White Pages

Someone once asked me if poets are haunted by white pages. Well yes, they are. But the haunting is mutual. We should take pity on the white pages, frantically trying to get away – not on the poets (never on the poets). The most important thing to remember is that poets are meant to be bullied by their own poetry. It’s their job. Poets wake up in the middle of the night because of a word that popped into their mind, and they are not able to get it out. Poets will leave their warm beds and go and search for a way to write the word down, and all other words and images and sentences and sounds that appear after the word that woke them up. They try not to feel intimidated. Most of the time, they don’t know why they bother. But they do it anyway. Stubborn, shivering, barefoot.