Last week, while finishing my review of Sheryda Warrener's poetry collection Test Piece (2022), I pulled from my shelf Annie Truitt's Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982).
Test Piece opens with a quote from Daybook, and because I try to be rigorous, I like to read what comes before and after such quotes, see if the context of the quote (now an epigram) relates to the book in which its excerpt now appears.
It was while reading towards the quote (on page 13) that I was reminded of another journal, May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude (1973), and so I began to read it too, and haven't stopped.
On September 16 (1972?) Sarton (pictured up top, in 1983) writes her second-to-last entry, this time on her problem with "Z", a writer like Sarton who demands a lot of Sarton's time -- which of course is the book's theme: Sarton's time and her need for solitude.
In the middle of this entry, Sarton writes:
"I know that after a dispersed and uncentering summer I must get back to my own centre and get back to work. Otherwise I begin to feel like a disposal unit that, if filled too full, gets stuck and can no longer dispose of anything. The physical symptom is nausea in this machine, myself. I want to throw up what I am asked to contain and to digest." (204)
As a writer I know that writing takes a degree of concentration that I am fortunate to possess. But I also know that the ideal conditions for writing (particularly at the polishing stage) never come at the snap of a finger.
Warrener is part of a family, the mother of a son. She works at least two paying jobs, another of which as a writer of books. She shows this rather nicely in Test Piece, enough for us, as readers, to remind ourselves of our own lives, where time is compressed and anxiety, more than poems, is the result.
I was told my review will be published in the British Columbia Review at 5 a.m. (PDT) on September 18. In the meantime, there should be copies of Test Piece at Pulp Fiction, Paper Hound, People's Co-op and Massey Books.
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