[Leslie Monsour]

Regarding Alicia’s remarks—“I'm intrigued with the idea of a period of silence--involuntary or voluntary--something that has come up in Suzanne Doyle's and Catherine's interviews as well. I would be interested in a general discussion of this if Leslie were willing to open a thread for it”— Alicia, your wish is granted.

--In this new thread, I’ve tried to gather the past comments that relate to the question of voluntary and involuntary silences. I arranged them below and included a brief comment of my own at the end.

Alicia Stallings—cont.—: It occurs to me that many of the poets I most admire wrote with difficulty and/or published sparingly. I wonder if there is more pressure nowadays just to keep churning poems out and to publish way too much. That would seem to have something to do with the professionalization of poetry as well...


Susan McLean: I suspect that a period of silence only looks silent from the outside. The internal reactions continue, and the experiences that go into the poems are being processed, consciously or not. I think some people can be too prolific for their own good, if their self-worth is based on productivity alone. For those whose poems seem to be wrung out only under pressure or else polished to a high sheen by continual revision, the power of the results may compensate for their rarity.


Maryann Corbett: I'm also very taken with the question of why people stop writing for long periods. I remember pondering the explanation given by Landis Everson, who stopped writing for over forty years, then began again and won the Emily Dickinson First Book Award when he was almost eighty. I wish he could find his exact words, but their gist was that the writing was a conversation, and to continue, one needs people to converse with. That may or may not bear on Suzanne's case, but I throw it out in hope that we'll say more about the subject.


Catherine Tufariello: I also am interested in the subject of the fickle Muse who disappears for long stretches of time. For me it was eight years, between 22 and 30. No desire or motivation to write, a few sad half-finished drafts, and that was it. I’ve since learned from talking with other poets that this sort of endless-seeming drought is more common than I realized then. Landis Everson's explanation hadn't occurred to me before, but it makes some sense. …Achieving a settled and happy family life, which took a long time, has been very important for me creatively. What turns me “off” writing (and life in general) is the flip side, depression. I guess there’s some argument to be made that the manic phase of manic-depression can be a stimulant to creativity, but in my experience “unipolar” depression has nothing to recommend it. Most of my poems come out of wonder and joy, including joy wrung from pain. Depression, the inability to feel, sends my muse packing quicker than anything.


Mary Meriam: An article in The New Yorker has a quote by Peter Schjeldahl that might be relevant to the disappearing muse dilemma. He's discussing an artist who gave up on his own work and painted forgeries: "The state of being oneself dies when set aside." My muse disappeared when I was overwhelmed by outside forces, and lost my own force, or voice, I guess. Then in 2003, I fell into the arms of the sonnet, and she soothed me, and slowly strengthened my voice.


Tim Murphy: I had two fallow periods of three years each in my thirties when I despaired of ever writing again. Frankly I was totally distracted by my difficulties as a farmer, but those gave me the material on which I rebuilt my writing in my forties.


Suzanne Doyle: As for my gaping void of new work over the past 15 years, I knew that would come up. I can't claim parenting as an excuse, since I don't have any kids; and I can't claim building a business as an excuse because everybody works; and now I can't even temporize and say I'm saving up my creative energy for my golden years because my retirement fund is a pile of equity ashes so I'll be working for the rest of my life. I guess I'll just have to admit that Tim Murphy was right when he said, "You're lazy!"

(--Suzanne Doyle also gave us two passages from Tillie Olsen’s SILENCES, which, she says, “resonate strongly with my experience:” “Was it ‘the knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life’ at their throat? Were the conditions not present for establishing the habits of creativity (a young Colette who lacked a Willy to lock her in her room each day)? Or--as instanced over and over--other claims, other responsibilities so writing could not be first?” and, “That suicide of the creative process Hemingway describes so accurately in THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO. He had destroyed his talent himself--by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook, selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.”)

More from Suzanne: (My) manuscript was rejected by every major commercial/university publishing house I sent it to, usually with a form letter. I’m not stupid; I knew when to quit beating my head against the wall. I no longer insisted on having a room of my own. I stopped writing. You might say it was choice, but I was also silenced by the publishing establishment.

