from The Crowd at the Baseball Game by William Carlos Williams
It's been a big week for poetry around here. Last Friday, the Mayor of Los Angeles named our city's first poet laureate--baseball-loving poet, Eloise Klein Healy. Eloise is probably not the first baseball-loving poetry royalty. But is she the first poet to pitch puns and sling similes for the Boys in Blue?
I'm not an expert, so I invite fans in the stands to throw peanuts. But if I'm not mistaken, Marianne Moore batted for the Yankees. Eve Merriam, a very fine poet, and a winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize in her youth--in fact, she wrote one of my favorite poems on new love ("I'm telling my hands not to blossom into roses"), penned these ecumenical lines:
Bare-handed reach to catch April's incoming curve. Leap higher than you thought you could and Hold: Spring, Solid, Here.
I loved attending the little poetry inauguration ceremony at the downtown library, falling though it did smack dab in the midst of an Antioch University Los Angeles poetry residency. I stole an hour away for happy announcements in a musty, muralled place. After, back "home" on the Antioch front, poet Kazim Ali came to visit from Ohio, and put us into our bodies and into sound. Then my mentees and I began to work on crafting their project period contracts, pulling books off shelves, as we will off and on all week, coming to a common vocabulary about literature and their own work and the changes and growth they hope for in the term ahead. And also a conversation about passions, about finding words in all their pockets. I love the dialogue and the magic of it. And the accidental discoveries.
Like this one. Here is another poet West Coast poet who has taken up the Dodger cause: B.H. Fairchild writes about a certain player's time spent as a Brooklyn Dodger during his own pre-poetry Kansas youth in "For Junior Gilliam." Gilliam served as second and third baseman for both the Brooklyn and Los Angeles' era Dodgers, was named 1953 Rookie of the Year, and ultimately became among the earliest African American major league coaches.
So on behalf of all Dodger-loving poemphiles everywhere: Congratulations to the first poet-laureate of L.A., Eloise Klein Healy!
In my John Milton class at Brandeis University (I am there attending school), time spent occasionally talking about God is evidently time spent talking about the relation between literary texts and religious ones.
In both the KJV and NIV (versions) of the Bible, the Book of John recounts the creation of the world via words thus:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
What I find lovely about this construction, literarily, is how one can use it to measure the space between saying and being, or one could say “word”-ing and “create”-ing. The repetitions and graduated iterations of the phrases describe potential geometries of the relationship between words and power: simultaneous or adjacent, identical or neighborly.
How much power do our words have to manifest what isn’t there? To portray what is?
Looking for more insight into this origin myth for language-qua-creation, I find myself grabbing for the Hebrew version of Bereishit (Old Testament) that describes the creational magnificence of words this way:
Yehi or va yehi or.
We translate that as “God said, ‘Let there be light and there was light.’” But look more closely. The actual words are not a graduated transition as the English implies. They are a sequence of identical twin-like repetitions—dual humps connected by a “v” (and). The uttered phrase (yehay ohr) is rendered identical to the performed one (yehay ohr). Only the single letter “v” (and) connects the languaging with the manifesting.
As poets and readers, we may find ourselves at times aware that words are incredible, and creative, and yet….there are often things in the manifest world that our human language can neither mimic nor summon up. Between words and being there is distance. And into that chasm falls...well, so much! childhood impotence, hocus-pocus, Lacanian lack, modes of consciousness, alternate realities, power and desire.
What exactly do words create? What do the non-word elements of the poem bring into being? In a series of blog posts, I’ll talk a bit about words—and wordsmiths—as creational, depictional, powerful and powerless.
Next Up: Plato and the Dangers of Poetry. Or Percy Bysshe Shelley and Strategies of Unsaying.
Last night I watched Beverly Hills Chihuahua Two with my four year old daughter and 7 year old son. The kids taught me the points in the movie I was supposed to laugh. If you have never seen this movie, the dogs talk and there is a voice over for each dog, and as the human voice talks, the dog’s mouth opens and closes, so as to mimic a human while talking. In the middle of the movie, right when the Chihuahuas are plotting to save their owner’s parents’ house from bank repossession, I fell asleep.
As long as I have been old enough to understand what the middle class is, it has been described as “shrinking.”
I imagine it is much easier to fall out of the middle class as opposed to rising from the middle class to the upper class. The middle class family in Beverly Hills Chihuahua Two is in a free fall out of the middle class and they are trying to save themselves. In one scene, they visit the bank which threatens to repossess the house. The banker says to the middle class family that unless the family gives the bank $40,000 within three weeks, the family will need to leave their property. To make the bank look extra cruel, the banker offers the family a free pen on their way out—I believe with a happy face erasure on the top.
When a text starts in the middle, we call it “in medias res”; when I think of the word “middle,” for some reason, it makes me think of the word “mediation.”
When two parties get divorced, they often end up “in mediation,” and if things go well in the negotiations, they receive a “mediated settlement agreement.”
When I wake up, Beverly Hills Chihuahua Two is still on, each kid at my side on the sofa, and I realize it’s in fact the very rich character, “Aunt Viv” (no relation to the middle class family) who saves the middle class family from ruin, not the well-intentioned “human dogs” who think that entering and winning the $50,000 grand prize at the Beverley Hills Dog Show might save the family. They don’t win because they are not pure bred Chihuahuas, something they could have known before they entered. Because the aristocracy intervenes in the drama, the only thing that the dogs can do is praise the goodness of the rich “Aunt Viv,” ie there is no sense that it’s the aristocracy that got the family there in the first place and the movie ends with a marriage between the middle class son and Aunt Viv’s aristocratic niece. It’s a comedy, after all.
Yesterday, I received a box of books from my future publisher, Wave Books. One of the books is a collection of interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter called “What is Poetry? Just Kidding, I know You Know). I was really excited to read this book, so I began to read through some of the interviews. In an interview with Eileen Myles by Greg Fuchs Greg Fuchs asks Eileen, “Do you think regular people can get ahead in life without being jerks?”
The lais of the Middle Ages are 2-D romantic narratives often depicting marvelous adventures of knights on great journeys. The earliest female poet of France, Marie de France (1155-1215), wrote a lais called “Bisclavret (The Werewolf).” But “wrote” isn’t exactly the correct word—she translated the story from the greater body of Arthurian legend; one thing transforms into another, one text bleeds into the next depending on time and culture. In the story of Bisclavret, a husband goes off to the forest three days a week and transforms into a werewolf; his wife doesn’t know what he does in the woods but his absence makes her anxious. Typically, on the third night in the forest, he goes to a chapel, puts on human clothes and returns home to his wife in human form.
We all know that the Middle Ages are a time of the in between—a time when the world was no longer ancient, but not yet enlightened. The medieval mind as depicted in these romances, isn’t a mind of variables or on/ off transactions. One thing happens and then another thing happens, but things definitely don’t happen all at once. There is no information to manage because there is no information as we understand it today.
