When you can’t, it’s impossible

I can’t write poems in recent weeks either. It’s not the first time it’s happened. And it’s not worth going on about either. There’s not much to tell. Karol Berger found something Victor Hugo said on the subject—he told me about it as we were walking in Paris, in the 16ème. When someone asked him how hard it was to write poetry, he answered, “When you can write it, it’s easy, when you can’t, it’s impossible.”

Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

I came across this quote twice last year, first, because I wanted to blog about it (I still do), during a search for Adam Zagajewski’s great poem ‘Lament’, at the amazing blog of Alina Stefanescu, and second, a few months later while reading Slight Exaggeration (translated by Clare Cavanagh). It falls on one of several pages that I dog-eared for future copying out into my commonplace book. ‘Several’ might be understating it. I mean hundreds. Then life intervened and I completely forgot about it, the commonplace book, the poem I was originally searching for, and Alina’s compendious blog of, well, everything.

Repeating my search for ‘Lament’ again the other day, I found it again. And was struck again by those words we rarely utter in poetry-land, ‘easy’ and ‘impossible’. Looking back over my teaching life, poetry and otherwise, most of it has been with what we might call ‘beginner writers’. That’s not to demean the experience and knowledge of those I have worked with, it’s a statement of fact that the majority have been young. Even before we begin writing, which is always with lots of talking and reading, I’m aware that one or two of them will find it easy, a small handful impossible, and the best part vacillate between these two states as the writing progresses. One of my jobs, without ever mentioning either of these two words, is create a space in which we can suspend, however briefly, our belief in the absolute power that easy and impossible can hold over us if we are not careful.

So much for my teaching. I confess that they stray into my room and sit on my shoulder, from time to time, with beguiling and damaging effects. There is a gap then, between what I profess in front of others, and what I face (demons, hesitancy, the prying eyes of certain teachers, even, occasionally, the odd burst of confidence) and the impact of those things on how I feel about actually doing some writing. Do I say, not as I do.

Which leads me to think that Victor Hugo, via Adam Zagajewski, might be right. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is impossible. But what if we add into this equation the desire to write? I’d like to think I desire to write always. I also know that is balls (impossible). Sometimes it’s impossible because life intervenes, as we know, or we’re tired, or we’re not reading very much, or it’s January for goodness’ sake. But what if it’s impossible because we just don’t want to? I spent most of last year itching to but also knowing it was impossible (life, blah blah). And so sort of gave up on wanting to. Which hardened into not wanting to. Which hardened into not expecting to.

And then something happened, ‘a helping grain of sand,/ a wonderful gust of wind’ as Tomas Tranströmer (trs, Robin Fulton) would have it, out of nowhere, walking the dog was it, suddenly looking up in the woods, and thinking, maybe I could just see about that folder that’s been lying on my desk for six months, how about it?