The Failed Poet’s Department
Taylor Swift has recently asserted that poets are tortured. I am decidedly not a Swiftie but on this matter Taylor and I apparently agree. However, if every poet ends up tortured, they don’t all start that way. I know because I didn’t.
Just over ten years ago Dappled Things published the first poem I ever sent anywhere. At the time I thought they were doing me a favor. Now I know better. I assume the editors did not mean to be fiendish creators of false hopes and yet, alas!, they were.
It happened this way. I was at the airport in Detroit after spending Christmas at my Motherhouse in Ann Arbor. Airport security is not exactly pleasant for anyone, but it is particularly unpleasant if you are wearing a full habit and veil. I usually just embraced the ordeal as a means of penance.
But on this notable day a kind TSA agent, doubtless having seen flocks of my Sisters traveling back to their respective missions, took pity on us, moved a barricade, and directed us to the PreCheck line. It was my first experience of such a thing. Cue the incredulity.
“I can leave my shoes on? And just walk through this dinky metal detector? You don’t need to search my bag? I’m sorry, is it 1995 or something?”
As our plane took off I felt how unmerited a mercy this unexpected grace of not-penance was and thought, “This must be how the souls in purgatory feel about receiving a plenary indulgence.”
That, though I did not see it right away, was the voice of The Muse. And thence the trouble began.
In Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet cycle Astrophil and Stella the first sonnet is about how Sidney wants to express his love in verse but is struggling to do so. At the end of the poem he records the words of his muse:
“Fool…look in thy heart, and write.”
Apparently when Sidney reached into his heart his words came out in the shape of a sonnet. 108 sonnets, actually, and 11 songs. Lined up to the Anglican liturgical calendar. Casual.
My Muse, having much poorer material to work on, gave smaller gifts: a sort of insightful idea (plenary indulgence), a literary reference (airports are Dantean Purgatory), and a vague sense of the need to write a poem. That was it. I had some ideas right away and quickly settled into a few extremely modest parameters. I word-smithed the thing into a basically goodish form and was pleased with the result.
And I, too, midway upon my journey
am struck to see so many soles undone,
unlaced, uninhabited...
Then I did what you do with a nice new piece of writing you want an opinion on: I sent it to a friend.
Do all poets have that one friend that they send new work to? And if they do, is it a gift or a curse? In this case, said friend liked it and told me I ought to send it somewhere.
I was taken aback. In a vague way I knew this was a thing people did, but that it could be a thing that I did was a very new idea. “Whelp,” I reasoned, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Into the mail went my poem.
Mail. Like, with a stamp. I think possibly even a self-addressed envelope for return post. Evidently some editors are still living in the nineteenth century.
Sometime later – circa six weeks – I received my rejection letter. The fact that he “read [my poem] with interest” did not make it less distasteful when he included an advertisement for his latest book of poems. Implication: Your poem was unworthy but, if you read my book you will learn how real poets do it. (I later learned that he put the same ad in his acceptance letters as well. The fact that his self-promotion was universal kind of makes it better.)
Now, Jo Marsh and Anne Shirley are heroes of mine so I knew that rejection letters are part and parcel of author life. I had to try again. While I was at it, I saw that the last two lines could be a little punchier. I set about revising.
I remember exactly where I was sitting when I suddenly knew that every word was at home and taking its place to support the others. The poem was, in its small way, a perfect thing.
I stared at it, slightly stunned and much humbled. It was an experience of singing – softly, and for the briefest moment – in tune with the music of the spheres. Electrifying. God-given. Such was my joy that I could even find it in my heart to thank the editor who had rejected the poem initially.
Newly confident, I sent the revised version to Dappled Things. (My Supportive Friend™ suggested this.)
And they took it! And they put it on the website! And it got linked by some Catholic link round ups! And I got legitimate fan mail about it!
All a rather heady experience.
“What,” I thought, “will The Muse do next?”
Do you hear that?
The sound of the aforementioned false hope?
I wasn’t exactly working out a title for my first collection but I figured odds were good that The Muse would visit again.
And occasionally she does the horrible, beastly thing.
No more gifts. Oh no. That initial rush was just to get you hooked. After that comes the torture. She drops an idea without a sense of a form. Or a line without any neighbors. Or a form that is way beyond my abilities. And then she insists.
What a demanding and dogged little deity she is! When The Muse wants a poem, she wants a poem – and she doesn’t much care if you are good at writing poems or not. She is like the friend who gives you a gadget for your kitchen that you did not ask for or need and then demands to hear of how you are using it and finally criticizes what you cook with it as being not quite up to snuff. She will bother you about it incessantly. Guilt you into action. Cajole you with sweetness. Wake you up at night. Invade your mental prayer time. Force you to write and rewrite lines while never giving you a sense of their rightness.
Nothing was ever so (relatively) effortless as “Plenary Indulgence.” Ever. Not once. In more than a decade.
Yes, I finished the occasional poem. Yes, I continued to send these poems places. So, yes, my collection of rejection letters grew. And grew.
I began to suspect that I was not a misunderstood genius but merely a lousy poet. This was rather a letdown. Enter Stage Left, Cycle of Grief.
