by Shannon Hardwick

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
-Muriel Rukeyser

I strongly dislike the word “career” when describing the writing life and yet my first impulse, my first sentence, when starting this article, was to say: I’ve found in my career as I writer that I tend to come back to the above quote by Rukeyser. And yes, it’s true. I very often return to her words. I pace back and forth in front of my bookshelf and reach for a book that might calm my nerves, my anxiety, in one of the many seasons of writer’s block and general feeling of failure in my “career” as a poet.

But the word career sounds so important, doesn’t it? It stands to justify the Western drive to “be someone.”  It’s not enough to write on the side. We have careers. We get published. And if we don’t get published, we fret. And worry. And compare. What are we afraid of?

Of course, it didn’t always used to be this way. In fact, I’m inclined to say that it really, really shouldn’t be this way, especially not when it comes to the art of writing.  Another quote that I often return to comes from an interview by one of my mentors, the poet Marie Howe, in BOMB Magazine, Issue #61, Fall 1997. She describes an alternative way of looking at one’s career as a writer, one that abolishes the very word “career.” When asked if she reads the reviews on her work, she stated:

…[I] it’s not my business as a poet to know what others think. I’d rather live life and write the next poem. It has nothing to do with my work. I think poetry is a vocation, not a career.”

To live life and write the next poem may sound easy. To shake off the stigma of the competitiveness of a career and call one’s vocation into being may seem liberating. But I don’t think Howe meant to imply this nor do I think either is easy or liberating.

The fear of poetry. What did Rukeyser mean when she said this? Why fear a couple lines of a poem as a reader? And for that matter, why fear writing poetry? Or not writing poetry? There are numerous reasons. Rukeyser answers with the fear of our reality. Our inner reality. Where poetry dares, or at least should dare, to go. To illuminate the unknown spaces within and without.

The poet and writer, Stephanie Dorwick wrote in her book, In the Company of Rilke: “Readers who cling too closely to the familiar cannot willingly be thrown into the air with no idea of where they will land.” This is true equally of both reader and writers of poetry.

We must shake off the familiar, the safe, in order to engage with poetry. Poetry is not a failsafe career, nor is it meant to be. It is meant to inspire, to challenge, to wake us up and tune us into the deeper truths of our existence.

It is not easy. Between the daily grind and the challenges, both of physical life and emotional life, sometimes it’s difficult to get “checked in.” We race from job to job, obligation to obligation, only to collapse in bed or in front of the TV. But what’s lying just beneath the surface? Who are we becoming—to ourselves and to our neighbor? These can often be frightening paths to walk. I believe one of poetry’s objectives is to light those paths, if only we are brave enough to face them.

The reader and the writer are more intimately connected than we think. Both are asked to put down the dishes and forget the career, if only for a moment, and purposefully wander, purposefully go into the deeper spaces of the unknown and the contradictory. Dowrick writes:

Intensity and intimacy are the characteristics of poetry […] The excitement of extreme tensions […] between the visible and the hidden; […] between what is highly engaged and what is oddly distancing. Most crucially, these tensions exist not to be resolved or appeased, but to be experienced. This demands a certain kind of surrender.

I love this quote and the idea of surrender. Surrender: to face poetry head on as a reader or a writer. To approach the work anticipating a challenge, whether the challenge is delving into a poem and conversing with what is found there, or choosing to make the work a vocation and, in times of drought, of writer’s block, to face even the silence in surrender. But, maybe a little fear is necessary. Maybe we should feel fear as deeply as the call to conquer it, to know the poem, to know why we are afraid. ~BE
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Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick graduated with her Masters in Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in 2010. She recently completed her first full-length manuscript of essays and poetry and has a chapbook in print. Some of her work has been featured or is upcoming in magazines in the US and UK, including: 3:AM Magazine, Night Train, Sein und Werden, Whale Sound, Sugar House Review, among others. She writes in the deserts of West Texas.