Craig Morgan Teicher on Poets' Progress

Literary Hub's Book Marks section features a conversation between Jane Ciabattari and Craig Morgan Teicher about many poets' beginnings, including Teicher's own. Teicher's newest book, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress, appears on bookstore shelves this week. At Book Marks, he discusses five books about starting out; the list begins with Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Teicher explains, "[m]y 10th grade honors English teacher, who really was one of those teachers who changed my life and is one of the two dedicatees of my new book, gave this book to me in 11th grade. It scared the shit out of me, but was my first real glimpse into the stakes for poetry." From there: 

Jane Ciabattari: What was so fierce and fearsome about Rilke upon first reading?

Craig Morgan Teicher: Rilke tells his correspondent something to the effect that unless he would die without writing, he shouldn’t bother with it. As a teenager, that’s scared me because I wasn’t sure if I would die without writing. But I really wanted to be a writer; I wasn’t sure if Rilke was saying I wasn’t cut out for it, didn’t deserve it. At the time, I thought he meant it kind of literal death, but now I think he meant a spiritual one. And I think without writing I would’ve died, at least spiritually. And, in a way, we have a choice about what kills us, and what enables us to survive. I chose poetry.

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Something in me now wants to see this guide to writing and living as sort of cheesy, but I think it probably isn’t, and it, too, very concretely changed my life. Goldberg proposes treating writing like Zen practice, and committing to timed free-writing sessions every day. My high school best friend and I did these sessions separately and together for a year, and the practice played no small part in enabling my mind to improvise and trust itself on paper.

JC: Were there particular insights and prompts you still use to this day?

CMT: Goldberg’s fundamental advice is that one must keep one’s hand moving. One of the best skills writer and learn is how to write badly but keep on writing. Like a pianist practicing scales, a writer writes badly—or at least writes without too much self-censorship or criticism—in order to keep in shape, in order to be present, hand moving, when the good writing is ready to come out. I keep that in mind every time I sit down in front of the keyboard.

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