Tag: Poetry

MORE ANCIENT HISTORY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time, there I was, actually, admitting that about now, whenever that was, it would be nice to find a big chunk of time to work on some new poems. Hadn’t done diddly since my week in the Maine woods, back in October, years ago. Had a big project lined up, the first draft already keyboarded – but other projects intruded, including a book-length prose manuscript I tried launching with a holistic Certified Public Accountant. Most of that volume was already written, but getting her input sometimes felt like pulling teeth. Figured that one would occupy my “writing” space through May. And then it went nowhere.

Was also trying to master the new computer means that my reading time was spent mostly with those fat manuals – good thing they’re indexed! Wished I could get those damn AOL logos off the bottom of my screen, too. I shifted over to Mindspring – for now, at least. And one more thing to master, in time, this e-mail process! (Well, I was already doing my checks from the terminal, and had a lot of the genealogy input. Transferring old 5.25-inch floppies in WordPerfect 4.1 was now possible, thanks to a drive a friend installed a month ago, but very time-consuming – a lot of garbage had to be removed with S&R, a big job when you’re handling drafts of novels! I expected to be nibbling away at that well into the autumn.)

As I was telling a certain woman in the midst of all this:

OK, you do have me reading the celebratory Poppy Z., at least in snippets as I find time. A month or so ago, I turned to one of the Goths in our poetry circle and mentioned there was an author a ‘zine editor-friend of mine out in Chicago raves  about, and somehow one piped up, “Oh! Poppy Z. Brite!”- so there you have it! (My friend, by the way, is in N’Orleans for Fat Tuesday and some recovery time thereafter – but I sense it’s part of a much bigger story I shan’t touch on just now, except that it looks like all the nasty fallout.) What impresses me most with PZB right now is how masterfully she handles dialogue – especially with seemingly inarticulate people. How evocative it is! (Envy time.) Since you have been smitten by N’Orleans (as, somehow, has a colleague at the office – again, another story), I must recommend an astounding novel by John Gregory Brown, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, which kept me up most of one frigid night in that cabin in Maine – as logs roared and sizzled in the fireplace – a box of Kleenex by the finale is advised, too – a real vortex of history, place, and those realms of caring for others that sometimes can never be spoken directly. By the way, did you catch the Streetcar Named Desire opera telecast on Public Television? Andre Previn’s music somehow intensifies an already sizzling text, and the casting would do Hollywood great. Less than a week after it was aired, I found myself spending an afternoon with a Cajun welder and his wife, whom my companion for the day had told me was involved with another man. Talk about things that cannot be spoken directly!

At any rate, much of your prose delves into matters that are generally not spoken directly – especially by a woman and by one who is still at an age when they are fresh! Matters of sexuality immediately stir up conflicts – lust versus love, power balances and reversals within relationship, passions/desires/dreams, promises and betrayals, egos, appetites, aging, vulnerabilities, layers of intimacy or distancing, pleasure/pain dimensions, possessiveness/freedom, giving/taking, nurturing/devouring. And that’s before we even touch on money, time, labor, wealth matters – the stuff that triggers most divorces – or questions of child-rearing or larger family interactions.

My, how much we had stirred up at the time! And how much lingers …

GETTING FREE OF GUILT EDGES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A renewed compulsion had me rethinking, reworking, pruning, and punching up much of my earlier writing – the dozen unpublished novels; the genealogy research and narrative; several hundred poems, many of which had been published in literary quarterlies; and varied essays and journal entries. It hit with a vengeance, and was given extra clout at New England Yearly Meeting one August when, in a prayer circle, it was made clear to me that these labors are an exercise of talent, a gift, rather than a self-indulgence that had too often before stirred feelings of guilt.

For the first time in my life, I felt free to undertake this labor, the writing that does not pay the bills but somehow keeps me intellectually and artistically alive. What a blessing! (Never underestimate the power of prayer!)

