About writing... and not writing

Writing poetry is something I love to do. I just keep not doing it. I put a picture on my computer desktop that was supposed to inspire me. To write, I hoped, wonderful poems, but most of all just to write. It’s a photograph of the view from the window of the studio I worked in last spring on a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I wrote some poems that I was happy with there, looking out at that view, the pasture stretching beyond an old wire fence, the trees beginning to green faintly and cows just out of sight. I thought I would be transported into creativity whenever I looked at that picture.

Well, it hasn’t worked out that way. I always mean to start working the minute I get to my desk. I make resolutions about how I’m going to do that. Instead, I look past the view on my desktop, check my e-mail and what’s on Poetry Daily, peek at a couple of newspaper and blog headlines and follow some interesting links to wherever they lead. When I emerge from Internet quicksand I find--surprise!--it’s an hour later and I’ve accomplished not one thing. Time suck is such a perfect, if inelegant, description. You can just hear that down-the-drain sound. Shlooop. Time gone. It’s not writer’s block--it’s just not writing.

I have a great quote by poet Jane Hirshfield tacked up above my desk: “If I don’t create the time to write, day after day will just slip by. The poems won’t get written and I won’t have lived the life I most want to live.”

The life I most want to live. That’s exactly the point for me. I suspect the world is not holding its breath waiting for my poems. But writing them is how I most want to live my life. So why don’t I get to it? Why don’t I do what I most want to do, what I feel exhilarated having done? What holds me back? And, since I’m guessing I’m not alone here, what holds you back? Besides reading this blog, which I’m glad you’re doing. A question to think about.