Waiting in the Wings
Friends, I couldn’t be more excited! SUMMER TRIANGLE will be released in only three days, and I’m having trouble believing that this dream of mine will soon be a reality. I feel such a mix of strong emotions. Excitement, anxiety, delight, and unrelenting wonder have filled these anticipatory days with shimmering color. I don’t want to forget this moment. My intention with this post is to create a sort of time capsule - for me, and for you as well.
Because this moment of profound uncertainty is - I believe - what stops people from sharing their work. I wish more creatives would open up about the tension before release. As a debut author, I don’t have a system in place for managing the headrush of a roll-out. It’s too new. I could wax on about how I see this wave cresting toward me, and even as I brace myself, I feel ready. I could say that everything looks so different from this vantage point. Already, it’s a real-life job blanketed in a long-held dream. Already, I’m grateful for new relationships and new experiences. Before I’ve even begun, I feel so lucky.
Still, I’m making it up as I go. Riffing. Improvising. Faking it until, well, you know. And in moments of confusion and fatigue, I (maybe like you) have to rest my head on someone else’s shoulder.
e.e. cummings has been called one of America’s most popular poets. He played with form and meaning in his poetry, rearranging language and white space in a boundary-pushing style - that may have been in part due to dyslexia. We love him now for his sincerity, his bravery, and his playfulness. I could use so many words - all of them insufficient - to try capture his work. So, I’ll simply say that his poems feel true.
But before his work felt true to me, it felt true to him. And, in his time, some critics trashed him for it.
When he won the Academy of American Poets fellowship, traditional tastemakers pilloried him. I won’t spill ink for them here. cummings response was simply to create more. He kept his head down. He wrote more poetry. He understood that creative expression is always an act of vulnerability - and always subjective. To this point, cummings once said that “poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly a question of individuality … Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.”
He was a Cambridge-born, Harvard graduate who relished nothing more than challenging the establishment. Susan Cheever, who knew cummings as a girl through her father, the writer John Cheever, wrote in Vanity Fair that cummings taught her that “[i]t wasn’t those in authority who were always right; it was the opposite. I saw that being right was a petty goal - being free was the thing to aim for.”
cummings challenged us to be who we are - and to fearlessly express our creative impulses. He famously said that “your head is living a forest full of song birds.” He spent his life listening to his own music and encouraging others to do the same.
I’ve thought a bit about the words we use to describe sharing our creativity with others. Before stepping into the spotlight onstage, an actor “waits in the wings” of a theatre. For me, it’s a beautiful visual of the transition point. When we think of an “exhibit” in a museum, we think of art presented thematically. Yet the actual word has its roots in the Latin exhibitum, which means displaying or showing - but is also wrapped up in the idea of giving and receiving. The word conjures an offering.
And a book “release?” This one stems from the Old French word relaissier which meant letting go. Interestingly, the modern word “release” is also intimately tied to two other words: relax and relish. As a creative, I think there’s peace to be found here in surrendering. Let it be what it will be, and let it go. Then, go make something new.
e.e. cummings, I think, would’ve advised us all to set our song birds free.
