Negative Capability
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 and put them together in 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.
Last year, 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 now, for me, the most important word is “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 almost always fuels my writing. But when I try to make the facts tell the whole story or when I try to wrangle the manuscript into 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.
Exercising Negative Capability doesn’t mean giving up on a challenging project, or wandering off to see what’s new on Netflix. It means sticking with a manuscript even though it feels like you are making no progress at the moment. For me it often means going for a walk or folding laundry or doing some yoga—anything to get out of Neurotic Honors Student mode and back into my body so I can hear how my unconscious wants to approach the problem. 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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