Volume 4, No. 24: Writing is Pleasure

on the joy of making poems

Greetings, book and treat people! Last Saturday, I marched with a local group of organizers, Greenfield for Palestine, at Franklin County Pride. It was the first time I’d been to Pride since I moved, and while the actual festival was WAY too much for me (so many people! so much sun!) I was so happy to be out there with a bunch of queers waving signs and chanting Free Palestine. I didn’t take any pictures but local queer Palestinian activist and author Hannah Moushabeck got some great ones.

On Sunday, a friend and I went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. I live 40 minutes away from this magical place and, despite my newfound love of picture books, I had never been. I fell deeply and immediately in love. There are three exhibits on right now: one about Eric Carle’s bird art, one about the work of Brazilian artist and author Roger Mello, and one about metafiction in picture book art. They were all phenomenal. There is something so moving about seeing picture book art treated with such reverence and curiosity. I honestly wasn’t expecting to be so delighted and awed.

There is also an amazing picture book library there that I could have happily read in for hours.

I shared a few more pictures on Instagram if you’re curious. If you live anywhere nearby, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I’m still in a weird reading place, though I have been devouring audiobooks. I really enjoyed Curtis Chin’s memoir about growing up in his family’s Chinese restaurant in Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. I appreciated the solid, straightforward message in Sim Kern’s novel The Free People’s Village, which is basically about how to keep showing up to the work of liberation, even when the world gets worse every day. Now I’m listening to Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn, and let me tell you: I am riveted. My friend

Rosamond

recommended it, and I’m so glad she did, because there is something weirdly, immensely comforting in the realization that artists have been doing what artists do—thinking about art and what it means and why it matters (and gossiping about each other)—forever.

Anyway, today’s newsletter is about poetry.

---

Earlier this month the wonderful bookstagrammer Kristin Lee hosted a readalong of one of my favorite novels of all time, Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh. I didn’t actually manage to reread it, but I loved participating in the discussion. I dug up my notes from the amazing class I took on it last spring with Garth Greenwell. It was a four week online seminar, and I signed up for it partly because I love the book, and partly because I was looking for writing inspiration wherever I could find it. This was right in the middle of my long period of creative fallowness, and I was still fighting it. I was hoping talking and thinking about an incredible novel would jolt my brain and/or heart and/or hands back to writing. It did not.

While I was looking over my notes from that class, I came across something I’d scrawled in huge letters, mostly all caps, across the middle of a notebook page: “KEEP WRITING UNTIL IT FEELS RIGHT. You know something is good work only because of the SENSE OF PLEASURE you derive from it.” In the margin next to this, in much smaller handwriting, I’d written: So if I derive no pleasure, where is the book?

We’d been talking about the beauty of Chee’s prose, I think. We were discussing the choices he made—his syntax, rhythm, sentence structure, the sounds of the words in each paragraph. We were talking about how all of these tiny choices became a masterpiece. Then Garth went off on this long tangent about how great writers make these choices. It’s rarely conscious, as in: “I need to describe this tree using a three syllable word followed by a one syllable word, that’s what will sound right.” Instead, it’s something that happens in the body—a sense of pleasure felt in the weird organs of imagination and music and mystery.

I gasped out loud when I reread these notes a few weeks ago. It was several minutes before I was breathing normally again. I was completely undone by the idea that deriving pleasure from creative work could be a metric of that work’s quality. I’d clearly been undone by the idea when I’d first written it down, but in a different way. I remember thinking, as Garth was speaking, “This is important. This is something I should pay attention to.” I felt a spark of intellectual recognition. I experienced an “aha!” moment in my brain.

It was my heart, though, or the organ of my imagination, that wrote that question in the margin, a question which now seems to me the most important question I have ever asked myself about my creative life. So if I derive no pleasure, where is the book? I want to go back and wrap the woman who asked that question in my arms. I want to thank her for writing down that tiny, world-exploding question and then doing the only thing I think she could have done with it at the time: letting it go. I have no memory of writing down the question, or even thinking about it again until I finally reread Chee’s essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, three months later. (If I ever publish a book of poems, Alexander Chee will absolutely be in the acknowledgments.) But I’m more and more convinced that writing down that little, seemingly hopeless question—So if I derive no pleasure, where is the book?—was the beginning of my life as a poet.

The reason I could not breathe normally for several moments after I came across those lines about pleasure in my notes a few weeks ago was because I felt the absolute truth of them in my body. I felt it immediately. I reread that sentence, “You know something is good work only because of the sense of pleasure you derive from it,” and I felt it. Do you understand what I’m saying? The space between the words and their meaning and the blood in my veins collapsed. It was like the sensation of diving into cold water in the early morning, or catching the scent of lilacs on the wind. An experience outside translation.

