This is about the practice of poetry, about why it can be a struggle.

In “The War of Art” Steven Pressfield discusses what he terms the artist’s “orientation.” It’s a dichotomy (or, to use a more trendy word, a “binary”) of “the hierarchical” versus “the territorial.” You may know what he means by hierarchical, especially if I mention that he takes as his examples Hollywood, Washington (not just government; think of the cocktail parties) and the DAR. Perhaps the best examples, though, are from the animal kingdom: the wolf pack, with its fights to find a leader, the hen house, with its pecking order.

The territorial does not, in Pressfield’s description, yield as vivid examples as these, because, as I understand it, the territory is personal, and inner. It is a field planted and watered, weeded and nurtured, by a muse. The artist’s work is itself a territory, not found in a group, as is the hierarchical, but in the practice itself. The distinction is crucial, and I’m thinking of the root of that word “crucial,” which is “cross.” because here, between hierarchy and territory, are the artist’s crossroads. You know that the Devil waits at the crossroads, right? So, in the other direction, lies what Pressfield – and any artist – terms “a true calling.” At the crossing between the territorial and the hierarchical, the artist meets the devil and the muse. And decides whether to sell the soul for the gift of success or surrender the soul to whatever one is truly called to do.

We know how unreliable the Devil is. He has a habit of grabbing souls without keeping promises. One can argue, as well, that following one’s calling instead of selling one’s soul doesn’t guarantee fame and glory. But that’s where the real crossroads lie, at the junction of the hierarchy and the artistic territory. The hierarchical compass, the  way I understand it, points toward success which is outside, external, defined by others. It locates the practitioner in an artistic hierarchy. How many Pulitzers? How many Guggenheims? Commissions, best sellers? The territorial is, well, an end in itself, because her territory is where the artist belongs and where success is defined not as the product of the work but as doing the work. It’s the familiar principle of the work being an end in itself, its own reward.

Okay, that’s a cliché, I know. I wouldn’t be a poet if I couldn’t recognize a cliché. But there is truth in a cliché. That’s how an idea, an expression, becomes cliched. by repeating an important, if familiar, truth.  We realize this, make real the truth expressed, not by spouting cliches but by putting their truths into practice, in specific situations.

For me, in my poetry practice the struggle is with the hierarchical orientation. With the hierarchy of “great” poets. Even with less but still highly reputed poets. I don’t have to read Shakespeare or Milton, Keats or Wordsworth, to know that I’m not a great poet. The hierarchy of American poets of the past 100 years alone is enough. I’m not nor likely ever to be a Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, or even a Billy Collins. In fact, any given issue of “Poetry Magazine” presents a heap of poetry that I’m at the bottom of.  Reading just about any good poem – and I can tell the good from the not-so-good – I find myself saying “I could never have written that poem.”

I’m placing myself, and my practice, in the hierarchy. And at a very low position in the pecking order. I’m allowing the hierarchy to determine the value of my poetry and to question my purpose. Why am I writing poems only to find them at the bottom of the heap?

Basically, I’m cancelling my practice before I even begin.

Except that I continue to write poems. Why? Because somewhere in my tortured psyche something – or someone – is telling me that I’m called to do this. To do it no matter where in the heap I end up, no matter how successful I am by any measure of success, and no matter what I might think of my poems. It’s the work that counts. It’s the work itself that I’m called to do.

And the work is hard. I don’t know any poets who say otherwise. Mary Oliver wrote somewhere that writing a good poem is like trying to carry water in a sieve. But language is, to a poet, to someone who is truly called to poetry, an endlessly fascinating thing. And a thing capable of great beauty.  That’s the territory, the fertile field where the poet works: language. If he or she does the work, something will grow. And if he or she works hard enough, persistently enough, that something will be beautiful.