The Editor's Constipation

Confessions of a backed-up poet-editor drowning in other people's brilliance while his own dries up like spit on concrete

opens wrong

what of these words
a retching of residue
residing as roughage

climaxing in umami
but bile bitter
lingers unobserved
a knot the throat
refuses passage

turns tar
turns stone
a weight neither belly
nor brain can hold

this raw spasm shrieks
till silence settles back
and then everything
opens wrong

Ramon Carty ©

I have read two hundred poems this month. Good poems. Bad poems. Poems that made me weep at my desk. Poems that made me want to throw my laptop out the window and into the streets. I have written editorial feedback longer than the poems themselves. I have sat on Zoom calls telling strangers to dig deeper, bleed harder, stop apologizing for their own guts.

And my own guts? Silent. Tar. Stone. Refusing passage.

The irony is not lost on me. I am the editor of a literary magazine. I run a workshop called Museaic Monday where I hand out prompts like communion wafers and watch people break open beautifully. I am surrounded by poetry the way a fish is surrounded by water. And I am drowning in the desert. My own words have gone on strike. They left a note on the kitchen counter: Gone fishing. Do not follow.

I keep waiting for me to show up. I keep checking my inbox like I am waiting for a text back from myself. Hey Ramon, remember when you used to write? Remember when the poem was a scream and not a memo? I read my own poem, opens wrong, and I laugh. A dark, ugly laugh. Because it is not about a bad morning. It is about every morning. It is about the jaw spasm of wanting to create and the silence that settles back in, smug and comfortable.

Is this normal? I do not know. I know that I am tired. I know that reading other people's brilliance is a strange kind of starvation. You are full of their flavours, their umami, their blood, and then you open your own mouth and there is only bile. Bitter. Lingering. A weight neither belly nor brain can hold. The editor in me is obese. The poet in me is fasting.

I have written about rest before. I have written about discipline. I have written about creative freedom like I am some kind of guru who has figured out the balance between the grind and the grace. I am a fraud. A beautiful, exhausted, over-caffeinated fraud sitting in my office chair that squeaks every time I lean forward to pretend I am paying attention. I sit on my Museaic Monday calls preaching the gospel of showing up and all the while my own muse is on a smoke break that has lasted three weeks. I keep refreshing my email hoping she sent a postcard. She did not. She is in Barbados without me, drinking something with pineapple, not thinking about me at all.

I said on Substack once that the poems will wait. That they always do. Lies. The poems are not waiting. They are ghosting me. I am the needy ex texting you up? at 2 AM and the poems have read receipts on. I said I was grateful, back in April when the submissions flooded in and I got emotional reading strangers bleed onto the page. I meant it. But gratitude does not write poems. Gratitude just makes you a polite host at a party where everyone else is having fun and you are stuck washing dishes in the kitchen, smiling through the window.

I am out here reading submission packets that are sharper, hungrier, more alive than anything I have written in months, giving detailed critiques about tightening imagery while my own imagery is loose as a tooth ready to fall out. I am the mechanic whose own car is broke down on the highway. I am the chef eating instant noodles after service. I am the therapist crying in the parking lot. The workshop leader who needs a workshop. The editor who cannot edit his own drought.

And the worst part? The worst part is that I know the advice. I know all the advice. Drink water. Go for a walk. Read something outside your genre. Touch grass. Journal. Free write. Set a timer for thirteen minutes and do not stop. I have given this advice. I have given it with conviction, with the full authority of a man who has absolutely none. I have told poets that the work is in the retching, that the residue is the roughage, that the refusal is part of the passage. And here I am, throat knotted, refusing my own medicine like a child with a fever who will not swallow the spoon.

I have been hurt before. By love, by loss, by the body count of people who used me and strung me along. I turned that hurt into verse. I made it raw. I made it grit. I made it something that vibed. And now the hurt is mundane. The hurt is administrative. The hurt is a Google Doc with too many comments and a Substack draft that says insert brilliance here. The hurt is the banality of running a literary magazine while your own literature is on life support, beeping weakly in the corner.

Maybe this is the poem. Maybe the retching is the work. Maybe the residue residing as roughage is exactly what needs to be said: that inspiration is not a muse. It is not a lightning bolt. It is a muscle. And I have been using it to lift other people's weights, forgetting that my own body still needs to move. The throat refuses passage because the throat is overworked. The belly cannot hold the weight because the belly is full of other people's hunger.

So here is the truth, unapologetic and gritty as a Toronto alley in February: I am constipated. Creatively. Spiritually. Poetically backed up like rush hour on the 401. And I am writing this not because I have the answer, but because the jaw spasm demands it. Because the silence does not get to settle back without a fight. Because even this, even the confession of drought, is a kind of water.

Everything opens wrong until it doesn't. And I am still here, retching, waiting for the right wrong to finally give.

Ramon Carty

Editor, The Root System Review

@ramrockspeaks