It’s been a while since I’ve written a new poem. While I was at AWP I wrote a 27 word ode to sexy-man Mark Wahlberg, but other than that, nary a poem since October when I wrote a “this happened then this happened” short super-realist poem. Last summer I wrote a five-page miscarriage poem and a short anti-Bush poem inspired in part by the Wave Books Poetry Bus. Nothing last Spring. Two poems in Fall of 2006. Six poems in a year and a half, including my Mark Wahlberg masterpiece. Not nothing, but not much either.

When I was at Iowa I was tortured by what I considered my low productivity. In retrospect this was pretty crazy. I was writing up a storm. Once, during a thesis conference, Jorie Graham suggested I keep a calendar for new poems. The idea was that by marking down when I wrote a poem, I’d see, at the end of the semester or the end of the month, that I was doing just fine. I explained to Jorie that having just written a poem made me feel just-right with the world. It didn’t even matter if the poem was good. It was like a chemical change in my brain that set things right for me. But, soon after finishing a poem, the just-right feeling dissipated, then vanished, leaving me bereft. Any consideration of poems I’d already written did nothing to console me. None of the poems I’d already written mattered; it was as if I’d never written before. “How long does the just-right feeling last?” Jorie asked. “About a week,” I said. “You’re lucky,” she said and went on to explain that as I progressed as a writer it was likely that the feeling would disappear more and more quickly.
Prediction or curse, it has come to pass. I’m lucky if the just-right (just-wrote) feeling lasts for a day. On the other hand, I’ve come to (or had to) tolerate longer and longer stretches of no writing.
Perhaps my teaching job is to blame? It certainly doesn’t help. Perhaps it’s the two-kids-and- one-on the way? Or is it, as my artist mother-in-law sometimes says, “the tide goes out and the tide comes in”—just low tide?
I was explaining to my friend, Nathan Englander (look for his amazing novel, The Ministry of Special Cases due out in a few weeks) that writing is similar to what I imagine having a heroine addiction is like. I go to the writing place and get high but each time the high is over faster and after a while I need to go to the writing place just to get normal. Everything else seems pretty low. Nathan agreed but also pointed out that writing, like exercise, is one of the easiest addictions to break. After all, it’s easy to stop and absurdly hard to start. True.
A week ago I was talking to friend and poet Arielle Greenberg and she said she’d written a bunch of poems at AWP and that going home to her family and her teaching job was hard because the taste of writing again made her want more. I tried to listen compassionately—I understood the feeling all too well—but it was hard to hear her over the din of jealousy pounding through me—a “bunch of poems”?!
That night I had a dream. A series of dreams or, more accurately, the same dream over and over.
First some background: In college I took as many photography classes as I could and, under the direction of the fabulous Lois Conner*, began working in a large format. The 8 x 10 Deardorff is a beautiful instrument. It’s a box camera—the lens fits on the front, a bellows attaches the front plate to the back of the camera, which has a ground glass and a slot for inserting a film holder. Making a photograph with a large format camera is not like taking a snapshot. You have to mount the camera onto a heavy tripod, unhinge the front plate, attach the lens, focus by increasing and decreasing the distance between the front and back plates (this can only be done while standing behind the camera under a drop cloth otherwise you can’t see anything). Composing and focusing is difficult until you get used to the fact what you see through the ground glass is the world upside down and backwards—the camera has no internal mirrors. Then, you have to take a meter reading to determine the right light exposure. Then you set the lens to the appropriate aperture and close it all the way down. Then you take a film holder (each holder has two sheets of film a that are 8×10 inches) and insert the holder into the back of the camera. Now you can’t see through the camera, even with the drop cloth, and in a way, you’re shooting blind. Then remove the slide between the film holder and the lens, trip the lens with a cable release, which will expose the film (most of the time you need an exposure of at least a few seconds). Carefully replace the slide into the film holder. Now, you have exposed one piece of film.
*(A Favorite Lois Conner image:)
Later you will take your day’s worth of shooting (for me this was usually 12 sheets of film) back to the darkroom. In total darkness you will manually rotate the sheets of film in a chemical bath—slide the bottom sheet to the top, slide the bottom sheet to top—being careful not to scratch the film and minding the time, temperature, dilution, and speed of agitation (all of which will affect the processing). If any of your exposures come out right you can try printing the images. I made contact prints; there was no enlarger big enough to print an 8 X 10 negative. In semi-darkness you put the negative and photographic paper together in a homemade, carefully cleaned and dusted press. Expose the press to light. Then, process the paper in semi-darkness. If you do all of this right, the result is a photographic print that has a purity you can’t mimic with other photographic processes. There is a level of detail, of texture—it’s a bit like seeing something beautiful out of a window and then going outside. The photograph is the beautiful view out the window; the large format photograph is what you see when you go outside. (Sometimes what you really see outside is less “real” looking than the large format photograph.) Like a scrim has been removed. When you get it right it’s magical; but it’s certainly not a spontaneous process and not well-suited to those who crave instant gratification.
Getting back to my dream. It was highly detailed, vivid dream in which I was out making photos with my 8 x 10 Deardorff. In real life I haven’t exposed a piece of sheet film since 1995 when I took portraits of everyone in my MFA class at Iowa. In the dream I remembered just what to do. It was all familiar: the heft of the camera, the feeling of the textured metal focus screws, the slight ache in my back as I carefully checked the edges of the ground glass and readjusted the composition, the stuffiness of standing and concentrating under the black drop cloth. Setting up took a long time. I didn’t rush; I worked carefully. Then, just when I had everything just so, I reached for a film holder and found nothing. No film holders. No film.
Then, as sometimes happens in dreams, the scene would rewind. I would set up all over again in a different location. Over and over I’d set up and find myself without film. All night long.
I believe the dream is offering me a new metaphor to understand where I am. I haven’t quite parsed it all out, but it goes something like this: you’ve got the time, you’ve got inclination, you know how to work the mechanism, and these are the kind of images—achingly real to behold but highly artificial and deliberate in the process they require—but, you don’t have a single piece of film. And if you don’t have film all you’ve got at the end of the day (or night) is a sore back.

03.24.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 11:13 am and is filed under Poems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.