We live in a time where every aspect of life is managed and controlled through technology, surveillance and policing. Wilderness areas must be managed so that capitalism can flow properly. Emotions must be managed, so that capital can flow properly. All human impulse, desire, psychology, will, terror must be broken down into patterns of yes and no so that capitalism can flow properly.
Middle school originally referred to a school for middle class children and only very recently in history has referred to the years in school between elementary and high school.
People often look back at middle school as some of the most awkward years of their life. If you don’t fit in, if you are not a conformist, in Middle school, a kid might call you “a freak.” Middle school is the first time that I heard this word. “Freak,” a kid yelled at someone else. Freaks have no monopoly on goodness or badness. Sometimes so-called freaks end up shooting up schools; sometimes, they become great artists. One can never quite tell with these things, but a “freak” is someone who is separated from the community by something—either a quality or perceived “deformity”—that makes them different and a threat to a group.
I have a weakness in my heart for “freaks.”
There is no concept of “risk management” or “emotional management” in Bisclavret because the thread of the story is pulled by language thoughts in a linear way. If something happens, it happens.
Words that comes up over and over in the texts of this genre are “marvelous” and “strange” and “adventure.” One may not see a lover for three days, three weeks, three years. Time elapses, but not in the same way as we understand it. One could walk into the wilderness, never to return.
The wilderness of the Middle Ages not something to be managed, but a vast space of criminality, romance, adventure and possibility. In the Middle Ages, bad things happen in the wilderness—rape, robbery, just as bad things happen in our late-capitalist highly managed wilderness areas.
One might run into a werewolf. Likewise, one might be captured by fairies—one never knows exactly what will happen. When the character of the king in Bisclavret discovers the werewolf in the forest, the king stops his men from killing him and takes him into the castle, certain that the werewolf is good: “Look at this wonder/ how this beast humbles itself!/ It has human understanding, it begs mercy. Get all these dogs away from me/ make sure that no one strikes it! This beast has intelligence and understanding.”
The dogs of Beverly Hills Chihuahua Two also have “intelligence and understanding.”
To the king, Bisclavret’s uniqueness or should we say freakishness, is not something to be destroyed, but rather saved. Bisclavret becomes a source of truth because he shows no aggression towards his newfound aristocratic family. And when Bisclavret is reunited with his former wife, it is towards her that he shows aggression. It’s important to note that Bisclavret’s wife leaves him for another knight once she finds out that Bisclavret is leaving her each week to transform into a werewolf. Towards the end of the text, he rips off her nose and Marie de France tells us all her children were born without noses and lived “noseless.”
The nose is in the middle of the face.
Bisclavret is both a freak and a tool of the aristocracy.
Bisclavret is both a knight and an animal.
The Chihuahua are both humans and dogs.
The punishment for Bisclavret’s former wife’s disloyalty to him (besides the fact that her nose is ripped off), is exile. In a strange reversal, Bisclavret’s former wife and children become the “freak,” on the margins of society.
The final lines of Marie De France’s poem are “The adventure you have heard/ was true, have no doubt. The lai of Bisclavret was made /to be remembered forevermore.”
I sent a group text message to an anonymous writing collective that I was in that I could no longer take part because I couldn’t devote the time I needed to devote to it. My friend wrote back that the point of the collective was to “fit it into my schedule when there is time” except that there was no time, always having the feeling that I was in the middle of something.
I have heard that it’s awful to be the middle child.
In the Middle Ages, there was no middle class as we understand it today. Nor was there a managerial class.
I’m pretty sure that Frederick Jameson writes about the lack of the outside of capital.
A poet is often entirely in the middle of culture and entirely freakish (on the margins).
At a housewarming party I went to last week, where I was the only poet, when people asked what I did and I said “I’m a poet,” they seemed fascinated but in that way that I remember from middle school when someone called someone else a “freak.”
A minor poet is often more freakish than a major one.
What I like about the story of Bisclavret is the clarity of the casual violence and clarity of sympathy. The actions are unmediated by Marie De France in the sense. There is no psychologizing of these characters, what they do, how they feel. There is no longwinded explanation of why they do what they do because human psychology is not managed in the same way that it is today. Yet when Bisclavret attacks his former wife, he makes clear that he is in fact only “human” towards the aristocracy, or rather, in the king’s perception of him.
I am deeply suspicious of the field of psychology.
In an interview with Eileen Myles by Greg Fuchs in the Poetry Project Newsletters Eileen replies, “No” to Greg’s question and then goes on, “In the 70s it was possible to break out beyond the poetry community, and I mean that in a good way….I mean even get rewarded for being weird.”
I don’t really remember a lot from yesterday. Mostly, I remember some of the messages I sent and got. I got an email that was titled “The Desert.” I opened it, but it was addressed “Dear Friends.” Normally, I would delete an email that was addressed to “Dear Friends,” but I decided to read it since I had such limited access to the world of the internet. It appeared to be an invitation to go to a writing conference or gathering or something in Joshua Tree in California in April. Of course, there was no way that I could go to “the desert” this April because I’m a single mom and teach five classes a semester and I live in the deep south. Also, my son currently has hand, foot and mouth disease, so I had to take care of him today, which made this feeling of “of course I could never do something like this” worse.
I proceeded to read through the email. The part that struck me the most was in the body of the email where the people who sent it wrote, “What are we willing to change about our approaches to the mundane in order to alter that numbed consciousness—and can we usher in a time when the innovation within the arts in this country is less about how we can commodify our gifts and more about how we can use them to fight commodification in our daily lives? Are we truly courageous souls? Can we learn how to say ‘not for sale’….” The email went on. I wondered, of course, how many people this email had been sent to? 10? 20? 50? I wondered if someone who sent the email to “Dear Friends” would have seriously want to know the answers to these questions, or the material and labor conditions that would limit access to this kind of conference or gathering. It seemed strange. I’m not trying to disparage the people who sent the email. I am, though, trying to show you the mind frame I was in. As I said, normally, I would have probably deleted an email with the subject of “the desert” and I definitely would not have read through an entire email addressed to “Dear Friends,” because of the generic and impersonal nature of the address, but reading through the email made me feel more alone and alienated than I had in the previous three days and I thought it was ironic that a well-intentioned email aimed at pulling post-election poets and writers together for a nice gathering had become so irritating.
The other communication that struck me should have made me feel a lot better about myself and less lonely. My friend Natalie Eilbert, who I sent a pdf of my latest book to, (by the way, you should read her poetry!) messaged me to say it was “brilliant.” My friend Brian Blanchfield texted me to say that he had loved the poem I texted him a few days before (read his poetry too!). But for whatever reason, I felt sadder than ever. I think that the last message I sent before I went to bed was to McKenzie Wark and just said “I hate poetry,” to which I got no response. Alex texted, “you seem very isolated and alone.” I told him, “I know. I think that’s the point.” Throughout the day, I also cheated a little bit with my rules. I checked my Facebook messages and personal email sometimes during the day when my rules told me to only check them twice a day.
