"Is a poet still a poet if he spends most of his time sitting in a white plastic chair in his driveway? If he promises to write an introduction to a poetry anthology but avoids writing and instead riffs on poetry and poems, digressing to the point of absurdity?" Hmmmm . . . I'm never quite sure where "absurd" starts in my own life, and this prompted me to write about learning to savour the flavors of delay. A lot of writing involves an apparent delay, but it's not necessarily procrastination.
The quote above is the opening to Susan Perry's discussion of Nicholson Baker's latest novel; a novel I have yet to read but now will. Given my ignorance of the book, my comments don't pertain to the writing process of the protagonist or Baker himself. Instead, I wanted to add some thoughts about writing and procrastination.
This past spring, I was invited to particpate in a panel discussion at the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The panel was organized by Michael O'Driscoll, the Editor of the journal English Studies in Canada, for the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. I was the "odd" scholar, the social scientist among my humanities colleagues. But, the discussion fit my interest as the topic was procrastination. There's something about writing and procrastination. There's something about sitting in a white plastic chair in the driveway, I guess.
The debate was lively, the discourse rich (English professors, you know), and we're publishing a collection of essays this fall in English Studies in Canada that captures all of this. In the end, I think we agreed that delay is a necessary and important part of the creative process in our writing (in our lives). I'm just not sure that we need to carry the moral and emotional burden, misplaced as it is, of calling all of this delay, procrastination. In fact, I think we need to become connoisseurs of the many flavors of delay, and learn how to embrace and savor the delay in our lives (while shunning any notion of procrastination that is!).
Even without depicting this form of delay as a pathology (as is often done), I still believe that procrastination holds no virtue. It is the unpalatable form of the many flavours of delay in our lives. Procrastination is that needless, voluntary, often irrational, delay of an intended task despite the potential for undermining our performance and/or our well-being in the process. It's not a good thing, but there are many things in life that aren't "good" for us. I'll come back to this.
It's important to recognize that all procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination. That's the heart of the matter, I think. In fact, just acknowledging other types of delay in our lives --- necessary delays, inevitable delays, and, yes, even sagacious delays --- is important in addressing the many ways that procrastination is used and referred to in our day-to-day lives.
It's beyond the scope of my blog to summarize all of the great stories and arguments that my colleagues made about procrastination in their lives as writers as they prepared dissertations, journal articles, conference presentations, grant applications, books, etc. Suffice it to say that each spoke at length about delay that was labelled procrastination.
Stephen Bruhm (The University of Western Ontario) wrote an excellent piece entitled, "What I didn't do on my summer vacation." Of the many thought-provoking points he raised, he spoke of his research prior to his writing as an "habitual, compulsive detour." I think it's this delay that feeds our forgetting and our creativity, but it is not procrastination. We should welcome this delay, embrace it and celebrate it.
Is a poet still a poet if he spends most of his time sitting in a white plastic chair in his driveway?
I think, yes. We have celebrated many poets and writers of various sorts who have spent a great deal of their time sitting on bar stools. To the extent that the time in the plastic chair is truly a self-regulatory failure (like too much time on a bar stool), an inability to bring action to intention, our poet may have a problem. However, I'm not quick to judge what is "digressing to the point of absurdity" because what seems absurd today may be setting the foundation for the profound tomorrow. At the very least, it seems to be a necessary way of being for some as they take their own "habitual, compulsive detour" on the way to producing words on paper.
