While looking for a poem that I’m pretty sure I posted to the old blog (One Bad Poem), I rediscovered this audio clip on NPR, an essay by Alan Heathcock about the pleasures of reading a poem a day:
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/26/143853118/a-poem-a-day-portable-peaceful-and-perfect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcJ7wKSLQvk
One of the pleasures of having a poetry book is that at poetry readings I am sometimes asked to trade copies with another poet. That’s how I came upon Water Chasing Water by Koon Woon. Our conversation also resulted in the review of Sparrow at Five Willows.
So here is the poem that spoke to me this morning:
THE QUESTION I WANT TO ASK
A command sets a thousand horses galloping
while a question merely drops a frog into a pond.
Elsewhere the required question is not the same.
Elsewhere they ask for rain, for harvests, and for newborns
to pick up the heavy plows.
Elsewhere there are infants to pick up, messages to scurry.
One nation is on fire, another in revolt, still a third one quakes.
I peer out at the pond. I am the dwarf of Socrates
looking at humanity, the midget of Isaac Newton looking
at the invisible gravity.
The frog sits on a single lotus leaf, its eyes pinhole cameras
to record its domain
from an ill-defined mosquito to a very deliberate water snake.
It has been ten years since the frog leaped from my mouth.
At water’s edge the water lilies have transformed
from buds to jungle foliage, and every cell in my body
has been washed and replaced.
Grassy fields have turned golden, then brown.
I ask the wind if it would listen.
Elsewhere the wind sweeps a fire across a prairie.
The pond now smooth as a bald man’s head,
swallows my question but gives no answer.
But I am no longer disappointed that it is so, and
the thousand horses that went galloping
return now of their own accord.
-Koon Woon
Yes, yes, I’ve used this post title before. It’s still the best advice I can offer anyone at the onset of a big project. Of an abstractly, potentially big project.
Here’s a line that I think I found in You’ve Got a Book in You, by Elizabeth Sims: “A year from now you’ll wish you had started today.”
The first thing you have to do: learn how to start.
I am always baffled by famous writers who claim they do not write every day. I don’t always “write,” I guess. (Okay, I always write in my journal, but not always on my current project.) But when I’m swept up in a project, I can’t seem to help thinking around it, reading around it, even scribbling around it. It’s as if someone has dumped a truckload of bricks on my driveway. I can’t get anywhere else without going past the pile of bricks.
A friend told me the other day that she has to work herself up into a kind of passionate fit before she can write. I do that, too, sometimes. I find, however, that a passionate fit is just a passionate fit (soothed by TV or Spider Solitaire or a heavy-carb lunch) unless I pick up my pen and start writing.
image borrowed from http://www.codercaste.com/2009/12/08/how-to-add-a-directory-to-your-path-environment-variable-in-linux/
If you want to write something, the first thing you might do is begin making a space for it. Write a little bit–even if it’s not “productive,” not “on task.” Just write. Write for 15 minutes. If 15 minutes sounds impossible (that would be anxiety, also known as fear), try 5 minutes. Even if you’re highly anxious, you can write for 5 minutes.
Let’s imagine that your project really is a truckload of bricks dumped on your driveway. Sure, you can work steadily for several days until the bricks are off your driveway and in the garden where you’re making a path. But you can also move them one or two bricks at a time, every time you see them.
Write for a few minutes. Then, try it again later today or tomorrow. Make an appointment with your passion. Show up (on time, with a good attitude!). Repeat. Don’t be surprised when you look at the clock and see that a half hour (or an hour or four hours) has slipped by.
Get proficient at starting your work, and the next time that passionate fit overtakes you, you’ll have a pen, paper, and a little block of time waiting for it.
At his r
ecent Seattle reading, poet Ted Kooser suggested that we read about 100 poems for every one we write. I decided I would try to take that seriously. Well, somewhat seriously, and I have been reading poems every morning, even while working on the novel.
Here’s one of the poems I read today — “The Peace of Wild Things,” by Wendell Berry. To hear it, go to this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cqb3rVWxNY