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I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. Too much importance is placed on inspiration, we say. Go with routine, sit down at your desk, and write, write anything until something hooks.

I say to students, don't wait. Poet Frank O'Hara said, just go on your nerve. So much around us says,

go go go and that makes sense for a society built on excess and theories of efficiency and productivity.

For a long while, I approached the writing of poetry like the models and methods I studied in business school.

Then life intervened. Divorce, child rearing, new work responsibilities.

The writing halted.

I needed to find a way to enter the art differently.

I needed to create a routine of writing that did not replicate the same old

practice of sitting down at a desk, which I had grown tired of. First I tried to jumpstart my nervous system through extreme

measures like cold showers and sprints around my block,

which I'm sure was entertainment for my neighbors.

Next, I listened every morning

to a highly rhythmic loud percussive jazz composition by Amal-Jamal. I sat in my backyard in the middle of the

day with the sun bearing down. I meditated for an hour and a half. I even thought of checking into a hotel and handing

my clothes to the concier in order to write in the nude as I read Victor Hugo Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway had done.

Then exhausted I realized that no amount of tricking myself was going to work.

External stimulus wasn't going to give me a purchase on language

to enter honestly into the act of bearing witness to my life without fear.

Courage is at the heart of writing.

...