Taking the Slow Boat
As a young poet, I fell in love with Gerald Stern’s poetry when I attended my first live poetry reading at my fine arts high school in northern Michigan. He read with Li-Young Lee and the two of them left such an impression on me that I remember sitting in the low lit chapel, not wanting to leave my bench when it ended. I was so physically and aesthetically shaken by what I'd just experienced and that revelation never left my body.
These were my people. This is what I wanted to do with my life. I feel fortunate that I received such an early initiation by those two poets.
I soon learned that Stern's first book didn’t appear in print until he was in his late forties. I was just 18 at the time, and this detail lodged in my brain as a reasonable age to reach that mile marker; one when you were no longer green, and perhaps had learned a thing or two in life and about the craft, such that your writing might be worthy of other readers. As a result, I never felt that I needed to hurry toward publication. Having Stern and a few others, like Virginia Hamilton Adair and Ruth Stone, as examples of poets who were not what we'd call "young" when their first books appeared, made me feel that it was more important to take the time to do the work, even in a culture where early success can seem like the only way to ensure survival.
In the ensuing years, I have devoted myself to mastering this difficult craft, and have not fixated on when and whether I would achieve specific accolades. Stern's example helped me to ignore a great deal of the Po Biz chatter among some of my peers and it helped me to pay attention to what matters to me, which has less to do with public acclaim and more to do with living in accordance with a deeper purpose.
Over the years, I watched many of my peers celebrate book deals and book awards in their 20's and 30's. At the time, I wondered how long I would toil, privately and invisibly, before I felt my writing was as good as the writer's whose work I most admire, but I retained the strong sense that this is a slow art, an art that benefits from taking time, and giving care, even when one is long past ready to move on to something else, something easier, perhaps.
Enclosure: A poem by Gerald Stern from Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (Harper & Row, 1990). You can probably see the water damage because this one survived a house fire. Gerald Stern and I eventually became friends, back when we both lived in Iowa City, and he taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Most of my memories of those days involve food, laughter, and wine. And he gave wonderful hugs! Gerry encouraged my early poems and made me feel like a writer, even at 19 and 20. In addition to being one of our best living poets, he is a true Mensch. I hope you will seek out his body of work.
So what does it really mean to accept and even embrace that we need to give ourselves the time to mature in our art, and learn to do it well before we expect something like a book contract? For me it has meant that when I have felt the urge to hurry, because I too am conditioned to make things happen swiftly, I have told myself that poetry is a slow art, one that is enriched and improved by steady attention. When that falters, a steely nerve is also helpful! (Easier said than done, but practice hones that skill as well.)
I am not a naturally slow person. But recent years have reminded me of how good it feels to go slower than usual—if not in all areas in life. For example, I've been driving slower. I've been walking slower, too, after being encouraged by an Ayurvedic counselor to try this as a way to balance the intensity of my work life. Of course, back when I lived in a Zen Buddhist Temple, "doing one thing at a time" was a central teaching, and I try to remember this when I eat, and when I clean, and when I communicate. I sense that doing so eventually improves my poems.
Would it be a relief to take the time it takes, and gradually accept that some things need the slow boat? How or where could you practice going slower?
—Holly Wren Spaulding, May 2023