in large moleskin dotted journals (I like the kind with brown paper covers that so that you can write or sketch or put stickers on the outside) and I write with mechanical pencils. He prefers a row of freshly sharpened #2 pencils; we agreed, though, that the tools we sit down with shape not just the mood and experience of working, but also the ideas we produce.

Poems are not just made from language. They are made from breath and vocal cords, from micro-movements of the hand and wrist, from ink or graphite spread across plant fibers. (Even a poem typed on a digital “cloud” is made of tangible stuff, anchored to a warehouse full of computer chips.) And these materials shape and support the creative process in all kinds of subtle and interesting ways.

For instance, I accidentally switched to dotted journals during the pandemic (probably due to some kind of supple chain issue). The dotted pages look more suitable for an architect than a poet (then again isn’t a poem a kind of blueprint for experience?), but I love the way that they let me play with spacing. They free me from some of the linear tidiness I associate with legal pads, but they offer me more structure than the void of a completely blank page—and help me see how lines are relating across distance. In fact, some of the unusually formatted poems in Acoustic Shadows probably came about because I discovered dotted pages—and the joy of a loose grid—at just the right moment.

A mechanical pencil (appropriate for a writer obsessed with the history of technology!) offers me just a hint more precision than a regular pencil. It actually slows my writing down just a little compared to a ballpoint pen, and this builds a bit more care into the process and gives me time to make useful and interesting “mistakes”. I almost never use the eraser (I prefer to cross out or bracket words that aren’t working and write alternatives nearby so that I can see the poem’s history and possible futures on the page), but I like knowing that I can erase—that the draft isn’t permanent and will continue to change and evolve. And finally, I love the barely perceptible screet-shush sound that a mechanical pencil makes and the way it reminds me of a dog running through snow.

If you are feeling stuck or uninspired, it might be helpful to reflect on your tools—and to experiment with new ones.

P.S. Because recommending books is my love language, you can now find all the books I’ve discussed on this newsletter (including my favorite books on creative living and thinking) here. I’ll receive a small portion of the proceeds (and so will your local independent bookstore) if you buy books through this link, but you can likely also find these titles at your local library or used bookstore.

Negative Capability for Turbulent Times

For the past several years I’ve secretly thought of December as Negative Capability Month. This is partly my cranky introvert response to the over-commercialized “Holiday Spirit” and partly because the poet Keats first coined the term Negative Capability on December 21, 1818. For me, it’s a helpful reminder to be patient and attentive as I write and revise—especially if I am writing in response to current events. It reminds me that there is a difference between tuning into creative intuition and slamming down a hot take.

Keats (in a letter to his brothers) described Negative Capability as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. My own understanding of it keeps evolving over time. I first encountered Negative Capability as a teenager reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (if you are a fan of the series, Negative Capability is the mindset Lyra uses to read the Golden Compass). At the time, the most important word seemed to me to be “Mysteries” and I thought it sounded cool, but I wasn’t sure how one actually accessed Negative Capability or what one used it for (certainly not for passing standardized tests!).

Only later, when I read Keats in college and grad school, did I start to recognize Negative Capability as the frame of mind I needed to write a poem, or to revise one. At that time, “doubts” was the part that resonated most for me. I had so many doubts about whether I’d be able to finish projects I started, about how my work would turn out, whether any of it would ever be published. But I kept writing through/into/out of my doubts.

In 2020, I latched onto the “uncertainties” part. Every day was full of Covid-related uncertainties and political uncertainties. Creative work felt like my best way of navigating those uncertainties.

And in 2021, for me, the most important word was “irritable”.

My Negative Capability word for 2022 was “being”.

And in 2024, I am back to doubts in a big way. This time my doubts are more external than internal. They come in the form of post-election despair. Or they come from walking across a semi-apocalyptic campus into a classroom full of students and trying to peel their attention away from their phones (I could fill a whole separate post with thoughts about screens inducing Numbed Capability rather than Negative Capability). We are all up to our eyebrows in doubts—and worries, concerns, fears— that add up to a general sense of doom.

This is not an easy atmosphere in which to make art. It’s hard not to fall into apathy, and hard not to feel that I should be doing something “more useful” with my time. And yet, if I can write in/with/amid/despite/through these doubts, I find myself in a place of greater clarity and calm—capable of responding rather than reacting. When I’m writing, I’m not doomscrolling or raging or panicking. I might be anxious or enraged, but I’m also deeply engaged. Doubts don’t go away, but they drift into the periphery. Sometimes I can reread a draft and find that I’ve articulated a way forward through the day, or named an action I can take, or stumbled on a metaphor that helps me understand the situation around (and within) me more clearly. Almost always it feels like a step forward.

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Spontaneous Gestures

I don’t like exercise, but I do like to move throughout the week in ways that might look like exercise. I walk, I run, I practice yoga, I sometimes even lift weights, but I treat these activities as movement (an activity to be enjoyed/experienced) rather than exercise (a chore to be performed for a specific outcome). “Movement” probably has the same cardiovascular and strength benefits as “exercise”, but it feels very different—it’s an impulse coming from within, rather than an obligation coming from without.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit as I try to craft instructions that will give my composition students the guidance and structure they need to write their first college essays, but won’t be easy for them to feed to the Generative AI Demons. This is a difficult needle to thread in part because my students view every prompt as an assignment to be completed (or delegated to Chat GPT) for points, while I view prompts as invitations to experience challenge and express ideas.

I want them to do the writing equivalent of moving rather than exercising, to respond to the prompt with what the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott called a “spontaneous gesture” rather than a compliant performance. (Winnicott has been a huge influence on my work lately and on my creative life in general; his approach to the human condition is somehow pragmatic and whimsical and deeply reassuring all at the same time. Playing and Reality is a great place to start.)

