December 17, 2001 | 7:45 PM

I used to write poetry all the time. I would fill a notebook a week with poetry. I didn't care whether the poems were good or bad or intelligible or self indulgent. I just loved to write them and they spilled out of me onto the page as easily as sunslight spills to the earth on a clear June morning.

I carried a notebook everywhere I went. I had one on my bedside table in case I woke up in the middle of the night with a new poem itching to find its way onto paper.

I even had a chapbook published when I was 18 by a small press called Centering Publications in the town where I grew up. The book was called, "Peripheral Blues in Static and Other Poems". It was anxty Bukowsian type stuff, but it definitely wasn't bad for an 18 year old suburbanite girl.

I don't think I can express to you how much joy writing poetry brought me. Prose was always somewhat of a struggle-- having to organize my thoughts took so much discipline, but for me poetry was wholy (holy?)intuitive.

Just so you know what I'm talking about, here's a couple of things I wrote when I was 16 or 17:

Yes, I know it's not amazing or anything; I know I was no W.H. Auden but I was good. My work showed promise. And it was effortless.

And then it left me. And I haven't been able to write a poem since (unless you count song lyrics but I don't-- I consider that an entirely different art form)

When I was twenty years old several things happened in quick succession. I got kicked out of school. My mom kicked me out of the house. I had an abortion. I was for all practical purposes broke and homeless and a burden to everyone I knew.

And some fundamental bedrock of confidence that I had in my own voice was shaken and a fault line formed between my left and right brain, between my soul and my body, between my heart and my mind.

The poems stopped coming

Slowly but surely I clawed my way back to respectability. I am the lead singer of a band (The Sorry Jar). I work at Harvard. I am decidely middle class.

But...

The poems stopped coming.

And they never came again.

Oh, I tried to force them, but it wasn't the same. They were gone. The well had dried up.

I still have unimaginable grief over this. It won't go away. It hurts in a way that nothing else has ever ever hurt.

Well... now I want a drink.