Saturday, October 11, 2008

i am not a writer

words will not come when they are not ready. i was never someone who could force language out of myself just for the sake of it. i think about writers--like anne sexton and sylvia plath--my personal patron saints of literature--these women who would wake up before the sun to sit down at their typewriters and just hammer away at the raw materials of composition--an image, an idea, a metaphor, a literary device...doesnt work? take it apart. what can you salvage? what can be made new? just keep working and it will become SOMETHING. and it did--for them. it became their legacy--their immortality.

me? i dont write poems. they come out of me. just like child-bearing i have no choice what genes are selected when cells merge and begin to wildly divide. what's there is what's there and it grows and blossoms somewhere in me--beyond me--above me--until finally, through blood and pain and tearing, there is an emergence....

i envy writers who can WORK with their craft, sorting through scraps, fitting pieces, connecting the gaps over and over again--reworking and refining until truly they have shaped language into a form. instead of the form insisting upon them, they can insist upon IT--at least to some degree..

when i feel moved to write-it's like a blizzard--blind rush of i dont even know what--i barely feel like a part of it. when i was younger i used to say 'i dont know it just came to me.' i am puzzled still today about how to MAKE writing happen. so many people have urged me to write--that im publishable--that i have a unique, strong, beautiful, vital, even graphic voice. so many professors have pulled me aside whispering of gifts. 'do you realize youre the best writer i've ever taught' both professor fried and professor jones told me (and these are women who taught for over 30 years EACH). but it's not true. i am not a writer. i do not own this. i am just a channel. i wait until something tunes into me and whatever comes comes.

i'm a person who, every now and then, ends up making a poem because im trying to save myself--usually--from something else. monotony. restlessness. depression. much worse. when im writing, im trying to find a way to bleed without breaking the skin--and poetry is just a biproduct of that search...

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