We’re working through Elisa New’s very interesting questions about poetry from the Emily Dickinson Harvard MOOC. The next question is a big boy: “Is poetry a deliberate craft controlled by a maker?”

And here I think Elisa New is asking about how much control we have over our creations, how much of the poem comes from inside us versus how much comes from something outside of us. And this is really a spiritual (and biological) question about where our consciousness begins and ends.

You might believe you are a singular entity, biologically and mentally speaking, or you might believe you are part of a larger system of energy or thought.

I personally am agnostic in pretty much every spiritual sense: not ruling anything out but not fully accepting of any belief system. I’m spirit-curious, as it were. Non-committal. I have commitment issues, religiously speaking. I was raised by one stalwart atheist and one reluctant atheist.

I believe it was the writer Will Storr who said it takes just as much faith to believe in ghosts as it does to not believe in them. And you could pretty much take that perspective to any kind of spiritual dilema.

Anyway, as it pertains to writing and creative thinking, I have had three kinds of experiences around this.

1) Writing with the conscious mind: this includes a conscious effort to brainstorm, organize, draft and edit work.

2) Subconscious accidents and architectures: these are unplanned things that happen but that are traceable back to training, experience, expertise and other subconscious activities happening in your own brain. Sometimes natural, serendipitous connections and subconscious decisions are made with details and architectures.

3) Outside contributions: here is where it gets a bit spiritual. Some writers believe in a real external muse, a mystery or a loved one or maybe input from God or ghost writing. Poet James Merrill believed his content was being provided by a Ouija board in his book The Changing Light at Sandover and poet Jack Spicer was another major poet who believed language was “dictated” to him and he was not “an agent of self-expression.”

This question has prompted me to go back through my own experiences in writing poems (from high school to now) and make a survey of my various “phases.”

High School Phase in St. Louis: this was my first, exploratory, practice of poetry (reams of it!) handwritten in notebooks, a lot of high-school love stuff and play with free association. It’s marked by a lack of training and very little reading of other poetry. And not a lot of thinking about how creativity works.

Undergraduate College Phase in St. Louis: these were my first advanced classes in the explication of literature, my first poetry-writing workshops, the happy discovery of writing mentors/teachers (the first encouragements I received to continue on). I started to meet other poets (amateur and professional), started to read poems (contemporary and the canon). This period was marked by my revolt against the idea of a poems written in a series (no idea why; it seemed pretentious) and embracing metaphorical writing, especially the extended metaphor poem. My word choices became more conscious as I had discovered the magical uses of a thesaurus. All this was firming the muscle of my conscious writing skills.

Graduate School in Yonkers: I was getting continued encouragement and realizing I was wrong about the series-based poem thing. I actually loved doing series work and would continue to do basically that going forward. I was also learning to write narrative poems (the Mars poems) and telling small stories. I was doing more conscious-writing skill-budling.

Post-Grad School in Los Angeles: here I started a deep dive into Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and was developing an interest in telling my family history on my father’s side, having an epiphany of confluence for those two interests while reading Zen and the Art of Falling in Love by Brenda Shoshanna, which eventually resulted in the cowboy book. The family history got dropped and I was practicing more long-form narrative poetry instead. This to me was some unconscious work starting to happen, some happy accidents, integrations and conflux of various separate interests and ideas.

Writing in New Mexico: this period is marked by starting on the NaPoWriMo challenges while I was temping at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. These were yearly explorations in form prompts and series poems on speed. After moving to Albuquerque, I started to take MOOC surveys on the history of American poetry, the final phase being “Electronic Poetry” or digital poetry after which I began exploring browser-based poems.

Now, from the beginning to this point I had never experienced anything like writer’s block on any writing projects except maybe day-job assignments in marketing (which were miserable experiences). For good or bad, I’ve always had plenty to say, a lot of obnoxious opinions. Maybe once in a while I’ve had a problem with a plot point or a spot of rhythm or word choice, usually needing help ordering a series or a book. For spelling and punctuation, I will always need another set of eyes (if I can find them).

But here is where it starts to get weird. For all the NaPoWriMo projects from 2013-2021 and including 2024, the writing was mostly directed  by me. I had complete authority over those poems (in my mind at least). There were some subconscious happy accidents, some parallelism I didn’t consciously intend or a clever plot point that designed itself.