Denial:
Listen. No, really. I don’t care what that editor said. These are actually quite decent. I mean, I don’t aspire to be T.S. Eliot. But seriously. Did you see what I did there? The way I captured that? The clever reference to Keats? This is quite nice! Give a girl some credit!
Anger:
How dare Dappled Things take my raggedy little TSA PreCheck poem so blithely and make me think that publishing was an easy business?! These are at least as good as, if not better than, many of things in X publication. Why do I even read this publication? I don’t even like these poems!
Bargaining:
I know that this online, undergraduate-run, in-house journal that accepted my poems is a legitimate step up from publishing my poems on my own blog myself… but it is not a very big step. I am happy to support these students and flattered that they liked my work, but this, let’s be real, is a more class project than journal. Submitting here at all smacks decidedly of desperation on my part.
Depression:
The depth of my poetic mediocrity is impressive, or would be if mediocre things had depth rather than pathetic shallowness. I do not have the necessary discipline or inclination for this. No more.
This particular stage is hard to tell apart from that stage of any artistic journey at which you become convinced that, not only is your work bad, but you, yourself, are probably also a horrible human being. Ms. Swift calls it “self-sabotage mode” and, if you’ve ever tried to do anything creative, you will recognize it as part of the process.
This was more than that. It was the end of an era, a complete tapping out. I was too thrifty to go full Gerard Manley Hopkins mode and burn all my notebooks but I did repurpose most of them for other things. And there might have been the end of it – scattered crumbs from a scattered Muse now overtaken by the scattered notes of a scattered professor.
I stepped resolutely away from creative writing for a few years.
Except I didn’t. At least, not exactly. I stepped away from poetry.
Writers, as it turns out, will write, mediocre or not. In a strange turn of events, right around the time I had reached the anger stage of grief my Supportive Friend™ became an editor. Thankfully he required short devotional essays rather than poems and he asked me to write some. I enjoyed the challenge of fitting all seven of his publication’s requirements (!) into 250 words or less. It was analogous to writing sonnets but more fun.
It started to dawn on me that conversational prose has always been a strength. My one published poem probably worked because it was practically prose. All through the death of my poetic aspirations and the absolute drudgery of writing a dissertation a handful of longsuffering correspondents received regular, sparkling, self-deprecating updates I wrote to make myself laugh and blow off steam. I never thought of these off-the-cuff letters as creative because writing them was so notably without torture.
Whence the revelation that they could be more than charming nothings, you ask?
Well, recently, at the end of an extremely draining couple of weeks, two of the short devotional essays were due. One of them was absolutely perfect, even unusually good. The other was a struggle. I knew my Supportive-Friend™-turned-editor wasn’t going to like it. He didn’t. I rewrote it. Twice. He asked if I had a different idea. I didn’t.
He rejected the second essay and got a different writer to replace it.
Reader, this almost broke me. A rejection from my personal hype-man? When I was already having a miserable time?
But here’s the thing. The essay he didn’t want contained a couple of particularly good ideas. This is not just denial speaking. I’ve done enough of these to know. He couldn’t see it, but it was clear to me that the problem was less the idea and more the word limit. I needed more space to do it justice.
“Why,” I suddenly thought, “must Father be the only person for whom I write essays? Surely there are other places to send things.”
Once again I discovered the logic of the Gospel: unless a piece of writing falls into the hands of an editor and dies it remains just a single piece. It is when it dies that it produces a fruitful harvest of self-knowledge.
So, with many thanks to Father Supportive-Friend™ for being such a resolute fan of my poems (he regularly gives one of them out while preaching retreats), and for (inadvertently and in several ways) helping me realize my true identity, I would like to make an announcement.
I have come around to the final stage of grief,
Acceptance.
Let the people understand: I am a failed poet.
Further, I am a failed poet with a new department: The Essay. So far the shoot-from-the-hip, freewheeling nature of the form seems to suit, as it does in this essay.
Which, come to think of it, has rolled off the ends of my fingers with particular ease. I am aware of the danger that this effortlessness has been caused by The Muse but I have good hope it was not she.
The first time I ever wrote something I knew would make someone laugh I was in sixth grade. It was a detailed description of how to pack a suitcase. When I heard, through the small-town grapevine by which my teacher’s husband told someone who told my parents who told me, that it made my English teacher laugh I didn’t understand why this was news: of course it did. I knew it would. (Having since graded roughly an infinity of student essays I now see why this was worth remark.)
I write prose for the love of the game and the love of words and because I am good at it naturally and not for the sake of an immortal literary reputation. I would (and do!) write for fun and without much care for an audience. No Muse required.
My forgiveness of Dappled Things’ previous editorial decision to accept my work is, as you see, complete. I have given up being tortured. Essayists are known to be tortuous, perhaps, but that is altogether different, though it looks so nearly the same that I only recently learned that it means winding, labyrinthine – like this essay that began in an airport and is ending in a psalm.
The moral of my story (other than the obvious necessity of paying for TSA PreCheck, which I now do) is that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Our God-given identity is always going to be more fulfilling than a flashy, false identity given by a pagan deity. Praise God I can cast off the bothersome Muse – and scansion and rhyming and all the rest of the torturous poetic kit. I am grateful to be the sort of writer He made me to be whether He has plans for my writing or not. The Lord has laid me down in the green pastures of the essay to restore my soul and create space for my cup (and my word limit) to overflow.