I’ve been writing since I was a teenager. During the years I spent writing short stories, and three different partly-finished novel drafts, I experienced many moments of pleasure. I can remember distinct bouts of transcendence, minutes or hours when the act of creation took over my body, when it felt like I was flying. I guess scientists call this flow state. I also experienced word-delight, language-delight. I can remember taking pleasure in the making of a sentence or a paragraph. But the overwhelming sensation I had, in my prior writing life, was of wading through muck. It was always a slog. I did not enjoy writing. I felt compelled to write, but I rarely (if ever?) liked it. I did not look forward to siting down at my desk. I felt good when I had gotten through the day’s writing. I looked forward to being done. I liked the thing I thought I was making, and I liked the heady rush of creation. But I did not like the work of it. I did not derive pleasure from the actual making.

***

I have not opened my poetry file in five days. I’ve been stressed at work, it’s been hot, I had a wonderful but extremely exhausting weekend, there are a hundred banal reasons I haven’t worked on a poem in so many days. Five years ago, when I was working on a novel, this would have stressed me out. If I deviated from my plan, how would I ever finish the book!? If I missed one day, and then another, and then another, would I ever write again?!

I know I will open my poetry file today (or, if not today, tomorrow, or, if not tomorrow, the day after that), because making poems fills me with wild, incandescent, cascading pleasure. It is one of the most joyful experiences I have ever had in my life. Messing with words. Reading a line over and over and over again, remaking and remaking it, until my whole body fills with pleasure at the sound of it. “Keep working until it feels right.”

Don’t misunderstand me: making poems is not easy. It is sticky and often extremely hard. It is full of problems that I do not know how to solve—until I solve them, or don’t. But through all of this tangle, it is so much goddamn fun. I do not have to force myself to sit down to write. I suspect five days is close the maximum I can go without writing, because the pleasure of it, the plodding, ordinary, beautiful work of playing with words until they sing—I cannot get enough.

So far, this year, I have written ten poems that I consider finished. I know they are finished because of the pleasure I derive from reading them out loud. I have sent several of these poems to literary magazines, and received rejections for all of them. These rejections have done nothing to deter me. I know the work is good because of the pleasure I derive from it. I am confident that, eventually, an editor somewhere is going to read a poem I send them and feel that pleasure flowing through the lines. It might take 100 or 200 or 300 rejections. And even if that never happens, even if after 500 or 1,000 attempts not even one publication accepts my work, it will still be good. It will still have been worth it. I will still have made something beautiful.

I recently read Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle. It’s a collection of poetry lectures she gave to graduate students over a dozen or so years. It’s marvelous. The titular essay is one of the best essays I’ve read in a long time. In it, she talks about the madness, rack, and honey of poetry (a phrase that came to her in a dream!) and about the making of poems as the confluence of these three states of being. I’m not going to summarize her ideas—it’s an essay you have to feel, I think, like a symphony or a garden—but I will share this passage, which I read maybe four days after rereading my notes from the Garth Greenwell class:

Anyone who has not experienced the joy, pleasure, transport, and sweetness of writing poems has not written poems. If it has never once been fun for you, you probably haven’t experienced what we talk about when we talk about poetry.

I read this, and it was several moments before my breathing returned to normal.

A few pages later, she gets into the rack of it. She presents several definitions of the word rack, including:

• to strain to the utmost

• to examine searchingly, as by the application of torture

• to pull or tear apart, to separate by force

• to stretch or raise beyond the normal amount, extent or degree

She goes on:

It is what poetry does to the world, what poets do with words, and what words will do to a poet. And that's the rack of it. And if you have never experienced the rack while working on a poem then you have never worked on a poem. Have you never put language in an extenuating circumstance with dangerous limits until an acute physical sensation results?

And it was several moments before my breathing returned to normal.

Essentially (and too simply, you should really go find the essay), she says that poetry is the place where the honey meets the rack. That is what makes the madness. That place is the madness.

People like to say things like, “if you write poems, you are a poet,” and “if you write, you are a writer.” I wholeheartedly believe in and celebrate anyone who writes poems and calls themself a poet, anyone who writes and calls themself a writer. Garth Greenwell and Mary Ruefle are two writers out of millions, and their ideas are not better or truer than anyone else’s. They did not write the book on what it means to be a poet or an artist. There is no book. You have to make your own book. I am making my book, my book of how to be a poet, and their words are part of it, not because they are so wise and so smart (though I do think they are both wise and smart), but because of what Carl Phillips is always talking about as the thing that animates poems: resonance. Their words hum inside me.

Question: So if I derive no pleasure, where is the book? Answer: Nowhere. That book is not a book. It is the haunting that makes the real book possible.

I know, in my bones, that I am a poet, although, I admit, it feels strange to say so out loud. The reason I know I am a poet—and understand, I am not speaking about or for anyone else—is not because I write poems. It is because of the pleasure. It is because of the honey and the rack.

In closing, here is Dianne Seuss, from the poem ‘Poetry’ in her new collection Modern Poetry:

As for beauty, a problematic word,
one to be side-eyed lest it turn you 
to stone or salt,
it is not something to work on 
but a biproduct, at times, 
of the process of our making.

And here’s a little bit of beauty to send you on your way:

Catch you next week, bookish friends.