Tolu Oloruntoba’s Writing Day: Like a Boxer Beating the Air

5:30 AM, Tuesday: I wake up daily and continue my prayer: I want, I want, I want.

I want so much, have so little—time, endurance, day-lit hours when I have both time to lay one thought upon another and the wakefulness to do so. Right now, I want to unplaster my eye lids, wake up, and unfurl my body from the painful pretzel it has become overnight, and get ahead before my daughter (who has joined us in bed) wakes up.

I try the old method: irradiating my brain with rage from Twitter to wake up fully (also because I’m addicted). This morning’s fare: the now familiar pandemic with unfamiliar twists—of the knife; the cruelty of empire; skirmishes and insurrections; and tweets that give me the first of the day’s many stank faces. I shouldn’t use adrenaline in this way, but it works: I’m awake, my generator of rage seething in the background. That would do. Let’s do this.

5:55 AM: I remember I slept early last night so that I could get some work done this morning. I curse the neighbors beeping car alarm as I start to swing my feet over the bed’s edge. I will be so mad if it wakes the kid. It stops. I settle back, close my eyes, and grope for my thoughts. Feeling my way for some calm, warding the grasping hands of the things I want to do, be, have remembered, give to others, believe of myself. The sigils of my bondage are the same as they ever were—pretzel, ouroboros, Sisyphus wheel.

The first strains of the phrase “I wake up daily and continue my prayer: I want, I want, I want” occur to me. Open eyes. Kid’s still asleep. Good. Go. Grab pants, laptop, charger, phone. Leave room stealthily. The thought crystallizes as I descend the stairs. I type it in my Notes app at the bottom of the stairs, into a note where other fragments from these pandemic months wait.

6:10 AM: I skim through tabs I’d opened last night: “6 Ways to Take Control of Your Career Development If Your Company Doesn’t Care About It”; “Designing for the Quadruple Aim: How Can the Built Environment Support Quadruple Aim Goals?”; “The 7 Things You Need for an Ergonomic Workstation.”

6:20 AM: I begin to type this note. I collect my thoughts from 5:30. I have finally found, I think, a way into this article about my writing day that Rob requested. It remains to be seen if this will indeed be a writing day.

7-8 AM: Her Maj is awake. I hear what must be hunger tantrums, get to pacifying and feeding, showering and getting her ready for school, posting on LinkedIn to keep ye Olde professional persona alive.

8:25 AM: At my bedroom desk to start the workday. More rage, this time from LinkedIn: “Canadians who've transitioned to working from home permanently face another change: a potential pay cut.” There is no depth, it seems, to which extractive capitalism will not sink. I take the phrase I have been holding in my head, and combine it with the other fragments that had been waiting:

I wake up daily and continue my prayer: I want, I want, I want.

I use the anaphoric I want to string the disparate nonsenses from the past three months together:

I want poetry again, poetry as patricide, poetry as effigy-burning;

I want the pen, mighty against my thigh in swordless alleys;

I want to perform heresy against the silence of my culture;

I want to medically-examine this question, leave it flayed, filleted, laid open and bled out, dehusk the innuendo.

I want to see, unlike others, the imp of the perverse playing us all like lithophones at the edge of train platforms

9AM-6 PM: A blur of project management spreadsheets, emails, Skype meetings, the spine of my wooden chair chafing mine. 30-minute break for lunch downstairs, another 30 to pick the kid from school. I glance at the typed out note a couple of times, add, move, remove.

6 PM-11:30 PM: One hour break to feed the kid. Handle the evening’s meltdown. I don’t remember what it’s about. Caroline’s doing the bedtime routine and putting her to bed tonight, so I can get some editing done for the new journal gig I just got. I’m glad for this one, because I’d lost another to COVID in March, but moonlighting is a laughable term that doesn’t begin to describe the anguish of freelancing. For each batch of articles, I spend a month or two doing work that will be paid for at least six weeks after I’m done. I spend some time acquainting myself with the academic style guide. I edit exactly one 12-page article. I work out how much I have earned in 5 hours of work—$10/hour. Lol. More rage. Why do I do this?  (I know the answer: more money, however little, helps us tread water a bit longer). Perhaps I can go faster tomorrow once I’m better acquainted with the style guide. There’s a mutiny in my vertebral column, and in the lampshade crook of my bent neck. Let’s continue this tomorrow.

I don’t, I can’t look at the garbage I put down earlier today. It doesn’t have that animating spirit to gather flesh around. All I know is I want: every day is the same; I am encased in glass; I am confined to my wheel; my psychic screams do not cut the dome. I’ll wait to see if a new direction will occur to me.

But I drag myself into bed, just, you know, for a change of posture. Caroline’s asleep already. I hate sleep because it feels like dying before my work is done. I get N.K. Jemisin’s “The City We Became” as an Overdrive Superloan. I’ve heard good things about it and begin to explore the narrator’s paranormal New York, the light text, running off the dark page, clawing my bleary eyes. I don’t remember falling asleep.

P.S.