Today, as always, when I manage to tap that deep creative vein, I start working the moment I wake. By the time I look up, it’s often dark outside. Sometimes I’ve never left the bed. To step outside of time, be utterly oblivious of its passage, only happens when you are doing the thing you were born to do. And that, to my mind, is as close as it gets to being immortal. Like a junkie, I wonder how I can ever stop writing, now that I’ve tasted the stuff again. Then, life intervenes


Catherine: I feel exactly the same way about writing poems. The total absorption it requires gives the illusion of an escape from time. And also from self (though poetry is at the same time an expression of the deepest, truest self—for better and worse). To be immersed in writing a poem is to know the bliss of self-forgetfulness. I share your bafflement about why it can be so hard to sit down and make space for that immersion to happen.


Me (Leslie): There was a poem in the NEW YORKER a few months ago by the late Elizabeth Friend (1933-2003—a woman with no previous publications, as far as I can tell. Her husband is a professor at Swarthmore, and she was known for her paintings and dinner parties). The poem is free verse (ie. prose), of course, but most accessible and moving, and full of a sorrowful charm, I think. It might strike a familiar chord in some of us:

STEAM REASSURES HIM

My husband is watching me iron.
Steam reassures him. The hiss of starch
The probing slide around each button of his shirt
Speaks to him of Solway Street in Pittsburgh.

As for me, the wicker basket is a reproach.
There is last summer’s nightgown,
And several awkward round tablecloths
Which refuse to lie flat.

My house specializes in these challenges.
Bags of mail I did not ask to receive
Choke the floor of my linen closet.
A photograph of me, holding a baby on a beach.
But which beach and, for that matter, which baby?
A Japanese chest whose bottom drawer has irresponsibly locked
Itself,
And who can remember where I put the key?

That night, waiting for sleep, I whisper,
I did only trivial things today.
And he asks, Why aren’t you painting?


The Tillie Olsen passages mentioned by Suzanne resonate with me, as well, particularly “the knife of the perfectionist”—as does Tim Murphy’s blunt, “You’re lazy!” Tim’s no-nonsense analysis reminds me of the anecdote about the filming of “Marathon Man,” in which Lawrence Olivier, impatient with the delays during Dustin Hoffman’s efforts to summon up the appropriate mood (muse?) from the depths of his inner resources, muttered within earshot, “Why doesn’t he try acting?” If I agonize over the duration of a dry spell without a poem, I say to myself, “Why don’t you try writing one?” Then, there is the problem of The Muse. Perhaps we need someone to impress, as in Wendy Cope’s self-mocking villanelle, “Manifesto:”

I’ll work, for there’s new purpose in my art—
I’ll muster all my talent, all my wit
And write the poems that will win your heart.

(I feel terrific now I’ve made a start--/ I’ll have another book before I quit.)

This indicates a sort of temporary, manic state, and reminds me of the passage I brought up from George Eliot (in my interview with Tim), in which a young would-be poet explains that the writing of poetry demands conditions that come “only by fits.” I tend to go with Aesop’s moral, “Slow and steady wins the race.” So, why don’t I just write one?

More poems on this topic? Experiences? It would be interesting to know how the MEN have handled this affliction, and what they see as its causes.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Leslie,

Thank you so much for garnering all these important thoughts. I am moved by what Catherine refers to as 'the inability to feel'. In my experience, I would single out fear as the great enemy of feeling. Fear makes me blank and utterly numb. And completely unproductive. I can neither think nor feel in an environment of fear. To me, the silence of depression is more like winter, when you must wait like a seed in the cold ground.

I think Don Paterson has an interesting way of understanding the muse's apparent absence:

We grow into our prophesies. Often it is the simple embarrassment of having told everyone we will leave our lover that affords us the courage to do so; but this trivial
example calls a deeper system from the shadows. Usually we must open up the path before we can follow it, the air standing—all too often—solid against us. On those occasions we send out the god in ourselves, and follow his empty trail to our salvation. This is why transition often feels like abandonment.

I think there is great deal to this idea that the muse has simply gone ahead. Perhaps, when we feel forsaken, we are never less so. I trust the invisible work that's always going on - when all we can write is the sign to hang up: Closed For Winter.

I look forward to reading the thoughts of all the wonderful poets celebrated here.

Cally

edit back to add a small experience. When I was in primary school, in geography class (always my equal favourite subject with literature - always felt I was engaged in the same process in both areas: reading the world), I learnt the first word I actually fell in love with. I breathed it repeatedly, thought it the most beautiful word I had ever heard. The word is fallow. Fallow.


[This message has been edited by Cally Conan-Davies (edited November 29, 2008).]

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

Good work, Leslie!

