Instagram and the Commercialization of Poetry

Note: This article first appeared in the print edition of the Press-Enterprise on Sunday, August 25, 2019, in the Inlandia Institute’s weekly column.

Instagram poetry might be the most hotly debated topic in literature today. For the last few years, citing a boom in book sales, outlets like The Atlantic, the Guardian, and Publishers Weekly have regularly proclaimed the social media platform to be the savior of poetry. “Traditional” poets have either professed a sanguine agreement or fired back with scathing reviews and parody accounts.

Whatever the response, Instapoetry is something to be reckoned with. As I write this, 7 of the top 20 bestselling books of poetry on Amazon were written by Instagram poets, and none of the other authors—Homer, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou—are contemporary in the literal sense.

They’re all dead.

One of the top 20, the poet and musician David Berman, died just last week, and just this week became a bestselling poet, I assume, for the first time. The message to poets seems clear. If you want to be commercially successful, there are two options: be dead or be on Instagram.

Needless to say, that isn’t a message poets want to hear.

With an open mind, though, we’ve spent the last year exploring Instapoetry for this summer’s issue of Rattle. Over a decade ago, we did the same with slam poetry while it remained controversial among publishers and found much to admire on that stage, so I thought we should try the same with Instagram.

For those unfamiliar with it, Instagram was designed as a social media app that allows people to quickly optimize and stylize smartphone photos to a quality that mimics professional photography, and then share them with friends and followers. Eventually users started sharing aspirational quotes and other text along with the photos and adding longer captions—features which lend themselves well to short-form and visual poetry.

In preparing the summer issue, we received submissions from over 1,000 self-described Instagram poets. We also allowed each of them to recommend other Instagram poets, and we scoured hashtags and media articles, trying to read as much as we could.

Having scrolled through thousands of accounts, it might be true that I’ve now read more Instapoetry than anyone in the world, and I’ve come to this conclusion: Instapoetry just isn’t poetry—at least not in the way that I’ve always conceived of poetry.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t creative or artistic, or that it’s lacking in value. That doesn’t mean there aren’t poets on Instagram or poetic elements involved. But poems and Instapoems are different objects on a fundamental and irreconcilable level. They’re different actions, in different directions, with different motivations.

Elizabeth Bishop was talking about poetry when she called art the act of “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” What she meant was that poetry is a meditative form of aimless exploration. It’s a door to the inward unknown and to the mysteries of our existence. The word “poetry” itself comes from the Greek poiesis, “a made thing.” A poem is a mantra, a “mind-tool,” that makes meaning out of the chaos of human experience. Poetry is the creation of an associative empathy machine, forged on human breath, which illuminates the limits of our awareness.

Instagram poetry is the exact opposite. It’s self-aware and entirely useful. It is designed to sell and so it sells. It’s not exploration, but expression. Rather than poiesis, it is mimos, “to mimic,” or better the Latin mirari, “to look at and admire.” Rather than a door to new meaning, it’s a mirror held up to the reader, reflecting and rendering beautifully back what the reader already knows and wanted to express.

For example, this recent post by Atticus is typical of his style:

If I conquered all my demons
there wouldn’t be much left of me.

The two line aphorism doesn’t have 40,000 “likes” in spite of it being a cliché—it has 40,000 likes because it’s a cliché. It’s the memorable re-articulation of a cliché that we can all relate to and appreciate.

There is value in that. And there is skill and craft involved in its construction. There is, sometimes, even poetry—but the poetry is tangential in the same way poetry is tangential to music. Some music includes poetry, but it doesn’t have to in order to be music. The poesis, the meaning making itself, isn’t the point.

In the same way that some great musicians are also great lyricists, there are many Instagram poets who are also “real” poets. We had no problem filling an issue with interesting Instapoems, but there was no correlation between there poetic quality and their popularity.

In the process of putting this issue together, I met and interviewed Pavana Reddy, a kind of Leonard Cohen, who does a marvelous job of successfully navigating both worlds.

Reddy has tens of thousands of followers online, but has also published two books, Rangoli and Where Do You Go Alone, that genuinely are doors to the unknown. In her candid interview, she acknowledges both the strengths and limitations of Instagram:

“For Instagram as a way to make any kind of profit, I’ve learned that you need to write for that audience, as much as you don’t want to. It’s funny, sometimes I’ll post poems to see what the reaction will be … and it could be a good poem, but people would rather hear me tell them they’re magic.”

People are magic. And it’s important that we be reminded of that as often as possible.

But to remind is an act of reflection, not creation. Once we understand that distinction, the controversy about Instapoetry begins to unravel. Instapoetry sells more than traditional poetry because it isn’t poetry—it’s something different altogether, something with much more commerical appeal. And it’s no coincidence that the dominant publisher of Instapoets, Andrews McMeel, isn’t a literary publisher—it’s best known for its comics, puzzles, and gift books

Later in the interview, Reddy shares her excellent and concise definition of poetry as “making a story out of a moment.” She goes on, “You can unpack any moment so many different ways, and that’s what I like to do. It’s kind of a relaxing time; I can go to work and come back and unwind by thinking about the story.” In other words, she writes for that self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration that Elizabeth Bishop described.

