A Walker in the Suburbs

I began this blog three years ago, not sure how often I would post or for how long. It would be an exercise, I told myself, “a slow, patient accumulation of words,” a daily discipline. Maybe people would read it, maybe they wouldn’t. But if I kept at it long enough, I told myself, I would have a body of work.

Don’t know if there’s quite a body yet. Maybe the beginnings of one.

What I do know is that somehow, every day but Sunday (or Saturday!), the blank screen is filled. Even on the hardest days, the words come. Some days they rush in as quickly as I can get them down. Other days I spend way more time than I’d like with fingers poised above the keys.

But eventually the muse speaks — and I listen.

Today I pause to thank that muse — and to thank all of you who visit, read and cheer me on. Your encouragement means more than you know.

This morning’s Washington Post tipped me off to a literary kerfuffle that has recently been playing out in its pages and online. An op-ed by Alexandra Petri, “Is Poetry Dead?,” has 375 comments and counting. I didn’t read all of them — only enough to convince me that no, it is not!

Petri’s piece seems to have been inspired by Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem and the fact that Blanco “has overcome numerous obstacles, struggled against opposition both
internal and external — in order to excel in poetry, a field that may
very well be obsolete.”

Petri raises valid points, criticizing not just poetry and poets, but a culture that has turned poetry from a romantic, individual act to a heavily workshopped, grant-driven endeavor.

But she certainly touched a nerve.

With rants and reasoning, 375 people took the time to defend the art form, many of them in posts that used the art form itself.

“Poetry turns darkness into light,” wrote one.

Another quoted William Carlos Williams, from “Asphodel”:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

“People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can
teach you how to write a
better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a
plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say,” says writer Ann Patchett, quoted in yesterday’s “Writer’s Almanac.”

Ahh, the ever elusive something to say. Seems self-evident, but of course is not.

Maybe the something to say is buried and must be excavated, shovel by shovel, until you hit pay dirt. Or hiding and must be tamed like a shy bird. Or blocked by a gate to which there is no key.

How many times have I sat with  fingers poised above a keyboard — or even with fingers flying only to realize 500 words later that these words are going nowhere.

“What do you want to say?” is the question.

Too often, I don’t have an answer.

Half an hour into Wednesday’s eight-hour drive I realized that I had left my journal behind.  It wasn’t the sort of item one turns around for, this notebook of half-baked ideas, first lines of poems, morning thoughts. But for the last two days I’ve felt its absence.

What I’ve missed is not just the potential, the blank pages waiting. I pressed my calendar into service on that errand right away, and now the odd week or two when I had no appointments, nothing in particular to remember, are covered with scrawl.

No, what I miss is the weight I carry with me, the journal as repository. It’s as if without the words I’ve written I’m not exactly me.