The Muse is certainly ambivalence personified. While self-preservation is often a prime mover in finding the Muse, it can often also be the impulse for excluding the Muse. I think if we're honest it's more a case of us kicking out the Muse rather than her going AWOL. I think the Muse "disappears" at times of stress or perhaps also in its aftermath, i.e. in the period of recovery. And then we can welcome the Muse back with open arms. And that she doesn't bear grudges is the miracle.

Of course there are lots of mundane things that can cause stress, but something that strikes me as very stressful is the fact that poets seem to be expected to have higher private morals than the public morals of a politician. How people can expect a poet to be an angel is beyond me. The whole point surely is that the poet has some demons to exorcise. We all have a dark side, but it is the poet's job to express it.

For example, Larkin's prose and poetry was deeply motivated by his phobias and prejudices, and this is what gave his work its edge. Bt look what happens. The poet is hailed for writing incisive poetry and then picked on afterwards for having the background to do so. Rock artists are allowed to behave abysmally in public, but shame on the poet who is so bold as to express his bile in private. So much for enlightenment. The hypocrisy of public life is beyond belief. But that's material for poetry, I guess.

Duncan

PS Nice post, Cally!

[This message has been edited by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin (edited November 29, 2008).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks, Leslie, for gathering the strands for this thread! I think "fallow" is a good way of putting it. I think too there is a pressure on poets that to be a poet you have to be writing all the time. Was it Olga Brumas (who has had a long period of silence) the one who said you are still a poet even when you are not writing poetry, just as you are still a sexual being even when you are not having sex? Maybe it would be better for us all to have periods of silence. Why the pressure to keep coming out with another poem, another book even? I look at Cavafy, who never even published a proper book, and kept his "canon" down to 154 poems--the number of Shakespeare's sonnets. Or Housman, satisfied with "A Shropshire Lad" and the daringly titled, "Last Poems." I would love to have the daring to title something, "Last Poems."

In my case, there are certainly periods when I do not write poetry, and do not even try to write poetry, though I might be churning out a book review or something else. These bother me less than they used to--I tend to look on it as a "fallow" period. And I would say that, like Catherine, I absolutely cannot write if in a depressed state--I can write if I am sad, or angry, or happy, but a depressed state leads to poems as devoid of flavor or color or sound or sense--they are not workable. It is pointless to try. When I do write, it is often a poem a day, but the "window" is a three or four days, at most a week or two, then the poems stop.

I guess one proceeds on faith that the Muse will return eventually... though of course the fear is that she will not, something confronted indeed with every poem. A Greek poet friend, the amazing Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke puts it thus. When she is in a poetry state, it is like being in a different room, and everything, everything is poetry or can be turned into a poem. When she is not in a poetry state, nothing is poetry, nor could it be, and she wouldn't try.

The thing is, when one is writing a poem and it is going well--when it is a real poem, not an exercise--that has got to be the biggest thrill in the world--it is electric, erotic--and very little else compares. You always want to have it again.

[Andrew Frisardi]

This discussion reminds me of a story about the dancer Isadora Duncan. At some point in her life, I forget when, she couldn't dance. And she decided she wouldn't force a thing, she'd just wait for the movement to come on its own. She wanted the movement to come from a deeper place and it eventually did.

It's much like monks and nuns who take vows of silence, not to undervalue speech but precisely because the word is sacred. For them, silence is the place a prayer is taking shape. This is essential because it is so easy for a prayer to be only words.

Poets don't want poems to be only words, so we have to learn to appreciate silence as well.

[Tim Murphy]

Leslie, you've done us a great service by harvesting so many examples of this central obstacle from this discussion. I'll begin with the saddest example I know, then relate it to my personal experience. An example of permanent silence. In 1956 Dylan Thomas was at the Wilbur's apartment, got very drunk, and started sobbing "I'm still going on the inspirations I had when I was seventeen." A few days later, not knowing he was diabetic, he drank six martinis, went into shock, and died.

I have mixed feelings about Thomas, with whom I was rapturously enamoured as a teen. But I think Fern Hill and The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower are both unspeakably great poems. Like me, like so many others in the 20th Century, Thomas believed that he required vast amounts of alcohol to write. Julie Kane once believed that, long ago. Suzanne might believe it to this day. I nearly died September 14, 2007, not of intoxication but detoxification, and I finally resolved not to drink, full of fear that I would never write again. (I had written one exceptional poem in treatment in 1999, and the other 359 were written under the influence of drugs or alcohol!)

