by Andrea Bates
No matter what happens, I always carry a notebook and my favorite pen du jour. No matter what happens, I write it all down. And if not all, then at least the parts I remember. This year more pages detailed the things I would prefer to forget. But the writer in me must bear witness. No matter what.
The end of a year, and over two hundred and fifty hand-written pages stare back at me from between my notebook’s covers. It’s a natural time to pause and reflect, to re-read, to re-group, to re-imagine the future, to be re-inspired by the writers and artists who I had the good fortune to learn from this year at various writing workshops and conferences, their wisdom lovingly shared and gratefully inscribed in my black notebook, in black ink, in my large, unruly handwriting:
“Get into trouble. Get into a poem. A poem’s trouble.”—Earl S. Braggs
“Sometimes talking about something realistically doesn’t do it justice.” – Robert Thomas
“Think all around the photo.” – Emily Smith, in a workshop on ekphrasis
“Persona poems are a great alibi.” – Robert Polito
“The worst thing you can be is already decided.” – Carole Maso
“Fill the void. Tell the greater truth.” – Silas House
“When the big moment comes, one page is not enough.” – Earl S. Braggs
“The nature of writing is to wobble.” – Katherine Soniat
“If you don’t write poetry, you’re surrendering [to trauma]”—Alicia Ostriker
“From the claw you can deduce the lion.”—Mark Smith Soto, retelling a Spanish proverb
“The basic problems never go away.” – Fred Horowitz
“Everything is a dance.”—Paulus Berensohn
“Art is a bridge between visible and invisible worlds.”—M.C. Richards via Paulus Berensohn
“Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back. Then choose wisdom.”—Earl S. Braggs, retelling a Chinese proverb
We may never know when we might be the bearers of words delivered at just the right time – to exactly the person who needs them most. No matter what happens, there is always a pen and always a notebook; there is always a story to tell and poems to write. No matter what happens, it is comforting to remember this line from Mary Oliver: “Keep room in your heart for the unimaginable.” We may never know when the right words will fly in on light-glazed wings, illuminating the recesses inside that most mysterious-and resilient-chamber.