I lost the developing poem two days after, before I could save it, but I am thankful that the originating fragments were still in my Notes, and I was able to feel my way around what the poem was, and how it wanted to grow into what it became. I had panicked when I realized I had lost it, but that want helped me feel my way through the rest of the poem. A fragment that helped me complete it was my regret at missing the joint burial of my grandparents (who had died within weeks of each other), and remaining unable to fully confront my grief. This haunting thought returned just as a neighbor’s smoke alarm went off, and I wondered what I would try to salvage if fire from one townhouse spread to ours. Grief, frustration, and powerlessness often feel like sleepwalking through a house on fire, when you know with certainty (although your body cannot move fast enough) that you cannot save yourself yet—because there are other things to take with you. But all that came two nights later, when I had some time to search out the end of the poem. I am very grateful that it came back to me. To give an idea of my speed in slow periods, this is my second poem in four months. Here it is in its “final” form:

I wake up daily and continue my prayer: I want, I want, I want.

I want the poem again: poetry as patricide, poetry as effigy-burning;

the pen, warm against my thigh in swordless alleys;

the performance of heresy against our silences;

the medically-examined question—the flayed drupe, the flesh disrobed,

the extradited, planetary—stone in a chaos of sluice;

to ambulate from the pupa of sleep, the bonds of no, the dome beyond,

for the absolution of the dead that cannot forgive me

for deserting their double grave, for the elegy withheld;

to be cleansed by the finally-burning house

of memory, the one I calmly pick curios within,

under a galactic entreaty of alarms.

Tolu Oloruntoba is the author of the Anstruther Press chapbook Manubrium, and The Junta of Happenstance, a full length collection of poems forthcoming from Anstruther Books in 2021. He lived in Nigeria and the United States, and practiced medicine before his current work managing IT projects for BC health authorities. Tolu’s poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Columbia Journal Online, Obsidian, This Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

christian favreau : My writing day

Since I have a day job (currently remote), much of my writing day occurs in fragments. This segmented writing process, I find, works for poetry over other types of writing. So much of writing fiction, for instance, comes down to diligence and regularity. A certain quota must be met, and whatever is written can be edited later. With poetry, the need for diligence and regularity comes in a different form: although I am not constantly writing poetry, do I feel like I constantly am in the poetry writing process. Reading is part of the process. Walking in the park is part of the process. Experience, in general, feels part of the process. These assertions may sound like excuses to avoid working, but in all honesty, it’s exhausting to exist in the process. As a poet—and a realist—I don’t really aim to make my art profitable, and so my writing day really consists in navigating around the constraints of a production-driven society. Or, put differently, my writing process is a learning process, one whereby I try to figure out how to be functional and productive in an environment that encourages speeding up over slowing down.

These days, emotion guides my writing. For a long time, I felt myself at a disadvantage: I was under the impression that most people felt emotions more deeply than I did; there’s a lesson about how we raise boys in there somewhere, I’m sure. As such, writing brought with it a great deal of pressure. It wasn’t until I realized that the obstacle wasn’t my capacity to feel but rather how long it takes me to process my feelings that writing stopped being something that I sit down to do but instead something intrinsically part of me. By allowing myself the space and time to breathe, to feel, and to create at a pace that feels both balanced and reconcilable with societal constraints, my writing now feels more natural and more honest. I think that poetry facilitates the act of questioning, and in that way each step in the writing process feels like a small act of revolution, especially under a hyper-individualistic capitalist system. So, being critical of everything around me, including myself, is how I lay a foundation on which the actual writing is produced. I stay open, vulnerable, and accepting. Part of that is accepting interruptions when they arise, while knowing which ones will undermine inspiration and which ones will enrich it. Interruptions can be periods of emotional and intellectual gestation. Or they can be instances where my cat sits on my lap insisting that I stop writing.

 The day begins and the first interruption is, more often than not, an alarm. Once it has woken me up, I’m left with whatever lingering emotions my dreams have fuelled. The dreams themselves may have been forgotten but their emotional remnants bleed into my day. I make notes in my journal, which I write in constantly, and then make coffee, shower, dress, water my plants, feed my cat, etc. I put on a record, spend too much time on Twitter, check my work inbox as well as any climate justice organizing work I’m a part of, and read some of whatever book I’m engrossed in—at this moment it’s Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. Influence facilitates the writing process for me, especially abstract art because there’s greater room for interpretation. Sometimes a song will play, which provokes a feeling; I put that song on repeat to sustain the mood, so that I can work out its significance and its resonance. Throughout these tasks, it’s the writing itself that becomes the interruption because it is integral to how I understand what I am consuming or doing; thinking, feeling, and experiencing inevitably prompt writing for me. The writing isn’t always poetry; it can be a journal entry that I will eventually strip until it reads like a song. Sometimes I can write the poem all at once, and even then, it isn’t ‘done’ because it too must be processed, digested. I need to sit with my poems the way I need to sit with my thoughts. I write a poem multiple times, first by hand because I can place the words exactly where I want them to be without having to fiddle around with the spacebar or the return key. A poem can take anywhere from an afternoon to a year, and even then, regarding it as complete is questionable. But there is a sense of ‘done-ness’ at some point whereby a poem, though bound to my experience and my subjectivity, feels like it can breathe on its own. The rest is up to a potential reader.

The process of writing is not just an integral part of the day; it is not merely an action, but rather a state of being. The writing itself may not populate most of the day but it gives the day its meaning.

christian favreau is a poet and activist living in Montréal (Tiohtiá:ke). His work has appeared in antilang, Lantern, Vallum, and elsewhere.