Again, cleaning up these works and seeing them published may be one more way of bringing some closure to what too often seems a honeycombed life! Writing pulls so many of these threads together.

I began trying to set aside one free day each week as a no-automobile day, a kind of sabbath for writing, reading, or reflection; even with my usual three days off at the time (Sunday News worked a double shift every Saturday), achieving this goal became surprisingly difficult – but wonderfully rewarding when it did.

In some rich ways, it became a kind of retirement, even while being employed elsewhere full-time.

STACKING FIREWOOD AS A METAPHOR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Because we rely on a wood stove to heat part of our house, one of my annual rituals involves ordering and stacking timber. Living where we do in northern New England, there’s plenty of forest to draw on and we can anticipate suffering through an extended winter. With the advance of “renewable energy” sources, however, we’re also competing with the local electrical utility, which has begun using wood to fire some generators. Since we reside in a small city and have full-time occupations (though not always of the paying variety), we depend on the services of independent entrepreneurs who proclaim, as the saying goes, CUT – SPLIT – DELIVERED. Cordwood, for the stove, being a couple of inches shorter than fuel for the fireplace. It’s a crucial distinction.

This is not something I grew up with. Nobody we knew had a working fireplace, or if they did, it wasn’t used in our presence. My appreciation of wood fires originated in Boy Scout outings with a troop dedicated to backpacking and primitive camping – quite a feat, when you think of it, for a troop based in southwestern Ohio. My first-hand experience with working fireplaces came later, with my residency in an ashram in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania, in a single winter of living in town in Washington State, and in the house I owned for a couple of years in the Rust Belt – a half-dozen years, altogether. Thus, my sustained encounters have been largely in the past dozen years in New Hampshire, though I suspect the applications are fairly universal.

Ordering in itself is an act of faith. You find a phone number – perhaps in one of the weekly neighborhood newspapers or perhaps on a kiosk in a local store or perhaps by word of mouth, and eventually dial (one of my delays is making sure I could pay for the wood on delivery; the timing of our income-tax refund is often a factor); usually you wind up leaving a message on an answering machine and hoping for a reply. Even then, there’s no guarantee the woodcutter will reply or follow through on a promise to deliver. For the dealer, arranging for trees can be iffy – a warm, wet winter, for instance, may keep cutters out of the woods. One year, this meant our pile never arrived, and we were stonewalled on our inquiries. These days, our firewood comes from a man in his early seventies. How much longer he’ll continue, of course, is in question. In typical Yankee farmer tradition, he shows up when he’s ready – anywhere from a month to three or four months after he’s expected. We don’t need to dicker over price – he’s well in line with the going rate, and I’ve always been impressed with the quality he delivers.

After some irregularity in our annual pace, we’ve settled on ordering four cords a year, green wood we hope will arrive in time to lose much of its sap before late autumn. Since we’ve been burning about three-fourths of that amount, I’m hoping to get ahead enough to have enough well-seasoned wood, having had more than a year to turn from yellow to gray, to sustain us – a goal that still eludes me. Maybe we won’t have the creosote buildup this year that has afflicted our chimney by March the past two years, but I can’t convince my wife that the savings in purchasing green wood outweighs the cost of the chimney sweep, something she says we have to do anyway. Seasoned wood also burns hotter and catches more easily. Maybe this year will be different. I keep hoping.

The delivery comes in two parts, each one dumped in our driveway to produce a lovely, chaotic heap of timber that also releases a heavenly aroma, especially after a light rainfall. And then I typically set to work, between my required rounds at the office (who knows what will happen, now that I’m retired) and usual household activities. Let me admit, I don’t rest easily while the driveway is covered; I’m like a beaver when it hears running water. So stack I do, probably more than is healthy for a largely sedentary creature of my age and condition.