Winnicott, with his recognition that the opposite of creativity isn’t blankness (or uncertainty or the abyss) but compliance, predicted this situation decades ago: “In a tantalizing way, many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.” My students struggle not just because the semester is an artificial high-pressure construct that doesn’t fit anyone’s natural thought-rhythms (but does make it super tempting to turn to AI shortcuts), but also because most of them are emerging from an educational system that rewarded them for compliantly regurgitating facts (and Googling answers) rather than tuning inward or exploring uncertainty.

Poets can face similar challenges. Poems are most alive when they are spontaneous gestures—when they arise from within the poet as a response to internal weather (which is, of course, highly permeable to lived circumstance)—but most contemporary poets exist in an ecosystem that values “productivity” and “rapid content generation” and “hot takes”. It can be all too easy to get caught up in the pressure to react and produce, and to fall out of sync with our own (often slower) creative impulses. And yet I still believe prompts can be useful tools when they invite writers to respond with a spontaneous gesture rather than strictly limiting style or subject matter. It’s sort of like the difference between a scripted play and an improv act. (My MFA advisors made me read a little book about improv and it almost broke my introvert brain, but also was extremely useful. And now I can’t remember the name of the book, just that it was a slim volume with a black and white photo on the front. If you think you know it, please be in touch!)

I give myself prompts all the time—by seeking out or stumbling upon experiences sounds/images/ideas/facts that I want to respond to and then giving myself a frame (not a fence) to bring them into focus. In some ways, the self-prompt is the start of the spontaneous gesture. When I write poetry prompts for others, my goal is always to give them some gestures/possibilities to respond to and some scaffolding to respond with (but not a script for how to respond). I’m still figuring out how to do this for my composition students. 

Joy in the Delete Key

I spent July in Revision Mode and deleted hundreds of words. Maybe thousands (if you delete words, write new words to replace them, and then delete those words, does that double your delete count?). My net word count for the month is definitely in negative numbers.

I deleted the usual suspects: articles, adjectives, and adverbs. I cut opening lines. I cut closing lines. I got rid of entire sentences and stanzas. I let go of images that detoured too far from the centers of poems. And I abandoned entire poems that didn’t fit in either of the two big projects I’m concentrating on at the moment.

And yet, it was a month of process/progress, of transmutation, and, yes, (slow) forward momentum. It’s fun and exciting to draft new work—and I’ve missed that excitement. But pausing to take stock and to winnow down existing work is, for me, an equally urgent and vital part of writing.

Hitting the delete key isn’t about undoing ‘mistakes’ or punishing myself for throwing a whiny/moody line into a poem (this is just how poems come out in November) or even about ‘polishing’ the poem. It’s about discerning what the poem doesn’t need (what doesn’t ring true, what pulls the poem out of its orbit, what weighs the poem down) so that I can give the poem what it does need. It’s about spotting/hearing the words (or punctuation) that impinge on the poem’s momentum and filtering them out so that the poem can move freely across the page or through the reader’s mouth.

Giving myself time and permission to delete (and even abandon) work is also an opportunity to clarify my intentions—to decide where I most want to focus right now and to set aside lines or poems that distract from that focus. It’s a chance to think “not this, not this, and, instead, that!” and to hone the poem or the manuscript toward that.

Living Revision

I live in an oddly shaped studio over my parents’ garage. It has very sloped ceilings, strange nooks, a giant closet (or a tiny bedroom), and a weird looking cross beam that seems to hold up the roof. (It also comes with woodsy view, a nearby owl who gets very loud around 1AM, and some pretty cool landlords/neighbors.) A week ago, my sister collected about half the furniture for her new home in Boston. I did a happy dance in my newly emptied space (which had served as a family furniture storage unit until I moved in mid-pandemic) and then realized I was going to spend the month of June living in a partially revised poem.

I had lots of blank space, some things I knew I wanted to keep, some clothes and linens I probably wanted to donate, a couch that needed to be relocated to make better use of the space, and some ideas about how to decorate the newly revealed walls and rearrange the remaining furniture. It was like living in a draft from which I’d recently deleted a bunch of lines, a draft full of highlighted trouble-spots and/or hand-written questions to myself—only I could walk around and make breakfast and live with/in the space.

I started by vacuuming up all the dust bunnies and dead insects that emerged from under the old bookshelf. Then I found 37-inch bookshelves (to fit where the ceiling slopes down to 38 inches). Then I used the process of re-shelving my books to decide which to keep and which to resell. It was like cutting some unnecessary adjectives, writing a new line that created new possibility, and then trimming some more to fit the new possibility.

I’m still inhabiting my work-in-progress. I’ll move a lamp and live with in a its new location—seeing how it looks/feels/works there and how that fits or doesn’t fit with the rhythms of my life. And then I’ll move it again. Or I’ll decide it does work there, but now I need to move the arm chair closer...It feels very like the process of writing a new line into a poem and then leaving it overnight and reading it aloud the next morning to see how it holds.

Don’t Call it a Creative Download

I had a creative breakthrough the other week! In a few minutes, I wrote a poem that got out The Thing I had been trying and intending to say for months. Then I sat around blinking at it, wondering where it came from–much the way my dog seems to blink after letting out a long howl. 

I know that some people call this kind of experience a “creative download”, but I don’t and won’t. I’m deeply skeptical about metaphors that reduce our minds to machines. I think there’s a temptation to confuse ourselves with computers when we do this, to get overly focused on productivity at the expense of play, to cling to logic, to ignore our bodies and our ability to make associative leaps. “Download” worries me particularly because it suggests that writers and artists are passive automatons waiting to be brought up to date by some higher standardized authority. But creative inspiration, at least in my experience, is never a simple one-way process. 

