Why I Write

Let's be honest.  Poetry is a hobby to me, an important hobby, but a hobby nonetheless.  It's not putting food on the table and I have no illusions about my stature or talent, except perhaps for the illusion that I have no illusions.  I'm good at it.  I publish and can probably continue to publish.  Beyond that, who knows?  I'm probably not the worst poet in America, and certainly not the best (whatever that means).  I am neither convinced of my own "genius" nor of my own "immortality".

The question then is why I write at all.  Why one writes at all.  I mean, why bother?  If one is not convinced that one is contributing in an essential way to culture or humanity, what is one doing and why is one doing it? I have always written.  I started writing in Third Grade and haven't stopped.  That may be a complete answer, but still an evasion.

It may simply come down to a combination of laziness and stubbornness.  Really.  Writing, I think, is a kind of shortcut to life.  It takes this complex impossible task, living, and reduces it to two-dimensions.  That is, it provides substitute aesthetic satisfactions for the hard-won real satisfactions of life.  I can only speak for myself, but I have no desire to "get ahead" in life.  None.  Writing is a way of getting ahead OF life without getting ahead IN life.  An odd use of one's time, if you ask me.  It is, in many ways, of course, self-contained.  Its rewards, for me, nonetheless, are spiritual, in a very broad sense of that word.  Writing is an exploratory experience which also allows me to confirm my basic ideas about who I am and what's important to me.

Don't get me wrong.  I like clean sheets and hot meals and paid bills.  I have had periods in my life when I didn't have any of those things and I don't romanticize that insecurity.  I'm just saying that, if that is all there is or if getting more of those things than someone else is all there is, I'm not extremely motivated to get out of bed.  I am lazy and unambitious in that way.  I don't care so much.  Perhaps, for this reason, I will never be a "successful" writer.

I like the pretend world better.  The world of music and words and ideas.  The world of synthesizing all those things into something I call a poem.

The stubbornness?  Persisting despite constant discouragement, disappointment and doubt.  Somehow, at an early age, I came to believe that writing is important, and despite the evidence of reality, I won't let go of that ideal.  Pure stubbornness and laziness.