My feelings of total isolation reminded me of an art project that I put together a few years ago. I wondered if I could be a conceptual poet or like a video artist or something. I don’t know. I set up this thing where I went to TJ MAXX every day either before or after work and took a video of myself talking about, well, nothing in the dressing room.
The dressing room functioned as a kind of confession booth that I went to religiously, day after day. I remember that at first the experiment was fun, but over the course of a few weeks, it became horrific. It became uncomfortable and annoying to go to TJMAXX to just sit there and talk to myself day after day. People in the dressing rooms next to me thought that I was a crazy person. I wanted to know what it was like to go to a place where you are supposed to go after work to make yourself feel better about capitalism (buying things like purses, tops, pants, perfume) but instead just sitting there with it. The project made me feel sad and isolated to the point where reality started losing its bearings. The dressing room made me feel self-conscious and paranoid. I wondered how experience, altered and organized differently, not based on impulses but art projects could bring you to new levels of consciousness.
In no time, fun flipped into something terrifying and now I’m starting to realize that that what’s happening here, right, with my internet deprivation project. The internet was supposed to be fun. Becoming a body of information is supposed to feel amazing! I mean, the internet is fun. But it was also masking a lot of the horrors of capitalism. With all of that information over the last few days, all of that reading and interaction literally drained out of my body, it was hard to know who I was. Happy feelings were replaced by dark feelings, perhaps always there. Without the constant directive of the internet to be positive enforced on an hourly basis, what was to hold back this flood of negativity?
At TJ MAXX, during the weeks of my video art project, I never thought about the, for all purposes, slave labor that made the clothes I was talking about. Slave labor in other countries far away—but I could feel it. I could feel the dead labor—it was all around me. The vectors and specters and vampires and trade ships and ghosts and graveyards and morgues of capitalism, I could feel it all.
The women always said the same things to each other “That looks cute.” The person who gave people the number of items of clothes never said anything bad about anything anyone tried on. If someone emerged from the dressing room, she would say, “That looks cute.” On the outside, things were cute. On the inside, the new reality, organized by a set of principles that I set up completely arbitrarily, was crumbing and scary. I gave up my art project because I thought that I would lose my mind if I didn’t.
I thought too, back then doing the art project, and now with my internet deprivation experiment, that something of the memetic was dissipating or collapsing before me. Both experiments forced reality to be something else, perhaps closer to itself, and that reality wasn’t more awesome, it simply highlighted that both the fantasy and the reality were deeply flawed. With no mirror, with no memetic spectrum to bounce between, at TJ Maxx, I was bored, lonely, hopeless, angry, depressed and annoyed. All of the feelings I had previously gone to TJ Maxx to alleviate by in consumer culture, sat inside my body like a swamp of negative feelings from which I could not escape. I became the alienated labor that I was—that everyone around me was—I had to inhabit it, and it was equally frightening that the mask of ideology, of consumption, was so easily torn from me simply through a few “rules” that I had set up for myself—mainly, that I had to go to TJ MAXX every day and videotape myself in now what had become not the confession booth of my despair but the prison of it.
And so one day, I aborted the project and returned to “normal” consciousness. I can’t stress enough how much this project threw off the coordinates of not only my sense of who I was but what I was. Theoretically, I knew what I was—a mother, a consumer, a late capitalist American bourgeois, but I don’t think I had ever felt it in the way that I had felt it.
My internet experiment had brought me to a low place—that of disconnection, paranoia and depression in a matter of days but I was determined to continue through Sunday, despite Alex’s concern. And I wasn’t going to cheat. I leave you with the last poem that I wrote before I started this experiment, the one that Brian said that he loved:
The Crisis of Capital
Oh how I cathected so much
onto the great Ponzi scheme
Of late-capitalist literature
Watching the dew roll around
Inside a swiveling rose
Trying to retrieve some pleasure
From fucking what may come.
Maybe I was responsible
For the breakup of a marriage or two who can say anymore
what those eyeballs
Blamed on me
And so I cruised the streets more Parisian , More vampire than I cared to admit
Having had enough of the crowds
The blighted yes yes yes
And wanting to fold back into my body the ruin and devastation,
Of the antique centuries
but nonetheless trapped here inside
the ever-morphing architecture
of the deep state
Which is a system of course
More than a structure
The players, coded, who change sides with no remorse
And the military industrial complex
Brain stem from which
There is no way back, the bleak talk of peak oil inside the conference center's monstrous ebb
Since this is all decline as
When the digital subsumed the analog and another
eugenics set in
Simple and sad
These new clocks
Their death sentences
Their ticking mechanics
And what to make of
The mother's death?
The Seine was beautiful and the Rhine
was beautiful too
And the Elbe like the bird
Calls of loons
And being in bed with you was also beautiful even though
we messed it all up with our sad expectations
With our excessiveness
I should have told you I loved you
But I was nervous and wanted you to be impressed by me
And because you didn't love me
It made it worse but maybe you did who knows
maybe you just thought this is the poet
who fucks all the other poets
but what does it matter anymore?
This is the most desperate ransom note to the future--if you are out there---please save us from this--I'm sorry we were statecraft--if it makes any difference, I was a poor agent, a poor analyst, a poor, poor player who knew very little and cried a lot in spaces you aren't supposed to--in the office at work, in the closed down Safeway parking lot at night alone in bed when no one could hear me--made bad move after bad move, made the most embarrassing situations more embarrassing, I was language's poor double agent and to employ me to spy on language took my body in opposite directions and ripped me apart--- "I dread the events of the future not in themselves but in their results" hohoho Edgar Allan Poe
On Saturday (and Sunday too, actually), the Los Angeles Poetry community celebrated the life and work of Wanda Coleman--a poet large of life, of craft (eclectic, authentic, bold), of hair, of head (she was among our most brilliant cultural thinkers), and of heart. And the event felt large--ample and sprawling, generous and sunny, gorgeous, glamorous and gritty as Wanda's words, her friendship---the best our Los Angeles poetry community has to offer.