That’s why Pavana Reddy is both a poet and an Instapoet.

For those interested in learning more about Instagram Poetry, Reddy is hosting a workshop on September 28th as part of this year’s Wrightwood Literary Festival.

So You Want to Write a Political Poem?

The following article appeared in the Press-Enterprise, Sunday, April 17, 2016.

This is the year it could happen. Maybe you’re stuck in a stop-and-go rubberneck on the 91 Freeway, the radio a dull drone through your morning migraine as the partisan station of your choice recaps last night’s 184th presidential debate, a town hall-style, lightning-round game of charades, where the candidate who terrifies you the most intellectually pantomimes the dismemberment of the candidate who offers at least a squint of hope, like those glimmers that might or might not be oncoming headlights emerging from the glare of a blinding commuter’s sun. Maybe it’s already happened. Maybe you’ve already begun making a list of rhymes in your head. Dump. Slump. Jump. Maybe you’re slant-rhyming Bernie with wormy, smarmy, and germy—most poems start as limericks (it was true until the fact-checkers checked it, I swear).

Wherever it happens, you might find within yourself at some point over the next eight months the sudden urge to write a political poem. If you do, I’ve prepared this simple guide to help you handle the situation with aplomb.

First of all: Don’t panic. Pull over to the side of the road somewhere safe, or wait for the nearest exit, then find an empty parking lot or an exceptionally long drive-thru line. Poems sometimes write themselves, but they can’t write themselves while you’re driving. Only poem in park.

Don’t feel guilty. A poem is just a special way to talk about special things. Human beings come equipped with language processing lobes in their brains that demand we talk, and all humans are subject to special times like now, and special thoughts about those times like these. We all have an innate desire to say the unsayable, to articulate all that lies just beyond the reach of articulation. Poetry can happen to anyone, anywhere, so remember: It’s not your fault.

Find a recording device. Often people today carry with them smartphones, and if you yourself have one, you can record your poem as a voice memo, text it to a long-lost friend, email it to yourself, or tap it out using a standard writing application. If not, many of the world’s greatest poems have been written on ancient, crusty glovebox napkins. It’s true. If all else fails, there’s still rhythmic memorization, a pneumonic device, which historically has been the point of poetry more often than not. Whatever tool you use, just don’t lose it.

Now that you have your poem saved, the real trouble begins. Sure, you’ve written something “felt in the blood and felt along the heart,” as Wordsworth put it, but what next? Does your political poem have any cultural value? Should you share it with close friends, or perhaps even the general public?

On this question, poets themselves have long been split. In “A Defense of Poetry,” Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and others have been trying to pat themselves on the back equally firmly ever since. William Carlos Williams says, “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” Your political poem could be a matter of life and death! More recently, Meena Alexander writes that, “We have poetry/ So we do not die of history,” a statement I particularly love.

Not everyone agrees, though. In a 1965 lecture to students at Berkeley, Jack Spicer said, “I don’t know of any political poems which have worked,” and suggested instead of writing poems that they write letters to their congressmen. Both would be equally effective, he reasoned. I once asked National Book Critic’s Circle Award winner Troy Jollimore why he finds political poems difficult to write, and he worried about preaching to the converted: “The people who know those are good values are already on my side; the people that don’t think they’re good values aren’t going to be convinced by my siding up with good values.” He has a point, too. A poem isn’t an argument. A poem’s purpose isn’t to persuade—persuasion is for op-eds and campaign ads. Poetry doesn’t argue; it argonauts.

So keeping that in mind, re-read your political poem. Is it cheer-leading, or is it trail-blazing? Is it just a bullhorn for someone else’s bullshit, or does it reach deeper into that abyss to haul up some new creature?

Last month, an Orange County poet named David Miller wrote in a political poem, an elegy for the personified American Dream: “I ran when I heard you crying/ like a phone, no one told me how alone you are.” Now that’s what Shelley meant when he said that poetry “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.”

Be honest, does your political poem really purge the film of familiarity, or is it just more mosquito guts on the windshield? If it’s the former, then by all means share it widely!

This is the year for purging.

Blink of an eye / ideas and people connect / in haiku

The following article appeared in the Press-Enterprise, Sunday, December 6, 2015.

When my grandmother’s hearing had grown too poor for the telephone, we started exchanging letters. Once a month—on the same day as the Edison bill—I’d receive a handwritten letter, pressed firmly with a retired schoolteacher’s perfect cursive, yellowed paper cut neatly from the same ancient notebook. Family gossip, news of my father, the weather back east, details of her various ailments.