Indeed, when I paged back through my commonplace book and journal and calendar the next day, I saw that the poem had long roots: weeks of watching crows gather in the buckeye tree near my window, months of conversation with friends (and in my own head, responding to a podcast), hundreds of walks in the woods, months of reading about spies and then months of not reading about spies and wondering why I’d lost interest in espionage, dictionary definitions I’d copied out and played with, images I’d written and cut out of previous poems because they didn’t fit, and etc. 

The poem I’d written didn’t suddenly upload, it grew and evolved through weeks of being alive and permeable to the world around me, doing other work, paying attention and forgetting, daydreaming and thinking, walking, resting, running, breathing (what is inspiration if not breath?), taking notes, and trying again. The moment of actually writing the poem felt much more like the delight of suddenly being able to coordinate my way into an arm balance or backbend (after months of building muscle memory and strength) than it felt like logging into an updated version of Word. 

I think human creativity is way messier and more interesting than a download. And I want the language I use to describe my process to reflect the messy embodied joy of it. 

How to Write a Historical Persona Poem

In my last post, I wrote about how I put my manuscript together. This time, I’ll go behind the scenes of a single poem “Trudy Swims the Channel” and discuss how I write persona poems based on historical figures. If you want to read the poem before going backstage, you can find it in Acoustic Shadows or read it online at Kitchen Table Quarterly.

Gertrude (Trudy) Ederle was the first woman (and 6th person to swim the English Channel); despite having to swim through some unpredicted storms squalls, she knocked a casual two hours off the previous record. I picked up a biography (Glenn Stout’s Young Woman and the Sea) in 2020, watched some early video footage of her swim, and sensed that a poem about this story (full of sisters, music, and water) might belong in Acoustic Shadows. Then I spent the next 18th months drafting and redrafting poems about Trudy. At first, I tried to fit in Way Too Many Facts because it was all so fascinating and wound up with a poem that felt long and slow (not at all the right fit for Trudy’s record-breaking speed), so my revision process was about discerning what was most essential (for me, in 2021) about her story and finding ways to amplify and highlight those essentials.

Along the way, I realized that there are two keys to writing a historical persona poem.

The first key is personal resonance. Trudy might be the speaker of the poem, but I was the one writing it, so the poem needed to matter to me (not just in a this-is-cool-history-way, but in a this-is-something-I-need-to-say way)—and I needed to understand what Trudy and I had in common. At first glance, not much. She was an Olympic athlete and record-breaking swimmer, and I was a writer with a history of bursting into tears during childhood swim meets. But, as I dug deeper, I realized that we had both chosen careers that required hours and hours of solitary practice. We’d both been told by well-meaning strangers that we should choose less risky paths. Trudy’s story was a story about staying focused on the challenge you’ve set for yourself no matter others have to say about it—and that was something I needed to celebrate.

The second key is cultural resonance—by this I mean the parallels or similarities between the moment I am writing from and the moment I am writing about, the things that make that historical moment a mirror for this one. Trudy made her swim at a time when new technologies had just made near-instant (though slow by our standards) communication possible. News was becoming more global and a culture of worshiping (and shaming) celebrities was taking hold. Sounds familiar, right? After her first failed attempt at a Channel crossing, Trudy had to find a way to keep swimming through visibility, distraction, and controversy.

Once I had these two keys clear in my mind, I was able to see which lines and facts could be cut, and I could revise images and phrasing to play up and amplify the two resonances (persona and cultural) that I’d identified. Research-based writing is never easy, but having a sense of clarity and purpose always makes it much easier.

Stepping Back to See the Big Picture

About a year before Acoustic Shadows was picked up for publication, I was feeling very stuck. I knew that the collection didn’t quite have the momentum it needed, but every time I tried to steer the poems into a better order using logic or historical chronology, I wound up with a stiffer, less interesting manuscript. I decided to take an entirely new approach—something more visual and intuitive.

I was inspired by games of Dixit and by Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit (she recommends stepping back to look for patterns in the way prose moves across the page). But my biggest model was the strategy the British Navy developed to protect itself from Nazi submarines and fight the Battle of the Atlantic (I’d just read A Game of Birds and Wolves and written the poem “War Games” and felt deeply drawn to the method of mapping the whole battle out on a linoleum floor, understanding how different ships and subs moved in relation to one another, trying and failing and trying again). When I see multiple threads of my research, reading, writing, and life suddenly weaving together, it is almost always a sign that I am on the right track—so I commandeered my parents’ ping-pong table and a box of markers and got to work.

I printed out my whole manuscript and used markers to track the weather and atmosphere in each poem. That makes it sound too elegant; really, I just drew blue squiggles for ocean poems and green squiggles for land poems, then I drew little black ovals for poems in submarines and little black houses for poems in homes (and both for the poems straddling both worlds). Then I started spreading poems across the ping-pong table (not an essential tool, but it happened to be a nice ocean-blue color and the net gave me a convenient way to divide Part I poems and Part II poems). I stepped back far enough that I couldn’t read individual words and kept shuffling poems until I liked the mix of land and water and the movement between the two. Then I used my birds’-eye view to look at the form of the poems and to make sure that the poems were cycling through a variety of different forms and not getting stuck in any one particular shape.

And then, once I’d shuffled things around and around, I let myself look at the words on the page again and see the new conversations between poems that my shuffling had revealed. Then I tweaked the order of the poems to highlight some word connections, then I stepped back to track the atmosphere visually, then I removed some poems because they just didn’t fit, I stepped close again, and so on, for several hours. By the end of the day, I had a new structure for the manuscript, one that is pretty similar to the published version (though I wrote and added a handful of poems after the Big Remodel).

