You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
I still miss the Douglas firs and the Western red cedars. In their maturity, they stand tall – not quite to redwood stature but still impressive, especially when they’re massed together or the clouds roll through the branches.
Close your eyes and let the aroma present another unforgettable impression.
Maybe off in the distance of night you’ll hear the singing.
~*~
For more, click here.
Dwelling at the edge of a large Indian reservation, I found it impossible to ignore a vibration in the earth itself of their spirit.
Had I remained there a few more years, I no doubt would have collected turquoise-and-silver jewelry, the work of many Native masters.
Sometimes I still see their inspiration in the stars, though. Especially on a clear night. A very clear night, at that.
~*~
To see how it’s inspired my collection of poems, click here.
I’m tempted to say there are two sides to the mountain – a wet one and a dry one. Or even the side you see and the one you don’t. Or what’s ahead of you and what’s behind.
But none of that’s quite accurate.
You could, for one thing, be standing on the summit.
Or you could realize it’s one continuing side, like a Mobius strip, to explore. Even in your mind.
~*~
For a set of related poems, click here.
As I said at the time …
It’s a quirky process, this exercise of seeking homes for personal work – the reactions of editors and readers so idiosyncratic and varied that the same piece can be considered too intense, by one, and not raw and bloody enough, by another. I can never predict who will accept what, no matter how long I’ve known a publisher or journal.
Contributor’s note? Just say I hope soon to be tent camping again.
I’ve spent a lot of my life behind a steering wheel, and that’s where a number of my poems originate.
From this, I can look at a concept. Lines from the road. Basho? Brautigan? McCord?
Flight or escape remains a central theme in American literature. Kerouac’s On the Road and Hunter Thompson come to mind, along with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Blue Highways. Of course our two greatest American novels also reflect this action, often with its male bonding and fields of discovery – Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn. It’s not just some vague sense of the liberty of a frontier to resettle, but with wheels, there’s the thrill of speed more destructive than hiking or canoeing or sailing. As for hobos and the rails? Another era. Outlaws more than vagabonds? As for the Gypsy, there’s an entire community to consider. As well as flights with a destination, in contrast to those lacking.
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.
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 …
There it was on a public television broadcast, a curator proclaiming that no other artist had made as many bad lithographs (and maybe other kinds of prints) as Picasso. But, came the rejoinder, no other artist had made so many of genius, either. The freedom of one was necessary to open the other.
I took the message to heart. Genius, of course, is another matter.
As I said at the time, the attempt to gain a clearer picture of my high school and college years took an interesting turn as I considered (let’s call her) AA, and an attraction that never went beyond a few words and our shared hours in Mrs. Hopkins’ horrid English class. AA was, I believe, the one who knew what a choral descant was, perhaps indicating she was Episcopalian. What I remember – and the yearbooks confirm – was that she was squeaky clean, of the pure skin and bright eyes variety. Even Ivory Soap spotless.
I would have also added “virginal,” though I could speculate there was a hidden passionate side – she was, after all, on the elite marching squad, and ambitious enough to hold several offices. Some of the portraits hint at some mischief or playfulness behind those serious eyes and smile. Yet she did not show up on the homecoming or prom courts. I seem to sense she may have already had a serious boyfriend.
Now I find, as AB, a nurse, possibly divorced and looking nothing like the girl I remember, she’s still in that locale and even contributed to a Republican Senate campaign. It’s amazing what you can discover online, if you find the right thread, even without coughing over any money.
This has me thinking again of the missed opportunities and how, maybe, they were essential to my eventual pathway.
I never spoke much to her or to BB or to CC because I felt they were way out of my league. Even DD, whom I did ask out a couple of times, to no avail – usually too late. Now I see how our youth pastor’s comments about another may have actually been an attempt to bridge something on her part, but again I felt all too incompetent and impoverished and minor-minor league constricted. (Yet, as a golden boy in my mother’s eyes, only beauty would do as my consort, at least in my own expectations.)
The swirl around EE, of course, was a situation in which one person finds himself or herself unwitting having a small but pivotal role in a much larger drama. I wonder what I’d say to her now. (That would be an interesting letter to compose: note to myself.) My mother’s values, my own ambitions, my conflicted religious situation, and the raging hormones all tangled.
Suppose I had somehow found myself going steady with any of them? (Much less the twins or FF or GG – which brings up the younger woman syndrome.) Would I have felt more content, to continue studies at Wright State, work at the Journal Herald, settle in Dayton forever? Would I have been Republican, Methodist, or … ? How small that all looks now!
On the other hand, the hippie movement was around the corner. HH (now there, along with JJ, were older women – a grade or two ahead – I could have gone for!) did move, according to the Web, in that direction.
At the time, I thought the girls all possessed a secret wisdom far beyond what we wretched guys – well, for the most part: a few seemed to be on a privileged inside track – could muster. As if they would only show mercy! As if that was what I was reading in their coy glances. Heavens!
Jnana's Red Barn 