What better medium than collage to express the accumulation of memories?
ROMARE BEARDEN, creator of A Black Odyssey series of paintings
Tag: Culture
TRULY CORRESPONDENCE
A while back, while reading a selection of letters by the itinerant Quaker minister Elias Hicks (1748-1830), I was impressed by the length and quality of some of the individual correspondence. These were pieces that could have been published essays, yet were addressed to a specific individual – pieces, I should add, from a farmer by trade.
I’m left wondering about the amount of time some Friends (and others, of course) spent daily or weekly in reading and writing as well as reflecting on the issues at hand.
Don’t tell me it was a slower era or that they had more time to employ – labor was more demanding and often tedious, after all. I think something else is at play here.
As I said, I’m impressed.
MAKING TIME FOR THE WORK
As I said at the time …
There’s no denying the importance for a writer to have a physical space where the work-in-progress can be left out in the open, safely behind a closed door, between sessions. Where there’s no lost time putting everything away, only to have to bring it out again in order to resume where one left off. This doesn’t have to be a dream space, either.
But making time for writing is even more crucial. Being able to get a thought or line down on paper, while it’s fresh. Of finding large blocks of time to engage in the interior dialogue of characters as they emerge amid your daily errands and nocturnal dreams. (Like babies or demons, they possess you.)
I’m not alone in finding my practice of writing becomes part of a larger juggling act, especially when I’m already working fifty-hour weeks as a professional whatever somewhere else. Especially when those hours are outside the “literary” field altogether. Then there are the needs of a home life to contend with, and, in my experience, a faith community, too. For instance, I’ve found that as long as I’m employed as a full-time journalist, my off-duty hours leave me only enough hours to (a) write and revise or (b) focus on submissions and correspondence or (c) attend and give readings and other public events; but there is no way to do two of the three (much less all three) in the same period.
On top of it all, the work takes as long as it needs. Or, like the old-house syndrome, every repair or renovation project will require at least three times more time and money than you budgeted.
JUST A ROLLING STONE
Lately, thanks in part to a great yard-sale find, I’ve been revisiting a lot of Bob Dylan and realizing how many phrases that pass through my head originate in his lyrics. Or at least the ones that also have a musical line. I came to him in late ’62 or early ’63 and was a loyal fan until he went electrified and left the activist and folk scenes. Count me among the contingent that felt betrayed.
OK, I’ve come to recognize and even admire a lot of significant material he wrote in the years since. The man could turn a phrase, for certain, even when he was drawing heavily from others.
The line, “Like a Rolling Stone,” had me wondering about its relationship to the naming of the band and the rock magazine, all three products of the ’60s. Did the song prompt the other two?
Turns out the band was formed in ’62; the song, ’65; and the magazine, then a tabloid newspaper, November 9, ’67. But, in another twist, the band took its name from Muddy Waters’ 1950 “Rollin’ Stone.”
As for the popular phrase, “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” the line points to John Heywood’s 1546 translation of the Roman-era Pubilius Syrus. So it’s been rolling around for some time.
~*~
Also from the ’60s was my discovery of the common Pennsylvania road sign, “Beware of Rolling Rock,” along with the brew. I suppose looking at the connection between those two would be like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. Or even why the chicken crossed the road before or after.
PUBLIC MAGAZINE SWAP
One of the most popular services at our local library is a small cart in the hallway where patrons leave magazines they subscribe to. The periodicals become free for the taking.
Considering the cutbacks in the library’s own subscriptions (accompanying the cuts in the hours the building’s staffed and open), it’s a major service.
We feel good leaving our now-read copies, and feel grateful when we pick up others for perusal.
It’s quite an impressive array still coming in the mail. Hip, hip, hooray!
