My third poetry book, EMU BLIS, BUMS LIE, BLUE-ISM, is at the printer — arriving in February. In the meantime, I’m tying myself in useless knots thinking about where I go next. I have a couple projects in progress, which is nice. But without strict deadlines, it’s hard to find my daily focus.
I think, for may writers, these in-between times can be fraught with matters of doubt, anxiety, worth, and so on — until the next project takes hold and all is fine again. Reading a collection of essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, American Originality, I came upon her reflections on being an artist.
In “The Cult of Healing” essay, she writes:
“The artist’s experience of his own work alternates panic and gratitude. What is constant, what seems to me the source of resilience (or fortitude), is the capacity of intense, driven absorption. Such absorption makes a kind of intermission from the self; it derives, in the artist, from a deep belief in the importance of art (though not necessarily his own art, except in the presence of it being made). At intervals throughout his life, the artist is taken out of that life by concentration; he lives for a time in a suspension that is also a quest, a respite that is also acute tension.”
Gendered generalized artist aside, Glück basically nails it, I think.