Donald Miller introduces me to my favorite poem for the moment by Billy Collins. As a social scientist who formerly wrote poetry, I sometimes find academic writing stultifying. You spend must of your graduate and pre-tenure life writing for others, even while you are supposed to be “finding your own voice.” The great joy of academia is when you at last figure out how to research and write in a way that is methodologically sound while also being courageous, personal and pure.

Purity

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.
Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
Completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.
Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.
Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.
I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.
In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
most of them exploiting the connection between sex
and death.
I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death and typewriting.
After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes
in language light as the air between my ribs.
Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
And clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage
And speed through woods on winding country roads,
Passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
All perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

What do you think? Does this poem apply in any way to academic writing? Or is this simply an illustration of effective fiction/literary writing? I personally think that social scientists can “remove their flesh” via the questions they ask, the conclusions they draw, and the way they seek to apply the knowledge they create.