By now, I have something of a routine down – maybe that’s in the nature of a ritual, too. The location of the two firewood stacks has been determined, in part as a consequence of landscaping decisions by previous owners of the property and in part as a result of my own tinkering. Half of the wood will go on one side of the house, by the lilacs; the other half, on the other side of the house, well be behind the barn and our shed.

The ritual sets in as I fill my wheelbarrow and begin moving the wood, piece by piece. Immediately, I search out pieces that are squared off, having four sides rather than three; these are essential for constructing the corners. Some are flatter than others, and will be used for the lower levels of what has some resemblance to a filled box or brickwork – three pieces set at a right angle atop three more, alternating as high as needed. Eventually, the warped pieces begin fitting snuggly, and if there’s any lean to the line, I want it to slant toward the pile itself to let gravity add to the stability of the stack. At first, the task of reducing the pile appears overwhelming; there’s no visible progress at the source, and little on the other end. Here I must rely on previous experience, remembering that it’s something that is accomplished, one step at a time. The hard work has already been done – the cutting, moving, and splitting of the wood.

A rhythm sets in. I recognize that each piece has already been handled multiple times. Now I handle it at least twice – once to put it into the wheelbarrow, and again when I add it to the stack. There, it may be turned or jiggled for a secure fit in the emerging puzzle. It will be handled at least twice more, once to be carried to the kitchen and then to be placed in the stove. The ashes, of course, will be carried out and spread on the garden. For now, I regard the wood itself, trying to identify the species (maple, birch, oak, ash, beech, mostly) as well as the color and shape. No two pieces are exactly the same, and some that are gnarled or curved are placed aside, reserved for the top of the stack, where stability won’t be quite as essential.

A pattern emerges, or rather a fascinating movement of visual design. Not that visible harmony is on my mind as the pieces amass; instead, my concern is for engineering security and solidity against settling and the elements. I long learned that no matter how stable the stack feels now, it will slip in the months ahead; while one stack will begin dwindling by Christmas or my birthday, and its interlocking tensions need hold only so long, I am planning on the other stack staying in place a year beyond that, so its lines need to remain shipshape. If anything, I try to anticipate the many small shifts, so that the weight of one row will brace another. Still, there’s a degree of chance on how any of this will fare, no matter my care. A Zen Buddhist saying flits through my mind, “In nothingness, form; in form, nothingness,” though “chaos” or “chance” substitute well for “nothingness” here. In other words, look and see: things come together.

The labor also has me reflecting on how I write a poem – or many other works, for that matter. I usually start with a pile of debris – observations and scattered thoughts I’ve jotted down and collected. I’m not one for formal structures or invention; to my senses, that’s more like carpentry or cabinetry, and the related ritual would be stacking 2x4s from the lumberyard. No, I’m sticking closer to the grain, or the quest of exploring wilderness. The irregular spaces in the stack, resulting from half-moon ends and triangular thrusts and other geometric possibilities coming together fascinate me more. The negative gives dimension to positive, shadow plays into light, and small critters will likely find shelter somewhere in the heart of all this.

I can also see the woodpile as a metaphor for my faith community, though there the number of craggy pieces may be multiplied, and I keep hoping for more new greenwood – we seem to be seasoning a bit too much for a good mix, and I’m not alone in that observation.

Either way, you work with what you are given.

So here I am, pleased to have two woodpiles in place by early July. One measures roughly six by six by six, the other 3½ by ten by six – each about 210 cubic feet, in other words, short of the purchased measure (a cord being 128 cubic feet), but fitting the normal practice. I’m not complaining. Besides, I pack tight in my stacking, unlike the typical woodcutter. With the promise of winter comfort, of caring for my family, of coming home from the office (as I often did) around midnight and loading the stove for the remainder of the night, I stand back for a moment, admiring my sculpture. Yes, Jesus did warn against the man who built a huge barn, expecting to hoard forever, so my regard of my woodpiles is tempered. Still, I know the arrangement will go too quickly, and the process will happen all over again next year, if I’m blessed.