She’d close every letter with a haiku. It was both a hobby of hers, and a nod to my odd profession. Her last was probably her best:

snow-covered sundial
waiting
to tell time again

I imagined her as the sundial, snowed in by age, her bed long-since moved to the living room so she wouldn’t have to negotiate the stairs, waiting patiently for whatever spring might come in whatever existence might come next.

When I had a moment, I’d tap out a hasty reply, glancing out at the palm trees on Ventura Boulevard from my office window, and close with a responding haiku.

it’s December too
in California
the crickets shout!

There was a joy to the haiku that I’ve only recently come to understand. Easy to write but impossible to master, they never grow old. You can write them in the car stuck in traffic, or plop them easily at the end of a newspaper article. Haiku are so simple they can be simultaneously silly and profound, and that contrast has kept them fresh for centuries.

Most often my grandmother’s haiku would offer a shift in mood, adding levity or perspective or clarity to the information that the letter had shared.

lost my other shoe—
now even the right
isn’t left

Almost a decade later, I still remember many of them fondly, and they always embody my grandmother’s quietly sarcastic personality.

More recently, I interviewed Richard Gilbert, a haiku scholar at Kumamoto University in Japan. He described with great enthusiasm the beloved space haiku holds within Japanese culture. With a total population of 130 million, it’s estimated that 12 million attend a regular haiku group. Witty celebrities compose haiku-like senryu live on TV.

Haiku itself descends from a party game, so it should be no surprise that they’re fun to write. At the kukai, as it was called, friends would gather around a bottle of saké, taking turns composing lines on a chosen topic. Class boundaries and social conventions dissolved as participants adopted pen names, many of them humorous. Bashō was named after the banana tree outside of his hut.

Listening to Gilbert tell it, haiku as a social act sounds like so much fun that I can’t help wishing we made it a part of our culture in the West. An outlet for playfulness and creativity and face-to-face interaction, haiku embody much of what we seem to be lacking in the age of smartphones and Facebook.

So let’s start now. Why not cap off your annual holiday letter with a summary haiku? Turn a family dinner into your own kukai, composing short poems about the season.

Before you start, it’s important to know what haiku are and what they aren’t. No other form of poetry is so misunderstood. Haiku are not three-line poems of five, then seven, then five syllables. Counting syllables doesn’t make any sense in Japanese, which is divided into units of time and not sound. You can think of traditional haiku as three lines that are short, then long, then short in duration, but even that generality isn’t an important rule in modern haiku.

The heart of a haiku is really the kireji, the cutting word, which is almost a form of punctuation that divides the poem in two. In English we might use a dash or colon—this division separates the first image from the last, creating a comparison that can be evocative or uncanny. The best example is Bashō’s famous frog:

old pond—
frog jumps in
the sound of water

That dash is the kireji, and it signifies a complete cut in time and space. The haiku presents one image, an old pond, and then another isolated image, the frog jumping into the sound of water. How the two images relate to each other is left up to the reader—and it’s that interactive, connective leap that stirs our thoughts and emotions. This is one of the many things Bashō meant when he said, haiku jiyu, or “Haiku is for freedom.”

Much more goes into classical haiku, but this is all you need to know to write decent modern haiku in English. Don’t count syllables, just count images or ideas: There should be two.

watching football
my keyboard
almost silent

To learn more about the history of haiku, you can find my interview with Richard Gilbert in issue #47 of Rattle, or read his translations of contemporary Japanese haiku poets at his website.

Poe and Poetic Discovery

Note: This article first appeared in the print edition of the Press-Enterprise on February 1, 2015, in the Inlandia Institute’s weekly column.

If you spend enough time around poets, you’re bound to hear grandiose claims about self-discovery and poetic epiphany. And it’s true, our favorite poems tend to be surprising, even to ourselves. There are prosaic explanations for this: The best poems give voice to the unvoiced; they provide words for thoughts and feelings that we hadn’t before been able to describe. Saul Bellow famously said, when asked how it felt winning the Nobel Prize, I don’t know. I haven’t written about it yet. There is certainly a way in which words build a framework for understanding.

The movie What the Bleep Do We Know? relates an anecdote that, when Columbus first came to America, the natives literally couldn’t see his ships, because they had no mental concept of a ship that large. As sure as I am that the story is apocryphal, the poet in me wants to believe it. I’ve felt it myself: Every poem I’ve written that feels successful has taught me something about the world that I didn’t quite grasp when I started writing it. What if there were some truth to this notion of poetic epiphany?

Everyone is familiar with Edgar Allan Poe. But what you might not know Poe’s last work, which he considered to be his greatest. Eureka: A Prose Poem, not only presaged the Big Bang Theory by 80 years, but also provided the first recorded solution to Olbers’ Paradox.

