Something is trying to get itself written. You can feel it: There’s a bulge in the ether, a protuberance in the brainpan. Something is trying to get itself written, and it has elected you—by what process, God only knows—as its writer. Can you do the job, complete the commission? It’s going to take some ninja skills. The energy accumulates, shapelessly, buzzingly, around no clear point. Les Murray has called it a “painless headache,” this pre-writing electrical build that must be “tapped” or siphoned into words on the page — into a poem, in his case. What does it mean? Might it mean, as your pen twitches over the blank space, that you, the writer, are preparing to participate, at an essential level, in the continually and explosively renewed creative act that is reality itself?
Maybe. Or maybe you’ve just had a drop too much of Robert’s magic coffee. Robert has been making his patented super-strong coffee for us at the Black Seed Writers Groupsince 2013: three silver two-liter pots (one decaf) per session, standing there on the trolley like robot owls with black plastic beaks. “Robert is consistent in his undertaking as a coffee maker,” wrote Al, one of our regulars, in “Read All About It: Robert Is My Favorite Coffee Person/Maker,” a recent poem. “I am well pleased with his coffee making skills.”
[For more of this story, written by James Parker, go to https://psmag.com/radical-effo...42c96ab43#.77yjq2tr1]
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