Co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and Red Hen Press, the Saturday event launched a weekend of remembrance. First, we sighed and were sliced through by the reading and then original poem of Douglas Kearney, whose tour-de-force "answer" to a letter of Wanda's tapped into her spirit, then turned West in the final few stanzas, on the hinge of a palm tree trying unsuccessfully to hold without arms, and landing on the lady herself, so ours, so gone, and unholdable. Then we shivered along with Terrence Hayes, an acolyte and Coleman fan, his story about meeting Wanda. We rode along the spine of Wanda's "I Live for my Car," one of the world's best car poems through a delicious reading by our own Suzanne Lummis. Jack and Adelle Foley gave a beautiful two-voice tribute that clearly had years of friendship behind it. Laurel Ann Bogan rocked a poem about a woman in a red hat, while wearing quite glamorously...a red hat. Ron Koertge made me smile and never want to get out of bed. Brendan Constantine lent voice and mystery to an LA Noir poem of Wanda's--funny and dark. Stephen Kessler spoke as only a thinker, editor, writing friend can..about her laser-sharp mind, her canny, committed friendship. Michael Datcher, Sesshu Foster, Charles Harper Webb.... Louise Steinman. Musical accompaniment by David Ornette Cherry. Wanda Coleman's collaborator and life-co-conspirator, Austin Strauss gave us a broadside sketch of the many Wanda's, is own, and in love and fire, brought the event home. And Kate Gale (who opened the event). What can I say about Kate Gale?
Watched the transcendent Cecilia Woloch do what she always does--show up with that authenticity and soul--and I remembered a long ago dinner--just after Wanda had published Bathwater Wine, her Lenore Marshall winning book--when she and Marilyn Hacker had read sonnets and other poems in the wonderful black-box reading venue at Beyond Baroque, and after, we'd all piled into two or three cars, and headed out for plantains and to talk science fiction, poetry, poverty, gaming, and life with Cecilia and Marilyn and Wanda and Fred Dewey, and Wanda's husband, Austin Strauss and her son, Ian and his partner, a woman whose name I'm sorry I don't remember. We laughed a lot. The evening was high in spirits and warm, so warm. And I could see why David Ulin would later call Wanda "the conscience of the LA literary scene." And I was new to Los Angeles then. And I thought, if this is my world, my new old world, I'm happy to be in it.
There's more--much more--to read about Wanda. But I want to leave you with two or three notes. First, there were several tears this weekend, but among the strongest for me, Robin Coste Lewis spoke with composure and passion about what it meant to know while she was a poet, growing up in Compton, this other woman poet--the only other one to this day--raised so near to where she was coming up. She brought us all this reminder about the hush-quiet also in Wanda's work. Oh, hurry. I needed this poem. And here it is:
from Wanda Coleman's "Dreamwalk"
7.
fear drives you to tears and out of the house during arguments with Mama for long walks on sweltering summer eves. the moths come, collect on grainy stucco porches, are hosed away at sunrise. you stare at shaded windows, struggle to decipher the lives inside. who are they? do they you see you out here watching? won't some sympathetic someone invite you in for tea? cars are being washed and turtle-waxed by loving hands, preteeners play dodgeball on vacant lots. the librarian admonishes you for staying so late and not having brought your card. palms nod against the neon rainbow sky. the moths come. and the starlings, and the dragonflies. you know something important is going to happen. to you. hurry, you whisper. please hurry
In a few days, LA ALOUD at the downtown Central Los Angeles Public Library will be posting a video of Saturday's cross-national event. So well choreagraphed. So personal. A tight 90 minutes of yaw and yes. Please watch! It was a beautiful ache.
Photo (c) poet, Lynne Thompson. Pictured here are Kima Jones, Maya Washington, Ashaki Jackson, F. Douglas Brown, Charif Shanahan, Terrence Hayes, Douglas Kearney, Robin Coste Lewis, Natalie Graham, and another mystery woman.
Poets: thank you those who came to Los Angeles for this weekend, reminding us of the reach of Wanda's impact, and everyone else, these incredible Angelenos, thank you for being Los Angeles with me.
When I was a child, I’d often read poems I didn’t understand. I’d throw my thoughts against the poem like a locked box, trying to parse the words together, so that the lock would slip open.
There were poets whom I knew were mostly beyond me, but my mind rubbed against them systematically, like my cat rubs her face against a hairbrush, and there were others whose work was made mostly of sound rather than idea, and those I could drink up like a glass of water. Emily Dickinson was in the first category, and Theodore Roethke in the latter.
I wasn’t a fan of Dickinson. Why should I be? A West Coast child who had no use for a version of nature that focused on the fly, the snake, and a bunch of east coast birds. Dickinson’s world was lacy, with holes. Her snakes all seemed to be wearing little Preacher’s suits. Not enough sex in it, I might have said, had I been anything but a child.
But then I stumbled on two short Dickinson poems of nonconformity.
441
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me—
The simple News that Nature told—
With tender Majesty
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see—
For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—
Judge tenderly—of Me
I was an oddball kind of child. Not fitting in was kind of my philosophy.
260
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
At last, a code I could use, a message I needed!
Later, I returned to Dickinson, and we sat together in the window where she whispered to me. I was grown by then. She’s not in my body as a form of sound. She’s in my mind, deep down there, like a series of locks. I open one, and she opens another. And in this infinitely regressive chain, she and I travel through a lonely place together.
I've been thinking lately about Cool. About cool before the concept of cool. Or before the cool people of today knew about the concept of Cool because we weren't born yet. Take E.E. Cummings in 1926, for instance, entitling his third book of poetry, in titling his fifth book as book
is 5
which must surely have been among the coolest titles of poetry books published in 1926, or in any other year for that matter.
Which is why I want to take a moment to say that I really like E.E. Cummings.
He makes verbs out of typography. He metaphors the hell out of grammar. He lets a lot of air into his sentences. (Or philosophy. Or science. Or thought. Or ego. Iconoclasm. Or humility. Or maybe he doesn't. Maybe I'm just not seeing him clearly. Readers: your thoughts?)
What he does do is karate chop the line breaks and even whole/holey/un-whole words--a trait for which he has been both praised and lambasted. (Edmund Wilson called his punctuation "hideous".)
It's true! Sure, we probably knew his poems sounded good. But did you ever wonder why? One story I can tell you about E.E. Cummings is that he was apparently hiding a pocketful of meters and a burial plot of sonnets inside his outwardly-apparent "free verse". Marilyn Hacker broke the news to me in a conventional sonnet class. I was 25 years old and floored. Instead of "Where's Waldo?", poets with a hankering to do so, could read swaths of Cummings and ask, "Where's the buried sonnet?" She showed me some secret examples.
The Poetry Foundation web site's bio of Cummings seems to point toward confirming this. From the age of 8 to 22, Cummings practiced writing in traditional verseform. So it's no wonder, no puzzle, and no surprise that a deep canon hovered under the cannon he carried back inside his heart and mind and experience from the first world war (where, incidentally, he hung out with Pablo P. and other avant garde artists).
If you have a little time at work today, I'd highly recommend a brief trip over to the Poetry Society of America's "Old School" collection. Similar in some ways to the classic poems section of Slate, where David Lehman has located an 'overlooked masterpiece by Thomas Gray', Old School also pairs pre-19th Century poets with the contemporary poets who adore them.
