One of Those Really Typical Blogs

Many friends of mine who write say that teaching sucks them of any writing energy. They work hard to protect themselves from having all their creative energy sucked out of them by their students. One responded to the idea of doing writing exercises in class with the students will disbelief. He would never do that. He had to protect his art. Other teaching writers have complained to me about the time spent marking papers, preparing lessons, doing the reading needed to really give the students a solid experience in class. I have never worried about any of this. I have somehow managed to compartmentalize well enough to keep writing even while I am teaching. But blogging is another matter. I have not written a poem in weeks.

It is not as if anything I have blogged about would make its way into a poem. Nor have I arrived at that panicked place that I know quite well, of feeling as if it has finally dried up and nothing will ever come from me, again.
But writing for me is like driving. I learned to drive quite late in life. I was thirty when I learned to drive. I did because we were living in South Carolina and my wife was pregnant with our second child and it seemed idiotic of me to be expecting her to be the only driver in the house. So I learned. But having learned, I noticed something quite fascinating happening to me. Before I would sit in the car to start driving, I would imagine the process of driving, the route I would take. I would mentally plan the whole driving exercise prior to actually driving. And almost always, that time of imaginative preparation would fill me with terror and deep anxiety. I would see the prospect of driving as impossibly dangerous and unsettling. It is hard to explain. Because as soon as I would get behind the drivers wheel and start the car, I would be comfortable, confident, assured. The anxiety and terror would seem absurd. Yet, once out of the car, once I start to think of moving that vehicle somewhere, the disquiet would set in.
It has changed somewhat since the early days, but it is still there years later. When I think of driving in New York, I feel that sense of anxiety. When I get to New York and am driving… well bad example. Let’s try again. When I think of driving in Atlanta, the maze of strangely roads going nowhere, seem to disturb me, but once I am in the car, once I am in control, I suddenly feel little of that anxiety.
So writing is often like that for me. The thought of completing a whole book of poems fills me with some anxiety. And yet I have this sense that once I get going it will all happen. And this is why I have to just live and start trusting that the writing will come. I have decided, however, to prepare a list of the topics for my next poems. This is an act of deceiving the brain into thinking that I am in fact at work on poems. I have done lists like this before and very few in the list have made it into a poem. I say “very few” just in case my memory is not working well, but in truth I don’t think a single poem has come out of such a list.
1. A poem about progesterone in my male body.
2. A poem about my growing anxiety about being fat
3. A poem about hotel rooms
4. A poem about American Idol
5. A poem about portable toilets in Iraq
6. A poem about my dreams of cricket
7. A poem about coaching soccer
8. A poem about not coaching soccer
9. A poem about a crazy soccer coach that scares me
10. A poem about sticking to my Lenten resolution
11. A poem about eleven o’clock PM
12. A poem about when I looked at my son and told him, “My goodness, you look like me!” and how we both laughed and laughed and laughed.
13. A poem about my daughter looking at me and giving me a look and we both start laughing and laughing and laughing without swaying anything.
14. A poem about mosquito netting
15. An epic poem in dactylic meter
16. A poem about when today I saw a list of thirty best Caribbean writers done by a friend of mine and my name not being there, and how that made me feel.
17. A poem about lack of sleep
18. A poem about My Space sagas—the one about the woman who went to the My Space page of a woman who claimed to be sleeping with the first woman’s man and who (the first woman) posted a comment about this, and how over two thousand hits followed with other women claiming that they too have slept with this man, and how it was all going on on My Space and no one was talking about it elsewhere, not even the first woman and her man.
19. A poem about my concern that I am forgetting simple things like names of people, even when I go through the alphabet, and an even greater anxiety that it is being caused by sleep deprivation.
20. A poem about how quickly the "new carsmell" air freshner in my car fades to old funky smell--especially when i have to pick up a really famous poet in my car.
I should feel assured now that I can make poems. I have a list. I won’t let anything get in the way. Still, I can’t seem to beat back the anxiety.
I vowed not to blog about blogging, just as I have tried to avoid writing poems about writing poems. I have broken one vow, here, but only sort of. This blog is about how to survive weeks of poem-lessness. Do haiku count? If so, I am not in bad shape.