Writer's block or why it's okay to be a mess at all times

At a recent book party, someone asked me what I was working on and I said that I hadn't been writing much for the last year and a half. I guess that's what others would call writer's block. But, of course, that's not entirely true. If I look at my notebook, at least my main poetry notebook (and yes, I do write by hand, preferably with a fountain pen in a physical notebook), I might find very little there. And yet, there are now all these other little notebooks I carry around (usually 3 1/2" x 5 1/2") in bright colors or patterns, as in the photo of some I bought at MOMA (I started buying Moleskin once they started doing something other than basic black). There I scratch away, particularly when in transit, in fact, mostly when in transit so that for the last several years, I have found myself writing by not writing sequences of aphorisms (prose poems?) connected to place.

The most comical aspect of this project is that I've been getting these aphoristic sequences published as creative nonfiction. As someone who has always only written poetry, I feel like I'm a prose writer-in-drag, that is, a poet tricked up as a writer of creative nonfiction. In fact, my New York Aphorisms will be published later this year from Fourth Genre, which only publishes nonfiction. You could another sequence here:http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2011-summer/selections/andalusian-wind/.

So perhaps that is the secret to writing without writing: to write with the left hand (if you're a righty), to write someplace else all the time believing that you're not writing at all. And I've had this experience before: the sensation that I'm not really writing, and apparently, it's not a unique one. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz, author of Other Desert Cities, was recently interviewed by Alec Baldwin on his radio podcast Here's the Thing .http://www.wnyc.org/shows/heresthething/2012/jun/04/ At the very end of the show, Baldwin asks him if he's working on anything new. Baitz balks at an answer and Baldwin persists, "You're scribbling . . ." And Baitz, "Yeah, I'm supposed to be doing things. I'm a mess at all times."