Also called the Dark Sky Night Paradox, Heinrich Olbers described the problem of the relatively low brightness of the night sky in 1823. If the universe were infinite and eternal, as was commonly held at the time, then any line of sight would eventually hit the surface of a star. In other words, there would be so many stars in the sky that every point in the sky would be bright. In Eureka (1849), Poe explains it like this:

Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy. since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.

Poe is describing the concept of a bounded observable universe. Light has a finite speed, and perhaps the universe just isn’t old enough for all of it to have reached us yet. He goes on to explain how the universe sprung from a primordial particle:

… one particle. a particle of one kind. of one character. of one nature. of one size. of one form. a particle, therefore, without form and void. a particle positively a particle at all points. a particle absolutely unique, individual, undivided …

The particle then expands outward by divine volition, a repulsive force that’s opposed to gravity. Once matter is expelled outward it begins to clump together due to gravity, forming the stars and galaxies we see today. Eventually, gravity draws all matter together to once again reform the primordial particle, resulting in an infinite series of big bangs, and a continuously expanding and collapsing universe. He even acknowledges our impossibly small place within it: Our Galaxy is but one, and perhaps one of the most inconsiderable, of the clusters which go to the constitution of this ultimate …

Keep in mind that Poe died 60 years before Edwin Hubble discovered that there were other galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Poe didn’t know about Einstein’s cosmological constant, or dark energy, or cosmic microwave background radiation; there was no WMAP of galactic clusters. But he was able to intuit one of the most fascinating theories of the century to follow him, using only a term he himself coined: ratiocination.

For Poe, ratiocination, an idea introduced in his detective stories, was a kind of imaginative reasoning—the ability of intuition to make sweeping connections between seemingly small and disparate details, a leap from all the might-have-beens to what probably is. It’s a counterfactual logic that’s able to reveal deeper truth.

For those bound by logic, ratiocination is only accessible in dreams: the sewing machine, the structure of Benzene, DNA’s double helix were all discoveries said to have first appeared in sleep. But poets practice ratiocination every time we sit down in front of a blank page, often with only the faintest glimmerings of what we actually want to write about. Imaginative intuition is a daily practice.

So next time a poet tells you about some grand epiphany, consider (maybe) listening.

Poetry and the Subconscious

Talk first given at the RochesterINK Festival Brunch
Sunday, October 21, 2007

 

This talk might be subtitled, “Where Poetry Comes From,” because that’s what I’m most interested in. The best poems, the poems we want to reread and memorize and carry with us forever, are those that offer some kind of insight. They connect. They resonate. They touch on a deeper truth—a universal, emotional, spiritual truth that’s more difficult to access than simple fact. And it can be a small truth—we don’t need our worldview shattered by every poem we love. But always there’s a vibrancy, an excitement. Surprise. Where do these experiences come from? How can we create them on paper?

I have my own ideas, but I’m no expert. I wrote my first poem less than 10 years ago. Many of you were probably writing poems before I was born. As the editor of Rattle, I live in poetry 24/7—it’s literally my day job—but that makes me more of an expert in unsuccessful poetry than anything else; the majority of the poems I read fail to reach the epiphanic promised land, to say the least.

What I do have, is a 600 page manuscript of interviews with 40 of the best living poets in the country, which Rattle has done over the last dozen years. A selection of these interviews is appearing as an anthology by Red Hen Press next month. All of them talk about process, how they go about tackling their craft, and so I read through all of them, looking for commonalities. What I found seemed to be 40 varying descriptions of the same thing, to the extent that I started wondering if this wellspring of creativity was common knowledge, if it was even worth talking about. But in all the workshops I’ve attended—from U of R to USC, and all the conferences and seminars in between—it never seems to be addressed directly. Classes in writing poetry focus on the shaping of language—line breaks and sentence clutter, finding the heart in what you already have—but they tend to ignore where those words and ideas and images come from. How does writing work?

Billy Collins: “I examine lots of little notions to see if there’s a poem in them, and most of the time I don’t find one there, it doesn’t flower, it doesn’t open itself up to possibility. And then every once in a while, there’s a little notion or an observation or a phrase or some little starting point that wants to go on, that wants to go to a second step, and then I become like a little bloodhound. I kind of sniff my way through the trail and try to see what’s at the end of it. So, it’s pretty much catch as catch can.”

Stephen Dobyns: “The poem begins with what I think of as inspiration, which is the sudden hitting upon the metaphor, which I may not even know is metaphor. I may just have an image and the writing of the poem is the trying to discover the object for the image … if something strikes me and I start generating lines in my head, then I have to do something with it. If I have a line, then I have a second line, and then I have a third line. I have to go with it.”

Yusef Komunyakaa: “I usually have an image, sometimes no more than a word, that I meditate on to improvise on. For me, jazz is important.”

Li-Young Lee: “I’m always listening for or trying to feel, just to get a sense of that field of mind that you’re in when you write, when a poem happens, so I’m always feeling around for that.”

