June 2017
David Huddle
dhuddle@uvm.edu
​​Writer’s Block is no fun for the writer, especially if it goes on for more than a few months.  But I’ve come to think of it as an opportunity to find new territory, a new sound, a new vision, a new way to write.  All of us “creative writers” come to understand that the process itself helps us find those elements that are just beyond our reach and that are the very ones we need to make a piece of work successful.  Which is to say that we get a little help from giving ourselves over to what comes to us while we are sitting down struggling to make art out of words.  A blocked writer is a humiliated writer--but the one who discovers a path around or through or beyond the block almost always becomes a rejuvenated writer.
 
Sit With It
 

want to make something out of nothing got
to sit with a soup of vague thoughts images
jittery words agitating to line up
direction not yet clear destination
mostly unknown got to forget spouse kids
email newspaper even that book you love
that’s lighting the path toward a death
you can live with got to sit still and try
to believe something’s somewhere in this non-
profit time-wasting sandbox full of cat-
droppings something that wants to fork lightning
down from your brain up from your heart even
a whisper out of your soul assuming you
have one which maybe this morning you don’t.

"Sit With It" was first published in Dream Sender: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets), LSU Press, 2015.
© 2017 David Huddle
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