Is The Pilot Light Out on Your Poetry?

How to keep writing when the world wants so much of your attention elsewhere.

Photo by Yaoqi on Unsplash

I’m a voracious reader of other poets—not just what they write but their writing about why and how they write. I’ve been writing for a long time now, but I still look to other writers for clues about how to continue refining my practice and process. How on Earth do we poets make a habit of poetry when the culture seems purposely designed to force our attention elsewhere? 

The other day in The Poets Circle, someone posed a similar question: I have a big work project that is going to take my attention away from poetry for a while. How do I keep writing poetry? The trite answer is to just commit to writing and then build good habits. 

But when has it ever been that easy? Never. 

Not for me, anyway. How I’ve managed to write and publish two poetry collections while putting full-time hours into “regular” work and juggling all of the usual responsibilities of parenting, etc … I’m still not entirely sure.

Yes, this is what the pressure of a workshop or an MFA is for. Peer pressure is great. But I’m talking about the work before the workshop, and the work after—the long process of bringing not just poems but bodies of work into the world.

Poetry is a spell I’ve been under for most of my life. However, being spellbound never illuminated How to Do The Work. What, actually, keeps it going?

First, forget willpower and inspiration

Before I suggest anything practical, let’s address the biggest reason for not writing: You don’t feel like it. A lot of times, I don’t feel like it. 

So we need to throw out the false notion that writing depends on willpower or inspiration. Mere willpower can’t force you to write, and waiting around for inspiration is a profound waste of time.

What does it look like to write without willpower and inspiration? 

You’ll have to answer that question for yourself, it depends on so many circumstances. But I urge you to consider the activities and habits that truly support your writing, and what your writing life would look like if you stopped waiting for that sense of urgency and energy. 

How I write when I don’t feel like it changes as my circumstances change. For the past couple months, it has looked like getting up at 6:30 a.m. Making coffee. Being at my “poetry desk” (a space with books and notebooks) for about 60-90 minutes. That’s it. I don’t pressure myself to generate or revise poems, although often I do. Sometimes I just research or read. I go down rabbit holes on archaic words or botany or artworks.

Mostly I just … inhabit the space.

It helps that I’m doing this before my family gets up, before I open myself up to my inbox or any digital workspace. 

Write quick, with no goal—and have an end time

Only have 30 minutes? Great. You’ll probably find more satisfaction in the writing and get more done than if you had a whole day. I put a cap on my writing time. Every morning, an alarm goes off at 8:30. It’s my cue to close my writing, walk the dog, and get ready for work-work. I close it out even when writing is going well. 

The end time soothes my brain and mitigates pressures: One, the pressure to produce or finish any creative work. Two, the pressure to continue to put off the inbox. I know when I’m going to get to All of That Other Stuff, so I can ignore it without feeling any guilt or distress.

Resist FOMO, embrace limitation

Just as a poem is made by its limitations, the writing life requires a kind of intentional structure to resist being pulled apart by external forces. Limitations are what help writing flourish, giving it the chance to renew the knowing beyond knowing that arises in the act of writing.

Writers who keep writing say “no" a lot. No to big social events. No to PTA volunteer opportunities. No to seemingly small requests for their time and energy, even for people they like and causes they believe in. 

Conversely, they say “yes” to a small number of things that do matter to maintaining momentum—time with likeminded writers, research and travel opportunities that nourish their work. Daily, they say “yes" to activities that replenish mind and body. (Exercise, for me, is critical to writing.)

Most of us must say “yes” to paying work. Everything else needs to be negotiated.

Lean in the direction of sanity—monkish devotion

Maybe there’s a tinge of madness, a kind of poet’s temperament, that drives us back to poetic language time and again and propels the work. That could be. More than that, I suspect its my more monkish habits—the practices and limitations we set—that keep me making poems and books. 

Which of your habits help keep the pilot-light lit? What advice would you give a poet struggling to reclaim their rhythm? Share in the comments.

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