I have been thinking about audience and its importance.  In an email, a Heidy Steidlmayer said this:

I always think of this image from Loren Eiseley’s “The Star Thrower” — it is when Eiseley sees an orb weaver steadily building her web under a streetlamp in the frost.  He writes; “One specimen of Epeira observed building a web in a street light. Late autumn and cold for spiders. Cold for men, too. I shivered and left the lamp glowing there in my mind. The last I saw of Epeira she was hauling steadily on a cable. I stepped carefully over her shadow as I walked away.” And even though Eiseley “comprehends somewhat reluctantly that her adventure against the great blind forces of winter, her seizure of this warming globe of light, would come to nothing and was hopeless”— at the same time he observes that it is also a world where “even a spider refuses to lie down and die if a rope can still be spun on to a star.”

I think that is a wonderful notion of audience — to build your web because you do.

I had a joyful, heady, and intense period of working right after my son was born.  Writing work consumed me every second I had free.  I was prolific in a way I’d never been and it left me red-cheeked and flying high for months afterward.  It was unlike any other experience I’ve had as a writer.  I held onto it for a while thinking that even if I never wrote another thing I liked, having had that experience would be enough.  I returned to my normal working mode/habits, but at some point (last year to be specific) that enough-ness, my satisfaction with the work itself and even the jeweled memory of that particular working period stopped being enough.  I couldn’t be the spider anymore.  Couldn’t face the frost or the street lamp.  I felt that if the web weren’t made and seen by someone beyond me it was futile.  I wanted to be part of a larger conversation.

Eleanor Wilner sent me this note:

“I think the subject seems a difficult one for us because we think mostly of the expressive notion of our art — and forget (or wish to) how much of our technique and craft is really out to snare the heart and mind of an audience.  Even the Ancient Mariner needed to stop the revelers with his skinny hand on their arms, and tell his tale.”

After a spate of rejections and near-misses, I let disappointment — a sense of silence around me — get the better of me and decided to try to go off the junk.  I quit.  I picked up my camera, over-filled my calendar, shut the word eye and closed my ear to the work of poems.  Why speak, I thought, to an empty room?

And still words came.  I wasn’t very productive — my efforts at quitting were not entirely in vain — but the urge to speak, and in that poem way, remained present despite my efforts at shushing it.  Clamorous at times.  It didn’t matter, to that impulse, that I had stepped out of the room — the public room — the place where we offer what we have to say to each other in hopes of being heard.

I’m back at it again.  I’m a failed ex-writer.  Sitting on the train this weekend I read this:

There is a big change after you write a poem.  It’s a marvelous feeling, and there’s a big change in the psyche, but I think you really go into great chaos just before you write a poem, and during it, and then to have to come out of that whole, somehow is a small miracle, which lasts for a couple of days.  Then on to the next.

—Anne Sexton from an interview with Patricia Marx, from No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose

On to the next.