Writer's Block

When I was in school I wrote a lot of poetry.

I used to joke that this was because I was lazy and a terrible typist (back in the days of manual typewriters... yes, really), so whenever a writing assignment came up where we could choose between a short story or a poem, I went for the poem.

But the truth is I really liked poetry. I liked its precision and economy -- and that if you wrote in rhyme and meter, you could get away with all kinds of bizarre constructions and multiple meanings.

Verse became my specialty and when I started churning out sonnets in the 11th grade, our English teacher made me a poetry editor of the school magazine -- a privilege usually reserved for seniors.

Throughout grade school's 12 years, teachers entered my stuff in citywide contests, and I often got some kind of prize or "mention" but I never thought of myself as a "poet" -- and I never wrote anything for my own pleasure.

When I got to college, I found I was unable to produce anything without being compelled by an assignment, so I signed up for an advanced poetry class -- and was rejected.

I confronted the professor; he felt the work in my portfolio was "glib." But he was impressed by my tenacity and let me in the class anyway.

But he was right... something had been lost, maybe to self-consciousness, insecurity, vanity. I knew I could impress with verse, so I relied on it, even when I didn't have to because it forced me to choose words carefully in a way that blank verse did not. (I believe I know the reason, psychologically, that this happened -- that that is a subject for another essay.)

So nearly everything I wrote in blank verse was unreadably bad and I didn't do well in the class, overall.

For a few years after college, I wrote maybe a half-dozen poems -- all sonnets -- usually dedicated to various friends.

But for the past 10 years I've written hardly anything.

One friend had a "poetry" birthday party a few years ago, so I wrote her a sonnet and recited it to the blank expressions of her DefJam-style poet pals.

And that was the end of that.

This past year I've told a few friends I'd "write a sonnet for them" but the well has felt dry, and even thinking about it made my brain hurt.

Last night, however, as I strained to will myself to sleep through a punishing headache, I found myself teeming with words about, of all things, writer's block.

Here is the result:

Words
packed incomphrehsibly
pressing impatiently
against the fragile pinhole portal
of articulation.
Single spies emerge
disoriented.
The battalion must wait.