In 2021 I started what turned out to be a two-year project of dictionary poems. This was a project inspired by Lohren Green’s Poetical Dictionary (2003) and I had assumed I’d have complete authority over not only the the containing poems but the words themselves.

I soon found out that I was unable to insist upon any of my own words. If I picked out a word I wanted to use, I would always get writer’s block. This was the first time in my life experiencing a block over anything. What the hell! I could pick as many words as I wanted but poems went nowhere over and over again. There was no rational argument I could make to the mysterious muse.

And it’s not like words just came to me from the outside. That didn’t happen either. I would come up with a few words every few days and a voice (that didn’t seem to be me) would almost nudge me with an encouraging voice telling me that “maybe you should explore that word.” And I would have to wait for that nudge or I couldn’t proceed. So f**king weird. And I had no control over how often words would be sort of “approved” by this voice. How frequently they would come or not come.

At the same time I was working on another series, NaPoWriMo 2022. I was pretty busy doing that and hoping to put the dictionary poems on hiatus. But that month a large bunch of dictionary words came in a fury and I found myself often posting two poems a day, one NaPoWriMo poem and one (or more) dictionary poem. It was crazy-going until I finally appealed to the voice (or whatever it was) to stop sending me dictionary words.

Almost in a huff, the words stopped and they stopped for what seemed like months. Was this myself in a huff with myself?

I can’t characterize much about the voice but it almost seemed to have a gender and an age. But hey, let’s not go there.

For that NaPoWriMo year in 2022, I had a similar but not identical experience with “the voice.” These poems were based on pop and rock songs and I did determine (for the most part) which songs I was going to write about. I also felt I had authority over the hook for each poem and their narrative direction.

The voice (and it did seem like the same voice) appeared only to help me with particular problems. For example, I had a big problem with the poem for the song “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” That poem was a hot mess involving literally a shipwreck. Figuratively, the poem was a wreck itself. I opened up my mind to suggestions from outside of myself and I received back the idea to use Theodor W. Adorno’s famous quote about “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” as a alternative guiding principle for the poem. Big help. Thank you very much.

Similarly, I became stuck with the poem for the song “Could It Be Magic.” I couldn’t get a direction or any traction with it. All I knew was that the poem was half-written and I got very angry every time I worked on it. Why was I getting so angry? Then one day while I was in Cleveland, Ohio, visiting my parents an answer popped into my head like a gift.

It was the song making me feel angry. Incredibly, the response I needed was not only the answer to my question, but it was the answer to the poem and the whole set of poems. It was amazing!

In another section of the set, the muse was completely unhelpful. I had a placeholder song for a poem (and a placeholder story to go with it) that I did not want to use. I wanted to use another song by that artist but I couldn’t yet find it. Also, the story was too enigmatic. It didn’t fit with the other more direct poems in the set. I was blocked again.

I opened up again for help. The voice returned but this time with an adamant no in response. The voice said unequivocally, “this is the song and this is the story you get.”

Well, I couldn’t believe this was true. Surely, open-mindedness would prevail and another song by that artist would come with and new idea, just like it did for those other problematic poems. This artist had many songs, after all, and I had months to prepare. As the day of publication kept getting closer, I felt nervous but never resigned. I kept checking in; the voice kept saying no. This is the song; this is the story. So aggravating! Up until the day of publication, I kept hoping for a new idea and that voice never waivered. To this day, I see that poem like the flaw in the Navajo blanket, the open door that defines the whole set.

I have not experienced either of these experiences since those projects of 2021 to 2023.

And I can’t honestly tell you I even believe in this voice or the idea of an external muse. It’s not very rational and human perspective is so limiting and easily misled. Maybe I just have a very active imagination. Maybe I have a deep, subconscious creativity.

Maybe the longer you practice writing, the more deeply you go into your thinking mechanisms and the weirder that might seem. On the other hand, maybe the longer you practice writing the more you are able to tap into intelligences beyond yourself.

So in answer to this question of whether poetry is a deliberate craft controlled by its maker, I really couldn’t say.