Greetings, writers—
My younger daughter has a job walking the neighbor’s dog every night, and most evenings I go with her, because I like an after-dinner constitutional and I want to spend time with her before she decides I’m too embarrassing (she’s 14; it could happen tomorrow). As a bonus, I get to hear the hot goss, such as it is, learn slang I’m too old to use, and pretend I have a dog of my own.
Anyway, the other night, she was busy, so her 16-year-old sister agreed to do the walk. Even though she doesn’t really like dogs, she likes Alaska, who is beautiful and dumb and lazy, with soft, shaggy fur the color of a toasted marshmallow. Jon decided to come too, so the three of us were ambling along the sidewalk when Alaska took an uncharacteristically speedy dive at something in the parking strip. “Mom, what is she doing?” my daughter asked querulously as Alaska, with more enthusiasm than I have ever seen her display, smeared her nose and cheeks and ears along the ground, tail wagging madly.
Nothing good was the obvious answer. We pulled her away and looked down; in the grass was the flattened remains of a squirrel, almost nothing left of it but shreds of gray fur and stench.
And oh my God, did it smell. We had a half mile yet to go on the walk and every few seconds a putrid wave of rotting garbage air would waft back in our direction. For some reason I felt the need to confirm that this horror was actually coming from Alaska, so I leaned in close to her ear, sniffed, and promptly started gagging. Then I spent the rest of the walk trying to get Jon to smell her, too. He wouldn’t do it, I can’t imagine why.
You want to know why I’m telling you this. It’s because yesterday in my friend Justin’s Substack I read this fantastic quote from the poet Eileen Myles, which is about dogs and gross things but also about writing, because everything always comes back to writing. I mean, that’s what we’re here for.
It really takes so much time to become a writer and you have to be able to roll in time itself, that was my experience, it seems to me, like a dog likes to roll in dead fish at the beach. Or a dog (my dog) stands in the shit of a stable underneath the body of a horse (trembling) and feels awe. Cause there’s so much shit and so much horse. But if you’re somebody that wants to do that with your life which is just waste your time moment to moment, I mean it’s great, I thought I will waste it being a poet, I threw the gauntlet down and what happened after was nothing and nothing is where I work.
I’ve written before about how little patience I often have for the process—how hard it is for me to roll around in time as Myles suggests we should. But I love the way they frame it: If they’re going to waste their time, they’re going to waste it for poetry.
“And what happened after was nothing and nothing is where I work.”
Maybe we can take this as a reminder not to get so knotted up and angsty when some piece of writing isn’t going well: nothing is where we work.
But don’t forget the awe! That’s a crucial part of it, too.
For your prompt today, take yourself on a walk. See or hear or smell something, and then go home write about it. (Or be like Eileen Myles and take a small notebook with you, in which you can write the kind of short, clipped lines that often characterize their poetry.)
P.S. Here’s a fun poem for you word nerds.
Resonates with me. My sister is a poet who spent her life teaching comp and barely ever got a poetry class to teach. Got very angsty about her work, even now, retired and with dementia, she has the complaint that no poems are coming out. But no one can use her computer because this is where she writes. I like the thought that she has done quite a bit of nothing over time. Thank you for the poetry, and especially thank you for the dog walk. Dogs are very special and have much to teach us!
Loved the poem.