Writing in the Dark
by Denise Levertov
It's not difficult.
Anyway, it's necessary.
Wait till morning, and you'll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.
Fumble for the light, and you'll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.
You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen, ballpoints don't always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There's nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.
Never mind about crossing your t's, dotting your i's--
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.
Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,
or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:
words that may have the power
to make the sun ruse again.
§
That poem is reason enough -- in every possible permutation of the verb -- to circle thoughts.
As one who gets dragged out of bed to write a thought before it crosses from 'elusive' to 'lost', as one who knows that she should write it down because the notion (they're not called 'passing' for nothing) will be forgotten, and as one who absents herself within the lands of others' words . . . Maybe I simply need a midnight space. It's always midnight somewhere. It's half-past one in the heartland, as I type this, which doesn't mean it isn't midnight somewhere inside me. Nighttimes aren't measured only in cycles of outer light.
Daily word-nappings, daily musings upon (vampire and other; I understand some people have muses that are gentle), daily detours . . . And there's naught to say that any other eye must rest upon the words I type.
Levertov was born an Essex girl on the 24th of October in 1923. She knew herself to be a writer at an early age: five. The child of an Anglican priest, she was home-schooled. When she was twelve, she sent off some of her poetry -- to T. S. Eliot, who was wisely encouraging. During World War II, she served as a nurse, which must have affected her on levels seen and unseen. After the war, she married an American writer, Mitchell Goodman (guaranteeing herself a partner who'd understand that the primary relationship was with words and that all other forms of intimacy were tertiary with flashes of higher standing . . . although all breeds of intimacy and awareness interweave). In the course of her life, Levertov bred, loved, taught, edited, and eventually returned to poetry. On the 20th of December, 1997, she died of complications due to lymphoma. Two years later, her final book, This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, came into print.
Writing at midnight presents problems. Turn on the light and your brain jolts from dreams or half-slumber to full waking, and shy ideas may bolt. That's an 'if you're alone' problem. If you're sharing space (a bed, a room, an open chamber, a tent . . .) then it's unlikely that your late night lamplight will be welcome by a person or people blissfully insensible.
It's a delicate line. The words must be captured (which they do not always like). They must not be scared away. The darkness in which they move should not be deranged or disarranged. How do you tempt shy adverbs to your palm when you are half in dreams?
Levertov does not address what is for me a key issue: not writing in darkness, but reading in daylight what I scrawled the night before.
That's always the problem, isn't it? The pain comes in the morning that trails behind the preceding night.
As one who gets dragged out of bed to write a thought before it crosses from 'elusive' to 'lost', as one who knows that she should write it down because the notion (they're not called 'passing' for nothing) will be forgotten, and as one who absents herself within the lands of others' words . . . Maybe I simply need a midnight space. It's always midnight somewhere. It's half-past one in the heartland, as I type this, which doesn't mean it isn't midnight somewhere inside me. Nighttimes aren't measured only in cycles of outer light.
Daily word-nappings, daily musings upon (vampire and other; I understand some people have muses that are gentle), daily detours . . . And there's naught to say that any other eye must rest upon the words I type.
Levertov was born an Essex girl on the 24th of October in 1923. She knew herself to be a writer at an early age: five. The child of an Anglican priest, she was home-schooled. When she was twelve, she sent off some of her poetry -- to T. S. Eliot, who was wisely encouraging. During World War II, she served as a nurse, which must have affected her on levels seen and unseen. After the war, she married an American writer, Mitchell Goodman (guaranteeing herself a partner who'd understand that the primary relationship was with words and that all other forms of intimacy were tertiary with flashes of higher standing . . . although all breeds of intimacy and awareness interweave). In the course of her life, Levertov bred, loved, taught, edited, and eventually returned to poetry. On the 20th of December, 1997, she died of complications due to lymphoma. Two years later, her final book, This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, came into print.
Writing at midnight presents problems. Turn on the light and your brain jolts from dreams or half-slumber to full waking, and shy ideas may bolt. That's an 'if you're alone' problem. If you're sharing space (a bed, a room, an open chamber, a tent . . .) then it's unlikely that your late night lamplight will be welcome by a person or people blissfully insensible.
It's a delicate line. The words must be captured (which they do not always like). They must not be scared away. The darkness in which they move should not be deranged or disarranged. How do you tempt shy adverbs to your palm when you are half in dreams?
Levertov does not address what is for me a key issue: not writing in darkness, but reading in daylight what I scrawled the night before.
That's always the problem, isn't it? The pain comes in the morning that trails behind the preceding night.
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