7: How to sing in these dark times
Hot tips for those facing imposter syndrome, creative blocks, and/or ill-fated laptops
During these days,
I would wake up and my head would hurt
and then I would realize that in my dream
I had said to myself that I should write some poetry.
But my dreams never explained to me why.
Or how.
How to sing in these dark times?
- Juliana Spahr, excerpt from “Will There Be Singing”
The initial shot of pride I felt when I learned I was one of six poets accepted to the University of Montana’s MFA Program was immediately chased by a sense of shame and, more specifically, imposter syndrome. I had written only one fully-fledged poem in ten months after graduating from college. Yes, I had recently completed a 30-page poetry manuscript as part of my senior thesis that carried me through the application process and to this conflicted feeling of simultaneous validation and embarrassment. But that collection of poems was the culmination of years of consistently showing up for myself and my writing—of actively integrating poetry into the structure of my life. I felt so separate from the version of me that once stole time to write whenever I could.
I used to write pages upon pages of poem fragments while working at the Chazen Museum of Art, trysting with my notebook while I repatriated countless manila folders in the filing room and performed data entry on the endlessly inspiring museum collection. I would trawl Wikipedia on my quiet overnight shifts in the UW-Madison residence halls, taking down information on concepts like biophilia or moral disengagement—things I wanted to investigate through my writing. I wrote poems in my head after putting in evening hours at my college prep job in the suburbs, wandering through unfamiliar lamplit neighborhoods while waiting for the bus. Poetry used to complement my busy lifestyle, serving as a constant outlet for the attention I paid to the world around me and for the mindful externalization of my feelings. It underscored everything I did, and that fact provided me relief. But somehow, after years of sustained productivity and fulfillment, it seemed I wanted nothing more than to avoid engaging with the work I once loved.
Summiting this new poetic peak—accepting an offer to study for an MFA—required me to seriously reappraise myself and my writerly habits (or current lack thereof). What had changed? What had severed me from my creativity? How could I continue to call myself a poet when my output was next to nonexistent? How could I commit to multiple years of life focused on serious dedication to writing when I hadn’t written anything for nearly a year?
As previously covered in this newsletter, COVID set in and I decided to defer my acceptance, exempting me from having to fully face this loss of writerly direction. While this is also well-trodden ground, it is worth noting that the dark reality of living through a global pandemic—of witnessing illness, loss, strain on essential workers, and recklessly squandered governmental leadership day after day—compounded the toll already taken on my creative faculties. And I was not alone. In the early days of our near-nationwide lockdown, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs blew up on Twitter. Kind strangers reminded other kind (and downtrodden) strangers that self-actualization, including achieving one’s full potential and creative output, was largely inaccessible in these unprecedented times. With many aspects of daily life either on pause or wholly destabilized, only our basic needs were being met. Beyond this, making art about our current collective situation seemed depressing, out-of-touch, and impossible all at once—but so did making art that pretended away the present, creating a false reality of normalcy that no longer existed. Each route felt so overwhelmingly wrong that I—and undoubtedly many others—made hardly anything at all.
The summer passed in a haze of me wanting to externalize my thoughts but feeling ill-equipped to do so. Finally, on the last day of September, I hit a limit. On a whim, I wrote out everything I was feeling and shared those feelings with my tiny corner of the Instagram world:
i’ve been at a standstill with my writing since i graduated. i don’t know if it’s burnout/self-preservation/fear, but i’ve been avoiding writing or studying poetry for longer than ever before in the past 5 years i’ve been at it. idk what the purpose of this post is beyond the externalization of this dry spell for myself and maybe for anyone else who might also be goin thru it right now creatively or w/e—something that’s definitely compounded by everything going on in the world. it’s just weird to not have access to this part of yourself that was once so active. i just have to remind myself that i know how to do the thing by doing said thing. trying to remember that it’s all muscle memory—you’re still in there, just dormant until you decide not to be! as of now, i plan on forcing myself to do the damn thing daily. hoping discussing my writerly shame publicly will force me to hold myself accountable lol. here goes!
