Why Write? It’s Like Everest — Because It’s There

by Joan L. Cannon

I write because I can’t help it. A better question would be why can’t I help it?

First, I need to find out what I know; second, I need to discover what I don’t know; third, I need to note what I must not forget.  I’m an indifferent amateur painter, and the other visual arts are beyond my talents altogether; I can’t perform music. I find I can put words on paper. They can do for me what nothing else can.

Since I have a poor memory and perhaps a little too much emotion, the act of writing helps to suggest the perspective I need to cope with what is happening or what has happened to me, and to suggest how one experience might be useful to others.  Utility is not all there is to that. Love for rhythm and cadence and image-making, and the opportunity to cause a chuckle and the frisson of recognition are involved.

Writing is the corollary to reading. All the words that have instructed and inspired and comforted and exhilarated through all the years of a long life prove to me that if I could find the readers, even I could add to that legacy.  I can’t resist the temptation to try. I care about how words can conjure and reveal; I respect the fact that if you think (as opposed to dream or imagine) you need words. They matter. Most people want to live a life that matters. After my children, words seem to be my best opportunity to accomplish that, on however small a scale.

That’s not quite the whole story, though. Poetry seems to be a different matter. Perhaps, in part, because the kind of precision required for satisfactory prose could be like a curse on a poem. Self-revelation is often an unintended consequence in prose; in poetry that generates that delightful shock of comprehension that has nothing to do with fact or analysis, the exposure of the poet is likely to be what makes the poem work for its readers. So if you sit down and produce a poem, it’s likely that you’ve exposed some of what lies beneath the skin, even as deep as bone if you get the words right.

Not every writer wants to go there. I’m not even sure I do. However, in a poem, suddenly a layer of understanding becomes visible through the imagery, the formality or lack thereof, the figures of speech that are nonliteral (rather than denotative are connotative, and thus mean no more to the reader than to the writer). One of the thrills is writing often is that I’m amazed when I read over something I’ve committed to paper. It’s a feeling of unmatched achievement. It feels so good to have put out there something that until then seemed inexpressible.

Illustration above:  New England Courant. (Published by James and Benjamin Franklin, 1721–1726). Franklin’s own file of the paper is now in the British Library; in it he wrote the authors’ initials beside anonymous articles. His own initials, “B.F.,” here mark the third “Silence Dogood” essay.