Red Cedar

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how you can ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

from the poem Berryman by WS Merwin

I keep coming back to the last stanza of this poem this week, over and over I’ve half-remembered it until finally this morning I leafed through the book I thought it was in until I found it. Copied the stanza both here and in my notebook to remind me that self-doubt is normal, but it’s best to keep at bay if you want to keep coming back to the writing desk. That’s what I’m finding hardest right now, I wonder too often “what’s the point?” and when it’s six in the morning this angst becomes an all-too-convenient reason to stay in bed rather than write.

My journal on mornings like this becomes a litany of complaint about tiredness and internal worrying. Who do I think I’m fooling anyway? It’s ferocious to be self-hating in the middle of writing a story, and this week I have dragged my fingers across the keyboard as if afraid to move forward, afraid to finish a piece started with great excitement only a couple of weeks ago. Okay, perhaps not great excitement, but a story that intrigues me nonetheless – written from multiple perspectives and part of the series I’ve been working on for months. I have half a first draft, but as I said, I’ve been balking as I enter the third section. I wonder if it’s because I have no idea about endings, or pacing, or whether this story is about anything more than the way some people live because they have to. Which feels like it’s about nothing. Though I do realize that few things are about more than that. I’m feeling nagged by it when I’m not writing, but resistant when I do – sortof like having to write an essay for school and leaving it until the last minute. That’s the feeling.

This morning I decided to stop forcing myself through it for a couple of reasons. The first being the obvious, I’m being too hard on myself with this piece and need a bit of a break. The second has more to do with the totality of my writing in the last six months which has been exclusively focused on this single project and has left me wondering if I am capable of writing anything else. I go to see poets like Shane Koyczan read and feel decidedly unhip, Elizabeth Bachinsky makes me wonder if I’m unable to feel things deeply enough, is that why I’m not writing in first person or making autobiographical attempts? But it’s part of the nature of what I’m writing (a twisted and fictionalized family memoir of sorts – in poetry and short prose), that it’s not about me at all. It’s about them, and if I use first person it’s only to hear what they are saying to me, not the other way around.

In any case, I grabbed my poetry forms book this morning and wrote some lunes and haikus instead. Structured short poems. I never write those – though I greatly enjoy them. I love haiku, the poignant and the ridiculous, there is something so fantastic at looking at the world through 5/7/5 – calming I suppose, filtering out the noise, finding the essence of what needs communicating. I gave myself leave to write a love poem in linked haikus, just for this morning, and for half an hour I was able to work uncritically. I could have gone on longer, but that was all the time I had after fooling around for my first half hour. Relieving the pressure of voice and theme was exactly what I needed to find the creative place inside myself this morning. The part that doesn’t just think it’s hard work, but gets enjoyment out of the work process to finished product.

Which is the point, I suppose. If I don’t ease up and stop asking myself that question above over and over (“is it any good? is it any good? is it any good?”) any desire to continue will be killed. There is no answer to that question, at least not to the person writing, because we can never read our own words outside of the process in which they were written. Outside of the sprout of an idea from which they grew. Validation is important to continuing, but really I agree with Merwin (or Berryman who’s speaking)… “if you have to be sure don’t write” to which I would add – otherwise you’ll drive yourself crazy.