Guest Blogger Tom Mallouk, on Writing Poetry (or anything) and the Joy (!) of the Workshop

In June, I met poet Tom Mallouk, not on the relatively small territory between our respective New Jersey and Pennsylvania homes, but hundreds of miles north at the Nantucket Book Festival, which makes some sense since he's spent time on the island for many years. Tom was there to introduce his poetry book, Nantucket Revisited (Antrim House) 

When I asked him to contribute a guest post for my blog, he demurred, but then wrote back, "Here's a poem I've written addressed to other writers, designed to entertain my comrades and offer a humorous perspective on the writing and workshop process for poets."

I think it applies to any writer, poet or prose, who has sat in a workshop.

To My Fellow Writers

I want you to feel about this poem

the delight I feel about every poem

shortly after I write the first draft.

Before the workshop points out the clichés,

hackneyed metaphors or I realize it’s the same poem

I’ve been writing for thirty years.

It’s the feeling of the rush of new love

and, the cliché notwithstanding,

that’s not just a metaphor.

Neuroscientists maintain connections

suffuse the brain with flush

inducing chemicals like serotonin

and others with too many syllables

for a respectable poem

If I could spare you

that cold slap of embarrassment

and regret that gets you hunched over

the manuscript wondering what you were thinking,

comparing this to the transformative

dream you scribbled illegibly in the leather

bound notebook you keep

by the side of the bed to remind yourself

you are a writer, the dream

that has slipped away like wet

spaghetti down the drain

of your unconscious mind, I would.

But wouldn’t you persist in reworking

every line, creating a narrative subplot,

pruning each excess syllable as you chip

away at this unwieldy hunk of rock, believing

in its essential beauty, believing something

that started with such promise can’t possibly

belong in the scrap yard of broken poems.

You could abandon it like a movie star

ends a marriage, hoping

the next time the stars will align

or you can recommit to the toil of a deeper love

where you question not just the words

but yourself, where you open yourself

to the life of the poem, surrender to it

and love it not for what you want it to be

but for what it is trying to become.

But in any case I want you to believe,

as I sometimes do, in the afterglow

of verbal love making, that I’ve penetrated

some barely perceptible fissure

in the otherwise seamless marble of meaning,

a fissure that has been staring out

into the existential abyss waiting for someone,

and in this case me, to notice.

I want you to imagine you could have written

this poem, even rue the fact that you didn’t,

and still be glad that someone did.

- Tom Mallouk