SINGING WHERE WE LIVE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Like all of the arts, poetry has a long tradition of speaking for the marginalized and disenfranchised. Just look at a lot of the Psalms (even those attributed to David the King!) or Isaiah, for starters. That, as well as the court poets throughout antiquity. Or Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive. We sing where we live.

As for the review, remember: being a writer requires a thick skin when it comes to criticism – and, as Gertie Stein said, every writer wants to be told how good he is, how good he is, how good he is. Now, let’s look at the depth of this “criticism”: adjectives like dumbest, dumb, dumb … how many times? To say “I didn’t like this” is not criticism, O Wondrous Publisher, but the lowest form of consumerism.

Much of the most powerful art we find unlikable in our initial encounters – only through repeated exposure and exploration do we finally begin to see it open in its fullness and awe, and to appreciate its scope. (Not that everything that’s unlikable is great art, or even art, mind you – just that candy in and of itself can leave one seriously malnourished.) So don’t invite this cad to the opera, Shakespeare or Shaw, the symphony, art museum, jazz, a wine-tasting or brewpub, wilderness camping/backpacking, or your next edition. I once counseled a photographer I know in the Pacific Northwest to go beyond the obvious, superficial beauty there and to instead capture the real nature of the landscape.

Last time we talked, he said his work had taken on a breathtaking intensity, but that none of the galleries would touch it – because they didn’t believe it was real! It isn’t what the owners and collectors think they see in the outdoors – it’s the reality, in its naked majesty, instead. That’s what art is about! Or should be.

Or, as Gary Snyder once argued, all poetry is nature poetry – even if the closest the poet comes to nature is his old lady’s queynt.

Another thing to remember when it comes to publishing: not everyone will like everything. Back when Doonesbury was the “hot” comic strip, one newspaper was astonished to find in a survey that the strip was both its most popular – and the most hated! Please the latter subscribers and you might not be selling copies to the former; but please the former, and the latter will still be onboard, to get whatever it is that they like. Or. if a restaurant removed every item that any of its clientele found objectionable, there would be no menu. Even McDonald’s has detractors.

Of course you’re going to tinker with each edition! Every poem is different, too – or should be. (I could name some writers who are repeating the same formula they struck upon ten or twenty years ago, but that’s not for me – Eskimo artists, I’ve heard, will do a subject only once and then move on to another. Good model, methinks, although the “once” might mean a work within a series of sixty to a hundred poems – kind of like a novel, I guess.)

Maybe you’ll even have a stretch where the personal life and upheaval and discovery and adventures quiet down, and you feel it’s time to do a mostly-poetry issue – go for that, too!

Right now, what’s singing where I live is the mockingbird. Ever so gloriously, with a song that’s rarely the same.

SHIFT IN SUBMISSIONS STRATEGY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

For decades – perhaps generations – writers would send their works off to magazines as exclusive submissions. Only one journal at a time would get to look at a piece, usually taking six months to reject it. And with rejection rates running 95 percent and higher, a writer could spend a lifetime trying to see a piece published.

More recently, many editors have turned to allowing simultaneous submissions, something I’ve avoided simply because of the difficulties of keeping track of what I have out where. But I don’t call mine exclusive submissions; if I don’t hear back in six months, I assume the work was lost, the periodical’s gone kaput, or the piece has been rejected – and then I put it back into circulation.

The Postal Service submissions also meant including an SASE – self-addressed, stamped envelope – for return of the work and the typical rejection slip or scrawl or, happy day, the rare acceptance note.

When I returned to submitting after a five- or six-year hiatus, much of the field had changed. Many of the journals now took submissions only electronically, especially through one of several formatted services. For a while I tried to maintain two separate sets of files, one for submissions I was sending off in envelopes and another for the online offerings.

And then, one day, I looked at the odds. All of my acceptances were coming from the online submissions. More impressively, some came within six hours rather than six months.