David St. John: “I go into a poem with a piece of language and a piece of verbal music and some vague pressure, some sort of interior concern, whether it’s a kind of psychological concern, whether it’s a context of some emotional situation, whatever it is, that pressure is there. But I don’t want to know where the poem is going to go.”

Charles Simic: “Whatever the eventual subject of the poem is, it emerges in the process of fumbling around.”

You get the point. Fumbling around. Feeling out. Following the trail. Listening for. To quote Robert Creeley, “I think the presumption that one knows what one is writing is pretty naïve, that it’s all planned and everything goes to some specific point of purpose or even understanding.” In other words, poetry isn’t an act of creation, it’s an act of pursuit. It starts with an itch—an image or a phrase, an idea stuck in your head. A poet feels a gust of wind, throws up a sail, and discovers where it leads.

This is why I prefer to use “subconscious,” rather than unconscious. The term subconscious appeared in Freud’s earlier works, but quickly grow out of favor for its ambiguity, yet I don’t think what we’re talking about can be described without ambiguity. Moreover, I feel like the word “unconscious” is inaccurate—we’re never completely unaware of these deeper thoughts that lurk below the surface of our understanding. We’re not randomly plunging our own depths like a trawler at sea casting its net; we’re fly-fishermen throwing our lines into the eddies where intuition and experience tell us a bass might rise. What many call “inspiration” is simply the soft pang of truth from below, a blip on the sonar telling us where to look.

If anything other than subconscious, it might be the preconscious impulse we’re chasing—not in the psychological sense of memories that we haven’t yet accessed—I mean preconscious in the truly precognitive sense—not necessarily seeing the future, but finding some harbinger of a future mental state. Poets press at certain material because they sense a broader understanding, a surprise, hidden beneath it.

And why write toward surprise? Poetry, like any other form of language is a means of communication—why not simply communicate what we already know? Well, if I wanted to simply be informed, I’d read a position paper, or a philosophical proof. Poetry is not a logical argument. Again from the interviews, here is

David St. John: “I believe that poems are not meant to be essays. So … poems persuade invisibly. They enter through the mind and the experience of reading. But it’s really about the music of intelligence. It’s really the pulse and the rhythms of language that are enacting whatever the poet’s concerns happen to be. For me, poems persuade through the texture and the rhythms and the movement of the speaker’s perceptions. But not by argument. Only a bad poem tries to convince somebody of something. Only a didactic poem tries to convince somebody that A or B is “right.” What a good poem does, always, is to provide the reader with a particular experience. A poem itself is an experience.”

I don’t want to get too mystical, but I think that last sentence is the key: A poem is more than just the words on a page, it’s an experience. To me, the difference between prose and poetry is the medium—prose is of the mind, it exists as the holistic, engrossing world that consumes our imagination while we read. Poetry, however, is of the body—it exists as a physical state within the reader, in the pattered regulation of breath, in the orientation of the tongue in the mouth. Even when we don’t read out-loud, neuroscience tells us that subvocalization stimulates the muscles of the throat as though we were. A poem doesn’t exist on the page, it exists within the reader, and so it’s able to communicate the kind of experiential insight that those words alone cannot.

Think of the first line from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, “The way that can be spoken of / is not constant the way.” What he means, of course, is that Reality (with a capital R) is so vast that it can’t be contained, or even described, by language. It’s like trying to bite into a beach ball, or imagining a sphere in four dimensions. This is what Einstein meant when he said that the highest physics evolves into poetry—only poetry can touch it, even fleetingly.

Roshi Philip Kapleau, founder of the Zen Center of Rochester, writes that, “Ultimate truth can be grasped only through direct experience, not by abstract thought. Zen training can be called a process of bringing into consciousness what was formerly hidden in the subconscious mind.”

Is it any wonder, then, that the poetry’s excavation of the interior often presents itself as Zen-like? Elizabeth Bishop writes that “the thing we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” What a wonderful phrase: a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration—that is Zen. And don’t gloss over the first part: “the thing we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation.” Not only is the creation Zen, but the act of creating is Zen, too.

One of my favorite of the Rattle interviews is with Alan Shapiro, who picks up Bishop’s quote and runs with it:

SHAPIRO: “To me, the only thing that has kept me going through the years, as a writer, is that deep, private, self-forgetful joy that I feel when I’m working. When you sit down at the table and it’s eight o’clock in the morning and then you look up and it’s, God, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. All that time has gone by as if in a single moment. And in that prolonged moment, you were completely given over to the task at hand, you were joyful, even if you were writing about how joyless your life has been. Because you had totally forgotten everything but the poem you were trying to make.”

