Long sprawling post. Picture of horse. Questions at the end.

The horse stands for something, I'm sure,
 if we could just figure out what it is...

The other day a non-English major friend was working on a poem analysis for an English class. He was trying to wrestle the poem to the ground and make it surrender some kind of deep one-to-one correspondence--the horses stand for nature, the grass is Death, the wind is...our souls?... Finally I said, "You're probly working too hard. Maybe you should try just absorbing it."

"Typical English major ," he said. Then he read it again, more relaxed. "Huh," he said. A friend from the class called, and he answered his cell phone. "Elena says we're working too hard," he said.

(Yup. That's what I thought.)


Recently I've been reading books of poetry, but also poets talking about poetry. I've found that experts reflecting on their own craft can be immensely helpful for me (in small doses), mostly because it gives an articulate, insider view of some of the same things I'm trying to deal with.

"Poems don't just happen. They are luckily or stealthily related to a readiness within ourselves. When we read or hear them, we react. We aren't just supposed to react--any poem that asks for a dutiful response is masquerading as a poem, not being one. A good rule is--don't respond unless you have to. But when you find you do have a response--trust it. It has a meaning."

from Writing the Australian Crawl by William Stafford

I appreciate Stafford's ideas first from a reader's perspective. Poetry can be daunting, not always because it gives us deep feeling, but because we expect to get deep feeling out of everything (or there's something wrong). Sometimes it's helpful for me to approach a poem knowing I may not like it, any more than I'm going to like every food that I eat. But I won't know what food I like--or what food is good for me--until I try it.

From a writing perspective, Stafford also seems to explore how things feel as he writes, and to respond when he feels the need for a response. And maybe that response is poetry. Tom Andrews says something similar:

"James Thurber was once interviewed by a reporter who had read Thurber in a French translation; after reading Thurber in English, the reporter said he preferred the French translation. 'That's always been my problem,' Thurber replied. 'I lose something in the original.' While writing a poem, I hope to be confronted with a moment when, as William Stafford put it, 'the material talks back,' often frustrating my original intent or design for the poem. At that moment I have a decision to make. I can insist on my original intent or I can try to listen to and follow the poem's emerging direction. Invariably I find that if I insist on my original design, then 'I lose something in the original.' Increasingly I'm interested in letting my poems...engage directly this tension between my own desire to speak and the languag's tendency to displace the speaker. The more I write, the more I discover the truth of something Michel Focault wrote: "Language always seems to be inhabited by the other, the elsewhere the distant."

--Tom Andrews

from What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry eds. Buckley and Merrill

I find Andrews' statement true for me; if I'm being honest about what I'm writing, it often goes a direction I did not intend, and the language itself directs it. One of my goals for this capstone are being willing to go where the language seems to be leading.

Something else I'm thinking about: reading books on "craft" don't work unless I'm practicing at the same time! I can read all I want about electrical wiring or deep sea diving or babysitting or writing, but unless I'm going to be practicing it while I'm reading more and more, it will be flat knowledge on a flat page. The practice feeds the knowledge I can glean from the "mentoring" of books and those who've gone before me.

Other writers I'm reading: Aaron Belz, who will, incidentally, be at the Festival of Faith and Writing (some of his quirky poems here and here).

Questions I'm curious about, for you all:

• What has your experience with writing poems or prose been in terms of who is directing the piece you are writing? Do you think you're able to let go of writing enough to explore?
• How do you find yourself responding to poems, or expecting to respond? How do you want other readers to respond to your writings? Is it even good to consider readers' responses at the creation stage?
• Do you have any writers you've stumbled across that you'd like to recommend?

The Wet Collection

I have been reading Joni Tevis for capstone. Her collection of essays, The Wet Collection is fantastic! I’m already beginning a grieving process for when I finish the book and I have to
move on to something else! The essay that has moved me the most in writing style and content is “Building a Funeral.” Tevis writes on a dry season of her life in Texas, working in a funeral home. What impresses me beyond her writing style is the variance of emotions she is able to produce off of one broad subject matter. Sometime I struggle to keep myself from reading ten sections aloud when my roommates are around because I am either laughing or my heart is breaking over something.

Here are a few sections from “Building a Funeral,” just to portray the moods I am describing:

He flips to the next page of the Why Pre-Plan? section, a photo of a teary woman in a black blouse. “Stress to the families that pre-planning sends a message of love to those left behind,” he tells me. “It says to them, ‘I love you and I don’t want you to have to make these decisions alone.’” The woman in the photo looks tired, in need of a comforting shoulder, a drink, a makeover. If only she’d pre-planned. “Why should so many widows be compelled to make these decisions alone?” reads the caption. Much of the sales pitch directly targets women, though nobody admits
it. (34)


The mother doesn’t say much. Her sisters take care of the forms, the signatures, the money. I can’t look at her. I cannot help her, I know; it is enough that I do no harm.
“Will we have to pay for everything right now?” one sister asks, “or can we do a payment plan?”
“Well, we only allow payments on pre-need packages,” I say, hiding behind the euphemisms. “When it’s at-need, the company requires payment in full.”
“What’s at-need?” she asks.
“It means we need it right now,” sobs the mother.
Later, we walk the narrow road to the space together. I hold the lot book and look away when they cry. A pine tree and the shadow of a pine tree. He was eleven years old. The service will be Tuesday. (43)



Most of them add one or two clods of dirt, then pass the shovel on, but one handsome boy of eighteen or twenty loosens his tie and keeps digging. It’s not ceremonial; he wants to fill the grave. The shovel bites into the mound of dirt. He bears down on his loafer-clad foot, lifts his load, and throws it in the hole, violently. Time and again he does this. There’s a rosebud stuck in
his back pocket. His Adam’s apple shakes as he fights back tears. (46)

Style-wise, I am constantly influenced by Tevis’ use of listing. Sometimes her lists are in commas, other times in fragments. But the quality of the listing is in the rhythm she uses while still developing the setting. Some of the listing is in the structure of the essay, segmented into numbers or mini-titles.

