Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night by Morgan Parker

Mostly what this means is I run with a lot of weird ideas, and most of them turn out to be failed attempts. That’s sort of the way I conceive of projects-I dare myself to try something. But a lot of times it doesn’t, and that’s always really exciting to look back and say, “Oh, something is happening subconsciously that I didn’t even really know in the writing of the poems.” On staying creative What was missing from that collection of poems. With the second book, I don’t know, once I put some poems together, I started to see where the connections were and how to finish it, basically. In that case, it was a moment of, “Oh, I have this many poems, I wonder if there is a book to be made out of them.” I, of course, had no idea that it was going to be a book. With my first book, it was some of the first poems that I ever wrote. I have never really conceptualized a book before writing it. I know a lot of writers who have something in mind before they start. That’s still my creative process, where I’m just like, “I don’t know, I’m just going to do whatever I want.” Even if people say, “This is not what you’re supposed to do or say.” On conceptualizing a book I felt like I could do whatever I wanted. It provided structure, but it also gave me rules to break. There are so many rules in poetry that there are no rules. It really took someone else saying, “This is actually good and can be better.” That put the idea in my head. My professor was like, “Morgan, did you know that this stuff is really good?” I really wasn’t even thinking about it like that. I was still thinking about it as an exercise. I found it freeing to be able to write about my life and to try out different forms in that way. I was like, “This has nothing to do with me” until I read more contemporary poets in college classes. It’s just basically Robert Frost, and that’s it. When I took a poetry class at college, it was the first time that I was like, “Oh, poems are also this.” I had always thought it was whatever bullshit you get taught in high school. It was an entertaining thing, but I didn’t take it seriously at all. In my freshman year, I would write poems, but they were really just jokes about my roommate that I would read at parties to my friends. I was like, “This is bullshit, this is weird hippy shit, I hate this, it has nothing to do with me.” That was my relationship towards poetry. When I went to writing camp, I was put in the poetry class and called my parents and was so pissed off. I was never really good at prose, but I was passionate and loved writing and could write a sentence. I don’t know what made me take it, but even when I was in high school, I went to a writing camp and I just wanted to be a writer. I hated poetry until sophomore year of college.

Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night by Morgan Parker