Shapiro is describing what the Buddhists call Samadhi—a unified state of mind in which there is no distinction between self and environment, no sense of time or place. Samadhi is becoming attuned to the fundamental interconnectedness of reality. It’s the dissolution of Self, the absorption of one mind into the total oneness of creation. As such, doesn’t it makes sense that melting into the universal would bring us into contact with universal insight? Doesn’t it make sense that a fading of “consciousness” would reveal the secret knowledge of the subconscious?

I have to digress here and admit that this joyful, meditative state is what drew me to writing in the first place, as it has for so many. I mentioned that it was only 10 years ago that I wrote my first poem, and I remember the day very clearly. It was early spring, the day of final cuts for varsity baseball at Greece Arcadia. Growing up I’d always been overweight, but a good athlete regardless, and I played Frosh and JV, did well in tryouts, so I thought I had the team made. When the coach didn’t agree, I was devastated. I literally ran home crying in the rain like a scene from a bad movie. My English teacher that year, Carl Ruggeri, gave us a weekly extra credit assignment to write creatively based on a phrase. That’s all it took for my first poem: “Angry Cats.”

I won’t reproduce the poem here—Samadhi doesn’t guarantee good poetry, it only facilitates it—but what I wrote came out in perfect tetrameter, the thoughts I didn’t know I had, laid out stanza by stanza as if the thing were pulled out whole from my gut. It wasn’t therapeutic in the traditional sense of catharsis—I was still upset for weeks—but that trancelike state, that full immersion in language, was something I needed more of. So I wrote on the Word of the Week for the rest of the year, and have kept at it ever since.

It’s interesting to me, too, that baseball lead me to writing, because baseball is the only other place I’ve ever experienced a similar state—sometimes I can feel myself merging with the field in the same way I can merge with the page, so that when a ball is hit, I’m moving before I think to move, and after I make a play, I have no recollection of what just happened. A Buddhist would call it experiencing notan—nothingness—a Taoist would call it the Tao, but it’s all one thing.

Back to Shapiro, who makes a similar sports metaphor:

SHAPIRO: “It’s the same thing that athletes talk about when they say they’re ‘in the zone.’ The game slows up, and everything seems like it’s happening in slow motion, and the basket is this wide, or the strike zone is this wide, it’s exactly the same kind of profoundly in the body and profoundly out of body experience. You feel there’s a, I don’t know how to describe it except as an intense state of happiness where you feel like all of your faculties are in agreement with one another, and what’s inside is in agreement with what’s outside.”

The word Zen, of course, is derived from Zazen, the practice of seated meditation. Nabokov wrote standing up, so we know that’s possible, but I think it’s safe to say he was in the minority. So are all poets unwitting practitioners of Zazen? As Master Dogen wrote almost a thousand years ago: “Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.”

But Zazen isn’t easy. If it was, we wouldn’t need retreats, we wouldn’t need the Zen Center of Rochester, or Breadloaf. We wouldn’t need MFAs, or workshops with Dorianne. Poetry would spill from our mouths like tunes from an iPod. So how do you do it?

In game 1 of the 1992 NBA finals, Michael Jordan hit a record 6 three-pointers in the first half. For his career he only made a third of his three point attempts, but he couldn’t miss that day. Jordan played over 1,000 regular season games, another 200 in the playoffs—how often was he “in the zone?” 5% of the time? 10%? And this is the greatest basketball player of all-time.

C.K. Williams: “You can’t tell [if this is a day that you’re going to be inspired]. I tell my students that you have to sit there for a certain amount of time, even if it seems as though nothing is going to get written, because sometimes if you wait long enough, it might.”

This first rule seems obvious, but it might be the hardest for people to accept: Like the lottery, you gotta be in it to win it. Randall Jarrell said that “a poet is someone who spends his life standing out in rainstorms. A good poet is someone who gets hit by lightning six times. A great poet is someone who gets hit by lightning 12 times.” As a poet, you have to let yourself get wet if you want to get struck—but just because you’re standing in the storm doesn’t mean you will; you have to keep going out there day after day. You have to stay in the game through all of the failures and false starts that come with it. So many poets talk about writing every day, but that doesn’t mean they’re publishing everything they write. In his interview, David St. John mentions that he only publishes about a third of the poems he writes, and I suspect that figure is close to the unspoken norm.

But sitting in a chair waiting for Nirvana isn’t much better than getting up and making a ham sandwich. There are ways to make yourself more receptive to your subconscious—besides drugs and alcohol. Ginsberg may have written “Howl” after a peyote trip, but I want to write about life, not shorten it.

We can start with ritual. Humans all over the world have been using ritual since the dawn of time for one reason: It works. Rituals are the doors between mental states. We use rituals to mark the passage of time, and to transition smoothly from one context to another; they help us feel safe and secure. The more ritualistic we make the process of writing, the more we might see those benefits.

