Prompt #10: Live the Questions
Prompt #10: Live the Questions
How to illuminate truth without being self-actualized
What is the responsibility of a piece of writing? Catherine and I have been spinning around this question recently, more so than usual. Reading book-jacket reviews of bestsellers, which promise that the work inside navigates our interior territories deftly while breaking open humanity’s oldest questions, I easily work myself into the belief that poems must illuminate an indisputable, surprising truth in order to succeed. “Alright,” I think, rolling up my sleeves, “let’s get to illuminating.”
The problem with this approach is that it assumes the author knows the answer. To resolve a problem, you need to know how to solve it, right? Catherine and I have no issue with the first half of this process. We conjure characters and speakers who embody our flaws perfectly and establish conflict with ease; they’re anxious, self-indulgent, somewhat irresponsible, and strangely attached to romanticized images of escape to faraway lands. But this is where we both get stuck. How do you resolve a problem in fiction, or in verse, that is unresolved in real life? How do you give the reader a satisfying end?
In the introduction to “The Triggering Town,” Richard Hugo hints at a reality that I’m slowly realizing. Of self-criticism, he says, “At the base of such an approach is the notion that the writer’s problems are literary. In truth, the writer’s problems are usually psychological, like everyone else’s.”
It’s hard to hear that the difficulty in resolving my speaker’s fraught relationship with her mother is due to my actual relationship with my mother, rather than a matter of editing the poem into submission. How, then, can writing composed by ordinary, un-self-actualized people illuminate truths worth reading?
I read a Li-Young Lee poem this week that gave me a new way to think about finding answers. “Love Succeeding” begins with a declaration of what the speaker doesn’t know. But as the poem progresses, we call these statements into question. Perhaps they are precisely what the author does know, or wants to show us:
And I don’t know
what might bring peace on earth. But a man
fallen asleep at his desk while revising
a letter to his father is apple blossoms
left lying where they fell.
These are not timid questions. What might bring peace on earth? What makes God happy? Who does God think is worth saving? In claiming ignorance from the beginning, the speaker disarms us. “Don’t expect an answer,” they seem to say. And then the images come tumbling forth.
In a way, this approach is refusing the terms of the question. Does a question as large as God, as large as life, really have an answer that can be written plainly in words? Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” points to the example of Bartleby the Scrivener, a fictional clerk who refuses the terms of his boss’ requests with the simple phrase, “I would prefer not to.” Protesting the terms of a question, or turning elsewhere for inspiration, is itself a creative act.
In “Letters to a Young Poet,” Rilke urges a young Franz Kappus (in letter #4) to hold onto the questions, absent as the answers may be, for dear life:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
So for this week: write a poem that asks a large question. Let the poem live the question without giving an answer plainly.
A few suggestions for how you might do this:
Ask a question directly, and follow with something that is not an answer
State plainly what you don’t know
Allow the poem to be one single, continuous question (my old favorite, T.R. Hummer’s “Where You Go When She Sleeps,” does this well)
I’ve really been enjoying reading all your responses to past prompts. If you haven’t read the dream-inspired poems yet (including images like “knife teasing at the stalk” and “a magnificent horse drips brown gloss”), check them out on Prompt #8 (thanks Rachel for your poems!). Happy writing, and happy living the questions.
Hugs,
Steph