Answering a Question No One Ever Asked
This essay first appeared as a Substack post for Wild Roof Journal
If you write all the time, you begin to recognize what the universe is giving you, as you’re receiving it.
An image occurs to you, unsought, seemingly out of the background radiation of the cosmos, and you begin to scribble about it on paper. And as it starts to take shape, an inner voice says, “You’re not really writing a sonnet, are you?”
And sometimes, you really are writing a sonnet.
Sometimes, no matter what you do, no matter how you try to innovate, change the setting, flip the perspective, the damn thing keeps coming up sonnet. So you go with it because you have no choice. You write the damn sonnet because that’s the only thing it wants to be.
Then, if you have any aspirations for publication, you try to mask its sonnet-ness just enough to make it appealing to the editor of some journal. Because it’s 2024, and no editor likes to seem old-fashioned, no matter how many times they write their own sonnets, or read them, or (most importantly) remember them.
A lot of my poems want to be sonnets. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked on a piece, found its voice settling into iambs, then counted the lines and…Holy hell, thirteen, again.
“Okay, universe, I’ll write one more line for an even fourteen. Damn it. But you’re making things very complicated for me.”
All writing is mysterious and frustrating. My sonnet example is merely a useful synecdoche for the process as a whole, an example of the pressures we put on our work as it unfolds.
As I write, I am aware of at least three audiences for every poem, sonnets or otherwise, and it’s not easy to serve so many masters at the same time.
There’s the editor, the gate-keeper who makes the decisions about what sees the light of day and what remains hidden. Editorial decisions are public, and editors don’t like to choose poems that make them look bad in front of their peers. (As “Co-Editor Across the Pond” for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, I know a little about this psychology.) They want to get it right, they want to get it new, and they appreciate any rules the culture can provide about what’s in and out of fashion.
Then there’s the actual audience. Those are really my people. I have great faith in everyday readers, because they read what they like and don’t read what they don’t like, and they aren’t on the hook for their choices. In a way, they’re disinterested, if not dispassionate, so they have the most honest perspective.
And then there’s the universe…the cosmic energy that keeps forcing my thoughts into fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. “Did I get it right, universe? Is this what you’re trying to tell me?”
The trick, for a writer who has aspirations for publication, is to satisfy all of these audiences (and more) all at once.
With experience, you begin to identify your work as you write it. You see it coming, learn to play with expectations, and figure out new ways to navigate the competing interests. “This one feels like free verse.” “Everyone loves a ghazal.” “What’s the form Merrill uses sometimes? With all the end rhymes? Let’s go with that.”
But what if you write something, and you know it isn’t like anything else you’ve ever written or read, and you know you have to write more of it anyway? What if you have no choice but to follow the weird thing to the end?
A few years ago, just as a few journals were starting to publish my poems with some regularity (some regularity…there’s no actual regularity in creative endeavors), I sat down one morning and this came out:
I am trying to philosophical
as I lose my philosophy.
I am training a new tendency,
learning to…let it be,
connect a duality
as old as my dreams,
an ill-favored effort
to worship my own feminine
energy.
Now…what the hell is this?
I was going through a rough patch at the time. We all were, in fact, since we were still locked in our homes during the pandemic. But I was having an especially difficult time for all kinds of personal reasons.
To while away the depressing hours, I found myself surfing Instagram, and part of the Instagram lexicon started creeping into my poems. I wasn’t even sure what some of the phrases meant. My own feminine energy?!?
But I knew the new lines felt real, and true, and that I had to keep going. That’s all my inner voice could give me at the time: “I don’t know what this is, but you have to write it all.”
Thirty or so pages later, I had a long, fragmented poem (including a hidden sonnet or two) that I called “I Sit At This Desk and Dream.” It answered a question no one ever asked: “What if you crossed T.S. Eliot with Paul Muldoon, David Bowie, and (my father) Joe Tessitore?”
Or something like that, anyway.
For the first time in a long time, I didn’t recognize what the universe was giving me, and I didn’t think anyone else would either. But I liked whatever it was, and I wanted to see it in print.
Fortunately, we live in an age when we don’t need anyone’s permission to make a chapbook. So I published “I Sit At This Desk and Dream” all by myself.
Since then, I’ve been able to recognize a new gift from the universe as it unfolds in front of me: a new kind of line that indicates the coming of another strange, long, hodge-podge pastiche of a poem. I’ve written five like this, with a sixth on the way.
Since then, I’ve been able to separate poems I will send to editors and journals from poems I will publish through my DIY publishing operation.
Of course, I’d love it if every poem could be for the editors. If you have any aspirations for publication, you need all the help you can get. But I’m more comfortable taking what the universe is giving me now—even when it’s some combination of T.S. Eliot, Paul Muldoon, David Bowie, and Joe Tessitore—and being my own judge and jury if I have to be.
“You’re not really going to write another one of those long ones, are you? A Tessitore special?”
I am.
(Check out Wild Roof Journal here on Substack or at www.wildroofjournal.com.)