Poetry and Solitude

  In Writing Alone and With Others, Pat Schneider urges prospective writers to find "a room of their own" in which to cultivate the solitude necessary for writing. She remarks:

     If you have not yet claimed and made for yourself a room of your own, begin to to so. Do what is           possible: love it, use it, and dream of the day that you can take the next step. The first "room" of             my own  was a few lines each day in a five-year diary. From that tiny seed grew the studio in which I   work today (p.30).

When she describes "a room of my own", of course Schneider is not simply talking about having a separate room in the house to collect one's thoughts and write (although that is certainly a vital aspect of writing). More so, she is describing every small turn inward as a "room of one's own": crafting one's own narrative on a daily basis, learning to attend to the raw details of lived experience, putting all one's senses onto the page, and so on. These "rooms", as it were, are really steps toward having a relationship with one's innermost being or soul, which to a certain degree is always experienced as a deep solitude that is untouched by the world's changing events. In fact, this might be one of the benefits of writing: it slows people down enough to pay attention to the most vital thoughts that pulse underneath the plethora of distracting ones.

   I have recently been re-reading two collections of poems I wrote some time ago. To tell the truth, some of the poems mean less to me now than they did back when I wrote them. Sometimes I don't even recall what I was thinking when I wrote the poems. However, reading these poems after so many years feels to me like visiting an alien from another planet. "I" am the one person I can never encounter, except through a glass darkly. Has anybody, in fact, ever really "met" the person in the mirror? One of the most intriguing aspects of writing is that it can be like chasing the tail of an elusive dragon that lives in the air. Writing attempts to capture the impossible, or to grasp something so deep an infinitely changing. We think that others are "graspable", because they have familiar traits and appearances, but if we even try to fathom our own writing after many years, we might see that this self is really unfathomable and mercurial. And it is precisely this mercurial aspect of reading one's past writings that makes the exercise such an intriguing experience. Who is this "I' who wrote these poems some years ago? Is it the same "I" who experiences them today?

   I no longer feel that poems are meant to be for others or are even judged worthy based on their being published or not. More so, I see poetry as a method of peering into an infinite depth, and thus challenging the surface, conditioned view of self that one tends to identify as "me".

Schneider, Pat (2003). Writing Alone and With Others. Oxford University Press.