"How do you know you'll actually write poems?"

I found a copy of Elizabeth Bishop's collection Poems, Prose, and Letters this afternoon and have been reading through her letters. I found one to my thesis advisor, professor Frank Bidart from July 27, 1971 regarding his reaction to the poem "In the Waiting Room." Bidart really liked the poem (it had just been published in The New Yorker), so Bishop was relieved to hear this first bit of positive feedback. The New Yorker had kept the poem for "over a year" so when it was published Bishop said she felt "only fatigue & impatience" when she looked at it (p. 881).

Reading greats like Bishop can be inspiring but also tend to get me bogged down in reflecting about my own work. (I start to feel fatigued and impatient just like her!) How can I make my poems more ambitious? How can I take up difficult forms but still make them look effortlessly easy? And then I start thinking about what Bishop had already accomplished by the time she was my age, etc and the anxiety starts to creep in and it can be hard to sit down and write anything.

When I had the opportunity to show Derek Walcott my work several months ago, he told me to push past my comfort zone and to shy away from writing poems that were "too domestic." (Although he liked the poem Linnaean Rain.) I've been thinking about this a lot and he's right. In looking at my thesis manuscript there are a lot of poems that only concern landscape and the daily happenings of my fairly conventional life. However, I'm hoping that this past year has/will "shake up" my poetry.

During my last conversation with Bidart right before I graduated, he told me that the Watson sounded like an amazing chance to write, but asked: "How do you know that you'll actually write poems?" The question caught me off-guard and I told him that all of the new settings, people, languages, and flavors would inspire me to write something. I have written poems (some that I have now lost), but I didn't write as many as I had anticipated when I set off on my travels 11 months ago. I certainly wrote notes in my journal and have fragments galore stored as miscellaneous observations and beginnings of poems. However, I think actually living everyday life turned out to be immensely absorbing. I've always said that it's easier to write about a place once you've left and have some distance from it. This year is certainly unique in that I've been catapulted from one place to another with no punctuation in between.

Bidart then followed up his final question with the reassurance that even if I didn't write the huge volume of poems I had initially set out to write, that my year would slowly resurface in my poems for years to come. I think he was right. I hope he was right.






Final thoughts:
"Still dark.
The unknown bird sits on his usual branch.
The little dog next door barks in his sleep
inquiringly, just once.
Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires
once or twice, quavering.
Questions--if that is what they are--
answered directly, simply,
by day itself."

--E. Bishop, "Five Flights Up"