For whatever reason, this little self-exorcism worked. Openly acknowledging my inability to be poetic to whoever would listen became a watershed moment—one that culminated in a month and a half of renewed creative consistency. I worked hard to uplift that past version of myself, learning from her mistakes and establishing new habits to help her achieve her goals. By early November, I had a wealth of poem fragments to work with, multiple strong starts under my belt, and even a few full-length poems that were both finished and something to be proud of. Even though my path back to poetry was more regimented, I felt closer to my younger self—the girl with ink-stained hands that hid spiral notebooks in art museum filing cabinets because she couldn’t go one shift without needing to write something down. I felt more like myself again. I could call myself a poet once more and believe it.
Enter Jankerson (christened by Anna herself), my electric blue HP Stream laptop with only 4 GB of RAM. I had purchased Jankerson for about $200, fully aware he was janky from the jump. HP really outdid themselves and created such a low-memory Frankenstein of a laptop that it didn’t have enough capacity for required Windows 10 updates even in the early days, when I hadn’t saved much of anything at all. Anyway, my intention was to study abroad with a lightweight laptop that, if stolen, wouldn’t wreck me financially. Given that he was never stolen, I utilized Jankerson as a glorified word processor for the next three years. He didn’t possess enough storage to do hardly anything beyond play host to Microsoft Word and the documents I produced with it. This was fine with me, but my schoolwork, job applications, and creative writing ultimately began choking Jankerson up over time. I am strangely averse to using ~The Cloud~ in all its manifestations, preferring to keep my files local. Jankerson protested this illogical habit of mine in his (spoiler!) final days, crying “low disk space” whenever possible. I acquiesced, moved nonessential files to Google Drive and OneDrive, and he seemingly returned to his lowly existence of just scraping by.
After a weekend at a cabin with my best friends, I returned to find Jankerson dead. He had mysteriously succumbed to the Black Screen of Death in my absence. Cause of death: Error 3F0, aka “Boot Device Not Found: Please install an operating system on your hard disk.” And he had potentially taken all of my new poems—poems I had neglected to give over to ~The Cloud~ due to my misplaced trust in him—down with him. I tried to stay calm, walking myself through BIOS resets and other at-home fixes before I admitted to myself that he needed the care of a professional. The next day, I brought him to a local device repair shop that will remain nameless. A computer technician did everything he could to revive Jankerson, but his prognosis was grim: he was lost and so were all of my files. I had tried to stay positive up until the end, but the realization that I had just lost all of the hard-won fruits of my labor—and the carefully distilled memories they contained—was overwhelming. I fought back tears as the technician made the truly wild decision to try to hit on me while I was at this incredibly low personal point. But hey, at least he didn’t charge me for his time. I left with the corpse of Jankerson in tow, devastated by this turn of events and unsettled by male audacity. I cried all the way home—and for the rest of the day, if I’m being honest. It was the ultimate L atop a dogpile of so many other Ls. I had lost a significant portion of my life’s work (all of my new work, poems I had written while abroad, and even portions of my thesis), and much of it could not be replaced unless I could somehow cobble it together from memory. I felt incredibly, incredibly low.
With the support of friends and family, though, I pulled myself together enough to continue pestering local computer repair businesses until they referred me to data recovery services. I ended up sending Jankerson to a lab in Ohio that felt confident they could extract my data from the integrated hard drive chip soldered to the motherboard (thank you, HP, for the nontraditional, inaccessible, dysfunctional hard drive). They gave me a quote of over $1,200 upon successful completion, and I was luckily able to negotiate the price down to $600 by allowing them to complete the extraction in whatever time frame worked best for them. It hurts that I will be paying three times Jankerson’s worth just to salvage files that I could have saved myself if I had used ~The Cloud~ like a normal responsible adult. But I would much rather have hope that everything I worked toward over the past month (and long before it) is not lost. I am taking the hit because I can’t take any more hits this year.
So here I am, a writer once redeemed and now shaken. I fought my way back to creative fulfillment and productivity only for the rug to be pulled out from under me. In the past few weeks, I retreated from my writing as I recovered from the mindset that all was lost and took actionable steps toward solutions I didn’t know existed. Despite being steady on my feet once again, starting to write—to foster and give myself over to creativity—feels a bit insurmountable and scary. As such, I’m retracing my steps. I am once again self-exorcising, externalizing my thoughts and feelings to those who will listen, and renewing the process of holding myself accountable. While I wait indefinitely for my poems to find their way back to me (come through, Ohioans), I am reminding myself of the ways in which I rediscovered and sustained the poet in me in the hopes of resuscitating her once again.