There are lots of ways to adapt this strategy for different projects and with different materials. You could use stickers or stamps to track particular characters/elements/colors/seasons etc. through your poems. You could tape the poems to wall of your apartment or use a laundry line for a vertical visual experience. You could paperclip a tarot card to each poem—or a photograph, leaf, or dried flower. You could use different colored stones as paperweights or use toys or knickknacks to visually represent the poems. The idea is simply to find a way to step back from the individual words in individual poems so that you can show yourself the tone/feeling/atmosphere of each poem—and re-envision how all the poems might work together.

Metaphors, Vehicles, Submarines

I have a book of poems coming out soon. It is also a book full of submarines. One of the side benefits of writing about submarines and the history of technology is that I get asked “why write poems about this subject?” very frequently. And I’ve gotten to think a lot about how we find the vehicles—the metaphors, since this word originally comes from the Greek “to transfer” or “to carry across”—that serve our projects.

Here are just a few of the reasons I started writing about submarines (and not just writing, but reading stacks of books and driving hundreds of miles to visit decommissioned submarines) in early 2018:

I’d been writing a lot of poems set in airplanes, but I was starting to feel that these were in danger of becoming stale. So I asked myself what the opposite of an airplane would be, and my answer was a submarine.

I was interested in the word ‘nuclear’—how it could be used to describe a family or a weapon, what it might have to tell us about nearness, power, and conflict.

I had some big questions and anxieties about the role that technology plays in our lives, but when I tried to write about algorithms, for example, or media echo chambers, my work felt flat and full of opinions. I didn’t have the distance I needed to observe the situation clearly. When I researched the history of submarines, I found that they gave me a new way to ask questions about how it feels to rely on machines and what happens when we trust our survival to them.

I was looking (these days, who isn’t?) for a way of navigating extreme and uncertain environments.

Submarines seemed an ideal vessel for getting out of a logical, land-locked mindset and diving into subconscious creative depths. (I was raised by psychoanalysts and can’t resist reading into homonyms.)

Then in 2020-2022, nuclear submarines suddenly became a great imaginative lens for understanding containment, isolation, contamination, and resurfacing.

I’m researching other things now and I’m curious to see how my research obsessions will shape my current projects and how they’ll shift with the passage of time.

Beyond “Write What You Know”

“Write what you know” is popular writing advice—so popular that even non-writers can quote it. I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, there’s real joy and possibility to be found in writing from—and learning to investigate and celebrate—your own lived experience. Writing about my own errands and routines and hobbies, writing from my own hometown and body, helps me bring an attentive and curious mind to my daily life. And, as a reader, I love to encounter work full of the depth and nuance that familiarity brings.

On the other hand, “write what you know” sounds an awful lot like “stick to what you know”. But if you only write about what you already know, how will you ever learn anything new? How will you step into mysteries and uncertainties and unleash your Negative Capability? How will you step back into a beginner’s mindset and discover new images and techniques? How will you get out of explaining mode and into exploring mode?

I like to write what I know, but I like to write into unknowns even more. Research helps me stay curious and open to new ideas. I write to learn about science and history, about the nervous system, about the Cold War, about spies and submarines, about the first woman to swim the English Channel. And then I look at the poems or essays I’ve drafted. I admit I don’t know everything about my subject matter, but I work with my uncertainty rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. Are there gaps in my knowledge—words or dates or concepts I need to look up? (Yay, more research!) Or are there gaps in the record—places to imagine my way through? (Yay, more writing!)

This writing into the unknown can work even on the level of an individual word. Too often I see writers apologize for putting a less familiar word in a draft; “I don’t know what this word is doing here,” they’ll say, “I’m not even 100% sure what it means.” But the word is there because it called to the writer’s instincts, it sounded its way into the poem, and now it’s a doorway to a new dimension. For instance, maybe you throw the word “radical” into the poem to describe a choice and then visit the dictionary and realize you’ve brought in surgery and chords of music and groups of atoms and a handful of roots from which a tree might grow. Where will the poem go now?

In honor of back-to-school season, I invite you to let go of writing what you know. Write to explore, to learn, to discover. Write your way into knowing what you don’t know. Write in ways that reflect your ongoing learning and experiencing and digesting of life. Write tunnels through the inner world, open the door to surprise.

On “Writer’s Block”

I don’t believe in writer’s block, but I do suffer from it at times. What I mean is that I don’t believe writers are especially prone to creative stuckness and stagnation, but humans get blocked all the time. Human Block is a real and pervasive problem. We look for the fun (albeit challenging) path that we took for granted just yesterday and find ourselves staring into a howling white blizzard of blank pages. Musicians get stage-fright; downhill skiers (I’m guessing) have days when the mountains look extra steep and perilous and they wish they’d stayed in bed; chefs get sick of finding new ways to use up zucchini; and sometimes I found myself drawing and redrawing a box around the date at the top of the page, not writing anything, wondering where all the words and ideas went and what the point of this whole poetry thing is, and stewing in that foul mix of terror and boredom we call writer’s block.

When I hit a patch of writer’s block this June, I stopped trying to write poems and instead started trying to write through the block itself, to see what it wanted to tell me, by jotting answers to my ever-growing List of questions I find it helpful to ask myself when I feel blocked:

• Where do I feel stuck in my body? Is there a physical/health need or problem to tend to before I focus on writing?

• Where do I feel stuck in my life? Is there a decision I need to make?

• Do I need to thank someone or repay a debt?

• Do I need to offer an apology to someone?

• Do I need to quit a habit or change a routine in order to free up energy for writing?

• Do I need to say no to someone or something?

• Am I not getting enough information/stimulation for my brain to engage with? Do I need a trip to the museum / zoo / library for inspiration?

• Or is my brain overloaded to the point of numbness? Do I need a walk / a nap / some restorative yoga?

