You Can't Stay Here

A friend sent me a poem recently:


Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mark Strand


I'm moving. Out of my Toronto apartment, leaving my stuff in storage at my cousin's and will be back here at the end of August to move into a new apartment I don't have yet. I'm a little anxious, less about the packing and more about the fact that I don't really have any idea how this year is going to go. My partner has to be in Vancouver for the year for work and I'll be back in school in Toronto. And there's the rest of this crazy summer to get through. Which has actually possibly been the best summer ever so far, but it's also filled with a lot of moving around.

Which I'm kind of getting used to. I'm enjoying this strange part of my adult life where I don't really have a 'home' exactly, and I now have stuff in storage in three different provinces. For years I was stuck in this emotional state where I was afraid to leave my city. Afraid that I would just feel isolated and alone and never be able to build the kind of close community I've had. What I didn't expect was to love the sense of coming and going, leaving and arriving.


Which is probably why I love this scene. This is so me two years ago:

Do the Work, Stay Out of the Results

I just did a little review of my latest posts and I was amused to discover that almost every post begins with some version of 'I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted on this thing...'.

I am clearly never going to be the weekly blog poster (secretly I hope this is a reverse psychology method being used on myself right now), but I try, right? The main problem with being a poet (with being any genre specific artist, really) is that whenever you are doing something not directly related to the craft, you feel like you're wasting your time.

Isn't that slightly sick (and kind of melodramatic)?

In season 4, episode 2, Claire meets Edie. A spoken word artist who breaks Claire's eye open just a little bit. Who shows Claire not to be afraid of her own work. Not to worry about how it sounds/looks/is. And more importantly, not to be afraid of what others think about it. This is her first appearance on the show:



Honestly, I have always loved this. Not because I think it's necessarily that great of a piece of work (though I think it's kind of cool, and I have to admit I kind of get chills when I watch this scene, probably because I can see a spark returning in Claire), but because it holds a certain kind of fearlessness and honesty, and it refuses to apologize for what it is. Yeah, it's self-indulgent (which Edie admits to herself) and it's melodramatic and probably not for everyone, but she sums it up in a later conversation with Claire and Anita, when she remarks matter-of-factly, 'I say do the work, stay out of the results'. That might sound dismissive and not to say that I don't think revising is absolutely crucial, but I think we do interfere in our own work half the time. And the better we get at our craft (I find) the more likely it is that the pressure builds to produce something of a certain standard and value. Edie's casual response when Claire mentions that she hasn't picked up her camera in months because she was experiencing a rough time, is 'That's the best time to work. When your guts are all raw and you don't have to spend too much time thinking about it."

I feel a panic inside me every single day that I'm not writing poetry. Even if I don't want to write poetry. Ever. Again. And it's been coming to that. Like, obviously that'll never happen. Certainly sheer stubbornness pertaining to the idea that I Am A Poet will take over. Because, really, who am I without that identity? It's a scary thought. I find so much assurance and confidence wrapped up in that silly little title. I feel boring without it.

But honestly, these days I can't seem to write anything I like. I feel tired of it all. I was working on a fiction project for awhile, just to do something different, but even that has come grinding to a halt. I told a friend this morning that I had finished with the majority of my residency/grant applications and my second collection is back circling again and now I can relax and just write. I can work on the raw stuff. Isn't that great? To be free of such obligations like the 'business side of writing'.

It's not great. It's hard. It's upsetting. It's like pulling teeth. Every twenty minutes I'm on Facebook, praying that someone's written me a message so I can tell myself that I should really reply to that. Every hour I decide it's time for a washroom break. Every ten minutes I try to read even one line from one of the twelve books of poetry I brought along for inspiration. I can't even be bothered to read poetry. It's just so dense and condensed and I don't even know why I want to write in such a constricted form.

Part of the problem is that I just don't have any new ideas right now. That never stopped me before, I was always one to write my way into the poem, so to speak. Believe you me (if I could throw this phrase into every post, I would, I love it), I was damn prolific. But I've been making the realization that about half the poems I write never make it above ground. They never surface and find their way to the published page. Simply put, they just don't make the cut. And I find it painful to know that probably all of the poems I might write today will get scrapped in another six months or a year or two years. But you have to write those underdeveloped poems in order to get to the goods. That's the rule. I mean, it's not a hard and fast rule. Maybe some people can polish every poem they've ever written to be immediately worthy of publication, but I can't. I guess because I'm still evolving as a writer.

So, maybe I secretly (or not so secretly) hope I never evolve to the point where I write the perfect poem in one sitting. I don't even know how that could be possible.

At one point in their conversation about producing work, Edie says to Claire, 'What's the worst that can happen, some asshole will make fun of you?...There are probably a ton of people here making fun of me" I LOVE this. What IS the worst that can happen? There will always be someone who doesn't like, connect or respect your work. There will always be someone who said what you wanted to say better than you can. Or so you think. There will always be nasty critics, yourself being among the harshest. There will always be a reason NOT to work.

So what, besides ourselves, is truly stopping us?