If you’re a creative being who has felt stunted by the hellishness that is 2020, I hope this list of practices and habits can serve to resonate with you or give you some ideas for how to unearth that part of yourself as well. My suggestions will be oriented toward poets and writers for obvious reasons, but many can be translated or applied to other forms of creative work. Anyway, here’s what has worked for me so far:
Acknowledging what isn’t working (aside from you, ha-ha). You can do this as publicly or privately as you like—whatever speaks to you. Just ensure you do your best to come to terms with the mindsets and habits that have been failing you so far and make a concrete plan to move beyond them.
Holding yourself accountable. Again, public self-shaming is not for everyone. Aside from that option, I found that utilizing a planner or a digital task list and including a daily task as open-ended as “write” does the trick. It is hard to fail to “write” once a day: “write” could mean journaling, recording a few bulleted observations, or taking a crack at a poem. Keeping these tasks consistent yet simple affords you more space for successful completion as well as flexibility, encouraging you to write every day in whatever form you can. It is better to hold yourself to writing something, no matter how fragmented or small, than nothing at all. The small and fragmented pieces will eventually create a whole.
Keeping a notebook of observations (yes, your Notes app counts). I cannot recommend this enough if you’re a writer. Take the time to jot down things you notice as you make your way through the world each day, if at all possible. Things that strike you as odd, moving, beautiful, ugly, depressing, or indescribable are best. These become the things that I refer to as poem fragments, and they can combine to serve as effective imagery in whatever you end up writing. Some of my examples from this year: “measuring time in footfalls, in lungfuls of borrowed air,” “yellow plumage overhead, feathering the sky in canary,” “sumac ablaze, flames licking at nearly every roadside,” “a house emptied of its memories,” and “crying to Radiohead in the Delano American Legion parking lot.” The range. I highly recommend the pocket-sized Moleskine cahiers with paper covers that come in sets for this purpose.
Putting words down regardless of quality. Once you start to write, remember that your first draft shouldn’t be your final draft. The words you use and the concepts you try to convey should be far from perfect when you begin. Wade your way through the darkness of your first attempt, either tinkering as you go or analyzing and altering the stanza or paragraph as a whole once it’s tentatively complete. A few helpful thoughts from Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott: “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper” and “The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. […] Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means.”
Leaning into the fever. If you’re feeling enticed to write or you’re in the process of writing toward what feels like a sweet spot, do not take your foot off the gas! Follow that impulse to its end! I’ve written my best poems when (for better or worse) I’m ignoring all of my other responsibilities to write while my hands are hot for as long as I can. Really give yourself over to wherever your mind is taking you and follow through until the feeling is gone or you exhaust yourself or you can’t ignore life and its trappings any longer without incurring some personal cost—whichever comes first.
Remembering that all reading is practice writing. Every time you read poems, stories, essays, or novels, you’re effectively becoming a better writer. Each work you read constitutes an opportunity to either consciously or subconsciously reflect on your own writing in comparison to the writing you’re taking in. Reading across a variety of genres and styles can really open your mind to the possibilities when it comes to craft and content. Personally, I have always found more inspiration for my poetry when reading fiction and nonfiction, for whatever reason. Don’t box yourself in and do read consistently, especially when you feel a little burnt out with your writing. It’s the best way to stay productive and spark inspiration in the face of burnout.
Reading, watching, and listening to things that make you want to write. This one is pretty self-explanatory. I would just suggest that you try to tease out and understand the components that excite you about these works. This will help you to more easily identify the work you want to create yourself and potentially begin the process. Content across multiple mediums that made me want to take pen to paper this year: Punisher (album, Phoebe Bridgers), I’m Thinking of Ending Things (film, Charlie Kaufman), Yes, God, Yes (film, Karen Maine), Columbus (film, Kogonada), Writers & Lovers (novel, Lily King), The Diving Pool (novella, Yoko Ogawa), and Strike Sparks (poetry collection, Sharon Olds).
