Poets Temporarily Drop Out...Poetry, Never

I fall into the poet-drop-out category right now. How, you may ask, is this possible for a Poet Laureate? Well, Covid, for one thing. International war and individual aggressions--the horror of these and horror of the feigned concern and apathy that follows. The engulfing power of contemporary Ukranian poets' work I've been reading. Family events, and dear friends' crises. Which is to explain how a kind of writing malaise has set in.

What I'm doing about it? Trying to be present with a notebook and pen close at hand. Listening a lot. Reading poetry (highly recommend Naomi Shihab Nye's collection, The Tiny Journalist) and a book of 28 contemporary Ukranian poets titled The Frontier--edited and translated by Anatoly Kudryavitsky. And conversing about poetry and poets whose work I love. I have two such recent conversations in mind.

One is with a fiction writer friend and confirmed prose-man who finally admitted to having a poem-of-scale he started many years ago and has kept in a drawer all this time, unsure if it, in his words, 'is valid.' He admits to liking some parts of it. So...of course it is valid, and it's probably a good time for him to wrestle with it on the scale it requires. If there wasn't something keenly necessary in the poem, he'd have chucked it long ago.

The other conversation is with a person who has been a writer all his life but is only now, at almost 70, coming to realize it. The journey he's on includes reading contemporary poetry and listening to many different poets read. Today I told him about the life of a poem--how it starts the poet's, becomes a draft with its own integrity and needs, how 'the speaker' takes over the telling of the poem, about how one may find the heart of the poem, about how to play with it in ways that get each word and line and image to do the work of the poem, which may result in something the poet never exactly intended, something containing surprises and discoveries for the poet, as well as the reader.

These conversations remind me how much I love the poetry-writing process--all of it intense and joyful. I love the discoveries. I love the music of words and rhythms and lines. I love the surprising image, and the way it does the work of the poem.