Find out about Matthew Rohrer's Shelley-inspired tattoo. Get brave with Yu Xuanji and Tina Chang. Experience Keats as a fragment of Ed Hirsch's consciousness, and hear George Herbert through the ears and mind of Alfred Corn. Oh I'm out on a kind of date there too, but my favorite pre-19th Century poet is wearing a wicked Invisibility Cloak. (And anyway, just between you and me, I think this poem of Robert Frost's might have competed hard as my top pick if I hadn't already written about it here.)
Since the first of the year, the days here in sunny So Ca have been unseasonably cold and occasionally wet. Several times a day, in and out of the house with dog, in and out of the car with groceries, with book bags (literally, bags o' books), with jackets in arms, once shed, abandoned and retrieved from the car, with leash, with ball, with muddy feet, I walk out past our rose garden.
Our rose garden--53 years old--another woman's treasure. Our rose garden belonged to our home's third occupants: not the 1930's-era Macy's furniture buyer, or the former general who sent away to Sears for plans for our house, but to the camelia horticulturalist and his wife, his wife who preferred roses. (We bought the home from the fourth owners, one of whom had once interned at the finest nursery in Pasadena, and had a verve for flower arrangements. Her rose arrangements "sold" me on the house, over twelve years ago. Not as skilled as Wallace Stevens, I toy with the art, understanding it very little. But I love my roses nonetheless. A sample of my latest creation is in the photo above.)
Anyway, no season surprises me more about roses--which have their pert season, the one where the insects first discover them, then the season they grow rank and stem-molded, and the season it's hard to cut them from the stalk before their little nethers are showing, so warm and ripe--indeed, little surprises me more about the seasons of roses than this season, this impossible January season, where the buds stay tight as long as they can, preserved as if in a nursery, and picturesque with drops. Where the roses themselves seem to belie winter, seem to speak back to short days, seem to promise something before failing at it. Every monday I wonder, will this be the week the gardener decides they are finished and cuts them back? This is the season of symbiosis and surprises. This is the season where the roses to me seem juxtaposed and various, seem to me like poetry.
One week, I ran into my gardener's young assistant: his wife was about to have a baby. It was fall. He carried around his phone. The next week, a red rose I'd been eyeing, a perfect red bud was gone after the gardeners came. It was hers, I hoped. No Rapunzel rules around here. The gardener, John, once told me that it makes them sad to watch the roses they care for die on the vine.
And now, it's full-on winter, as winter as California can get. Seeing them there--my garden's last Abraham Lincoln (a dark red, meant for bud-cutting, dainty as petticoats when it later opens), and my last Ballerina (fat and pink and white), a half-dozen lemon drops (with their faint ghost of citrus), I never go outside without thinking I should cut them. Cut them before the rain gets them. The rain that is always threatening.
Later in the sink, my house is filled with earwigs and fat spiders. All the symbiant, hiding life that took refuge inside the petals. Can you imagine sleeping in a rose? eating in a rose? all the wet winter long....And what are the insects symbiant in ideas, in creativity, in mind? The houses made by roses!
Rose gathering in rain reminds me of one of my favorite metrically lopsided, rhyming-and-repeating delicious little poems, by British poet, Louis MacNeice (and it's well-worth clicking through the biography of this capable, quirky, orderly man who made his living in words and the world--not just poems):
Snow
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes– On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands– There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
Two days ago, right about now, my family and I headed over to Orange Grove Boulevard, a wide, almost leisurely road with green lawns and mountain views that slices through the westmost-half of my hometown, Pasadena, CA. We parked nearby and walked into the darkness, the clumps of people. The sun had set, and families and college students had camped out on the side of the road, as they do each year, awaiting our parade. Portable camp fires and sleeping bags tangled in the toes. Kids impatient and excited, running from parent to parent, mouths smeared with lollipops.
Getting to the Grove is a project. Each driving-street heading N/S is blocked, and guarded. The Wrigley Mansion, whence the parade ventures, sits proudly on its long lawn, littered with TV cameras on poles, bins of extra flowers, each in their little plastic phallic green cups. And in the center of the road, the lonely giants--perfect, prepped floats--parked, coned-off, and waiting for dawn. Flowers and seeds, oddly lit by ten-foot tall lights. Throngs of people and dogs walked alongside, flasked and ear-muffed.
And my favorite element...four wandering minstrels, age say 18, from some nearby college played inventive variations on Auld Lang Sine on a clarinet, saxophone, accordian, and guitar.
And when the new year hit, we shared the countdown on a public avenue. Cheering all around.
But today, on the first "work" day ("word" day) of the calendar year, it's hard not to be lonely. Time passes, people pass too, never to come back to my long solo stem, to my lonely body to visit. And I found myself thinking about this poem of James L. White's below:
Making Love to Myself
When I do it, I remember how it was with us. Then my hands remember too, and you’re with me again, just the way it was.
After work when you’d come in and turn the TV off and sit on the edge of the bed, filling the room with gasoline smell from your overalls, trying not to wake me which you always did. I’d breathe out long and say, ‘Hi Jess, you tired baby?’ You’d say not so bad and rub my belly, not after me really, just being sweet, and I always thought I’d die a little because you smelt like burnt leaves or woodsmoke.
We were poor as Job’s turkey but we lived well— the food, a few good movies, good dope, lots of talk, lots of you and me trying on each other’s skin.
What a sweet gift this is, done with my memory, my cock and hands.
Sometimes I’d wake up wondering if I should fix coffee for us before work, almost thinking you’re here again, almost seeing your work jacket on the chair.
I wonder if you remember what we promised when you took the job in Laramie? Our way of staying with each other. We promised there’d always be times when the sky was perfectly lucid, that we could remember each other through that. You could remember me at my worktable or in the all-night diners, though we’d never call or write.
I just have to stop here Jess. I just have to stop.
by James L. White
I teach this poem. Not every term. From time to time. We listen to how it talks. We smell the gasoline and the leaves. It's sensory and simple. But the story is complex. We put it in our bodies. Our bodies take in this poem. Our minds take in this story. It gentles us in a bruised place.
But today, it's alive again for me. What I don't want to put down. What I have to. And going forward into this brave new year, I'm looking back. And I just have to stop here, people. I just have to stop.
* The sketch is by Bartolomeo Cesi, Two Men in Florence Kissing, 1600.
You now behold (in the photo above) a group of Beverly Hills High School alumni (parents, bankers, singers, and friends) returning to the alma mater as they do each December to sing "Still, Still, Still" with their old high school singing group, The Beverly Hills High School Madrigals.
