“There is really only one
reason for doing anything:
To be born, and reborn,
and live in between
the deaths.”
(final stanza of Cin Salach’s poem “After Birth”)

I know it’s against the Cardinal Rules of Blogland for a writer to blog about poetry, but nothing except this poem really illustrates what I want to say. And I’ve never been very good at keeping commandments.

Writing is my life. It’s what I spent most of my waking hours doing. When I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing. I dream about writing, and I steal ideas from my dreams to write about.

I’ve always fully believed there are only two real reasons we write: it’s your passion or it’s your job. Sometimes the two combine; I write for work and for pleasure.

Last night on the train ride home from the city, I sat next to a writer. I recognized her by the two pencils in her hair and the stack of library books she had to move for me to sit down. She broke the Unspoken Train Code by speaking to me (outside the allowed “excuse me” or “bless you”). For forty minutes, we talked about writing. In forty minutes, what she said to me is this:

“What all writers have in common is we write to communicate. Without communication, we can’t live. We write to save our own lives.”

And it makes sense. From e-commerce copy to poetry, outstanding writing communicates best because it reaches the reader. Whether it’s to obey the muse or to pay the rent, we write to save our own lives.

This might not sound as brilliant to you as it did to me, but I was really in awe of this idea. I jotted it down in my “things to blog about” notes. I took the notion to bed with me last night.

When I woke up, I had a stanza of poetry running through my head:

“This is not a clean place.
There are not drawers
to fit everything.
Sometimes the rubbish
piles up so high, it is
taller than me.
It could be a forest.”

I knew it wasn’t from one of my own poems, but I couldn’t place whose it was. On an OCD, BC (before coffee) mission, I had to dig through a stack of thirty or so poetry books to find it. When I finally did, I wasn’t surprised to find it was the opening stanza of the poem I quoted above.

The poem is about life, not writing. But I think for many of us the two are synonymous.

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