On Weathering Uncertainty

By acclaimed poet and translator (and painter) Andrea Jurjević

When my first poetry book, Small Crimes, was published in 2017, I felt lucky—not just because my manuscript was selected for publication but because I felt accepted into the literary community. I was a real poet, I thought, the publishing world says so. I also thought that writing would get easier from then on. Yet, nothing changed. My “new” writing life felt no different. Most of the time, I was still slowly stitching poems together in the odd hours of the day, not knowing whether they would amount to anything. Even though I loved the privacy of writing—its quiet venturing into the elsewhere—that work also meant again facing the uncertainty of a new endeavor. Small Crimes did modestly well. It won the Philip Levine Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year Award, and it got a few kind reviews. Yet, writing new poems still felt daunting. Perhaps more than ever, because I worried that by now, I was supposed to know how to do this work.

As I wrote in my previous column, prior to poetry, I painted. Even though my paintings sold regularly, sometimes the imposter syndrome would pop in, as welcome as a fanatical preacher knocking on the door on a fantastically lazy afternoon.