They are singing under the baton of a very dear teacher, Joel Pressman, who was already making room for creativity and discipline, tenderness, tough love, and a lot of humor when I was a creative soul lost in the halls of that high school. Mr. Pressman's powerful voice draws us all back. What a teacher! What a singer! And all those voices--those alums who have gone onto careers in diaper-management, advanced cookie baking, accounting and the law, we alums who still love to sing, who still remember to slow down for that huge diminuendo in the final verse, and know how and why to watch the conductor--well it leads all of us in the audience to a place very close to tears!
I had been a parent for oh about a minute when I realized that I would never again stumble upon a group of carolers singing on floor 3 of the mall, children chiming off-key in a red velvet auditorium, middle school brass sections bugling themselves bug-eyed at Disneyland without instantly bursting into happy tears.
Every face, every trying-hard face is so shiny and focused. And then there are always a few faces, bored and daydreaming...the child in the navy satin poof skirt inaccurately mouthing the words. The boy with the monkey-face dramatics who couldn't quite pull the requisite colored outfit together, and would fit in better at the local Chuckie Cheese. And the social dynamics. Gee, they just slap one in the face until the stomach remembers the old flip-flops. Nodding to the parents with a "hip" Queen medley mostly from Bohemian Rhapsody, "mamma, I killed a man...my life had only just begun..now I've gone and thrown it all away" as we audience members howl with laughter, the joke on us for getting old, humming along. A high school diva in a black slinky dress, draped over a piano as if she were a lounge act, supported by four guys her own age in hats and bow ties, two of whom she'd never date, and one who would never date her (wrong gender), and the one who just maybe...and that isn't even storying up to the accompanist. The girl-on-girl duet, part love, part catfight. The sounds of the audience, the live net of high school affections and antagonisms, providing the soundtrack to the series of festive, frought events. I love them. I love every single one of them.
There we sit, we parents, grandparents, and other partisans, holding our tinier-each-year camcorders and recording our bigger-each-year children. I am purged over and over by the beautiful imperfection of the music, from the tiny beauty pageant kindersingers, to the high school minnesingers or maestros, tuning with purpose, and following the conductor with more verb and verse. Sometimes it seems as if you can feel layers under the singing or strumming--the hours of practice, all the different ears assaulted by scales, the "have you practiced enough" arguing behind every household door, and then later the "stop practicing till you have done your homework" or the "that dress is black but it's too short" "too fancy" "too casual". The parents, the children and their dreams. Like raising peacocks or grooming unicorns part of what's so touching is knowing that this is it, this is childhood, the most "adult" form this art will ever have for many of our children.
It seems so grown-up really, to believe in this effort and practice and excellence. To work hard. And then to come together to live it all out. What's wrong with us adults--so quickly bored and scattered, our energy dissipated by not wanting to disappoint our own hopes. How big we were, small like that!
Last week on NPR, Barbra Streisand (now in a new movie) was interviewed by Terry Gross. She talks about singing "People who need people," a song whose lyrics might be exactly opposite of what she believes, but they felt right. She talks about the moment when she was thirteen, and a bridge in the music, a bridge she swore was too long, suddenly got filled by a new idea for her, and when she came back in, the sound that came out of her--it was new. It was something she didn't know she had inside her.
And so this is what art is like. What life is like. Near as I can tell it.
We stop worrying about perfection. We pause for not knowing. We let effort happen, for its own mysterious reasons in its own mysterious state.
And sometimes, if we're very lucky, both Heaven and Nature sing!
Thanks, Joel Pressman. Happy Holidays to One and All...j.f.
Henry David Thoreau, while barely catapulting out of his own 20's, was nevertheless ready to dispense valuable advice on creativity and the energy necessary to sustain a life of purposeful alertness. Here he is speaking on mornings.
"The most memorable season of the day, the awakening hour.
For an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.
Be awakened by our Genius, not by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor.
Be awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, not factory bells.
Be awakened to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light."
--Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I love these quotes. And largely, I love mornings. Though, in those funny creative collisions and collusions so common to early parenthood--timeless days, endless nights--one December, I found myself reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden over my infant's sleepy head. You may imagine I got a bit of a kick out of the statement on mornings that Thoreau makes above. And still today, on this "shortest day of the year", I curse at my 'nudging mechanical servitor' and solemnly swear that my rescue dog--the newest "baby" to interfere with my sleep--must be by tautology, logic, and luck, my personal genius. Now if only I could teach him to use a pencil....
Tuesday marked the birthday of poet, Marilyn Hacker. In her honor, I've been thinking about a writing an odd multi-part fairy tale poem, based around a particular Grimm story, and featuring a transgendered bear. I may never finish it (well, actually, yesterday I finished a draft) but if I do, it is meant to be a kind of tribute to something wonderful she did when she was just about precisely my age. I am a long-time fan of all her work, but I am a fan, in that way we love what we love that feels particularly personal, almost like a secret, of her very brilliant series of poems based around the legend of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and featured in her fourth book, Assumptions (Knopf, 1985).
I love The Snow Queen poems for the figure of the Little Robber Girl, whom Hacker depicts as a saucy, savvy, tough-skinned and tender tomboy-girl. The friendship between the Little Robber Girl and Gerda saves Gerda's life, allows her brother's rescue. The Little Robber Girl knows how to handle her knife, how to maneuver around her mother, how to get dirty and stay clean. I'm simplifying.
I am holed up in the kitchen at the makeshift windowseat table nearest the stove, monitoring a tiny pot of cranberries, citrus, and clove. These cranberries are even now popping their little heads, with a pud-pud, and becoming one with the pot's round universe.
Our new rescue dog must smell this. Though she is so shy that she'd usually rather shove her large body into the semi-hidden spot between the couch and the coffee table, today instead she is stationed outside the kitchen door, on a small pad we put there, as close to the alley-kitchen as we'll let her wait. Cranberries are an ingredient in one of her favorite treats.
To say this house smells like family, or a hopeful complexity, would be literally correct. But that belongs to my thoughts of tomorrow. To me, right now, it's the sound I'm after. Pud pud--as the cranberries give way to the heat and pressure I've assembled around them.
Something about this sound reminds me of the imagery-making sensation of my childhood, when I knew I was "catching a poem" as soon as I could envision a secondary world hovering by simile or metaphor over the one I was living and standing in. Those little tadpole poems had a single idea to animate them. And that was plenty. I feel oddly sentimental for their simple sense of plenty.
To my child’s brain, these cranberries are “red popcorn”...Regular (corn-kernels) are the popcorn of air and these cranberries are the popcorn of water, or red mud, or the underworld. I could say they sound more like fish bubbles than drums. Or that they sound like rain. Or risk taking. And there would be the Poem of That.
Tony Hoagland, in Real Sofistikation: Essays on Poetry and Craft describes a three-pronged taxonomy of poetry (by which Hoagland means, there are three main categories into which one could sort the driving energy of any given poem): image (“red popcorn”), diction (a kind of thought-applied, processed image, such as “red popcorn of the underworld” or “sound of risk”), and rhetoric (in which an argument is sustained). Poems each seem energized by one of these three primary drives: to embody image, to embody diction, to embody rhetoric.