Seeking out online spaces that consistently put you in contact with good writing. A good place to start is subscribing to the Academy of American Poets’s Poem-a-Day series and Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day series, features that send new and old poems to your email inbox daily for free. Following poets like Ilya Kaminsky (@ilya_poet) who consistently share quotes from poems and promote other poets’ work on Twitter can open you up to a wide range of new voices. I have found myself back on Tumblr as of late, which is (surprisingly) my top recommendation for finding high quality contemporary and classical writing. It actually led me to the Juliana Spahr poem that has guided this entire piece—contact me for details on who I follow if you’re interested. Finally, I recommend following the Academy of American Poets and Poetry Foundation on Instagram as well as artist Michael Dumontier, who runs my absolute favorite Instagram account: @stoppingoffplace—a curated collection of old photographs, book pages and inscriptions, found paper, and fantastic samples of typography.
Surrounding yourself with other writers and appreciators of good writing. Yes, yes. Self-explanatory. But also a nice place for me to give a shoutout to the people in my life who field literary opportunities my way, allow me to look over their screenplays, brainstorm creative projects with me, send me fantastic recommendations via DM and books through the mail, and text me screenshots of poems and pictures of especially highlightable lines. You guys keep me writing—and writing well.
Sharing your work and receiving feedback. Your work deserves an audience, and that chosen audience—large or small—can help you to make your work better. Get over yourself and your fears, share your work (and a new side of yourself!) with people you trust, and grow both as a writer and person.
Backing up your writing on ~The Cloud~ or else you’ll regret it :(
I hope these hot tips go down smooth. Let me know if you have any of your own. For now, I’ll leave you with the quotes that have inspired me to sing in these dark times.
Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
- Louise Glück
Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish—to let others vanish—without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art.
- Edward Hirsch, from How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry
I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky. Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief. The thing that I’ve found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing. Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, ‘You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.’
- Ada Limón, interviewed by Lauren LeBlanc for BOMB Magazine
Podcast But Outside. It does exactly what it says on the tin: it is a weekly podcast that is always filmed and recorded outside, where comedians Andrew Michaan and Cole Hersch interview any stranger that is willing to sit down and talk to them about any topic. The vibe is like an especially chaotic, low-budget, live action version of Humans of New York. Viewers have the option to consume the podcast traditionally by listening on any given platform, but its visual format on YouTube adds so much. Beyond Andrew and Cole’s comedic chemistry and expertly lowkey passive-aggression (some guests truly suck), the editing of each video brings the laughs home. I’m talking needlessly bad sound effects, carefully placed facial zooms, unnecessary “counts” of unrelated things happening in the background, and images that serve as ~visual aids~ for what guests are saying but are incredibly tangential and unhinged. A smattering of episodes that might pique your interest: Podcast But At A Trump Rally, Podcast But At Da Club (Simply Chaotic), We Invited Tinder Dates To Meet Us On The Podcast For The First Time, Podcast But At A Stranger’s Wedding, Podcast But Outside Olive Garden, and Podcast But Outside Spirit Halloween.
The Queen’s Gambit. Yes, I watched the one and only show about an orphaned chess prodigy. I’ve loved Anya Taylor-Joy in everything I’ve ever seen her in, and this was no exception. I binged this in a day, and I specifically thought that its humanizing representation of Russians—something not often found in Cold War period dramas—was incredibly refreshing and moving.
“The Specialist’s Hat,” a short story by Kelly Link. I originally read this short story in my one and only fiction workshop in undergrad, and it has stayed with me ever since. I revisited the piece after recommending it to a friend, and it hit just as hard as it did the first time around. It’s a spooky story (though one imbued with childlike wonder) about living in a haunted house while being haunted by loss—a truly unique reading experience.
My Spotify 2020 Wrapped! This year, I listened to 1,620 artists, 474 genres, a majority of 2000s music, and was in the top 2% of Phoebe Bridgers’s listeners. Now everyone can know the extent to which I listened to Punisher excessively.
Ok, I am late to the party in reading all of your newsletters but I need to know if the Ohioans recovered your poetry! I choked up reading it : (