language is not an animal you can tame
it's okay if you're not writing a banger!
In a talk with ISL Visiting Artist and poet Eduardo Corral, he said something I scrambled to note down: “Not every poem in a book has to be a banger. You need your buttress poems.”
Buttresses are the architectural supports that hold up the wall. I’ve never heard of them until now. It felt fitting; though hidden, these modest reinforcements have kept your wonders of the world standing for all to witness and marvel.
Can you imagine a book full of bangers? Sounds fake. An automatic case of overwhelm. If everything stands out, does anything, really?
Would be nice though.
“Not every poem in a book has to be a banger. You need your buttress poems.”
This month, I’ve written about four poems, all underwhelming. I try to force a draft to meet the vision in my head, but always, it veers left, takes off, like the bird outside my window I’m trying to befriend. I had hoped by now I’d come up with something cohesive for a collection, a book. Instead, each poem turns inward into their private worlds, a weird case of crown shyness, instead of engaging in polite conversation with one another.
And same old: the days are treacherously hot, all my friends are quitting their jobs, and somewhere, always, a war; a part of me is hurrying, anxious, panting in the sun for some kind of shade. I want these poems to take me to the last mountain in the distance, a concrete endpoint I can point people at when they ask, “so are you publishing a book?” “Yes, why YES, I am.” I want to hold my friends who are creating brave art, holding protests, healing spaces, healing themselves and their bodies, and say, tomorrow. Tomorrow, for sure: the news. The grant. The email. The life-saving call back. And we can all breathe a sigh and sink into the earth and rest.
I think that quote struck me especially, now that I’m writing an entry for this newsletter again, after somehow convincing myself it was “a waste of time.” Truth was, I was scared. I needed each newsletter to say something big — something revelatory, worthy of someone’s time.
In Lexi Meritt’s newsletter on why she returned to Substack, she wrote: “I love being a writer more than being a marketer.” More than anything, being a writer was never about being the person with “the most important and worthwhile thing to say.” It’s not even about what you have to show for it. Always, it is about the practice of living, of showing up, and trying (and failing).
I cannot rush these creative seasons any more than I can force great epiphanies to happen. I have to trust that life ferments, bubbles to surface, and makes something good without me constantly watching the pot. If the poem is not merely the page but all the little moments that lead me back to it — the coffee chats, the tears, the girlfailures, the daily nuisances and wonders, the detritus of living — then all I must do is to clear a path.
In an interview with Only Poems, Chen Chen shares: “Growing your voice involves this kind of experimenting, this kind of play — without fully understanding what it is you’re doing. I trust in this play — the messy making of shapes and sounds — more than I trust in the voice that’s already found.”
That’s the gift of language, I think; sometimes language itself can take you where you need to go. If you are curious, if you listen, watch it shake its feathers, watch it wander, follow it down new bewildering places, then I trust it to lead us through.
These are my words, for now. I’ll let them be as they are: modest, unspectacular.
I hope this read offered some comfort to you.
Best,
Andy