My dear friend,

I've started this letter more times than I can count, have opened the computer only to type a few lines and close it again. I am writing to you now doing all I can to push through whatever it is inside me that makes this very simple process of putting down one word and then another, far too complicated. 

The reason I haven't been wanting to write this letter is because I haven't been wanting to write. And I haven't been wanting to write because I have not wanted to be a witness to my own life, a life I fell into the trap of believing was somehow not worth paying close attention to. When I stop noticing my world beyond the obvious, I stop being invested in its nuances. When I am not invested in its nuances, I am not invested in its truths. Its rewards become less available to me, more elusive. But the writer, the poet, the thinker, the artist, the theologian, the researcher must always be invested in truth, right?

There was a time when I believed every experience had poetry in it. No matter what went on, my own private poetry and poetics swirled through my inner world. As I got older, it became more distant, its gifts further from reach once I understood (or thought I understood) what a “good” “poem” entails. So poetry became reserved only for when it was absolutely necessary. When a poem simply had to emerge. Or rather, when I felt that familiar thing start to move through me I would wrap it with black paper, placing it in the back of some drawer in an unused room somewhere, or perhaps buried beneath a pile of everything else that seemed more important: finding a romantic partner, doing things that would seem fun, looking at social media for the purpose of comparing my life to others or feeling terrible about how little I can do about all the terrible things in the world.

I wanted to blame online dating. I wanted to blame the tech culture that seemed to be ruining us all. I wanted to blame San Francisco, the city I love still more than any in the world. And then, of course, I wanted to blame my mother. Eventually I got a small dog (her name is Franny, you’d love her) and thought about moving back to New York. I committed to doing yoga regularly again, meditating (I’m not really doing much of either). (Sidebar: my therapist is great because he says I’m doing meditation and yoga in my daily life regardless of whether or not I have a “practice.” I love California. Everyone’s got an excuse.) I spent a lot of time convincing my one-year-old nieces that I am a real person through video chat. I called an ex, or rather, who would have been an ex had we extended our romance beyond last summer and across this giant country. It’s easy to think you love someone when you never are in their physical presence. When I was back in New York visiting we sat on a rock in the park and talked, took photographs, didn't kiss, not even once, but envisioned, briefly, what it might have been like to love one another, for real this time.

I’m happy to say that I'm very healthy these days. Maybe you remember my years of Crohn’s flareups. You know, there were years where all I wanted was to have a body that held up, a body that kept its value over time, a body like a Japanese car. There were years when I thought if I was held passionately enough by the right person for a long enough time, I might be cured, I might transcend to that other side, and permanently, even if I did get sick again. It was something else entirely to be held, to be seen as beautiful or powerful in the eyes of a beloved. It still is. There were ways to be held other than through sex but I didn't learn that until later. I'm trying to learn. Maybe that's partly what the small dog is about. 

Right now I am in a rented room on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, not far from the Nevada Border. I am with my dog, who is so small and so cute that I feel as if I've admitted to the world my own smallness, my own softness. It is not always so comfortable for me even though I love her and would miss her dearly if she were not mine anymore. But I'm with her and my pile of books, a new journal, and a feeling that somehow I need to make something happen here, or at least un-happen what happened to me back in the emotional bumper-cars of city living. 

Writing doesn't have to be painful, but sometimes the pain of self-knowledge can stand in the way of beginning. Can I really admit I feel this way? Can I admit the weight of my craving? Can I admit how many hours I spend looking for someone else to make it all ok? Who else can bring us to the edge of our longing but ourselves? Who else can hold us there, in that space, when desire is something we possess, something innate in us and is fulfilled with each breath? Can I really admit the turmoil in my head and heart and groin? Can I really admit what I want are the fruits and not the labor? Maybe part of growing up is finding a kind of labor one can love. But then when we get into the area of exchange value, everything seems to dissolve. What was once an organic process and a means for emotional survival becomes a route to praise, attention, a career, popularity. The whole effort of art making seems suspect to me sometimes. A poem is not a widget, but sometimes we train ourselves to treat them that way, which is perhaps why some of us stop writing altogether.