All rituals have two equally important components: action and intent. Think of Michael Jordan at the foul line. The ref hands him the ball and he tosses it out in front of him with backspin, the seams parallel to the baseline. He catches it and takes three short dribbles, bends his knees, exhales, and shoots. Every time, ten thousand times in his career, and always the same pattern. He’s telling his mind and body, “This is a free throw like all of the other free throws,” he’s relaxing, eliminating any distractions, and opening himself to the perfection of muscle memory.

Any simple repetition can help to make yourself more receptive to the subconscious miracle; it’s a way of telling your deeper mind that it’s time to write. Lucille Clifton composes all of her poetry on a 30-year-old Magnovox Videowriter. Tess Gallagher always uses the same pen. Lawrence Sargent Hall turned an old codfish-drying shack, no bigger than a kingsize bed, into his writing cabin, where he worked for 50 years.

I’ve always had problems with insomnia. One of the ways to resist it is to only use your bed for sleep—don’t read in bed, don’t watch TV or lie awake. In a very Pavlovian way, you can train your body to become tired when you’re in that space. While it’s not necessary—many poets can write in cafes, on planes, or on a Jack-in-the-Box bag—training your subconscious to be ready for the creative encounter can only help.

No matter what you do to get ready to write, I think part of the ritual should include reading out loud something you love, some piece of writing that’s on the level you aspire to write. Keep it fresh—read something different every day, something with a tone that fits what you’re working on. Think of it as stretching before a run; get those muscles loose. It’s important to have quality language bouncing around your head. It stimulates the neurons in your frontal lobe, like warming up your car in the morning. If the words echoing in your head are from a television commercial, you’ll just end up writing poems that sound like television commercials.

I realize some people aren’t as auditory as I am when it comes to poetry, though—Sam Hamill writes by ear, but Denise Duhamel says she thinks better with her hands than with her mouth. If your connection to poetry is more tactile, don’t read your favorite poems out loud—type them out. All of the same benefits apply. Think of it as Thai Chi for your fingertips.

Still, this is only the physical side of ritual. The less obvious side is intent. As Huai-jang would say, “Are you doing zazen to attain buddhahood, or to become a Buddha?” In other words, are you writing poetry to write a poem, or to become a poet? Do you love poetry, or do you love being seen with poetry? This is a huge problem, I think, particularly in MFA programs. A lot of people are writing not because they enjoy it, or want to explore language and the deeper reality, but because they like to be able to say that that wrote something, they like the praise of someone telling them it’s good. That mindset makes the self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration, become self-conscious and goal-oriented. Remember that Samadhi is the dissolution of self—writing for the sake of your own ego is the exact opposite of that.

From Zen in the Art of Archery: “The right art is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one, and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.”

You could probably read that book, substituting the word “writing” for “archery,” and have a better talk than I could ever give. The “willful will” is what the poet must avoid; it’s the conscious mind’s burying of the subconscious; it’s the killer of creativity.

If you’re having trouble stifling that oppressive self-consciousness, there’s an easy trick to get rid of it: Write something you don’t care about. It happens often that we’re so invested in an idea or image or story, we want so bad for it to be good, that we start trying to wrestle it out before it’s ready. Earlier I mentioned my high school Word of the Week exercises, but that isn’t just kids’ stuff. I took a fiction workshop with Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, and she still does them—she says that every story she’s written, including both of her novels, has come from one of her weekly words. The randomness of the themes prevents you from forming any preconceived notions of what you want it to become; it removes the goal and gives you room to play. If it turns out to be garbage, who cares? You never said you were writing White Oleander. And it works for poetry, too.

In any event, the ideal mindset of the writer is that of a child at play: purposeless, aimless, for its own sake. Children have the most incredible imaginations, they come up with amazing metaphors like its nothing—why? Because they haven’t yet been beaten by conformity; they haven’t been burdened with cliché. Their conscious mind isn’t yet oppressively thick, and so the subconscious bubbles up on its own.

Sharon Olds: “There’s not a bad poet in first grade. None of them are anything but fresh and original. Why am I saying that? Surely, they sometimes just write ‘roses are red, violets are blue,’ but when I’ve done a little in schools, they aren’t old enough yet to know that they’re supposed to be worried. I mean, we’re all so worried about what other people think of us … But in first grade, it’s different … they don’t know how to avoid being original.”

In some respects, we’re all born enlightened, and the spiritual journey can be seen as a stripping of entanglements.

Again from Zen in the Art of Archery: “You must hold the drawn bowstring like a little child holding a proffered finger. It grips it so firmly that one marvels at the strength of the tiny fist. And when it lets the finger go, there is not the slightest jerk. Do you know why? Because a child doesn’t think: I will now let go of the finger in order to grasp this other thing. Completely unself-consciously, without purpose, it turns from one to the other, and we would say that it was playing with the things, were it not completely true that the things were playing with the child.”