I’m wondering today whether I could map that taxonomy onto the originating impetus: the drive that makes the poet make the poem.
How do you know you have a poem? (Or I really mean, how does any writer know it’s time to pick up a pen, or race to the keys? What thought or sound or idea leads us to the zero-draft, the raw-recording of the coming-on of an energy that will, with work, become the poem?)
In childhood, for me, it was so simple: I “caught” an image. I had a poem. For several happy, simple years that poem-process lasted.
Then I dived deep into the riptides of adolescence, the emotional vibrancy of my early twenties. I came to “recognize” that start moment for a poem by a kind of sound and language--a single line that might lodge in my head, attached to the half-shape of an idea of some sort, or a sensory-tantalized remembering. I could “see” the poem--its discreet shape in the distance, and following that sound, that one line, I’d move toward it, hoping to sneak up on it before it left me.
One of my friends says (actually, this is from the poet, Elizabeth Knapp) that she first feels a poem in her hands. A kind of tingling. At least, that was true when she was in her twenties--an emotive time in my experience for the poetry project.
Is that emotive sense, then, similar to Hoagland’s diction (a kind of emoted-through image, a processed simplicity). And if so, is this part of Hoagland's typology also a form of impetus for the making of a poem? A point or type of origin?
By my thirties, the origin-place had changed again. Moving toward rhetoric, an argument would arrange itself metrically along a line, or I’d feel the ache of two lines rhymed together, with a few yummy multisyllabic words placed just right inside the meter. It felt so good, so kinesthetically good, to think and “argue” that way. Sure images would come to me, and so would “good lines” that weren’t metrical at all. But the beginning was in an effort to self-reveal--the origin's hope was that possibly a bit of eloquence, or aimed-after eloquence would redeem that process.
This is all too subjective. Too in the kitchen, smelling cranberries.
How do you know you’ve just “met” the thought, or sound, or texture, or taste, or argument, or rhyme, or imagined world that will “start” your poem? What trip do you take to that underworld where cranberries turn their whole bodies into incense, where the red mud becomes a dinner dish.
Forgive me, those of you in "weather". Under weather. Riding out weather.
Here is a poem much on my mind. It has traveled beside me for over a week...leashed (or perhaps, unleashed and dislodged from memory) by the Sandy of my west coast imagination, and now, today, stirred up again with the east coast storm warnings all over the news, in this funny well-publicized country of news cycles and imaginings.
There is probably a small image of this poem inside every cell in my body. I memorized it at 12 years old. Sixteen lines. Fewer end-rhyme sounds than one's average sonnet. (There are four in here...though some would say six, since two are debate-worthy, are slant.) All the lines are in falling meters: trochees, dactyls.
As for the sounds: so many W's. A beautiful haunting wind-like mouthful of lament.
Bereft
Where had I heard this wind before Change like this to a deeper roar? What would it take my standing there for, Holding open a restive door, Looking down hill to a frothy shore? Summer was past and the day was past. Sombre clouds in the west were massed. Out on the porch's sagging floor, Leaves got up in a coil and hissed, Blindly struck at my knee and missed. Something sinister in the tone Told me my secret must be known: Word I was in the house alone Somehow must have gotten abroad, Word I was in my life alone, Word I had no one left but God.
Robert Frost
I love how the "or" rhyme (door, floor, before) goes on for the first five lines...the tension the reader feels as one's ears anticipatorily try to abandon the sound at the normal stanza intervals for a couplet or a quatrain, but no, our author keeps going...three times, four times, five! Incredible.
I love "past", "massed", "hissed", "missed", with yet a sixth "or" rhyme thrown in between the pair of couplets, the jangly couplets that don't quite belong to one another, but nevertheless sound and feel fresh, as they try to create a little stir of exterior argument to the poem's primal rhetorical blow.
And then "tone", "known", "alone", "alone" comes...chiming hollow-voiced like a church bell, the "alone" repeated, so primal, so lost.
"Word"..."Word" the final two lines begin, as if the wind itself were infused with broken messages, as if language itself speaks of its own inability to redeem the sorrow of the poet, or me. This anaphora glues together a couplet whose ends don't even rhyme: "alone" and "God". Instead, "God" is part of an off-rhyme with "abroad". Our closure (on "God") is no closure...no click of end-sound against end-sound, but we know we've landed as close to closure as we are going to get.
A helpful anonymous person on Yahoo! Answers points me toward Jay Parini's really excellent Frost biography, Robert Frost: A Life (a book I read about two years ago, and would recommend) and tells me that this poem was written in 1893, which would put it concurrent with Frost's early work, three years after his first published poem and while he was still dancing into and out of college. This surprises me, enjoying it as I do in the volume in which it was published, West-Running Brook, in 1928. Itched by the fact, I take my early edition of West-Running Brook down from the shelf to look, and in fact, the poem bears a note on the Title page ("Bereft. As of about 1893"), a note I never noticed before.
Where have I heard this wind before?
I can't tell you that. But I think it was born inside me. And storms--not my own--but yours, you of the East Coast--have called it up!
Sometimes I have an odd kind of guilt for experiencing my own feelings of so-called empathy. My son's foray into philosophy opened our household up to ideas such as "speaking for others"--an unmitigatedly bad thing once one has thought about it. One must try to keep track of what one doesn't know (mustn't one?).
So forgive me for reciting "Bereft" for you. It is myself that I indict, isn't it? after all.
--Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) (her form is the 'cinquain')
In my childhood in Beverly Hills California, where our storms tended toward fire and quake, Los Angeles poet Myra Cohn Livingston served as Artist in our schools. Her first lesson was to use our real eyes, rather than to "buy in" to other people's metaphors and similes. She liked to remind us that "snow" wasn't "winter" in Southern California. I knew that if I "saw" the leaves turning something other than crinkly-and-brown, I should get my eyes checked.
On the other hand, she would bring in brilliant objects and ask us to come up with lists...what are they? what are they to us metaphorically? We would take metaphor-hunting walks. We would find the telephone in the seashell, the moon "as the north wind's cookie." (That last is Vachel Lindsay, in case you were wondering.)
And she would read us poems, across time, across space, from a stream she knew where poetry was always happening inside itself. A famous children's poet, she didn't believe in talking down to children. Her anthologies still sit on my shelves, and are of interest to my 43 year old self.
Her anthologies for children (among her more than 90 books), always included international work, spanning six centuries or more. Here for Halloween are some selections from Why Am I Grown So Cold: Poems of the Unknowable (A Margaret K. McElderry Book, Athenaeum, 1982).
Stanley Kunitz once implored all of us to become the person who writes the poem.
