In a 1976 interview with the New York Times, John Ashbery said: “I have a feeling that in my mind is an underground stream, if you will, that I can have access to when I want it.” Later, in a 1983 interview with the Paris Review, he repeats the idea: “I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up.... It will be not dissimilar to what I have produced before because it is coming from the same source, but it will be dissimilar because of the different circumstances of the particular moment.”
I have found this metaphor useful. The idea of writer’s block presumes this stream has, at times, run dry. But this is not true—that stream will trickle from our first thoughts to our last. The problem then is one’s willingness to plunge the bucket down its hole. What I mean to say is that we have, all of us, at all times, the ability to write extensively, tremendously, extravagantly, and (perhaps most important of all) pointlessly. I do believe this is an ability one has to cultivate. The concept of writer’s block is really a writer’s anxiety, or perhaps in particularly uninspired moments in our lives, a writer’s apathy (the weather, a divorce, skipping breakfast). But there is always a “something” there. Not necessarily something to write about, but something to write.
—Sebastian Castillo, author of Fresh, Green Life (Soft Skull Press, 2025)
Photo credit: Adalena Kavanagh