I have been thinking lately about what it would mean to quit. What would it mean to just stop trying with poetry, to simply leave it as a curiosity of another time in my life? There is such relief in typing these lines, in the idea of just doing away with it all finally. In giving up. But I also know that a world where poetry is not a possibility is a world that seems even emptier than this one.

When I was a teenager I ended up in a writing workshop. I don't remember how – maybe I signed up for it in the 8th grade, maybe my guidance counselor or English teacher did it for me, but for whatever reason I ended up in that workshop and it gave me a path toward figuring out who I was, toward actually being someone of my own choosing simply by having this tool, this lens, this way of seeing into (or out of) the world. I made lists of topics I wanted to write poems about and wrote them. I didn't worry so much whether they were good or not. I am sure I wanted them to be good, and likely believed they were out of some sort of necessity. The praise I got was only from the teacher or my peers, and it was measured. Good line here. Good ending there. Nice title on that one. And that did help to sustain my quiet practice. 

On the outside, however, I was in a punk band. I wore ripped jeans that I drew all over. I dyed my hair green, purple, red, black in turns, got facial piercings. My “success” as a poet mattered to me only privately and abstractly. I had my share of envy for the poets in my grade who were, in my head, “better” poets than me, but I never really thought too much about it. I never labored over the decision of whether or not to write. I never would just sit down, hammer out five lines, judge them harshly, then quit like I do now. I would show up because it was important to me. I really wanted to become a poet. Now that I am one, I want to go back to when I wasn't one yet, to when I really wanted to become one. To reach the end of becoming is to cease the creative life.

Back then, I showed up. Every day. I sat at the computer and I worked.

Sometimes I remind my students how few stories we have. How we are always just retelling the same ones in new ways. “There are no new ideas,” Audre Lorde wrote, “only new ways of making them felt.” This story is about the usual longing for a simpler time when there was less at stake, when aging and public approval seemed like a totally foreign concept. When I still had my “beginner's mind.” The teenage me would rage at me now for how much I care about the perceptions of strangers, would be appalled that I would choose company that would find me valuable only as much as I was publishing or getting some kind of attention for my work. 

I have also been afraid of taking real emotional risks. I have been afraid of being bold enough to move through the unsettling truths of my life. I have been afraid that no matter what I do or say my story will not be good enough because of who (or how) I am.

Sometimes I really wish I could start over completely, not just with poetry, but also with life. But that's not how life works. Fortunately, however, with poetry, with writing, it is possible. Yes, I have my name and all that is attached to it via-search engines. But more than anything, what I have is my own hands, my own lungs, my own blood and belly and brain. What I have is possibility – and that, perhaps, is the ultimate privilege. 

Eight years ago (!!) I wrote another Letter in the Mail for The Rumpus. I can hardly bear to read back through it, particularly because I was at an earlier stage of the same problem I face now: how does one do this work? How does one get over the fear, the laziness, the craving for affection, the urge to be seen as virtuous and inventive, smart, and yes, possessing a certain kind of cultural and social currency? Still, there are a couple things from that letter I want to hold onto.

“The work is never finished,” I wrote to you then. Growing up I always heard this line from a rabbinic sage (Tarphon) some two thousand years ago: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” What is the work, exactly? That was the question I wanted to ask, but as soon as I ask it honestly and willingly I feel I know. The work is showing up. The work is trying in spite of all the anxiety, the grief, the feeling of being not good enough, the feeling of being innately wrong. The work is being kind. And kindness is one thing that stood out from the 2012 letter that I need, right now, so desperately to remember. “...an important part of writing is being kind. It is the only thing that carries us through, that makes living truly special. Human kindness.” Being kind to others, of course. Yes to cheering on our friends and being happy for their positive book reviews, even as you struggle to write yours. Yes to remembering that people send out into the world what they need to get back. We all need validation from others. First, however, (did you see this coming?) I need validation from myself. Automatic, unconditional, whole-hearted acceptance of all that I am.

