Quitting writing, writing communities, and cultural narratives about emotion

I'm writing a manuscript of poems about Las Vegas

I’m writing a manuscript of poems about Las Vegas. It’s ecstatic and somber, unflinching, political, rhetorical, tender and protected—a bit like a love letter to someone who is flawed, but beautiful, but flawed. Cities are like that.

Before I began this project, I hadn’t written poems in a decade, and I was rusty. I may have told this story before but credit goes to

Tony Mancus

for extending the invitation to grapple with them again. A year ago April (April being National Poetry Month in the United States) Tony asked if anyone wanted to write a poem-a-day as a challenge? I said yes, then extended a similar offer to other writer friends in a Slack. I didn’t know what would ultimately happen, but an audacious goal, plus camaraderie, plus accountability lured me back. Slogging through stiff and clumsy work felt forced at first, like returning to the gym in January, but I did surprise myself with some decent work, too. Now I’m gunning to finish this manuscript by the end of this month.

I say this to everyone who wants to write, and it’s not original thinking but gospel in that it is passed down through repetition and authority and utility from writer to writer: writers need community. Community resuscitated me.

My return to poetry got me thinking of George and Mary Oppen, who abandoned art and writing in the mid-1930s for ethical and political reason. After George wrote Discrete Series, his first collection published in 1934, the couple dedicated their lives to more direct social activism, including organizing labor movements. In the McCarthy era of the 1950s, they moved to Mexico to avoid scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee (they’d also joined the Communist Party.) The New Yorker wrote a short piece about this in 2017: the couple who gave up art to fight fascism.

When I first learned about the Oppens, I couldn’t imagine not writing poems. I was in graduate school, so was Tony. This was several years after 9/11, and we believed writing poetry was an act of political engagement: to write poems was an investment in an attention-less economy, one that doesn’t generally bring you fame, or lucrative book deals, or employment. It was truth telling. There was a bit of defiance in it, staking your life on something that you knew mattered, but not to most. With this as context, I questioned the Oppens’ choice, art or activism. But this is very much how it went down, according to Mary Oppen’s memoir: with intention, no looking back.

Many of us became poets by accident or default. We fell into writing when we discovered that we could, or because we longed for clarity, or self-expression, or to articulate the intuitive or felt experience as art. Then it simply became a part of us. Poetry didn’t make a quiet exit from my life, either. I also decided to quit—not to fight fascism, but to pursue a writing life, or even a life-life, that felt more relevant and engaged. My definition of making meaning had evolved to value connecting in a new way.

In 1958, Oppen began writing poems again. He published The Materials in 1962, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Of Being Numerous in 1969. You could say he wrote his best work when he allowed it to come to back to him in time.

Related, loosely, I’ve been considering emotion like an armchair anthropologist. There are so many cultural rules and unspoken expectations piled onto our emotional expression—who gets to share or show what and how, who gets to discipline, label, or direct it, and how much is the right amount.

This coding is layered, nuanced, and complex, and I want to say these are cultural learnings as much as they are personal discoveries. It’s inextricable. Emotion is something to be regulated, or, expressed. Expressed but skillfully. It’s private and personal. It’s labor. It’s authentic, or performative. It’s frightening, or dangerous, or a symptom, or a strategy. It’s weakness. It means you’re broken. It’s data. It interferes with objectivity. It doesn't belong at work. It shouldn’t inform decisions; it should inform decisions. It informs every decisions whether you like it or not. It’s a Trojan Horse. It’s bait. It’s gendered. It belongs to actors. It belongs to artists. It’s untrustworthy. It is absolutely trustworthy. It’s disobedience; it’s leadership. It’s motivational. Inspirational. Enviable. Contagious. Addictive. It’s caused by others. Or, it’s all you.

We’re always weaving among and through these narratives, often quite seamlessly but at the same time dependent on so many factors, including how much agency or authority we have at any given moment, or how much attention we’re seeking to create for ourselves. Enter social media, where emotions gets bundled into our templated stories, fast, aesthetic, and performative on TikTok; educational, confident, and resolved on LinkedIn, etc. It is produced, disciplined and regulated: do it this way, not that. I don’t want to make this entirely wrong, just explicit. We’re not just creating content or telling stories but organizing and regulating our interior lives. Poetry is also a templated expression in that it has form, structure. But it welcomes the messy, ambiguous, and unresolved. It’s slow, not fast. It evokes. It asks for deep attention.

Last week, I wrote about the exercise of envisioning yourself at age eighty as a way to tap into your inner wisdom. This past week, I discovered that

Parker J. Palmer

—who is now eighty-six years old, and who has been an influence on me for some time—is publishing on Substack. His post about “The Alchemy of a Broken-Open Heart” was what I needed to read: “It's the brittle heart that breaks apart, explodes into a thousand shards, and often gets thrown like a grenade at the ostensible source of its pain. But there’s another kind of heart, a supple heart, that can break open, not apart, giving us greater capacity to love and generate new life.”

Palmer identifies as an activist too, and some of his wisdom is about the intention behind how we steer and guide our feelings in chaotic times: “Cynicism and idealism sound like polar opposites, but they have the same effect: they take us out of the action and leave us on the sidelines of history. Our calling is to keep standing and acting in the tragic gap where history is made, putting one foot in front of the other in the long, slow walk toward a better world.”

My first newspaper editor, a man who taught me how to nurture talent in others by the way he nurtured it in me used to say “skepticism is healthy, but cynicism is dangerous.” Cynicism blinds us. It is brittle. But skepticism keeps us pursuing the truth. It’s rooted in curiosity.

“What moment people think they’re living through, even in the time they’re living through it, matters for the decisions they make, and for what ultimately happens.”—Ezra Klein

I lived in Hawaii in my youth. This was our station wagon. It didn’t have headlights that worked, so if you were out late and it got dark, that was where you were sleeping, probably wrapped in a bedsheet in the sand on the North Shore.