Value in Silent Observing: Ada Limón on Not Writing

At Richard Blanco's website, poet Ada Limón writes about the pleasures of not writing, what happens when the poem slips away, the supposed loneliness of the writer, and accountability. "There’s a sense among writers that the world is so messed up you can’t talk about elation, or that, as someone who has a voice, you have the duty to speak only about topics of great importance." Read more:

...I don’t always think that’s true. The average human being has about 55,000 thoughts a day: some of them are about injustice; some of them are about ketchup. At the laundromat, while I’m folding my sheets and thinking about race and life and writing and mortality and Taylor Swift and how dog hair multiplies and I think the internet is destroying us, I suddenly feel like there should be a permission slip for writers. Something you can sign for someone that says, “You don’t always have to write. You have permission to just be in the world and grieve and laugh and live and do your damn laundry. Writing comes when it comes, and it’s not the most important thing. You and all the little nuisances and nuances of life are what matter most. Don’t miss this gorgeous mess by always trying to make sense of it all.”

When I start poems I don’t know where they are going. I want to try to be truthful, but I also want the song to emerge. I can still hear the sound of the Southern Pacific train go by like it was progress. I can hear Ella Jenkins singing on the record player in the background. My brother and I would sit and watch for the caboose, thinking maybe it wouldn’t come. I’d get anxious because I wanted the satisfying feeling of the train being complete. Being finished. As if the ending is also an answer. (Although it rarely is; things end unsolved all the time.) Some trains were so long, almost as long as life it seemed, as they went by and by and by. I could stand on that canyon and yell to the train, and when the caboose finally came I’d swear it would be enough just to have seen it, to have been there as a witness.

A lovely piece. Find it all here.