Poetry and the Creative Process

Poetry Recommendation: “What Use Is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around” by Kaveh Akbar

Retrieved from The New Yorker.

What use is knowing anything if no one is around
to watch you know it? Plants reinvent sugar daily
and hardly anyone applauds. Once as a boy I sat
in a corner covering my ears, singing Quranic verse

after Quranic verse. Each syllable was perfect, but only
the lonely rumble in my head gave praise. This is why
we put mirrors in birdcages, why we turn on lamps

to double our shadows. I love my body more
than other bodies. When I sleep next to a man, he becomes
an extension of my own brilliance. Or rather, he becomes
an echo of my own anticlimax. I was delivered

from dying like a gift card sent in lieu of a pound
of flesh. My escape was mundane, voidable. Now
I feed faith to faith, suffer human noise, complain
about this or that heartache. The spirit lives in between

the parts of a name. It is vulnerable only to silence
and forgetting. I am vulnerable to hammers, fire,
and any number of poisons. The dream, then: to erupt
into a sturdier form, like a wild lotus bursting into

its tantrum of blades. There has always been a swarm
of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now,
I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds

of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are
arranging their plans like worms preparing
to rise through the soil. They are ready to die
with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.

One thing I love about poetry is its honesty about the human mind. Minds are weird (though I’m sure you already know that). They are wired for making meaning, but do so in odd, specific ways. How is X like Y? How am I a part of the world, and how is the world a part of me? We even have a tendency, called apophenia, to see patterns in information that is inherently meaningless. A specific form of this is pareidolia, in which we tend to see human faces in things that are faceless. Think: the man in the moon.

So we’re always making connections, whether consciously or unconsciously. (Enter literary devices like similes and metaphors.) Kaveh Akbar’s poem is a great example of this meaning-making tendency. Take note of the subtle, evolving comparisons the speaker makes in relation to the outside world: unspoken knowledge is unapplauded like a plant’s photosynthesis; our desire to be seen manifests itself in the mirrors in birdcages, the doubling of our shadows. And, when the speaker sleeps next to a man, the man becomes an extension of the speaker.

There’s a frayed thread of loneliness connecting these images together, and a keen awareness of the borders of the self, the desire to dissolve those borders, our inability to do so. Even when the speaker isn’t directly saying “I am like X,” this desire to see the self in everything else feels embedded in the work.

But then there’s this sudden transition, marked by an expertly jarring stanza break: “I was delivered // from dying like a gift card sent in lieu of a pound / of flesh.” The speaker doesn’t clarify what this “deliverance” from dying is, but that simile is complex and haunting. We’ve taken a big leap (as a poem ought to) into different forms of self-comparison. A gift card has a sense of temporariness, of funds that will either be spent or expired. The poem then, daringly, takes up matters of the spirit, yet the speaker still can’t help but compare the spirit’s vulnerability with their own.

What do we make of the images in the final stanzas? They’re gorgeous and haunting, yet admittedly ineffable. What does the swarm of hungry ghosts represent? I’m actually more captivated by their description—”luminous diamonds // of fog” (what a stanza break!)—than I am by their meaning. But these images come after the speaker makes mention of their own vulnerability, so perhaps the image is intentionally unclear, a manifestation of whatever it is that haunts the speaker, that threatens their mortality.

And, still, the speaker can’t help but identify with those ghosts, which are, like worms, ready to die by being brought to the light. We’ve taken a huge leap from where the poem begins, and yet end somewhere familiar, with this desire to be seen, no matter the consequence.

Perhaps that’s what will kill the speaker—the desire to be seen. There’s a desperate impulse undergirding this poem, dangerous and human. The speaker’s desire to identify with anything, including what haunts them, is all too relatable. And the poem’s pattern-seeking tendencies and ability to create transformation out of comparison is an impulse familiar to any poet.

I love this poem for its vulnerability and its closeness to the workings of the human mind. I hope reading it inspires or empowers you to also lean into the seemingly disparate connections between things, and to expose the inner workings of your own mind. Chances are, your reader will understand them.

Craft Perspective: “The Work of Art: Inside the Creative Process of Beloved Artists, Poets, Musicians, and Other Makers of Meaning” by Maria Popova

Read it here, at The Marginalian.

Whenever I need inspiration (or else, some form of mind-expanding witchcraft), I turn to Maria Popova’s generous, exploratory essays. In this one, Popova dissects what it means to be an artist.

It goes without saying that each artist has their own process, and that process is informed by who the artist is themselves. As writers come into their own as artists, their processes for writing are bound to evolve. But the core of Popova’s essay is this: the process of making art is the process of “explaining the world to ourselves, and explaining ourselves to the world.”

What about the world don’t you understand? What about yourself does the world not understand? Ginsberg once prompted poets to write haiku based on their “neurotic obsessions,” and I like that phrase as a way of defining what it is writers write about. We are “neurotically obsessed” with what we don’t understand, with what the world doesn’t understand about us. And, when we write about things we do know, we end up connecting them to things we don’t know.

So this act of meaning-making is always happening in our work, whether we realize it or not. But I also like what Popova has to say about our identities vis-à-vis our art. I’ll let her say it herself in this gorgeous sentence:

“Because we are half-opaque to ourselves, because we are bathing in the mystery and confusion of consciousness amid a universe governed by forces beyond the reach of our control and comprehension, the work of art is cratered with exasperation and self-doubt, with failures and false starts.“

Art, including writing, isn’t just a means of making meaning, it’s also a means of self-discovery. We explain ourselves to ourselves, and this is critical to the creative process. For me, I know that, when I enter a state of negative capability, I become abstracted from myself in a way, but in clearing out my conscious mind, I create space for my unconscious mind to occupy, and the work of drafting a poem becomes all the more exciting.

I don’t know whether or not Kaveh Akbar had this in mind when writing the above poem, but I do see this concept present in the work. The search for selfhood in the world, and perhaps the search for the world in the self, create this tension that drives the piece towards its conclusion. Again, I love Akbar’s poem for its honesty about how the mind works.

I encourage you to read Popova’s essay, and perhaps even the book that inspired her to write this. How do you use your writing process to find or create meaning in the world? What are you trying to explain? What is your neurotic obsession? Your writing is your lifetime’s answer to these questions, but it never hurts to think about them head-on.