Poets and the Blank Page: a Brief Note

"Look into your heart and write" said Sir Phillip Sidney in his famous sonnet. Of course, he was toying with us as poets so often do. His plea to abandon literary convention for the authenticity of the heart is itself a literary trope and one the heart rightly scorns. The heart does not quite reveal itself in this easy way at least for most of us. If it does, once in a while, you should count your lucky stars but you will not make a poetic career out of Sidney's advice and I doubt he intended that you should. Still, we all, as Sidney did centuries ago, face the terror of the blank page. I myself, for over a decade, did not write a single line of verse out a simple inability to start even one line. By this I mean the first line of course. If you want to write you need a trick for getting the first line for after that the other lines come as naturally as the orderly flow of conversation (in my experience) so it is a question of breaking the ice. My trick is just this. The heart has a habit of showing itself when you least expect or want it so why not take advantage? Imagine yourself someplace with someone. What would you do? Well if you want to entertain the other person (and a poet cannot be a bore!) you would tell a simple story or share a memory. Pick one out of your head now. Say you went fishing with your father. You now have a setting; a river, a lake, the ocean and now you have not only a personal memory but the whole history of human attitudes to bodies of water and the primal human activity of fishing. Suddenly you are talking not only to a person in a bar or cafe but to the oldest Indo-Europeans (or others depending on your ancestry) from whom we get our words for salmon and lake. In this case you don't need to look in the heart becasue where rivers and fish and fathers and mothers are concerned the heart will burst out in images and associations both deeply personal and unique yet as universal as land and water. With a setting of course you are now perpared to convey a memory plus use your chops as a writer to evoke a setting which may trigger an entirely different chain of feelings and reflections in the reader. My personal experience (yours may totally differ) is that other people's stories can be more effective than your own. If your own head is blank looking at the empty screen or page try someone else's head. Nothing binds you to the tyrrany of the lyic I. Remember that time your friend got lost in the woods and it was terrifying but you had  laugh about it later? Well lose yourself in the woods. Best of course, if you have a dramatic sensibility, is to assume a mask or character. Nor are your own personal memories sacrosant: twist them around. Insert other people in your story as you would insert yourself in someone else's. Aristotle said poets are liars so lie freely! Often you will find yourself telling an uncomfortable truth. If this is not your game though, if you write the personal lyric becasue that is what you do just think how you would start a conversation with a friend. One day I was walking down the steet AND...suddenly you are describing the street and who is on it and what they are doing and that might even be enough and you can cut the narrative away as so much scaffolding. Of course these are just simple tricks that help you do what you need to do: release the unconscious faculty which is half of writing (the conscious part is all the editing you do later and you can learn that so don't worry). Of course, none of this is automatic. Sometimes no poem is getting started today and you should go do something else. This though, is what I find works as often as not so give it a try!