I. Today we’re going to talk about something I’ve been avoiding on this blog, and furthermore, in this life: my (other) work.

Hmm. Is that the sound of rubbing hands, the mute silence of a peanut gallery unexpectedly confronting signs of a woeful anti-climax? Well: that’s why I put that word up there in the title bar.

Like that other thing I am (i.e., a feminist) I find that poetry is often the thing that stops the party dead. Probably why I don’t discuss it much– at least, not in my daily life.

Example: To do grocery shopping, I don’t need to distill my fundamental essence to a dubious cashier. But I do need them to apply my coupon. Also, I used to be a cashier. Cashiers hate hearing You On You. They just want you to be accommodating and, well, quick.

Thus, no poetry talk, but much lively discussion regarding the weather.

Now, before I make any more dull self-interested jokes about writing, let me get to the point of this post.Blog readers, as I understand it, are about as patient as cashiers, but far more savvy– you know an errant post when you see one. So here it is.

There is a genuine dissonance between “my” work and, well, work. What’s a writer doing, hocking her wares on the open market, after all?

Whether I like it or not, poems and copywriting-for-pay don’t gel well in the vacuum of idealism. Atwood suggested that writers don’t have employers during her PEN speech. Of course, I disagree: most of us do, in fact. And if our readers (because we have any) are our sole employees in this life, well, what luck– or misfortune, depending.

I have always wanted to resolve this discord. As a writer and as a dedicated professional, I have always wanted to locate a way to level the keel.

Because, here’s my dirty secret: I love to work. I’m passionate about all work. I like to work hard, harder than most people, maybe. Something about the application of oneself to a task is inherently pleasurable to me, some vestige of my Puritan ancestry perhaps, a desire to sublimate most earthly things and create order out of chaos.

I will work hard at anything: smoothing joint compound over mesh tape, crunching numbers, voraciously reading columns in the Business section of the newspaper about “scalability” and “management technique.” I love it all– passionately.

All work is a manner of problem-solving to me, of devising solutions. That is its purpose, at least to me. But I often work harder on “work” than on writing. But it makes no damn sense.

Pretend for a moment you’re my friend, and you’re wondering what I’m up to that day. You might call and ask me, “What are you doing?”

Because I am dissatisfied with sloth, I will probably say either, “I’m doing work,” or “I’m working.”

The first is about something I call work, something to be done, a passive, performative act– there is work, I do it. The other describes my current state of activity. Always when I say the latter I am referring to the work of writing. Always when I say the former I am referring to everything else.

This is a critical syntactical choice which I never thought about until approximately 13 hours ago. That in itself is amazing, the way denial becomes part and parcel of the so-called Writing Life.

We are writers, we choose words, we believe in words, and yet, we’d really rather not discuss it at any great length. I fed myself, in part, on the towering, radical, myth-busting work of Adrienne Rich. I was obsessed with her, obsessed, I could hardly talk my way out of a conversation without quoting either a poem, or an essay, or a letter, or her brilliantly maddening NMA refusal. Still, today, I have more trouble than ever acknowledging my form. We select a form, after all: we do. Or we think it selects us (that’s a philosophical question).

Or maybe that’s exactly why I don’t discuss it much, even on this blog, which purports to be about the business of writing: I’m worried I’m not doing enough. Not writing as if my life depended on it.

“To write as if your life depended on it: to write across the blackboard, putting up there in public words you have dredged, sieved up from dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence–words you have  dreaded and needed in order to know you exist. No, it’s too much; you could be laughed out of school, set upon in the schoolyard, they would wait for you after school, they could expel you. The politics of  the schoolyard, the power of the gang. Or they could ignore you…” (Adrienne Rich)

I had that quote on my wall when I was in high school. I wrote it above my closet with a green permanent marker just high enough that I would have trouble reaching without a ladder, so that I could never undo it easily, in a moment of rage. So that I couldn’t get rid of it, or forget. It was also on a wall that I faced from my bed. I woke up every morning to that threat, that promise.

I did not want to dilute the message with logistics, ballpoint pens, or north-facing light, you see.

II.

More than a decade later, I don’t write on walls in Sharpie anymore. And I hardly talk about my poetry.

I was more radical when I was 16 than I am at (nearly) 26. One could argue that it’s easier to be incensed when you’re 16, especially when you were 16-year-old me, writing surreal poems featuring a talking Betty Crocker and “trussed like a turkey” as a tongue-in-cheek way to refer both to sex and eating disorders. …Yes, I was that girl. Aren’t you glad we didn’t go to high school together?

Yet even as a teenager writing hackneyed poems about eating disorders, I knew that this was a critical, if radical, point of departure for me as a writer and as a person.

I knew that what Rich had to say about poetry (and the women struggling to write it) was important. It was perhaps the most important thing any American woman had said, to my limited knowledge, about women writing poetry after 1950. About women being alive, trying to invent a dialogue – about women writers, surviving.

So why do I find it so difficult to accept the burden– to write as if my life depended on it?

And if I love to work, why can’t I work harder at the work I love most?

Why is that discipline so hard to find, so easy to dismiss?

I think that it’s more difficult for women. Yes, I believe that, in 2010. Absolutely, unequivocally. But I think it’s always difficult for writers. To revisit Margaret Atwood’s speech,

“Writers… are easy prey for the silencers. They don’t have armies. They can but cut out from the herd–they’ve already cut themselves out, by daring to speak – and few in their own countries will be foolhardy enough to defend them.”

You think I’m being cavalier in using this quote to illustrate why I (little old me!) don’t write poems with the same fervor that I hit the pavement running in most other respects, but I’m not. If anything, my willingness to derail my own work is proof that Rich wasn’t so crazy to refuse the NMA. There’s a certain American tradition of denigrating art that’s not useful, a forceful tokenism that serves to reinforce our values of “diversity” without actually examining them.

If individual writers or artists accept this, even “amateurs,” they are silencing themselves.

III.

I’ve been nursing this blog post for weeks, in a somewhat distraught frame of mind, only to discover (thank you, @largeheartedboy on Twitter) that Maud Newton has already answered my question vis-à-vis Philip Larkin.

It’s a little awkward at this stage in the upheaval (!!) to throw in the towel and say, yes, let’s defer to Larkin after my spiel about radicalism and Rich, but gosh darn it, it’s true: those library minutes are very good. Darn good in fact.

But poems? Poems they are not.