A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Sixty-Six

 I did not get to work writing this morning, as I tend to do most days, and most of the day was quite busy, but I still have managed to get quite a bit of work done this evening, including a number of poems I am rather pleased to have written.  That is not to say that they are good, but that they dealt with important subjects for me, and which I have had difficulty writing about in the past.  I think I am recognizing that I want to let go of certain things I used to hold onto as a writer, though I do not know what that means in a specific sense.  It is more that I found myself writing certain kinds of poems that were more personal in ways I often find difficult, and the feeling that it really is more a matter of habits, and of choices, and of certain pretensions, or, perhaps, biases is a better word.

For some reason that is difficult to explain, all this is reminding me of the experience I had as I progressed in writing essays.  I was fortunate to have been taught to write essays decently in high school, or so I thought.  The classes provided specific formulae for a proper outline, and for structuring each element within that structure, down to the specific role of each sentence in any paragraph.  I could provide the specifics, but the point is more that I had been shown how to write essays that I believed was the right way to do things.  

When I reached college, I often found that my essays were seen, at best, as decent, perfunctory work.  This was at the same time as I was being encouraged as a poet, and began to think of my writing talent as something worth investing in.  It went on this way for most of my college career, but then I reached a class with a professor named Ilja Wachs, who I should speak more of one day, but suffice it to say that he is one of the most incredible teachers anyone could be fortunate to have a class with.  One day, when Ilja and I were sitting in his office discussing my work for the class (a regular occurrence for any student in class at Sarah Lawrence) and Ilja said to me that my essays were very smart, but he didn't really care at all about the formality, about introductions or conclusions.  "Just tell me what you want to say."  

Now, this is not advice that one can just give a person, but the thing is, Ilja's objection to my essays was the stiffness, the failure to invent or move through the work in a way reflective of my thinking.  He recognized I knew how one should write an essay, and he made it clear that was not a thing I needed to do.  This was mind-blowing for me, and is something that still echoes to me in much of my work.  I knew how, the rules were already inside my mind, and I understood them well.  It wasn't important to pay attention to them at all.  That would take care of itself.  

Ilja's lesson was one that stuck with me, and in graduate school, I found that I often wrote essays that were considered outstanding.  In one case, I wrote a paper discussing the poetry of Walt Whitman for a class on poetic technique and craft which was taught by a professor who was expert in formal verse.  I did not know, until I was seated at the table discussing choice of paper topics on the day the assignment was to be turned in, that the professor was known to abhor Whitman.  I was terrified that I had made a fatal error.

Yet, a week later, when the papers were turned back, the professor was so impressed by my work he insisted I read the paper to the class.  Now, I am certain that paper was one I could never have written using the approaches I had once clung to.  It was a paper that required thinking outside the lines of that format, and it resulted in work that struck a chord even with an already disdainful audience, and that is partly due to the ideas, I would hope, but must also be a result of the approach and reasoning.  In short, I learned to write essays by forgetting all the stuff I thought was significant about writing essays.

Now, I do not mean to say that everything I think I know about writing is wrong, but rather that I am recognizing a need to free myself from constraints in my thinking.  Their are many things I do with intent, but how much of that would be there even if it were just an accident?  The hardest part can be seeing what is or is not needed, and the point becomes accepting that you already know what is important, have absorbed it.  I need to just let go, in some sense, and free myself to write things that I might not have until now, and I am not truly certain what that means yet, but I know it feels important to me that I progress in terms of the work I am doing, that it is time to renew my work in ways I might not have considered before.