One of my professors in graduate school, Sasha Pimentel, once told me and my colleagues to think of the language we create on the page as momentum and the white space as resistance. The remainder of the semester I asked myself two questions: What can live in silence? And, what cannot be contained by language?
As writers, we sometimes forget that silence is also a language within which a poem can be awakened. When I come to the page the first thing I notice is the resistance of the white space against what I want to say. A blank page can be intimidating to all of us because of its emptiness and stillness—we are afraid there will be no momentum (words) on the page and resistance (white space) will prevail—so I’ve learned to ask the page questions that challenge my understanding of reality, human nature, and the forces that continue to shape my life. Writing is my way of diving deep into uncertainties and creating meaning from what often fills the silence around me. I write questions using the Notes application on my phone every day. Later, I write the questions down in a notebook and categorize them under themes such as: death, love, family, beauty, politics, war, etc. I have a bank of questions for each category that I can pull from and attempt to answer when I sit down to write. I usually write toward the question I feel most called to for the day or week. These inquiries become prompts for me. However, I never find definitive answers to them, only a cascade of more questions.
I’m learning that my job as a writer is not to seek answers but to write in order to see what can live in silence, to witness what cannot be contained within language. Most importantly, to write in order to ask better questions.
—Saúl Hernández, author of How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2024)
Photo credit: Bradley Miller