Letters to a Young Poet(ess) I

August 29, 2018    
      
Ahavati      
Cherokee, North Carolina      
     
Dearest Poppy,      
     
     I received your letter just yesterday.  I must admit my heart sank when I became aware of your feelings. Especially in light of such a deep accompaniment of expression, obviously demonstrating great depth of emotion.        
     
     Perhaps such emotion is reaching up from the quagmire of doubt toward the rung of growth.   While you may feel you're in a rut, the enclosed poem contradicts that thought with hard evidence to the contrary. While I wish to focus more upon the crown of your feelings than the jewel of poetry adorning it, I will genuinely express I have grown to love your ability to evoke a state of presence and duel empathy through your verse.  This is no easy feat for modern day poets to achieve. Herein lies your true gift I believe has yet to be unwrapped, by even you.      
     
     I've personally experienced and observed such times are steps toward higher ground in the craft.  Unlike the filmmaker or makeup artist, for whom each day presents a fresh script to read or face to mask,  a poet can't always guarantee he or she will wake up with inspiration prompting their ability to express themselves.  This has been the truth for even for the world's most accomplished and prolific writers;  words can seemingly disappear from our ability to stitch them into coherant verses that convey our emotions (or, subsequently, arrive incohesively as unpublishable torrents).  This period can transpire for days, weeks, or even decades.      
     
     Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as he penned in his notebook in 1804, at the age of 32, "so completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month.—O Sorrow and Shame … I have done nothing!”  Coleridge's best-known work was written while he was young, in his mid-twenties.  Sadly he spent the rest of his life taking opium and bemoaning the loss of his gift.  Believing he had lost such a natural ability to overcome such a temporary period in life gave it the power to manifest truth.  For so a man thinks he shall become.      
     
     Another such case would be Stephen King, despite his seemingly usual rate of production. "Writer's block", or, as you so aptly put it, a "rut", for him may be defined as 5,000 words instead of the usual 20,000.  Yet, apparently, not even King is immune to the plague of drought that affects all writers at some point of their experience:      
     
     "There may be a stretch of weeks or months when it doesn't come at all; this is called writer's block. Some writers in the throes of writer's block think their muses have died, but I don't think that happens often; I think what happens is that the writers themselves sow the edges of their clearing with poison bait to keep their muses away, often without knowing they are doing it."  ( The Washington Post in 2006 )      
     
In his book On Writing, he described one of the few times he became mired in the rut known as "writer's block".  He decided not to present his new novel Sword in the Darkness to his college class. This led to a four-month period of not writing, drinking beer, and watching soap operas.      
     
     In having read your enclosure, I can only express with certainty ( being my age ) what you should become despite current circumstances of fleeting thought.  For that is all thoughts are, fleeing moments of experience designed to encrust us into the present, rusting away our years in disbelief.  Or, propel us onward over the hedge of doubt where fresh scenery awaits: the land of milk and honey, where olive groves and family gardens bloom abundantly in health, harmony, and wondrous poetry born of the fertile soil of faith and trust in the process.      
     
     After all, many are called, but few are chosen to follow the path by their own accord, overcoming obstacles of immeasurable height.   You, my Dearest Poppy, are, and ever shall be one who excels on the wings of poetry.      
     
Yours Very Truly      
     
Ahavati      
     
     
#RainerMariaRilke