Early research is often overwhelmed by curiosity.
There are more questions than answers and the questions just keep coming. Every person you talk to mentions something else you haven’t thought of and your project, a very reasonable Bruce Banner, suddenly starts growing, turning green and tearing up its clothes.
At some point you have to call it quits on certain questions and trust that if it is relevant it will come up again. Let the beast calm down.
Early in my project I became curious about the difference between confession and testimony. I was researching the Confessional Poets of the 50s and 60s and drilling down on what it means in poetry to confess.
Down the rabbit hole I went: confession/testimony, testimony/confession, on and on. Until…I stopped being curious and started being annoyed (I look good green). I climbed out of that particular hole, stored the readings where I would find them later and did something else.
It was early in the project and I was still learning about my curiosity. Interestingly, now that I am writing my academic paper, I am back down the confession/testimony rabbit hole but in a control, more purposeful manner—I digress.
I got better at being curious.
My curiosity was so broad, in the beginning, that everything was interesting to me. I didn’t really know what I was looking for and so everything needed to be looked at. But as time passed my reliance on this “aim at everything and hope to hit something” approach changed. And it changed without me forcing it.
I began to get better at noticing my feelings while I was writing. I could interrupt and redirect myself in the moment so that rather than the poem taking months to speak to the research, it began to speak as I wrote.
This is an elusive self-reflexive skill. It requires practice. Lots of practice.
Early in the process, it is easy to break the delicate flow needed to write poetry. Noticing that you are writing poetry and exploring a particular trauma moment tempts the writer to get too involved, resulting in a forced situation. The poem then takes on a “laboured” feel, losing its lightness.
I learned to persevere and admit, I pushed that somewhere it didn’t want to go. And then try again with less expectation and more observation, allowing the form of the poetry to flow once again.
Mistakes are an important part of curiosity. They keep you on the right track to new knowledge (by showing you where not to go). Curiosity may have killed the cat but only because she didn’t realise her mistake in time and change her thinking accordingly, and possibly due to those nine lives she’s been relying on.
Learning to observe what your curiosity is saying takes practice and courage. At some mysterious point—once you have practiced far more than you would like—it happens in poetry that the curiosity explored in the content is also the curiosity explored in the form. This, for those philosophers reading along, is a very “Derrida” thing to do.
By the way, curiosity doesn’t just belong to the creative arts.
It’s something that brings meaning to our lives, lights us up and gives us things to explore. Maybe we just want to know how to put up a shelf or maybe we are curious about life itself.
Test it out.
Take some time to be curious about a friend and watch your friendship deepen right before your eyes.
This Writer's Life 