If that concept of “the things playing with the child” doesn’t sound familiar, I haven’t been doing my job today. That’s the creative encounter, the miracle of “the poem writing itself.” It’s rare, but special insight is rare. Finding Samadhi can be seen as eliminating the lag-time between impulse and action. It’s diving for the ground ball before you realize it was even hit. If you think about it first, to quote Archery again, “Calculation which is miscalculation sets in.” Or to quote Nike: “Just do it.”

In focusing on spontaneity and play, it might sound like I’m endorsing automatic writing. I’m not. If you’re unfamiliar with automatic writing, it’s a Surrealist technique, taking advantage of the ideomotor effect to write unconsciously, basically turning your hand into a Ouija board. You can try it, and it might help you with writers’ bloc, but most of what’s produced is nonsense. It does reveal the unconscious mind, and it’s been used in psychoanalysis, but remember, we’re after the subconscious. We’re not casting nets; we’re fly-fishing. We need to be able to monitor feedback with the conscious mind, in order to stay on the path, and make sense of what we encounter.

It might sound, instead, like I’m endorsing the Beats’ motto “first word, best word,” and while that’s closer to my position, I don’t think that’s true—sometimes there is a better word than the first. What’s more, moments of trance-like concentration aren’t restricted to the initial composition of a poem. Some people get a kick out of editing; some find epiphany there.

Mark Doty: “I’m very obsessive about the revising process … in part because the work of revision is so much fun. I mean, it’s deeply satisfying and at a certain point, you are no longer the exploring artist in danger of encountering a messy and uncomfortable feeling, you are the craftsperson who is lost in the work of doing it, making it as well said as it can be, and that absorption in the making, in the shaping of the surface of the poem, is just endlessly pleasurable to me, and I find that when I do that, hours can pass unnoticed. It is a blissful absorption in the process.”

What I am endorsing is a phrase borrowed from Jack Grapes, a Los Angeles poet and actor and teacher. What he calls Method Writing is the literary equivalent of Method Acting—the technique where actors try to replicate the real-life emotional conditions of their characters, to create a realistic, life-like performance. The actor becomes the character, and then acts spontaneously within the context of the scene—so any tears are real tears, a shout of joy is really joy. In method writing, the writer becomes the work, and creates spontaneously within it.

When I came across this school of writing, I knew immediately that this is what I’d always done. This was “Angry Cats,” and everything I’ve written successfully since—before I knew to call it method writing I called it “the flow” (a word I must have gotten from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi): When you become immersed within the language, a phrase has its own momentum, and so the first line begets the second, the second begets the third, and so on, as if the path were carving itself, always one step ahead of you. It’s mysterious and it’s magical, and I think it’s what other poets do, too. I think it’s what David St. John calls “the music.” It’s what Lucille Clifton means when she says that “each poem has its own rules, and I try to obey them.” It’s what Sharon Olds is alluding to when she says she can hear the shape of a note that’s missing.

When the writer and the work become one they find Samadhi, they achieve that self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. That’s what connects, what resonates. Jack Grapes calls it the “deep voice.” I’ll let him explain.

GRAPES: “As I began to write more seriously in college, I realized there was something missing in my work. I remember picking up a book by Thomas Wolfe, a short story called “The Lost Boy.” And I heard a tone, I don’t want to say a voice because people think voice means the character of a person, a personality. It doesn’t. Voice is a tone, it’s the tone of a violin, the tone of a cello, it’s the tone of a trumpet depending on what the notes are and who’s playing them … I heard this tone, this deep note, and it vibrated inside of me. I realized that when I read the great poetry, that deep voice is what I hear, that tone that lies beneath the words. That’s why I can read Shakespeare or “Prufrock” in a coffee shop and all the noise goes away, the traffic, people talking, the clanking of the dishes. All I hear is the sound of that bow being pulled across the strings of the cello, like the moan of a human being sitting in a room at two in the morning. I heard that sound, and I knew that that’s the sound a poet must be able to get to. It doesn’t exclude the higher pitched notes and the more frenetic syntax and diction, but without that deep tone, it’s just scribbling.”

And why is that? Without the deep voice, without Samadhi, why is writing just scribbling? The answer is complicated, but I think I can explain it simply, and hopefully still make sense. By becoming one with the work, the poet becomes one with all of creation, and so may access the ineffable truth that we all share. As the Tao Te Ching concludes, “It is because it never attempts itself to be great that it succeeds in becoming great.”

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a poem should be worth at least 5,000. So I’ll end with a little tongue-in-cheek piece I wrote for a friend—who happens to be one of my favorite poets—after he complained that I was more prolific than him:

Advice to a Better Poet

for Erik

Think buckshot:
Not the rifle,
but the musket.

Ear-horn of
powder, arm-
deep in black

soot. Think
flint lock
and flash pan.

Muzzle blast.
Hollow point.
Don’t paint

the rounds,
don’t ready
the bayonet.

No aim
is necessary;
nothing is true.

Think percussion
cap. Any metal
as shrapnel.

Any spark as
lightning;
be bottled,

bottler.