Are you a fisher or a hunter?

A few thoughts on how poems arrive (or are sought after)

A couple of years ago, I took a break from writing and got into photography. At the time, I had recently entered into a graduate program, as well as a new teaching position. I was writing more than I ever had—essays, lesson plans, 24/7 email responses—but none of it was creative. I kept telling myself that I could use the rare free moment to at least sketch out the beginnings of a poem. Cut to me scrolling through Facebook Marketplace instead, mentally re-designing my apartment over and over again. Whenever I tried to write creatively, the muse refused, so to speak. I couldn’t coax an image, a turn of phrase, even a bit of alliteration. Eventually, I realized that I had overloaded my brain with language and that asking it to produce more wasn’t going to help. Hence, the scrolling.

But then a retired photographer put up a listing for her camera collection, and, without quite knowing why, I bought it. Over the next six months, I immersed myself in photography. In particular, street photography, in which both amateur and professional photographers spend hours wandering through avenues and alleyways, cameras around their necks, always hoping to stumble onto that perfect shot by chance. And “chance” really is the magic ingredient of this type of photography. Often, you’ll find a beautiful or otherwise visually interesting building, background texture, or mixture of light and shadow. But none of this matters if you don’t have a living being somewhere in the composition that pulls the viewer’s focus and suggests a larger story or emotion.

The reason I felt such a pull towards photography was because it required nothing more of me than instinct. If I had 20 minutes to spare before a class or before meeting with a student, I could grab my camera and powerwalk around campus, finger on the shutter button, a gleefully manic expression on my face. Click, click, click. In a way, it became something like meditation.

When I did start writing again, these experiences affected how I viewed my process. Specifically, a question repeated within the street photography community encouraged me to reconsider my poem-writing mindset. The question was: “Are you a fisher or a hunter?” A fisher is someone who finds a location with an interesting composition, who then waits for a person or group of people to enter the scene and become the emotional subject(s). A hunter, on the other hand, is someone who seeks out the emotional subject wherever it may be—moving from place to place in the belief that one is more likely to get that perfect shot if one takes a more active role in creating it.

There are pros and cons to both. The former builds patience and the fine-tuning of details, but it can also leave the photographer empty-handed if no one decides to walk by or if no emotion is captured by the camera when they do. The latter builds confidence in finding details at a moment’s notice and developing a variety of perspectives, but it can also cause a photographer to miss a good shot out of a desire to move on to the next location as quickly as possible.

This can apply to writing as well, especially poetry. Some poets are famous for letting their work stew for years before calling it complete (Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind). Others are seemingly able to start and finish multiple poems a week (browse a little of literary Twitter/X to see this in action). One type of poet has a tendency to wait for poems while the other seeks them out (and, again, there are pros and cons to both). For years, I’ve been a fisher rather than a hunter. I wait for weeks, sometimes months, for parts of poems to arrive before attempting to reel them in completely. What this has meant is that it’s difficult for me to sit down and try to write a poem in that moment. Basically, I’m the person who never volunteers to read at the end of a workshop because I’ve just spent the last hour’s worth of prompts pretending to scribble a response to each.

When I imagine a “hunter” poet, I imagine the kind of person who actually can produce writing in a workshop. Who can freewrite themselves into a first stanza, then a second, and then into a whole poem from there. Although I’m at a point in my artistic development (my career? my shtick? I’m never sure what to call it) where I don’t lose sleep over having to discard poems that don’t and won’t “work,” I still have fewer poems overall to select from than someone who begins and discards or finishes several consistently.

Now, of course, no one is a fisher or hunter all the time. You might naturally lean a certain way, but circumstances may force you to inhabit the opposite mindset, and even that can be a creatively stimulating experience. For example, one of my goals this year is to (finally) finish a poetry collection. To do that, I’m going to have to push myself out of my comfort zone—out of the fisher mindset and into the perspective of the hunter. This will include:

• Coming up with a schedule and sticking to it whether or not it feels productive in the moment

• Signing up for writing challenges (like Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project) as well as finding accountability partners to help keep me on track

• Trying out new forms and new subjects (and not allowing myself to give up on them)!

What about you all? How would you define these perspectives within the writing sphere? And would you say that you lean more towards “fishing” or “hunting”?