Sobering up, I put poetry out of my mind for two months: the near occasion of sin. But on November 14, I had a new song in my head about wild grasses of the short grass prairie as I drove out to hunt:

Cascading from the terraced cropland's shelf,
the sidehill western wheatgrass rolls away,
and the seedheads of sideoats grama sway.

That's all, just enough to catch the tune, which is how all my poems begin. Then the first slough we approached, an obviously injured bird flushed and flew a couple hundred yards with Feeney in pursuit. When he got there, the bird took off and flew another thirty yards. On the third flush Feeney leapt up and got it. Because I had been the only hunter on the land, it was a bird whose wing I'd injured. I put aside the grasses and started composing another poem, muscular and athletic, describing this scene. Well, all this morphed into The Chase, a 68 line ode, a love poem to North Dakota, which people saw me writing at Deep End, and can read in the winter Hudson Review. After two months' (how better than two years') silence, I was back in the po biz! Since then I written four years' work in one without the aid of drink, and I'm astonished, 'cause nothing like this has ever happened to me before. So there you have a tragic contrast between two alcoholics. When Thomas was my age, he'd been dead for nineteen years.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

I think the reason for those long silences that poets go through varies from person to person. I spent almost 3 decades writing very little, and sending out almost nothing, while I was teaching, bringing up children, busy with other activities in the community and with family matters, especially aging parents.

What surprised me was how quickly I started writing again once there was time to do so again, and--more important still--there were other poets around to share the work with. I think it really is, in part, a conversation, and some of us are not good at talking to ourselves for too long.

Another surprise was discovering how much had been stored away for future poems during all of that quiet time, event after event clearly visible and almost audible, complete with the emotion originally aroused.

[Catherine Tufariello]

What you say about fear is interesting, Cally. Certainly the fear of not writing makes writing even more difficult. Here’s a quote from Auden (The Dyer’s Hand) that I’ve always identified with—even though his generic "poet" is decidedly male:

Whatever [the poet’s] future life as a wage-earner, a citizen, a family man may be, to the end of his days his life as a poet will be without anticipation. He will never be able to say: "Tomorrow I will write a poem and, thanks to my training and experience, I already know I shall do a good job." In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

Somehow it’s comforting that even the prolific Auden felt that his claim to "poet" as an identity was momentary and tenuous. And I think it’s worthwhile remembering that readers of poetry look on silent or fallow periods, even long ones, very differently than poets look on their own. Reading The Blue Estuaries, I don’t think, "What a shame that Bogan didn’t write more poems."

Rhina, I identify with what you say about the importance of having others with whom to share one's poems. Poets are often wary, with good reason, of associating themselves with anything even remotely resembling a school or a movement. But forming friendships with talented fellow poets who share my basic aesthetic has been extremely important for me--as a source of fellowship, inspiration, challenge, and critique. Last year, coming home after West Chester, I had that sensation someone described on another thread, of suddenly seeing everything around me as a poem or potential poem.

Over the years I’ve relaxed a little about being a very slow and intermittent writer and realized that all I can do is make the space for writing poems in my life, whether or not they come. I don’t wait until I feel inspired anymore; I just sit quietly for a little while with a notebook and a cup of coffee, ready in case something happens.

[Maryann Corbett]

Rhina wrote:
...Another surprise was discovering how much had been stored away for future poems during all of that quiet time, event after event clearly visible and almost audible, complete with the emotion originally aroused.

and I just want to say: YES! at least most of the time. Once in a while I reach back for something that's so subtle it eludes the words. Those poems are still waiting; it may be years.

[Janet Kenny]

I have a new poem in the Deep End that was written from emptiness, lack of inspiration and total desolation. This was partly induced by weather and partly by some bad news. The first half was truly a process of waking the dead. The second half wrote itself because I had chased away the black hole. I think that sadness and distraction are common experiences. Grasping the nettle is often the best way to deal with it rather than waiting until a little ray of inspiration falls on our brows. Neither parts of my poem cause me great pride but I feel stronger for having refused to allow myself to be dictated to by inertia. Poems which I consider to be my best poems mostly came to me of their own accord but I do think that refusing not to write is good for the inner poet. All athletes, including poets, should keep themselves ready for the real thing.

I heard a Japanese woman say on the radio this morning: "Even as a child I was not a serious person".

(Somehow that seemed apt.)