Why do I write?   The best answer, surely, must lie in the writing itself.  Even when I’m brimming with ego, some part of me usually recognises, however dimly, that what I’m composing is a ‘textual being’ possessed of its own existence, its own purposes.  Ego has to get out of the way.  It’s the poem, not the author, ultimately, who moves and speaks.

So, why does the ego do it?  How is the Self implicated?  Those answers and processes sit outside (or on the fringes of) consciousness.  The desire to write is, for me, often a physical pressure like hunger or lust.  I’ve also described it as a thick vapour that creeps under the door of your brightly-lit life, demanding that you investigate (is it mist, or smoke?)... ah, but the rest is trying to get that blasted door to open!  It’s work.  An immense heaving and hefting of sound, using nothing more than a single lifetime’s accrued experience and the thin guy-lines of language.

Why do I write?  I sometimes think a large part of the answer is my innate inability to say quite what I mean.  A lifelong experience of l'esprit d'escalier.  Much of the time, I don’t know what’s happening until after it’s happened.  Also, writing is my fifth element: the element of surprise.  I write because I want to surprise myself.  It’s a bit like starting off a joke without any punch line: when (and if) it comes, you yourself laugh – or cry – as hard as anyone else.

Many writers talk about writing in terms of being themselves, the excitement of the process, etc.  I rarely feel those emotions.  It can, in fact, be a somewhat negative experience.  Some days, if a poem comes, I groan out loud: it means another bout of wilting work to squeeze around everything else one has to do.  Other days, the words and ideas flow effortlessly, as though I were taking dictation.  I’ve begun to find that if I pretend to welcome all that, it actually happens.

But books.  My God.  The exhaustion, the endless editorial circlings, the infinity of things that can go wrong.  I dread the perfectionism required, then promptly do everything to embrace it!  Perhaps Freud was on the right track after all.  What if I’m just wounded and dysfunctional, terrified of dying?  Well then, I’m proud of my kind for trying to turn all that junk into something valuable.

As for inspiration, it’s overrated.  More recently, I write because... I write.  Language inspires language.  If I’m not using language in a heightened way, I feel bored or listless.  I want to rejoin that conversation a poem starts.  All literature is, to me, one vast conversation.  I’m getting the same conversational kick writing this.  Even so, I do sometimes (can you believe it?) tire of hearing myself.  That’s why I read.  I suspect that most writers who don’t bother to read haven’t yet tired of their own voices.

Why do I write?  To stay as fully alive as possible, to keep paying attention.  I don’t want to be a pre-programmed tourist in my own consciousness.  Literature – the genuine stuff – is one of the ways a culture stays awake.  Our culture is barely conscious.  But, as a poet, I have to ask: how many people actually read poetry – challenging poetry?  Should poets give up?  Gandhi: “Everything we do is futile, but we must do it anyway”.

Today, so much of ‘why’ seems bound up with commerce.  There’s an ubiquitous obsession with profit-loss, whether the gains and losses are financial, material, artistic or psychological.  We’re witnessing a profound shrinking of culture into economy.  Even poetry is falling (perhaps has always fallen?) squarely into all that.  And yet, when poetry is truly itself, it subverts the monocularism of economics and utilitarianism to enact something incorrigibly plural.  It catalyses those irrational, sacred chemistries of Self.  One experiences, as a reader as well as writer, a loosening of bonds.

I try to think of myself as a person who writes poetry – not a poet who consumes the Self and its experience for his art.  After all, there are friends, family, piña coladas...  On occasions, though, the living happens through the writing – it is the writing.  I lament the way our lives get split into ‘what we are’ and ‘how we make a living’.  That phrase ‘the cost of living’ carries more than a monetary sense.  The (tired) enthusiast in me says: there’s only the vocation.  I’m realising one’s audience – ultimately – is an audience of one.

Why do I write?  My early years were spent in a house without books.  Nobody read to me.  When I finally discovered books, real books, I felt like Aladdin.  I don’t want that genie back in its bottle.  Maybe, by writing, I’m trying to conjure something I wish I’d found on my childhood’s ornamental, spineless shelves.

 

Mario Petrucci             RLF Forum  4^th March 2009                                                              800 words