FURROW
Like the American bison that dominated the prairie, the continuous ocean of tall grasses, which for so long spread from a corner of Ohio into Montana and Colorado, has been decimated. Homesteaders – seized by a fever to possess farmland of their own – sowed apprehension in their furrows. Inhabitants and land itself now lay open to chronic infection. After each harvest, the Breadbasket of the World, the Interior States of the American Soul, is left vacant, a stubble desert awaiting rebirth. Descendants of those who made this band agriculturally productive bear both its blessing, in economic output, and curse, as if no one can entirely escape the desperation that prompted settlement in the first place. In the recesses of the psyche, inheritors of these spaces must likewise sense themselves to be buffalo-people, and then fear they, too, may be heir to this fate. Pushed to the fringes, the intrinsic beauty and spiritual potential of the heartland are easily overlooked, both by the remnant population and the world’s policy-makers. Today’s farmers are mechanics, first and foremost. Cry, then, for harmony and healing – a proper reentry into Canaan, a taste of balm in manna. Look, ultimately, to the surviving bison and tall grasses with their underlying lavender shadings. Respect the faint drumming, growing louder.
A PROSPEROUS TURN
Demand for wool in the first three decades of the 19th century shaped the boom years of agriculture in New Hampshire, at least until the invention of the cotton gin allowed for a cheaper clothing alternative – a condition that was accompanied by a changing American workplace and economy.
The brief but prosperous boom financed many of the Granite State’s landmark large farmhouses and barns as well as the nearly ubiquitous stone fences that are still visible, some in the most unexpected remote forests.
Pay attention while driving along country roads, and you’ll often notice stretches where each house seems to be an evolution among the others. I suspect that what happened was they were all built by one craftsman carpenter and his crew – perhaps itinerants who would stay for a season of erecting a house before returning home – who were invited back in another year to build another, each one to customized specifications. The chimneys, for instance, reveal a progression away from the massive central fireplace of the Colonial era to the use of multiple chimneys after the Revolutionary War – something that has me thinking of how much firewood these houses must have consumed through a winter.
It’s possible, of course, that the carpenters and masons and others came to live in the neighborhood as well. But one thing I feel certain: the resident commercial farmers, faced with the demands of their flocks and fields, did not have the time or perhaps even skills to build houses like these.
Here are some of the fine examples found in a village along a ridge in the town of Deerfield, a neighborhood known as South Deerfield. There are more, I should mention, than I could capture in this outing. Meanwhile, I’d like to know more about the site of the popular Mack Tavern, with its fiddler’s throne to protect the player from the wild dancers.
OH, YES
As I said at the time … Eighth Month 24, 1997
Dear M of the Warm Heart and Extraordinary Signature …
Thanks for giving those five poems a first home. I look forward to seeing what you’re doing with your ‘zine, being already intrigued by your sense of graphic design. (A lobster in the crest? Great touch, especially considering how many French-speaking kids in Maritime Canada used to go to school with lobster in their lunchboxes while their richer English classmates had roast beef. How times change.)
You have no way of knowing how much your letter meant to me. (So I guess I’ll have to try explaining, right?)
Here I was dragging home from another hellish Saturday at the newspaper office — the 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. drill — well into a mounting depression that has been building for the last several weeks. (In part from watching an ex-girlfriend slip into alcoholism and eating disorders, and also in part from going to contradances where we’ve been way short of women partners, as well as in part from the pleasures of adult orthodontics, and even in part from car trouble, blah-blah. You get the picture.) So there, amid the junk mail and a bill or two: your letter. Poetry acceptances are always nice, especially when an editor selects more than one. An entire batch, of course, is a winning scratch ticket. But a letter? Not just a form acceptance? I’m touched.
You pack a lot into a single page. Things that trigger emotional reactions within me, too. For starters, you write so well — with seeming ease, grace, intimacy, color and a varied vocabulary, joy, and encouragement. You leave me arguing with myself: Is she really 18? (Na, can’t be … way too insightful to be a kid.) (Yes, she is: Listen to the dreams. Listen to the inner connections. You don’t get that from university study.) (Nah, it could be a very studied imitation — somebody who would like to be 18, like your friend who decided 17 was the perfect age and then spent the next half century remaining 17.) (Yes, see how she leaps with playful touches — the “love and liquor” or “little blade of grass in the garden of literature.”)
So, M, which is it? How is it you apparently have so much going — plus the resourcefulness and skill to launch your own magazine? Tell me, do … I’m intrigued. (And why, by the way, were you home on a Friday night instead of out on the town. Especially a big town, like Chi’town?) Ah, life! Ah, mystery!