• Is the writer’s block wrapped around all my writing—i.e. is something in my life outside writing occupying mental bandwidth, is there something I need to tackle before I get back to writing?

• Or is the writer’s block lodged in a specific piece/project—i.e. is there something waiting to be revealed by this particular work that I don’t want to know or share yet? If so, what might it be?

This time around I found that my block lifted after I wrote thank-you letter to a wonderful high-school teacher of mine who is retiring this year (a task that jogged some memories that were useful for my current project) and went to see a chiropractor for some back pain that had been bothering me for months (which has helped me sit more comfortably while writing AND prompted me to become aware of a situation where I was “bending over backwards” to please someone else at the expense of my own writing time). As soon as I had done these things, I had plenty to throw at the blank page. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe sometimes Human Block can be sifted and shifted and resolved with a bit of patient attention.

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Filters and Flow States for Creative Minds

I picked up Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How You Can Think Deeply Again in the hopes of better understanding why my composition students were struggling to complete even brief reading assignments, but I also found that his book had a lot to offer me as a poet and creative thinker. Usually I wait to finish a book before I start recommending it to others, but I started recommending this one at about page 150.

Hari lays out a whole range of factors—from air pollution to 24-hour news cycles—that disrupt our ability to focus on both an individual and a collective level (and he explains how our splintered attention threatens our democracies). What interested (and also disheartened) me the most, though, was his discussion of the way in which technology and media encourage us to inhale information at an unsustainably rapid clip (i.e. to skim everything and react with a hot take) and to switch frequently between tasks (sometimes under the guise of ‘multi-tasking’). These habits and the mental static they generate hinder our ability to work in flow—that state where we are so completely absorbed in a physical or mental challenge that we lose track of time and stop monitoring our own productivity and simply devote our full attention to painting a portrait or choreographing a dance or writing a poem (or even reading one). Flow states don’t just allow us to complete creative work, they help us to feel more alive and more contented; and Hari points out that our lack of flow has become a vicious cycle for many, leaving us irritable and prone to distracted doomscrolling. Depressing as his assessment is, it’s also a clear case for the value of creative practices—the time we spend creating in flow states helps us cultivate focus and attention, leaving us better equipped to respond (not just react) to the world around us.

I’ve written before about how poems need Frames (not Fences). What I’ve realized since then is that poets (at least those in the Smart Phone Era) also need Filters—ways of buffering and slowing the tumult of Information Overload that surrounds us. We need Filters not just so that we can carve out time to write in minimally disrupted flow states, but also so that we can make room for the vital invisible work of letting the mind wander and make connections.

My Filters right now include following the news on a weekly basis (not a daily or hourly basis), limiting myself to one hour of television per week, and keeping a weekly No-Screens Saturday. Your Filters might include a daily meditation practice or nature walk, an annual retreat, an app that cuts off Wifi access during writing time, a No-Phones-at-Dinner Rule, or designated quiet hours—anything that cuts down on mental overstimulation and helps you absorb and process all the information-experience-stuff that fills our lives with busyness.

Filters are the clouds that shade our mental landscape so we can tap into Negative Capability. They aren’t permanent bunkers that wall us off from the world, but methods for sheltering and recalibrating our minds so that we can see and hear the world more clearly.

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The Beauty of Back and Forth

“March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb”. It’s a weather report and a poem in one small package. Part of what makes it so catchy is its dynamic opposition; it offers a roaring lion and a gentle lamb, as well as the actions of arriving and departing.

Now that I’m commuting to campus again, I’ve been re-learning the value of back-and-forth movement not just for poems (where line breaks move the readers’ eyes back-and-forth, where pauses work with the in-and-out of our breath, where images and sound patterns draw our attention to a synesthetic harbor somewhere between the visual and the auditory), but also for the imagination itself.

There’s something about moving between indoors and outdoors, between home and world, that invites the mind to be a little more permeable—to blend mood and weather, to notice the robins landing on a fence post while I listen to a news report on the war in Ukraine—to dwell simultaneously in what’s real and what’s possible. There’s something about occupying liminal spaces like bridges and parking garages that seems to draw subconscious ideas toward the surface. My commute is an invitation to braid together thinking and feeling, remembering and planning and those rare (for me, anyway) moments of being fully attentively present. Any kind of back-and-forth journey—even a walk to the mailbox or a row of knitting—can be a chance to drop in to this both/and territory.

The creative spark isn’t an external bolt from the blue or a precious flame dredged from deep inside the writer. It breathes and moves in the space between self and other, between rest and work. This feels especially true in March—when I meet warm breezes and freezing rain on the same day, and find my mind shuttling between winter and spring.

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Curiosity

I’ve spent the past few weeks helping my composition students develop research questions and combing through poems I wrote in 2022—and realizing how essential curiosity is for both intellectual and creative endeavors. It’s the vital spark that keeps us digging, reaching, experimenting, and finding connections.

I worry sometimes that the sleek instantaneity of Google dims our curiosity. It takes away our time for puzzling and wondering and being uncertain. It encourages us to ask only small and Googleable questions, rather than deeper, more complex ones. And it discourages us from looking inside ourselves—or out at the world beyond our screens—for answers. So I’m dedicating this February to cultivating curiosity in myself and others.

Many of my poems, maybe all of them, begin as questions. What memory does this moment remind me of and why? What’s it like to swim the English Channel? How does sound move through water—and what might these echoes tell us about the difficulty of communicating through language? What does “dead reckoning” mean? Why did the US frame the initial effort to contain Covid as a “war” and how did that metaphor work out for us? Where does this trail lead?

Curiosity is a tug toward discovery—toward the surprises, insights, and revelations that animate a poem. Curiosity is love—if by love we mean steady open-minded focus that waits to see and hear what the other will do next, who they will become.

