When Gertrude Stein was asked whom she wrote for, she said: “Myself and strangers.” I agree with this statement now, but once I wrote wholly and only for me.
Digging through some files on my computer this week, I came across an old “Why I Write” manifesto. It wasn’t until I came to the fifth part of this ten-part manifesto that I even recognized the writing as my own. “I sound out each word in the quiet of my room with the door locked and the lamp on, like it’s a ghost story. But it’s only a poem. It’s only love I whisper in the dark, but I’m still frightened.” I don’t remember writing this manifesto, but certain pieces of it came back me as I read. In one section I could recite the lines without reading them.
“I underline because that’s how I conduct my dialogue with the poem. It’s how I speak to the words it has given me. An underline is a nod of understanding, applause. I underline because I want to touch the poem that has touched me. I want to know the words, so I mark them, corral them, box them in so that I can hold them and feel each fragile and spindly letter, each word heavy as a stone.” A tad dramatic? Yes, but what impresses me about this former self is the utter sincerity. When I wrote this, I read out of desperation. I wrote poems out of that same utter necessity to bring something forth, however artless it may be.
Discussing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard said: “I dashed in without any fear of God; at twenty-seven I had all the license I thought I needed to engage the greatest subjects on earth. I dashed in without any fear of man. I thought that nine or ten monks might read it.” I think most writers feel something akin to this. We begin because the urgency we have to make or to say overrides everything else: fear of God, man, self, others. Whether for ourselves alone or strangers or those nine or ten monks who might read it, we write. We write our poems, our stories, our novels, blogs, journal entries, our ten-part manifestos. It seems impossible not to.
If I had to begin writing another manifesto today, I’m sure I would essentially say many of the same things I said years ago: I am passionate about the words of others, I write to experience, I write to imagine, poetry has changed the way I engage with the world. All of these things are still true, but I think I’ll save the old manifesto instead, the one where the hopelessly sincere me declared: “We knew the words of true poems before we read them, yet they are elusive, like a mermaid’s song—we all know what it sounds like, but other people will tell us it’s a myth.”
Dear reader, the myths are true, and they’re in us.
About Traci Brimhall