Once again, I am shown the importance of using concrete metaphors to enhance setting; metaphors involving the five senses and objects that we as readers know so well. Here’s a section from “Postcards from Costa Rica”:

Meanwhile a woman does many things at once: washes a huge aluminum stockpot, relights the
gas with a piece of paper after a gust blows it out, stirs a bubbling kettle of beans Another woman cries out with joy when a child appears in the open doorway. Dressed in dark pants and a pressed white shirt, he carries a bag of books, ready for a day at school. After hugging him close she seats him at a table and gives him breakfast – beans and rice, eggs, a glass of juice. They talk quietly between bites. (55)

I’m encouraged by Tevis’ willingness to write about things that don’t necessarily have one strong message, but it seems it’s just what she wants to write about. Within that randomness, the reader feels totally connected.

READ IT!!! And that’s all.

Foment

The writing journey embarks. Pens ink, computers heat up, and coffee (or tea, if you prefer) brews. Our group of brave travelers into this new adventure has to create a schedule, read good books by good writers, and start cranking out creations hoisted up from the creative caves of ourselves.

When I think about that dark, creative space, currently I see cobwebs. There is something like a faucet dripping from someone not shutting off the water valve. There are gears pitched on the rocky walls, immobile– composed of dry, rusty powder and gritted, hardened rocky sand. An obscure animal from childhood imagination scurries across the dark, prism floor. I peddle after it only to plow into a Do Not Enter wall, which gives off a feeling of wanting to speak, but suddenly someone rudely interrupts. I want an idea to throw the switch. The world will look differently, if only a spark will start it. A charge is the impetus for the space to come to life.

I read something tonight that got the metal gears to grind forward, oil running through and over. If anything, I was struck with the beauty of it:

“I reel in confusion; I don’t understand what I see. With the naked eye I can see two million light-years to the Andromeda galaxy. Often I slop some creek water in a jar and when I get home I dump it in a white china bowl. After the silt settles I return and see tracings of minute snails on the bottom, a planarian or two winding round the rim of water, roundworms shimmying frantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjusted to these dimensions, amoebae….Do its unedited sense impressions include the fierce focus of my eyes? Shall I take it outside and show it Andromeda, and blow its little endoplasm? I stir the water with a finger, in case it’s running out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a tropical aquarium with motorized bubblers and lights, and keep this one for a pet. Yes, it would tell its fissioned descendants, the universe is two feet be five, and if you listen closely you can hear the buzzing music of the spheres.” -Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

They are turning.

A Few Thoughts on William Stafford

I find myself very drawn these days to a volume of William Stafford’s new and selected poems entitled The Way It Is. Stafford was a prolific American poet who died in 1993 at the age of 79. The following poem is one that has become especially important for me:

“You Reading This, Be Ready”

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life—

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

I love how he starts with a thoughtful, straight-forward question, then follows it up with some beautiful images—small things that one wouldn’t think would be important things to remember. Stafford seems to be trying to rein in those who would seek something more grand in their living and remembering, demonstrated with the gentle chiding of these lines: “Are you waiting/for time to show you some better thoughts?” I love the idea that the now, this moment of awareness, is what counts—the present moment is the world, it is all we have, and we must pay attention so that we can “carrying into evening/all that you want from this day.”

Stafford‘s style is quiet, subtle. His diction has a deceiving simplicity about it, and the words and images simply sing. Here’s the opening lines from “Where We Are”: “Fog in the morning here/will make some of the world far away/and the near only a hint. But rain/will feel its blind progress along the valley/tapping to convert one boulder at a time/into a glistening fact.” Here’s another beauty: “Sometimes the light when evening fails/stains all haystacked country and hills,/runs the cornrows and clasps the barns/with that kind of color escaped from corn…” (“Level Light”). The images are so spare and precise. The speaker’s voice strikes the ear as one that is sure and trustworthy.

Stafford’s poetry makes me want to have that quiet sense of surety in my own work—that steady, unglamorous voice and diction that nonetheless taps deep places in the reader. I like the simplicity of the syntax that somehow creates a certain authority because it’s not trying to do something self-consciously grandiose. I want my own writing to mirror that.

“You Reading This, Be Ready” was written two days before Stafford died. Knowing that causes me to pay special attention, to wonder, even, what this life with words is all about. Would I spend the best part of my day fashioning words if I knew I was so close to the end? Are all these musings with language worth it? The best writing that I read, Stafford being a good example, helps me to pay attention, gives me a sense of necessary beauty (and the older I get, the more beauty and meaning are becoming the same thing for me), and opens me to transcendent things. Thus, reading and writing, for me, become deeply spiritual and open me to God. Is the writing life worth all it extracts? I have to say,”yes,” and Stafford helps me to remember that.

Judy Hougen