Curiosity is inspiration, it’s the in-breath that draws us out into the world. This is obvious whenever I watch dogs catch a scent—their ears perk, their nostrils crinkle, their whole bodies seek to answer the call of what’s that and where is it?

Curiosity calls us to pay attention to what is and to imagine what might be.

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Revising with Negative Capability

Since this is the month for looking forward and backward at the same time, it feels like the perfect time to think about how I revise poems. And since I wrote about Negative Capability in December, I want to tell you about a strategy that helps me get out of “Fix-It” Mode and tap into Negative Capability during my revision process.

Here’s how I practice living with uncertainty in my drafts—whether they are book length manuscripts or individual poems:

I read aloud and listen to how the poem feels and sounds. While I’m reading aloud, I only let myself change the text in one way: by highlighting what I call the “sticky spots”—the words/phrases/images that sound off, the places where my mind wanders off to lunch, the things that make me cringe or that I suspect would confuse a reader. I’m not allowed to delete them or “fix them”. I just highlight them in aqua (for me, the yellow highlighter is too interrogation-lamp bright and makes my brain freeze up, but somehow the aqua feels like a friendly harbor for doubts, uncertainties, and new possibilities). And then I leave them there on the page in all their sticky, messy imperfection. I leave them there and walk away for several hours—or sometimes weeks. I accept that the draft is out-of-balance/not-working and resist the impulse to rush in and “fix” it. (I’ve found that my quick “fixes” are usually just patches. I’ll recognize that an adverb or adjective is wrong and throw in a new one without realizing that what the line actually needs is a new verb. It’s like wrapping some new duct tape around a broken handle instead of replacing the handle itself.)

When I return to the highlights with fresh eyes, something kind of magic happens: decisions and ideas surface. Sometimes I can see that a highlighted phrase is redundant or “too explainy” (a very useful not-at-all-technical term I learned in grad school!) and needs to be deleted. Sometimes a word or phrase floats up that smooths the sticky spot and enriches the poem as a whole (or even the surrounding manuscript). At other times, the process is a little less instantaneous; I might have an insight into why an image or metaphor isn’t working and type a list of possible alternatives/solutions at the bottom of the page and then choose (or find that the backstage management of my brain has decided upon) one on my next pass through the poem.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why or how the aqua highlighter trick works. I think, though, that it helps me over a few big hurdles. First, it acts as a kind of pause button; I don’t have to generate a solution immediately or worrying about forgetting that the poem needs work because I’ve got a colorful reminder on the page. My inner Neurotic Honors Student can stop trying to overthink the sticky spot and let my more creative/intuitive side take charge. Second, the highlights help me rethink the landscape of the poem; they let me visualize the sticky spot as existing separately from the poem and/or within it at the same time. Somehow that little block of color becomes a doorway on the page—one that I can open (by deciding I want to keep the sticky spot) or close (by deleting it) or look through to find alternate phrases/images/possibilities.

It's not a quick fix (and it’s sometimes scary to walk away from a manuscript full of highlights when contest deadlines are looming), but it’s a process I’m learning to trust. I invite you to test it for yourself in 2023.

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Negative Capability Redux

For the past few years I’ve secretly thought of December as Negative Capability Month. This is partly my cranky introvert response to the over-commercialized “Holiday Spirit” and partly because the poet Keats first coined the term Negative Capability on December 21, 1818. For me, it’s a helpful reminder to be patient and attentive as I revise poems or overhaul a manuscript (something I’m working on right now).

Keats (in a letter to his brothers) described Negative Capability as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. My own understanding of it keeps evolving over time. I first encountered Negative Capability as a teenager reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (if you are a fan of the series, Negative Capability is the mindset Lyra uses to read the Golden Compass). At the time, the most important word seemed to me to be “Mysteries” and I thought it sounded cool, but I wasn’t sure how one actually accessed Negative Capability or what one used it for (certainly not for passing standardized tests!).

Only later, when I read Keats in college and grad school, did I start to recognize Negative Capability as the frame of mind I needed to write a poem, or to revise one. At that time, “doubts” was the part that resonated most for me. I had so many doubts about whether I’d be able to finish projects I started, about how my work would turn out, whether any of it would ever be published. But I kept writing through/into/out of my doubts.

In 2020, I latched onto the “uncertainties” part. Every day was full of Covid-related uncertainties and political uncertainties. Creative work felt like my best way of navigating those uncertainties.

And in 2021, for me, the most important word was “irritable”. I actually do a lot of “reaching after fact & reason” when I put together poems with elements of history or technology or science. I use facts to find images and metaphors. I need facts because learning fuels my writing. But when I try to make the facts tell the whole story or when I try to wrangle the manuscript into a perfectly logical or chronological order, the writing falls flat and I get more and more frustrated. Irritably trying to yank the facts into place so that I can have a solution NOW, leads to creative dead ends. But when I stay calm and playful, when I turn the facts and quotes and images around and around like puzzle pieces, letting them show me how they might fit together, then I move the draft forward.

My Negative Capability word for 2022 has been “being”. We live in a culture that puts a big emphasis on Getting Things Done. But being creative sometimes means stepping back and doing less—or at least not immediately jumping into action. Being with the mess, “being in doubts”, being alive, and being surprised or unsettled are all part of my process—and not just my writing process, but also my reading process. Whether I’m reading a client’s poem or the Poem-A-Day in my inbox or even one of my own, I know that I learn more from it if I can start by being with it rather than trying to do anything to it. If I need to revise the poem or give feedback on it, I want those thoughts to arise from being and listening, not making and reaching.

