Given that poetry is a paradoxical art of, at the same time, knowing and not knowing what you're doing, the question of attention is key. How can you pay attention to not knowing what you're about? How can you not know what you're paying attention to?
Look at it another way. Focus is important, but so is distraction. Poetry often succeeds by looking at an object again.
This is what the Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century called defamiliarization or deautomatization -- 'making the stone stoney'... getting to the true nature of (even everyday) things by looking at them in an other-than-everyday way.
Have you ever noticed, looking at a crisp night sky, that you can see stars more clearly (or sometimes see them at all!) by not looking directly at them... I think it's a little like that with poetry. One needs to look sideways, like a bird, perhaps a little suspiciously, at least warily, in ordeer to get a better idea of what it is you're looking at.
And look at what, in the case of poetry? The simple answer is - to look at everything. And especially at everything that you had been looking at all along. Sometimes we just don't see what's right in front of us, what's been staring us in the face up till now. That's why - in Japanese poetry - we can say that the core of the haiku is satori - literally 'a slap in the eye'. Poetry is the wake up call.
I think a major function of poetry since the advent of Modernism has been to get the world to look again at things that were in front of your nose all along. But certainly the Romantics were after a similar effect. Wordsworth is full of it. This is what Keats' 'negative capability' was all about - hanging out with doubt and uncertainty, not freaking out because you lack the fact. I think the epigrams of the Greek anthology do this too. The poetry of ancient creation myths is full of the surprise of showing a reader or listener that things were not as they had been, up until now, imagined.
Surprise is the key with every kind of cultural production. The work of culture is to take you where you haven't been, even and especially if that's where you were all along.
Given all this contradiction / paradox / ambiguity about what one is doing when one is doing poetry, the problem of trying too hard may be more acute than in other areas of life. I think that what a lot people call 'writer's block' (a useless idea if ever there was one) has to do with trying to stay focussed when what one really needs to do is to look away for a bit so that one will be able to look back and see things with fresh eyes, to see again - and so see what one could not see before. This is what poets need to get their readers to do, so it goes without saying that they need to be doing this themselves!
To look again involves first looking away. Distraction and focus. Focus and distraction.
Best way to look away? You could do sudoko or mental arithmetic, you could get out in the garden, go for a cycle, swim, play ping pong. All good.
The other thing you can do is to take up another creative practice (or perhaps multiple pratices!).
In my case the other practices are painting, drawing making music. I have no proper training in any of these areas... I can't play the piano but I play the piano every day. I enjoy it a lot. And it's true, I do often think how much more fun and how great it would be if I knew what I was doing. I blame my parents, as one does. They were anti-music, in the sense of anti me learning how to make it.
Beginning with an instrument, like beginning at a language ...is where you feel the most incompetent... where you experience the helplessness of being unable to express yourself. But it is also where you experience the maximum wonder of the potential of the unknown.
Beginner's luck, beginner's mind - it's great to be beginning at things. Once you're good at something - have knowledge and discipline - it can be hard to recover that wonder of getting started.
Being a beginner at something is not just as a guard against the hubris entailed in knowing what you are doing, it's not just a good way to ward off dementia. It's valuable because approaching things as a beginner - like approaching things as a foreigner - is a powerful approach in every form of cultural production. Being a poet is a bit like being a foreigner, or being a child, in your own language. We can save that idea for later! Let's just say for now, poetry needs to be at the cutting edge of what can be done with words. Perhaps it is only as a beginner at something (maybe anything) that one engages the fundamental principle of seeing things anew... coming to the world as if for the first time.
I think Dylan Thomas captured the feeling well, in 'Fern Hill' -
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
I'll save coming into a new language - the affinity of that process for the making of poetry - for a later post. But for now, let me encourage you to spend some time beginning, doing something you don't know how to do. Then bring that experience back to your poetry making. In fact, why not write a poem about something you're beginning, about doing something for the first time? Why not write a series of these? They could be recollections of such events in your life. But why not try something new now? Why not not know what you're going to do next, and what comes after next? Why not write about that?
