The phrase comes to me as a confession: I am a slow writer.
I admit this with gratitude for being able to write at all. When I say that I am a slow writer, I am referring to my natural pace relative to the pace of the literary market, the creation of the product that is the poem, and the dissemination of the object that is the book. When someone asks me if I have finished a new book, I explain, “It’s in progress,” and excuse myself with a smile: “I’m a slow writer.” Truer is that I write for exactness and precision, for my own clarity and my reader’s understanding, and that takes time. Truer is that I am not a slow writer; I only write slowly. And it is not an affliction or shortcoming. It is a devotion to my process.
Though I compose material that feels vital to express, the vulnerability of embodiment or grief and its depressive aftermath, I don’t write daily or even weekly with necessity. When I do write a new poem or start a manuscript, I first ask myself, “What is urgent?” The answer to that question guides me through the subsequent years of figuring out my subject from multiple facets, making poetic missteps that sometimes lead to marvels, and navigating stages (like the one I’m in now) when my imagination labors to meet my subject’s potential, which is like seeing a shadow, then trying to fabricate its originating form. I daily grasp at this originating form; when a hipbone or clavicle comes to me in a dream, while commuting to work, or while paying my mortgage, I write it down. Sometimes, the synecdoche unfolds, and that small part becomes an entire poem. Other times, it’s nothing, just a flicker that will never yield light.
My first book, The Vital System (Tupelo Press, 2012), took 5 years to create. That’s 1,825 days to feel that I had constructed each poem in the book with exactness. I must have finished that book 5 times before it was in its published form, which meant I revised it every 6 months or so, reordering or shifting poems in and out, while bearing rejections from first-book contests and open reading periods at popular presses. I sent each iteration of the manuscript to my core readers, Sean Singer and Douglas Kearney, who know my work on a spiritual level. They were faithful advisors on what the book was accomplishing and how I could hone it for the next round of submissions. When it comes to writing a book that clearly conveys its thoughts, it takes as long as it takes. The earliest draft of The Vital System was my MFA thesis in 2007. In 2009, I taped the revised manuscript to a broad wall in my apartment; I’d graze past it, scratching sporadic revisions, reminding myself that I had made something essential and that it existed—even if no one wanted it.
I have dear friends who write daily, and among them is Terrance Hayes. Every time I talk to him, he’s tinkering with something new. And he’s damned excited about it. Tony Trigilio, my friend and colleague at Columbia College Chicago, included this understanding of Hayes in his Marsh Hawk Chapter One essay, “Is Daily Writing Possible”. The answer is “yes” if you have that inclination. However, once I write a poem that feels true and complete, I am satisfied to read it for days, thinking through its parts, and I don’t crave to work on another poem until one arrives to me. Despite this lack of craving, there is a petite pocket of desire in me to be a person who writes daily, prolifically—primarily when a friend publishes a new book. To write a book seems so simple once a manuscript is complete, because its narrative is illuminated. In the beauty of the finished book, the memory of its interminable labor transfigures to shadow.
It took 8 years to write my second book, Master Suffering (Tupelo Press, 2021). 2,928 days spent making poems about my body in lust, loss, grief, and major depressive disorder. I spent years messing with the structure of poems. They were all prose poems at one point, until my publisher poo-pooed that. After letting go of my ego, I let the poems’ content guide their structure and completely revised the book. Significant poems from the “God Letter” series weren’t written until a few months before the book was under contract, when I knew what I needed to admit to make the book’s narrative of suffering whole. Master Suffering did well “at market,” meaning it was longlisted for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the L.A. Times Book Award and Lambda Award for Bisexual Poetry. No matter the attention it garnered, I’m proud of it because it feels true to my experiences. I have faith in my work because there’s no guarantee that anyone else will, and once the shine of reviews, readings, and interviews dulls, I am again with a blank page and a deep curiosity for what’s next.
I’ve spent the last 4 years feeling relieved that I do not have any immediate sadness or grief to extricate through poems. As I write that sentence, it may not be true. All the same, there’s freedom in release from acute emotion and in having time. I’ve joined a writing group, where I submit a poem every Tuesday. Sometimes, I turn in real gems; other times, I submit a heart emoji with regret that the inkwell is dry. But I have enough new poems that I read from them at events, and I’m publishing regularly. I figure it’ll take me three more years to finish the manuscript. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I could write every day, but I won’t. I care about my writing’s measured evolution, because there’s a little Rolodex in my mind where I keep all the words whose sonics arouse me, experiences that incite, bodily desires that bind me to the world. I hoard them until, as poet Lucille Clifton once said, “these are some poems that wanted to be written, and I was available.”
CM Burroughs is the author of the poetry collections The Vital System (Tupelo Press, 2012) and Master Suffering (Tupelo Press, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, MacDowell, and Cave Canem. She has received commissions from the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Warhol Museum to create poetry in response to art installations. Her poetry has been published in journals including POETRY, Callaloo, jubilat, Ploughshares, VOLT, and the Best American Experimental Writing Anthology. Burroughs is an associate professor of poetry at Columbia College Chicago.
