the deepening ground

Sometimes I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be a poet or how to compose songs. In the silence that seems like writer’s block, those critical internal voices grow deafening. For example, since early October, I’ve been trying to wrestle my thoughts into a sonnet. That otherworldly rattling call of the Sandhill Cranes crossing overhead stopped me in my tracks as I left home to proctor the SATs early one Saturday morning. The sonnet is stalled at nine lines, and the cranes have yet to appear (they were planned for the final rhymed couplet).

But last night, I let go of the sonnet form to embrace the cinquain as imagined by Adelaide Crapsey, and a triptych of cinquains emerged far more naturally over the course of my lunch. I had forgotten the simple truth shared in Berry’s poem, which I accidentally stumbled upon tonight (though I know I’ve heard it before). I had forgotten that the seeming silence of writer’s block is actually an invitation to “[s]it down. Be quiet” and then, “[a]ccept what comes from silence” and offer that back in “the little words that come” (a fitting phrase for a cinquain – see my next post) — the poem that is a prayer.

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How to be a Poet
by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i   

Make a place to sit down.   
Sit down. Be quiet.   
You must depend upon   
affection, reading, knowledge,   
skill—more of each   
than you have—inspiration,   
work, growing older, patience,   
for patience joins time   
to eternity. Any readers   
who like your poems,   
doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   
the unconditioned air.   
Shun electric wire.   
Communicate slowly. Live   
a three-dimensioned life;   
stay away from screens.   
Stay away from anything   
that obscures the place it is in.   
There are no unsacred places;   
there are only sacred places   
and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   
Make the best you can of it.   
Of the little words that come   
out of the silence, like prayers   
prayed back to the one who prays,   
make a poem that does not disturb   
the silence from which it came.

From Poetry (January 2001)