“Professional” writer? My dear, all writing is work — and sometimes, when we’re really blessed, it becomes intense prayer, no matter how that particular piece turns out. Writing is a process, with two muses, as Wendell Barry insists: one says you can do it, you really have to give it a try, before the other reminds us, it’s harder than you thought! For most journalists, it’s a trade, as in plumbing or meat-cutting. Since no poet today pays the rent or mortgage from royalties alone, my definition of a “professional poet” is anyone who gets pieces published while being employed to teach “creative writing.” That makes the rest of us “amateur poets” — amateur, as in one who loves. Of course, as an editor now, you are “professional” to whatever degree you want to accept — especially since you’re in position to endorse some of those creative-writing teachers through publication. (Feel the power yet?)
Literary masterpieces? Don’t worry about that, not for a long time, if ever. The important thing for you now — as well as those other “mostly manic, angst-ridden teenagers,” who, you acknowledge, “produce some fine work too” — is to ride the energy, recording as much of it as you can while everything is extraordinary, intense, and fresh. This — your “shit load of poems (from) the last several years” — is the Mother Lode you’ll be drawing on for the rest of your writing career. Lucky you! Thirty years from now, you’ll shriek: “A diamond in the muck! A turn of genius where I had seen nothing remarkable!” Trust me. And in the meantime, throw nothing away. I wish I had begun keeping a journal six years earlier I did. One detail can spring an entire movie from oblivion.
A theory: By the time most writers develop the craft to accomplish what they intend technically, they’ve lost the opening that compelled them in the first place. The result is dry, technical work.
Put another way: A critic on PBS remarked that no other visual artist has produced as much bad art as Picasso did, yet we need the nine bad pieces if we are to appreciate the genius of the tenth one. Ted Berrigan, in one of his taped teaching sessions, says much of the same in warning writers to be wary of the limitations success can put on their outpouring.
About my poems in your hands: Yes, these five are delicate, subtle, even dreamlike. Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot on how the conflicts within any relationship often form as much of the fabric of connecting as the basic erotic/romantic attraction does. Of course, either partner can really know only his or her half of the interaction, at best, so there are always these gaps and misunderstandings and expectations and — well, the kind of lacy texture I think you perceive. I’m trying to let the images themselves convey this energy, without limiting it by any editorial comment. Does this make sense to you? (By the way, a hambo — one of the images — is a wonderful pivoting dance for a couple: somewhat like a waltz or a polka, except that the woman really does seem to fly about five feet rather than five inches above the floor.)
So how ‘bout sending a big batch (copies, of course) of your writing my way? Not that I’m bored, mind you, but as I’ve said, intrigued. The whole point of writing is to share it. Enclosed check, too, is for past issues, future issues, a subscription if you have one.
Wish you were here to read to me. It’s a lovely, dry, cool New England Sunday afternoon. A great day to head to the beach or the mountains. Or even off to Boston, for whatever. Thanks for making up for being so mean to everyone that day by being nice to me. Your penance worked!
Cheerios and grins …
SHOT FIRED AND ALL THAT
From a note dated 11 June 2005: Old North Bridge
Dixieland band on a pontoon party boat on the swollen Concord River
passing two Revolutionary War era uniformed re-enactors
on a hot, sweltering day.
(My younger one pointed out to them how their uniforms were wrong.)
Incongruous merriment.
How freely, all the same.
THIS OLD HOUSE DISILLUSIONMENT
One of the downsides of owning an old house is an awareness of just how expensive any repair is. (And it’s always more than you’ve planned.) Add to that just how many repairs are needed. (Remember, most of them are for things you don’t even see.) And that’s before we get to any upgrades.
The awareness has also afflicted many of my dream-house observations, especially when I’m nearing the ocean. Where I would have admired a stone retaining wall under construction or a long pier from a private boathouse or deck to the mooring, what I now see is dollar signs. Often, more than I would have made in a year. It’s crushing.
It can make you wonder what people do for that kind of income. Or what kind of wealth they were born into. Or how long it will last.
One thing I know is that fishermen used to live in some of these coastal communities. But not anymore. Not by a long shot. Some of them live closer to me.
Jnana's Red Barn 