Negative capability is holding space, it’s listening to a friend’s heartbreak without jumping in to offer advice, it’s standing aside for the inflow, it’s being on the water and letting the paddleboard move with the waves, it’s being moved by art and music, and it’s carrying the questions in the back of my mind for months, trusting my future self to answer them. It means shuffling poems into an arrangement (even a wrong arrangement) and reading them aloud, noting the rough patches without rushing to get rid of them, learning from them, shuffling the poems again, learning more, and finally starting to hear where they are working together.

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How to Spot Toxic Feedback (and find Nourishing Feedback)

The other day I received a rejection email from an editor. It was not, however, the courteous form rejection that I had been expecting when I sent my manuscript out. No, this editor had decided to provide feedback—feedback that opened with a sentence informing me that “like Jorie Graham your heady maximalism works about 40% of the time” (a real puzzler given that most editors reject my work for being too quiet and understated; and also because I had no idea that it was possible to compare me to a Pulitzer Prize winner and insult me at the same time) and then proceeded to roll through the whole toxic feedback playlist in a lengthy email. I’ve received my share of tough love from editors and harsh-but-helpful feedback from writing workshops; this email was neither of these things. It was toxic sludge. I’m writing about it not to throw myself a pity party, but because recognizing toxic feedback and finding its opposite (which I call Nourishing Feedback) are vital survival skills for writers (and all other humans!). They are skills we don’t talk about enough and ones that took me decades to learn.

One of the trickiest things about toxic feedback is that it tends to come from people in positions of power and authority (editors, more senior students in a writing workshop, sometimes even teachers) who feel threatened into defending their status by showing off their knowledge/experience/editorial-taste by attacking another writer. This editor already had the power to reject my manuscript, but for some reason it got under his skin enough that he felt the need to ‘justify’ his rejection with a long screed. Maybe he didn’t like seeing me co-opt boys’ toys like submarines and nuclear weapons as metaphors for navigating domestic and online spaces. Maybe he writes about similar topics and felt a competitive need to scare me off his turf. Maybe one of my poems raised an uncomfortable emotion for him. Maybe he felt intimidated by the fact that most of the poems in the manuscript had already been published in well-regarded journals. Whatever the reason, he put considerable time and energy into attacking my work.

Here's how I recognize Toxic Feedback:

1. The critic operates without taking the writer’s intentions (including her consent to receive feedback at that time or from that source) into account. This, for me, was one of the ickiest parts of the whole experience. I didn’t ask this editor for feedback—just for a yes/no decision about whether the press was interested in publishing my work. If he didn’t like my work, all he had to do was stop reading and click a tab to send me a form rejection. But he went out of his way (by at least 45 minutes) to shove his thoughts in my inbox. An unsolicited critique—whether of someone’s draft, clothing, or body—is almost always toxic.

2. The feedback privileges the critic’s opinions (and ego) over the draft on the page. This editor quickly made it clear that he had not actually read my manuscript—he’d laminated his preconceived assumptions and a checklist of his own dislikes across my work and attacked a strawmanuscript of his own creation. He spewed generalizations and often seemed to confuse his own subjective experiences with universal truths; for instance, “______ do not exist” or “_____ can’t be ______” were frequent reactions whenever I’d used an unconventional adjective-noun pairing to get at an emotional truth (one wonders just what this guy would have to say about Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar”).  What he really meant was “I have never experienced _____ and I’m finding it difficult to imagine”. This kind of retreat to overly concrete thinking is a classic strategy from the toxic feedback playbook.

3. The feedback rushes to assign categories and labels (good, trite, too long etc.) without fully observing or engaging with the draft on the page. Often the critic decides to categorize and judge the writer as well as the work—typical specimens include “you______ too much”, “you are too_____”, and “you should know better”. A writer who tries to push back against these judgments may be treated to such gas-lighting gems as “you are too sensitive” and “you should be grateful”.

4. The feedback includes “questions” that are actually judgments phrased as rhetorical questions (e.g. “You don’t want to come across as unlikeable, or do you?”) rather than invitations to new ways of thinking or attempts to clarify a point of uncertainty. My theory is that these “questions” are often expressions of the critic’s frustration that they lack the skill to articulate just how the writer’s craft decisions are shaping the reading experience and/or that they lack the emotional awareness to pinpoint where and why a poem has unsettled them.

5. The feedback makes the writer want to hide under the covers and/or punch something and never look again at the manuscript in question. Or the feedback triggers physical symptoms like headache, heartburn, or nausea—because the body is very good at reacting to toxicity.

I found this editor’s toxic feedback hurtful not just because it trashed my own manuscript, but also because, as a writing coach, I dedicate most of my working hours to crafting its opposite: Nourishing Feedback. I’ve built my coaching practice around nourishing feedback because I’ve seen too many writers (including my past self) gutted by toxic feedback; I believe nourishing feedback is the only kind that helps writers (and their manuscripts) thrive in the long-term—not only because it’s kinder, but because it’s more specific, more collaborative, and more useful.  

Here’s how I recognize Nourishing Feedback:

1. It works from a place of mutual respect between the writer and the feedback-giver—who acknowledges her own fallibility and recognizes the writer’s intentions and wishes (including the wish not to receive feedback at a particular moment or on a particular manuscript).

2. It attends to the writing itself, treating it as an experience rather than an object. The feedback-giver has the emotional intelligence and the editorial skill to describe how specific craft elements shape the reading experience—and how any recommended changes to those elements would change the reading experience to better reflect the writer’s intentions.

3. It makes observations without rushing toward categories, labels, and judgment. Nourishing feedback might include praise that helps a writer recognize and further develop areas of strength; it might address moments where the feedback-giver feels the poem is falling short of its own potential (and suggest revisions). But it always affirms the writer’s human worth and the worth of the creative endeavor.

4. It asks real questions from a place of genuine curiosity and empathy. It invites in new possibilities, thoughts, techniques, and ideas.

