What it feels like to pay attention to the limitations I live with in my daily life
Before I began writing my most recently published book, RISK, I was struggling with limitations, which I felt were mostly caused by forces beyond my control: bouts of difficult illnesses and injuries, challenges in my work, and my husband’s death from cancer. And after his death, I was alone with the precarious, risky state of our finances.
In retrospect, I see that I felt victimized by my life, and how that feeling pervaded my experience, making it difficult to trust what the future might hold.
Writing has always been a solace for me, and, more than a solace, a way to see with compassion what is happening in my life. It has always been through writing that I’ve discovered a wider awareness, and found the steps I might take to act upon what that awareness offered me.
Though I wasn’t clear about how victimized I felt, I did know that I needed help. I returned to a regular, daily, writing practice, early in the morning. In this work, I found more ease, more willingness to face the day’s challenges. This alone was of great value, but there was more.
I began to consider how I might use a form to enliven my work. I found that writing in a limiting form could give me a direct experience of what it feels like to live in the limitations. As I continued this work, I began to ask myself which were unavoidable, and which were subtly self-inflicted by negative feelings that I’d let impact me. By using a constraining form, I would not just write about limitation, I’d live inside limitation in the work and then see how I handled it. I would experience limitation as event, not aftermath.
Most of the poems in Risk have 14 syllables in each line with a caesura between the first seven syllables and the last seven syllables. I did not break a word at the end of each seven syllables, so I had to use constant revision. I wanted this approach to let me experience formally how challenging it is to keep my life in flow, and how surprising it can be to try something unexpected and have it bring meaningful balance into my life.
Besides these poems, there are also poems scattered through the manuscript that are titled “Narrow Negotiations.” In these, the form is this: each has exactly seven couplets (14 lines per poem). Each line in the poem has seven syllables (as does the title “Narrow Negotiations”).
Ann Lauterbach points out that the “convergence of subject matter with form releases content.” I found that the forms I created caused a contentiousness in my use of syntax that forced me to diverge from my more expected trajectories of thought, and so the forms exposed a content with more contextual resources than I’d previously had access to.
But contrived structures can obscure as much as they reveal; my obsessions are powerful. I had to let the poems continue to ask me if I was writing in support of my intuitions about freedom or if I was sometimes avoiding them. Once I saw, in the writing, how easily I could delude myself, I started to see it in my life.
Hélène Cixous tells us that “the border makes up the homeland, it prohibits and gives passage in the same stroke.” My work is to see where the borders, which I use to contain my understandings, are actually useful, and where they are borders that I must open and pass beyond, frightening as that might be.
One more thing comes to mind to say—the ways I work with Omnidawn poets, and poets to whom I give consultations, is the same way that I work with myself. With them, I believe strongly in creating a collaborative process that remains dynamic as we work from page to page, or image to image in a poem. With myself, I believe I must listen collaboratively to all the selves I am and let them all impact the poem.
I think of this work as comparable to sitting at a Ouija board. But rather than spirits talking to me, or me talking to another poet, it’s the poem’s true heart speaking into our hands. The board is the poem, intuitions combine (my many intuitions when I’m making my own poems or the other poet’s intuitions along with mine, when I’m working with another poet). In that combination it’s possible to hear how the poem wants to move the “planchette or movable indicator.”
This process is a form of spiritual practice to me. I am grateful for the ways it sustains me.
Rusty Morrison is co-publisher of Omnidawn (www.omnidawn.com). Her latest book, RISK, was published this Spring by Black Ocean. Her books include After Urgency (won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize) & the true keeps calm biding its story (won Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, Laughlin Award, N. California Book Award, & DiCastagnola). She’s a recipient of Civitella Ranieri’s fellowship, UC Berkeley Art Research Center’s Poetry & the Senses Program, and other artist retreat fellowships. She gives writing consultations. Website: www.rustymorrison.com