Writing Problems: Failure

This is reprinted from December 26, 2020. I am offering it to all subscribers.

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Writing poetry gets more difficult the longer I do it. I confront the blank sheet of paper and have to fill it with—what? Myself? My energy? My thoughts? The longer I do it, the more internal and external pressures I face: to make something better, different, or more interesting. 

I often tell my editorial services clients that “perfection is the enemy of the good.” I tell them we should free ourselves from the voices of ghosts that haunt us in the shadows: teachers, parents, authority figures. We should try to reach the place we were, at 17, that made us write a poem: a beginner’s mind. Nevermind that the poem we write from that place might be “bad”: we will recover some of the freedom we knew before our poetry went to a place of habit, of tedium.

Much of writing is a frustration: am I writing enough? Too much? Am I writing to get in X, Y, or Z magazine? Am I writing to understand something? To express something? For a reader? Who? Have I appropriately confronted myself—and all that I don’t understand—with enough music to make the poems move?

Poetry is neglected or it’s ignored, so it follows that its practitioners feel neglected or ignored. It’s easy to feel like a Barb in a world full of Nancys. Why do we keep doing it? 

I wrote about the seventy-seven rejections I received for Honey and Smoke. Why did I keep sending out the manuscript? Why did I subject myself to this punishment? What made it possible for me to keep going?

Sometimes I felt determined: somewhere out there was a sympathetic editor, and the poems would find them. Sometimes I felt enraged: could no one see how I put my whole life into these poems? Sometimes I felt like sending the manuscript out again and again was a perverse form of productivity: that it might it make up for the sacrifices I’d made to write the poems. Am I a writer if I’m not writing? Am I a writer if I’m not being published? 

“It’s pretty much hell”

As I’ve reached middle age I have learned to be less impatient with failure: my own and that of others. Other writers have understood failure through a range of lenses: personal detriment, lack of discrimination, lack of aggression, or political complacency. 

For Louise Glück, failure is a reprimand. Her attitude is not one of self-compassion—“the well is dry and will replenish itself”—but one of harsh judgment. She thinks she needs to transform from a woman into a poem factory.

Glück has periods of years without producing anything. I find this comforting. But her failure is a silence tinged with abnegation: she should be working harder to make a new poem. I find it more useful to imagine the function of this silence—not writing—as a series of flags on my desk: Be Patient. Let Nothing Escape Your Attention. Use The Silence For Future Poems. Poems Are Possible. Avoid Self-Defeatist Bullshit.

When I’ve had years of silence, I try to refocus my attention into other forms of writing: essays, reviews, letters, these newsletters. What Glück might really be saying is that a mature life in poetry tolerates silence; accepts it without knowing if another poem will come. To become a poem factory is to become a monster. 

“I ought never to have written it”

On October 17, 1963, speaking at the memorial for Louis MacNeice, W. H. Auden had the insight that failure doesn’t happen enough. We must live with the poems we wrote that didn't need to be written.

If you end up making poems in the category of “I needn’t have” it’s fine: bad poems disappear after a little while. And anyway, as E. L. Doctorow reminds us, failure is one of the hazards of a writer’s life.

“they are non-aggressive”

Agnes Martin’s paintings defy categorization: they don’t reference any external landscape. Rather, they’re about the silent beauty inside the viewer facing the horizon. Martin worries that her success as an artist is tied to the paintings’ failings, as if they’re beings that exist in the world apart from her. Martin saw failure as a corollary to non-aggression; that sensitivity, or the going-into oneself would equal failure because success in art means at least making an attempt at reaching the audience. Her paintings are like an extension of herself—they have non-outgoing personalities:

It’s embarrassing to look back on some poems that exist on their own for years when your techniques, concerns, and attentions are now completely different. This is why it’s important to think of writing as a process—a verb—and not as a product.

Another form of failure: the failure to speak the necessary truth.

In 1799, William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived at Dove Cottage in England’s Lake District. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his family lived nearby. Wordsworth wrote “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” at Dove Cottage, but Coleridge urged Wordsworth to write for people who “are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness.”

I don’t think any of these views are adequate. Poems begin with listening. Poetry expresses what can’t be said, or what can’t be expressed at all. No language exists to say what needs to said about the essential experiences of being human: love, grief, anger, or lust. Poems are for these inexpressibles, and this failure to express is the key to making poems.

Samuel Beckett, 1960:

Poems cannot be paraphrased and no part of them can be changed: a poem is a complete experience. Failure is personal to every poet and it is one of poets’ most overlooked problems. Note how many reams of listicles there are about success: how to get published, how to apply for awards, how to get into MFA programs, and so on. What about how to fail?

My definition of failure has changed at different points in my life. One of my teachers, Carol Frost, said if you ever receive any criticism that’s greater than that which you’d give yourself, you’re in the wrong business. At the time, I thought: Yes. I need to be ruthless. Burn the poems that aren’t working! Push harder!

I used to think of failure as a zero-sum game—I told myself: keep writing, keep publishing, keep bringing readers, keep applying for things, keep submitting.

Now, I feel comfortable if multiple years go by where I don’t make poems, or make notes for poems, or write anything at all. I’m not interested in what I’ve already written; I’m only interested in the poem I’ll write next.

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For further reading:

Alter, Alexandra. “‘I Was Unprepared’: Louise Glück on Poetry, Aging and a Surprise Nobel Prize.” New York Times, Oct. 8, 2020.

Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 3, 1957-1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. [Buy at Bookshop]

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Letter to William Wordsworth, No. 290, September 10, 1799.

Martin, Agnes. Letter from Agnes Martin to Pace Gallery founder Arnold Glimcher.

Plimton, George. “E. L. Doctorow, The Art of Fiction No. 94” Paris Review, Issue 101, Winter 1986.

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PROMPTS

These are three prompts to consider failure more purposefully in writing poems.

• Look back at the last four pieces you wrote. What risks did you take? Where did you risk failure?

• Look back on the past year. What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve done as a writer?

• Make an inventory failures. Take a suitably large number—36 will do—and keep searching your experience for failures. You might see how each of your failures were connected to some new form of freedom.

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About Sean Singer 

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