Poetry Comes From Silence

~ On Your Mind with Laura Ann Reed ~

When asked to write about what has been on my mind, my instinct is to say, emphatically, “No”.

This would not have been true before I began writing poetry.  But now that I do write poetry, I am reluctant to dissipate the psychic and emotional energy behind what matters to me by talking about these things.

Talking, I have found, or writing an essay, tends not to lead to new insights or understandings.  One says what one knows, or believes, or feels. Whereas writing poetry, for me, invariably entails gaining a new perspective on a given subject, or a heightened awareness, or a bringing-into-the-conscious-mind something that had been submerged in the unconscious, and inaccessible. Sometimes pure epiphany happens in the process of writing a poem. Something transcendent.

What I’m saying is that talking is talking, but writing poetry is transformational.

Writing poetry is the process by which I interrogate my life.  It is a pathway into what lies underneath, or behind, what I think I know about the past and the present. Or into what I downright don’t know.  I don’t write poems knowing anything other than something is impelling or compelling me to write.

Sometimes, it’s a memory. Sometimes it’s an impression or feeling about something in the present. Sometimes it is what poet, Louise Glück has called, “some motivating language”.  This could be a line or phrase from the work of another poet. Or it could be some word or words that leap into my own mind from left field.

The first sentence in the poem leads me forward.  I have to trust that there is a reason I am compelled to start writing. And as William Stafford put it, I have to be “ready”.  Meaning maintaining an alert, but not controlling, awareness that is primed to receive what comes to me from that part of the brain that has been called, ‘the creative unconscious’. 

I write into what I don’t know in order to find out what I think and what matters most to me about any given ‘subject’. As Jack Gilbert put it, to ‘find the something’ that lies at the heart of a situation or event or memory.

My poems are where I hold conversations about my family, my fears, my passions, my lovers, my ghosts, my past and my present.  They are conversations with the page. And when I send out my pages for publication, they become conversations with the world.

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Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.