Writing is Hard: Walking the Walk

81º feels like 87º ~ heat index to surpass 100º today, but then, the cold front lingering to our north will dip into the state and we will “plunge” into the high 70s tomorrow, sweet plunge it will be ~ whether heat or shortening days, the hummingbirds have been a bit overzealous of late

Every semester in my Creative Writing I class (a mixed-genre intro class) students come into the class with varying degrees of experience, but all with a desire to wrangle their emotions onto the page through words. And every semester, we hit a wall about now, as the students learn that writing is hard work. This is not a surprise to those of us long at the task, but many of my students have spent years writing in diaries and journals, letting the words fly and feeling great about it, but not having been introduced to the idea of writing for an audience. In my class, they come face to face with a new discipline, an attempt to apply a different kind of craft, and the great balancing act for me is to introduce them to craft without deflating their desire.

I talk a lot about messy drafts, consideration of audience, becoming aware of words as our palette, etc. And I talk a lot about BIC (butt in chair) and revision, revision, revision. Today, I’m living all of these lessons again as I search for new terrain in my poetry. I’m putting my BIC three times a week and I’m scratching and clawing, fighting with words.

Today, four messy pages of half-assed drafts in my journal before, again, I returned to the “am” poem. And then, some smooth sailing as the poem began in the journal:

Am jaw clenched hard
                            by dawn’s alarm,

It unwound from there and I got about 3/4 of it in my journal before turning to the computer to try and find the end of the draft. And here I had to persevere; I had to let the poem reveal what I had to say, and that is hard.

Are there poets out there who sit down knowing “I am going to write about the energy of nightmares through the use of a dog with a stick metaphor, and I’ll incorporate a savior figure and how the speaker trades the nightmare for an allegiance to a perhaps shady character”? Or simpler “I am going to write a poem about the lady at the pool who swims for 30 minutes and slaps & kicks the water as if trying to beat the life out of it”?

If so, I envy you at this moment. Perhaps I’ve come to the page like this in the past, but if I have, I’ve forgotten how it is done. And, this coaxing of the poem up out of the depths is terrifying…every single time.