By
the time I have set myself to begin writing, I am hours or days into the
process of receding from the order of the physical world. I am forgetting my
body and the trails of thought that net it together so that I might focus, or
do the work of condensation, for the poem. I don’t have a schedule for writing,
or periods of time made regular in my life habits. I have intention, spun from
an idea or sense of window into language, and I must wait until my feeling
catches up, matches it, so that the two might begin a conversation or fusion
from that point of critical context, contact. It is a kind of internalization,
but one already derived from interiority. So: no typical writing day for me,
but there is yet a process requiring a number of calibrations, and patience.
I’ll become aware of the next day I have a day of no, or very few, outside
obligations. I might begin winnowing obligations away, get extra groceries,
coffee, wine, take my dog on longer walks. I will spend time before sleep, and
sometimes in deep sleep, working the feeling, finding the point of convergence,
testing out words to suit. Nonverbally. I wait for night, or if not night, then
earliest morning. And then I enter a kind of space of meditative agitation. The
poem might have been formless forming for perhaps months.
It
is important that there might be a few commonalities: first, I must be alone.
Easy enough as my partner lives, for the time being, in England. Only a few
times has the need to write a poem arisen while we’ve been under the same roof,
and I have managed—but it must be said that I must feel like I am operating in
total secrecy, unseen. My dog, Tilly, sighing nearby or huddled furtively on
the bed is my tether to the material world. Once I have settled these matters
of material neutrality—pouring a cup of coffee, taking up sometimes seven
critical minutes of my writing threshold—I go to the desk. I assemble the
necessary supplemental books to begin reviewing and reminding myself of
language’s potentials: most often it will be Susan Howe, Lorine Niedecker, C.D.
Wright. Sometimes newer things, books written by poets I know, the phase of
what I’m reading shaping me. I’ll revisit poems of mine, reacquaint with their
idioms. Depending on the poem’s subject matter, there will be requisite historical
texts, research, family documents, photographs from a thumb drive of family
material that I carry with me. Populating the visual field, drawing me out of
intellectual solitude toward other arrangements, arrangers, of poems. How did
they do it. How I might do it. I stave off pre-emptive attempts, as any
misapplication of a word might tip this threshold of synthesis out of
proportion. I move a small candle in my line of vision; I hone in sync with its
energy. The approach approaches manic restlessness. If I have not left behind
any residual soreness from exercise, I will take a hot bath, bring the most
important book with me to read as the water rises around me. Then I lie very
still. There might be a small cycle of rising, stillness, rising, approaching
the texts, retreat, stillness, rising. If this fails to settle, and if I am
writing of a distant time or place, I will put a song on repeat for the next
few hours as I wait, write, consider, space. If I am yet still fraying beyond
measure, a glass of wine will do, a shot of whiskey. That would be a rare
occasion. By this time, usually, more than a few hours have passed. I begin
speeding up, as when one undertakes a section of sprint in a long jog. All of
this is yet anterior to actual writing. But then, I find myself in the writing,
not a self but a synthesis. This is a cycle similar to ones I’ve described, but
hyper-compressed. Then it is all sound drawn from a provisional sense. From a
set of distances, I am trying to reach a physical place, a particular one.
If
there is a deadline, I must begin negotiating with the poem, drawing it further
out of the recesses before it would have possibly emerged, considering whether
urgency or abbreviation of time will allow me to complete it (—it always does).
I run my hands over the lateral grooves of the thrifted desk I have used since
college, I play with my hair. I press my face into Tilly’s side and making
strange noises. She extends a paw when I turn back to work, softly growls,
eventually accepts my distraction. To give her some time, we’ll go out back so
she can do her Tilly things. I stand outside, looking up, a woman emerging from
her house’s glow into a wintry backyard night. Hoping no one sees. Return to
the books. Most often, the keyboard; rarely, the pencil and paper. The
reorientation process begins again in miniature.
Perhaps
it is a mode of hypervigilance, to be never not at work shaping or considering,
this process of calibration of sense and surrounding, compression of the
senses, provisional interpretations. That I must wait to find a day, or a night
to work into a day, to write a poem, seems even to me to be a touch absurd. Often
I am inexplicably tired. So far, this cycle of approach and fulfillment has
somehow worked both when I worked retail and publishing in New York City, and
in my time in graduate school since. And though graduate school—even a
PhD—brings its set of limitations, in financial and temporal terms, I still can
mold my activity and time around undertaking this trajectory. It adapts and
expands to the conditions of the life afforded me in any given circumstance. Surprising
no one, I am not particularly prolific. But when I write it, I mean it.
Originally
from Rome, Georgia, Alicia Wright
has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems appear or
are forthcoming in Ecotone, Crazyhorse, West Branch, Flag + Void,
Indiana Review, and Poetry Northwest, among others. At
present, she is a PhD candidate in English & Literary Arts at the
University of Denver, where she serves as Poetry Editor for Denver Quarterly.
