A Poem for Writers of Fiction
Non-Fiction Writers: "I think, therefore I am." Fiction Writers: "I feel, therefore you are." The trying times of empathy and the necessity of negative capability. Note: I think this could be the catchiest subtitle I have ever written!
I want to be everyone else
and I pray for some great undoing of self
To look beyond my own reflection
with its echo chambers of introspection
*
I want to see through eyes that are not my own
To walk as another through the ungrown
To write in pictures and paint in words
To hear that which has gone unheard.
*
I want to feel a different truth
sat at your table laid under your roof
to taste your food with a virginal tongue
to believe here, too, I could belong.
*
I want to dance to another tune
On faraway shores beneath a blue moon
Where heaven sparkles, weeps and cries
Its constellations beaded in sighs
*
I want to walk in your shoes
To feel your pain and become imbued
with the refractions of life, only you can see
to rebirth perspective to set mine free
*
I want to know what has gone unsaid
What monsters lie beneath the bed
What keeps you awake and sends you to sleep
What secrets have you been told to keep?
*
I want to learn what it is you desire
When you sit alone, in the dark, by your fire
What story would you want to live?
What worlds for you could I gift?
*
I want to speak with tongues unspoken
To bring meaning to that which lies broken
with words that drip in ink as tears
adventuring through realms, facing fears
*
I want to unhang myself from all old rope
with its fixed lenses and ground-in tropes
to run freely between the woods and the trees
to speak as the great and the small with ease
*
I want to hear a song in the buzz of a fly
to understand the wisdom bestowed by the sky
to hear philosophy in a baby's babble
and weave it all together into a sense that travels
*
I want to find more than myself
in the book that I finally put on that shelf
if only I could find the time for negative capability
and submerge myself empathically
to convey that much more than the limits of me.
***
Authors Note:
Yep. I am having a bad day of writing. Words are coming out of me like kidney stones. It's truly painful. So, I thought I would write a bit of a poem about what was causing my creative mojo to solidify into rocks. This is the result.
You know what they say - a pain shared is a pain halved, or perhaps it's that misery loves company. Who knows? I do feel better from the purging, so I guess the idea has paid off a little.
Although, this kidney stone analogy is pretty naff.
Anyway... A few other thoughts while I am here and rambling on with myself:
The term Negative Capability is something I have been obsessed with for years. It was coined by Keats in a letter he wrote to his brothers about why Shakespeare was such a good writer, believing it was because he could lose himself in the story without the constraints of the rational or of reason. T.S. Eliot, in "The Tradition and The Individual Talent", describes the concept as 'the progress of the artist [to] continual [ly] self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." Virginia Woolfe in "To The Lighthouse" shows her character, Mrs Ramsay, actively engaged in the process of negative capability "until she became the things she looked at." Many famous and talented authors reference the process of negative capability as the key to their success. Browning, Byron, Coleridge etal all extol its necessity.
To be fair, I rarely have a problem losing myself, it's more that I keep finding myself and falling over who I am. In essence, I am having re-entry problems.
Life has a way of calling you and holding you in lane, and for a writer, as Walter Percy says, in his bizarre book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, "Unlike the scientist, the artist has re-entry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.”
Yeah, baby, I feel that on rinse and repeat today!
About the Creator
Caroline Jane
Warm-blooded vertebrate, domesticated with a preference for the wild. Howls at the moon and forages on the dark side of it. Laughs like a hyena. Fuelled by good times and fairy dust. Writes obsessively with no holes barred.
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Comments (30)
Nice work ❤️ I hope I am okay cause the stories I write are starting to scar me 😪
Back to congratulate you on Top Story!!
Loved your poem Caroline! I smiled at ‘to hear philosophy in a baby's babble’, what a lovely image ❤️. I enjoyed your engaging notes too! I thought ‘I keep finding myself and falling over who I am’ was a perfect description of me, (and probably many other introspective writers). Many amusing images fill my head in reaction to what people say, and this one wasn’t me at my most graceful 😂. Congrats on TS xx
A wonderful piece that describes what a lot of authors go through.
This is such a Beautiful Beautiful piece! Don't worry my friend you will do all those things you long to do when the timing is right! Congratulations on your well-deserved Top Story!
Lovely poem and a great tribute to the struggling fiction writer in you, and all who try. I must say, and it seems I'm not the only one who noticed, but your author notes show your talent just as well as your poem. I'm maybe not so well read and was intrigued by your comments on Negative Capability. I might have to do some homework. Congratulations on getting top story. Well deserved.