5. It leaves the writer feeling energized and eager to write or go for a pre-writing walk. The writer might feel that there are tough decisions to be made or that a Big Rethink is required, but nourishing feedback empowers the writer to move forward.

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What Paddleboarding Taught me about Poems

I learned to paddleboard over the summer—and it taught me so much about writing poems. Every time I went out on the lake, I found myself coming home with a renewed sense of focus and experimenting with new forms, new themes, new subjects. Now that the season for water sports is drawing to a close, I’m reflecting on just what paddleboarding taught me and how I can bring those elements to the page all winter (even if I can’t bring the herons and turtles home with me).

I loved from the beginning that paddleboarding requires me to be fully, intensely present in my body and the world—that it is the opposite of skimming around the internet on my laptop. It draws my attention to the “surface-level” in a new way (a nice contrast to years of writing about submarines!). From a paddleboard, the water’s surface—its texture of ripples, waves, and currents, all buoying and tugging at the board—feels as richly complex as any ‘depth’; it keeps reminding me of the way that words and sentences can be nuanced experiences at the level of tone and sound, even before we dig around for their deeper meaning.

The most vital piece for me, though, was learning how to stand on the board. My initial instinct was to stand rigidly on the board, to muscle my way into smoothness as I tried to keep the board moving in a straight line. This was exhausting because I was fighting the board, the waves, the wind, and my own body as I paddled; after 20 minutes, my legs gave out and I toppled into the lake. It was only when I learned to stand with my knees a little bent and my feet active but not over-gripping the board that I stopped falling off. I found a stance in between relaxed and rigid and learned to move with the board and the waves; when I let go of trying to control (i.e. prevent) wobbles, I found paddling fun. The more attention I paid to the wind and the waves—as forces to work with, not against—the more I could actually steer the board.

Poems are the same way—I need to let them wobble and react. If I sit down with a very specific statement that I want a poem to make and try to write a poem that goes straight there, I wind up with a draft that flails and splashes and ultimately gets crossed out. But if I treat the poem (or my idea for it) as a surface made of words encountering the world, if I study and work with its impulses (images, sounds, etc.), if I allow a little bounce and wobble, I get a draft that moves forward. Some wobbles I revise out and some become integral to the piece, but they all help me understand how to get a particular poem moving and what it has to say.

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How to Park a Poem

My trusty Subaru has developed an odd quirk. Sometimes when I park and reach to take the key from the ignition, my car turns only partway off and refuses to release the key; then I have to wiggle the steering wheel to a straight forward position and then restart the car before turning it off and pulling the key out. This has is gotten me thinking about the tricky business of stopping the forward momentum of a poem—moving from words to stillness/silence and arriving at an ending that feels like a completion (if not a conclusion)—and getting a draft (whether it’s a 1st draft or a 12th) to a point where I can walk away from it and trust that it will still be there when I return.

I have three favorite (and sometimes overlapping) strategies for endings. An image—a forward glance, a backward glance, a distant point on the horizon, a pervasive smell or a fading echo—can give the poem a still point to land on. An action—whether a repeated hammering or a single knock—can end the poem on a decisive note like a crisp turn into a chosen parking spot (this is especially true if the action is one that has been delayed throughout the poem). And a speaker who voices a realizes or declaration (ideally something less generic than Google Maps’ “the destination is on your left”) can signal just where the poem has arrived.

Sometimes even when I think I’ve found the right final image (or action or declaration), the poem still doesn’t feel settled when I finish reading it aloud. In this case the issue is often pacing and my challenge is to change the penultimate line/stanza or even one in the middle—the equivalent of accelerating through yellow light on the way home or tapping the brakes at the top of the driveway.

It’s a tricky business to get the poem to arrive at a full stop without slamming on the brakes or losing momentum too early. And sometimes the best way to find it is through patient fidgeting.

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sometimes an ‘error’ is the poem’s new center

A few weeks ago, I was at a chamber music concert and a violinist’s stand collapsed with a loud thud during a Mendelson octet. The first time it fell, the musicians all tried to ignore it, acting as though a single sharp drumbeat belonged in the first movement. The second time, the piece crashed to a halt—there was an awkward silence and then all eight musicians sprang into action. They turned the moment into a delightful joke (“I’ll go find a new violinist,” the one whose stand had fallen said, “let’s not blame the equipment”). We applauded when a new stand was brought out; we shared in the anticipatory silence as the musicians reassembled. (“And the battle resumes” said another violinist, lifting his bow like a sword, and it did.) This was a much richer, more human experience than listening to a flawless recording of the same piece. The music was somehow louder and more harmonious for having contained a pocket of silence. And it got me thinking about how I respond to ‘errors’ (to actual typos or homonyms, to images or lines that seem not to fit) in my own writing.

My default strategy is often to delete or fix the error before anyone else can see it. And sometimes deleting a mistake (or ignoring it if it happens during a public performance like a reading) is the fastest and best way to handle it.

But the other way to handle a mistake is to explore it, to become an archaeologist of error and brush the dust off, study it, search for its origins, display it, and learn from it. For example, when I meant to write “mindful” but actually wrote “mine field”, I found myself reckoning with the connections between minds and fields and between thoughts and explosives. Some might call this “hanging a lantern” on the error; some might call it “writing off the subject”. I like to think of it as “digging in”—both because it’s a messy process and because it sometimes creates rabbit holes.

Digging in around an error often leads to interesting new material—sometimes even a whole new poem. An error is, after all, a kind of surprise; and, to paraphrase Robert Frost, the writer needs to be surprised in order to surprise the reader. Spotting an error and pausing to explore it takes a willingness to laugh at and with oneself, a willingness to turn a stumble into a fall into a roll. But it’s an opportunity to create a deeper, more human piece of writing. And it’s more fun than working in perfectionist mode and beating myself up for every mistake.

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