Every day, I am humbled and delighted by the community of writers, students and faculty, with whom I work at the Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA program. My colleagues and students take risks on the page, write hard, read seriously, live lives of meaning, and are wickedly talented. But what wows me again and again is this community's vulnerability, expansiveness, and humility. This puts very big, wide margins around the possibilities for words. Margins so big that everyone has room to risk and learn. And dream.
When I was a young poet returning to Los Angeles, recently divorced, newly "out", child in tow, with a satisfying dot-com editorial job, low-wage but creative, and without many local literary connections, Eloise Klein Healy came into my life as a gentle can-do dynamo. I'd meet her at readings, and through mutual friends; and eventually, we began a conversation about poetry. I became aware that she had created and was directing the Low-Residency MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, the first low-residency program on the West Coast.
Fast forward seven-tenths of a decade to 2006. Around the time I began teaching at Antioch University Los Angeles, I asked Eloise about our program's special focus on literature and the pursuit of social justice.
I know you're probably not local to Los Angeles, but I wish you could come out to hear two of my literary heroes, Sandra M. Gilbert and Ron Carlson read at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena this weekend.
Founded in 1894, Vroman's is Southern California's oldest and largest independent bookseller (two of Vroman's early employees are restacking books in the photo, above).
Here are a few words from Ron Carlson on bewilderment and humility and listening in the act of writing:
"Beginning a story without knowing all the terrain is not a comfortable feeling. It is uncomfortable enough in fact to keep most people away from the keyboard...But there are moments in the process of writing a story when you must tolerate that feeling: you stay alert to everthing that is happening and by listening and watching, you find out where you are going by going there.
"The single largest advantage a veteran writer has over the beginner is this tolerance for not knowing. It's not style, skill, or any other dexterity. An experienced writer has been in those woods before and is willing to be lost; she knows that being lost is necessary for the discoveries to come."
from Ron Carlson Writes a Story (Graywolf Press), page 15
Sandra Gilbert is one of my favorite living writers. She speaks of life as a woman, a daughter, a mother, a thinking person. "You write because you dream a different self into being when you write," Sandra M. Gilbert says in her essay, "Why Do We Write", On Burning Ground: 30 Years of Thinking about Poetry (University of Michigan Press). "You write because you meet a new you in writing, a you you didn't know you had."
Ron Carlson and Sandra Gilbert will be reading at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California on Sunday, April 15, 4p.m.
At the AWP conference in Chicago, I attended a panel--the first panel of the first morning--on contemporary Jewish poetry. There was a lot of genius at that table, and an adorable baby in the audience about whom the moderator said, "Don't be angry at that baby. We like that baby." A very happy little panel. Of all the things in that room I found to like, I left there utterly taken with the work of young Hasidic poet, Yehoshua November.
Here is the poem he read that morning, from his first book, God's Optimism (Main Street Rag, 2010).
One of my writing friends asked me a week ago whether I'd ever heard of a problem where writing is going fine, but all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it completely hurts to read. Hurts to read? I asked him. You mean like back pain?
"Sort of! My eyes just won't go there. I open books. I can't focus on them."
We were catching up over chicken sandwiches, followed by a tart with sliced pears and caramel sauce. Yum. But honestly, this is a hard time for my friend. His parents are unwell. In a short 8 months, he’s changed jobs and ended a marriage, and just lately, he’s moved onto some of his own medical tests.
He was surprised. But I wasn’t. At least, not very. I’ve known a number of colleagues, students, and members of my very own book-addicted family who have gone through a period of time where reading, once an outlet and a pleasure, felt almost palpably painful. The introspection. The quiet in one’s own head. Quiet that has to stay quiet enough to open to a writer’s voice, to another human’s point of view. Sustained focus. And all of this striking a self who no longer feels like the same, stable self.
I call it "reader's block" and it can feel just as insidious as the writer's version.
I do have a few strategies for dealing with it, though....
1. Try to read a single poem like a meditation every day.
Maybe twice per day. Give up on whole books and turn to the kinesthesia of repetition. Find and notice every piece of punctuation. Basically, run your mind mouth over the words multiple times and try to emblazon them into you.
I found this exercise during a time when I was going to shul regularly. During the month of Elul (usually sometime in September), there is a tradition of reading the same psalm every day. I have now done this three times--three whole months, exploring the words of this single poem. I'm amazed by how the poem begins to open--familiar, calming, and yet somehow also always fresh.
I have this Magellan-esq idea about reading that I want to explore today...
In my experience, reading (for a writer) is something like an opera singer's scales, a kind of preparation of the whole body for the writing work that comes after (months after, years after, moments after). It's the best place I know to get my conscious-editor mind and my writer-mind to meet on some common ground. It's like going on a journey with a boat full of Me.
The Me's in the boat are--sensory me, who reads; writing me, who loves to swing words around but can't look through the side or rear view mirrors, and editor me, who likes to figure out how all the contraptions are built. Really, it's the book itself that is our territory. The moments the book does something inside me--hits me in the solar plexus, makes the top of my head tingle, gives me a new kind of vibration in my hands or feet, makes my inner eye create pictures, gives me a heavy, settled-in feeling, jingles in my ear--that are the scenic lookouts, the encounters with wildlife, the hairpin turn, the trees.
I love how the cartographer's or bird watcher's spirit animates that idea-- the idea of reading for completeness, for discovery, to give the body and mind a full-immersion experience with language, and its co-vessel, craft. We settle into the text with our unified selves, like fly-fishers, or Columbuses, or canoers up the Amazon......
What I’m saying is this: every book is a territory, a geography, unmapped by our own mind until we’ve read it, until we’ve been there. A full penetration into the jungle of otherness, over the leafy floor on the swinging vines of words. Liking the book isn't important. The aim is completeness. The aim is a cartography. The aim is nothing more or less than the complete exploration of the effect on ourselves of everything that can possibly be said.
Reading hits the mind in any number of places:
the literal,
the visual,
the visceral.
And more. It hits the mind, and it often hits it so well, and so subtly, that it's hard to figure out where the book struck.
The goal for the writer is not just the reader’s joy, the reader’s transport, but also the doctor’s clinical observation and analysis of this joy and transport. To take books apart and figure out how they work on the reader.
Writing is a stunning business. We put down a charged line of letters, a form of communication, richer and more textured than actual depicting speech. If we're lucky (especially in the tiny enacting contraption that is a poem), every word vibrates like an excited electron and has the ability to send off sparks. We will never really know how our words are detonating in the mind of the Big Other (see Lacan) when we put them on a page and pass them across a table to someone we have never met. How their impact is being created and recreated in the brand new, not-our-own body.
The writer who reads must test this kinetic-body-mind-recreation process in the only reader she knows personally—the only reader to whom she has direct bodily access: herself.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