(Before reading the comments) this was brilliant and engaging, particularly your authors note. This is a phase I have never heard before re negative capability (After reading the comments) people 🙈 We can’t call it writers block during the dark moon…. That’s like saying you are a bad gardener and getting frustrated nothing is growing in winter season!!!!!! Attune back to the natural cycles of nature. You ARE nature…. There is only so much drug taking (caffeine) that can push you beyond the season…. But you still have to crash eventually. It’s far easier to just…. Ebb and flow with the seasons as intended. And every moon cycle, is indeed a season. Women especially, should feel this 🤍✨🕊️
YES to every single word of this! You captivated me with your poem and then did it again with your author's note. Made me think AND yearn AND laugh. Can't wait to read more of your ... kidney stones. (Ew?)
Great work and congrats on the top story! I've had far too many days like this too.
Congratulations ❤️
oh goodness ..... have you crawled inside my brain? My writer's block often feels like a huge rock of cement! While yes, it's painful not to have a sensible thought in my head, I also end up with pains in my back and shoulders from sitting here trying to think of something to write about. Ah darn! Tomorrow's another day.
I agree with your subtitle pitch And like how you wrote to overcome not writing …..wait, what? Well done Congratulations
Great writing! I’m very interested in negative capability as well, so I’ll gather some thoughts about it here: It seems that Keats’s extremely brief mention of negative capability is indeed frequently assimilated to the notion, for which support can be found elsewhere in his writings, of a bracketing of one’s self and/or an intense receptivity to objects and/or an undiscriminating identification with characters—but I find all these assimilations somewhat confusing. Negative capability itself seems to be just “what it says on the tin,” as they say: it is the “capab[ility] of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” This offhand definition, clear and precise enough despite Keats’s terseness, seems to mean something like a suspension of cognitive aims and their consequent impositions: the need to ascertain, know, classify, determine, etc. For such a suspension, an identification with characters or a poetic immersion in objects at the exclusion of one’s self—as perfected by the poet Francis Ponge’s rather selfless descriptions of candles, pebbles, and water—doesn’t seem to me sufficient (Ponge’s approach does, after all, resemble something like a precise determination, thus satisfying a certain need to know). It doesn’t seem necessary either: there are other ways to suspend cognitive needs than through such identification or immersion. Here’s one key example: Any difficult work of art (including poems) can make us feel frustrated, because we are unable to ascribe any definite or conclusive meaning to it; but we can also let go of that frustration by learning to enjoy ambiguity, to make ourselves comfortable in the mind’s penumbra. Wouldn’t that appreciation of ambiguity in art be a clear instance of negative capability? Yet that appreciation is not what Eliot meant by self-sacrifice—even though this latter is also crucial, and appears to accord with some of Keats's views.
First of all, That subtitle isn't just catchy; it's profound, so kudos on that! As for my thoughts on the poem, I'm still gradually learning to write fiction, after years of writing from personal experience. That said, I can already relate to this. Well done, and congratulations!
I think you have spoken to all of us with this. Very well done. Congrats on a much deserved Top Story.
"I keep finding myself and falling over who I am." Probably the truest, inspirational quote I've heard in a long time. Your poem gave me reflection, but this line gave me a new self-awareness. <3
Wonderful writing with peace
Congratulations on your Top Story, well deserved
Perfect. I felt every word. I want to framet this line, 'I want to unhang myself from all old rope' Super congratulations on a brilliant Top Story 🤍🤍🤍
This was the perfect poem for a writer. Your authors note really hit home for me. For as good or bad as a story ends up I do my best to get lost in the words to live the characters when I write them. I had never seen any of those quotes and loved getting the perspectives from them as well as your own. Thank you for writing this
I feel this one today too!! ❤️❤️❤️
Thus is excellent. Loved the afterward as well. And I get it, believe. My kidney stones are cantaloupe right now.
Holy crap, were you channeling me as well when you wrote this?? I felt every beautiful, conflicted line. This was my favorite, 'I want to unhang myself from all old rope.' Thank you for sharing this and the afterward, my friend :)
Excellent insights, writing is often being someone else somewhere else
"Negative Capability"... I think I'll allow that to marinate in my thoughts today. I loved your poem. The flow was immaculate, lyrical. Best of luck my friend. Re-entry is necessary!