And this is the last thing, and perhaps the most important one, that I'm always working through with my students. How does one be kind to oneself? This is another way of asking: how does one get free? And if one cannot be totally free physically, how can one be free emotionally to feel whatever they need to feel? And to express whatever they need to express? 

How does one cultivate a garden?  How does one cultivate, in themselves, a garden in which growth is possible? “Be the party you wish to attend,” I joke to my students, playing on that overused quote from Ghandi, “be the change you wish to see in the world.” I try to laugh with them because we all know how hard this work can be, this work of becoming, of beginning again, all the time.

I imagine real love between two people requires a regular cultivation of newness, of accepting that the other party is an individual whose identity is not etched into a mountainside. People change and the only way to honor them is to honor these changes. And the only way people grow is if they are accepted as who they already are. 

I, like you, am changing. I am doing all that I can to ensure that at the very least I can articulate the truth of my situation without judgement, without meanness, without wanting what has already happened to be different. Without worrying about what censure, what rejection, what suffering may come. 

“How can I be kind to myself?” is a question I would like to start asking each day and I wonder if we can both commit to that. How can we get the kind of quiet we need in order to love ourselves as we are, to love our bodies as they are? How do we reclaim the power which is always up for sale to the highest bidder? Our attention is precious, it is limited, and we never know how much longer we have. Annie Dillard said it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

I would like for us to be in charge of our attention. I would like us to not gravitate simply towards what is easiest because life hurts so much. I would like us to feel authentic gratitude, to not go through the motions anymore, to not try so hard. I would like to see us set up the conditions for ourselves where gratitude is easy, where noticing is natural, where we are authentically who we are meant to be: expansive, kind, and new.  

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it,” Rumi wrote so many years ago. I too have built barriers in my heart against poetry, which is to say, barriers against deep feeling, against deep commitment, against the solitude and suffering it requires. And I want to mention that solitude is already there. Suffering is already there. It finds us regardless. It is better to welcome it, to bear it with dignity. To allow it to impact who we are. To allow ourselves to make meaning. 

The desire to be appreciated is a barrier. The desire to have a good career is a barrier. The desire to have this or that publication or prize or review is a barrier. The desire to be invited to the conferences and dinner parties is a barrier. The desire to be a “big name,” whatever that means, is a barrier. I also desire these things, but I want to place that desire in a jar and I want to store those jars in the middle of a desert or somewhere they can’t harm me or anyone else. Do you know what I mean?

Willa Cather, in her preface to Song of the Lark, writes about the two options writers have. That on one side, there is no shame in the production of well-made art objects. But to write, to really write, is to create something “for which there is no market demand.” 

“Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer  all at once—nor, for that matter, does the ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning, the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to recapture.”

And again, thinking about Baldwin, from his speech “The Artist's Struggle for Integrity”: 

“you must decide...whether you want to be famous or whether you want to write. And the two things, in spite of all the evidence, have nothing whatever in common.”

Who among us can look past our desire to be loved, appreciated, held? Who among us can avoid considering the “ultimate goals” of writing? Maybe these pressures help motivate some of us to produce. For me this has not been the case. Wanting to get a poem in the New Yorker does not a good poem make. In one of my favorite Dear Sugar columns, Sugar (Cheryl) writes: “You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching.” 

I'm writing to tell you that I'm trying. That today I am showing up, and tomorrow, should I be so lucky to see it. And I hope you can, too. Maybe you already are.

In one week from writing this (or rather, one week from this moment of revising) I will be turning 35. What I am going to give myself this year is forgiveness. What I am giving myself this year is the ability to decide for myself what I will do with my “one wild and precious life.”

Until we meet (or meet again), I wish you kindness toward yourself, your work, and to others. We never know how much time we have left. Let's make it count.

All my love,

Matthew Siegel

Summer 2019 - Winter 2020