A few editors still limit themselves to entries on paper. But they’re not seeing my work. At the moment, I don’t even have easy access to a printer. (But that’s another story.)

FOLLOWING THE LINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I said at the time: Who am I writing to? Right now, me. A conversation with myself. Not that I want it to remain that way. In time, it may be you, the invisible reader wandering around my mind or heart. The kindred spirit. Or perhaps, as prayer, as confession to God. Who already knows the outcome. And who would cheat God? Yes, the ubiquitous “you” in contemporary American poetry may well be God as much as one’s lover.

In my experience, I really do need to get that first overview drafted, to see in part where my thoughts and heart are leading. At that point, I can begin to ask what else needs to be said about you or me, the family, faith, our part of the world (now I think of a friend who painted a much different picture of Maine than the coastal postcards most people imagine), and so on. (And don’t overlook the lessons from the convent, I tell her.)

“The new chapters in your letters have good energy,” I continued. “They move along well, keeping eyes open for details and heart for insight. A good direction!” Having just finished the ninth or tenth draft of one manuscript, retitled again, I acknowledged stages of writing and revision my own process entails. The first draft is essentially for myself: to see where the material leads. The next several revisions tend to round out the logic, support my leaps, provide background for the reader; in this stage, the work becomes wordy, by necessity and is written for others, rather than myself. Then comes the “sponge stage,” where the work begins to soak up more and more new material quotes, references, new insights; it must reach saturation point. Sometime around here, the work needs to be restructured or reblocked: the original outline or roadmap no longer leads the material through the best route. (A chronological approach, for instance, may be jettisoned at this stage.) Eventually, what I really need to say emerges, and that leads to some heavy copy editing, to make the light and dark contrasts stronger. This is when the thesaurus and the search/replace get heavy usage, too, punching up the diction, largely to expand repeated concepts and terms. In a long work, I always find a handful of overworked terms; maybe they reflect the central issues, but left untouched, they become tedious.

DANCING IN THE WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In his volume of essays, Life Work, Donald Hall draws distinctions among jobs, chores, and work. The first is done for the pay, the second because it must, while the third arises as a passion, a calling, often an avocation – and is ultimately energizing and life-affirming. Lucky, he says, is the person whose work is also a paying job. So for income, where do we turn? Retreat into farming? Farmers aren’t surviving.

Wendell Berry speaks of two Muses. In Standing by Words, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983, highly recommended, he writes: “There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form.

“The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap energy civilization, in which `economic health’ depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.”

Here, then, is yet another slant on work from an unabashedly Christian poet and essayist.

Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing. Not even for the inspiration. Certainly for the revision.

And revision. And revision. His estimate, it seems, is quite optimistic.

In the practice, I keep asking: Are my facts right? Is this the most appropriate detail? How will the piece open and what structure will it assume? What is unique and most meaningful here? For whom? Does it boogie?

All of this to guard against shoddy workmanship; anything lazy, even deceitful; the artiste and the counterfeit.

PRACTICE AS THE WAY ITSELF

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Central to a life in art is the matter of practice. By this, I do not mean a dry run for a finished performance or product, but rather the repeated exercises that make an action habitual or proficient or even, in its variant, practical. Everyday, useful, helpful, sensible. At its core, the Greek root for practice means “to do,” something we see repeated when a musician practices scales, a physician practices medicine, an attorney practices law, an athlete practices basketball – it’s what one does or must do to be a musician, a physician, an attorney, a ballplayer. In its purity, a practice is pursued apart from an intended outcome – a concert, a healing, or courtroom victory – but rather as the daily discipline itself, which may in turn possibly lead to discovery and increased proficiency. To accomplish this requires time and physical space for experiment: what if I try it this way, what happens if I change that?

All of this requires time, of course – especially time free of specific outcome. (The Shakers, for all of their “Hands for work, hearts to God” ethic, left enough unencumbered time in their labors to experiment and invent – the creative acts that have become their legacy and living witness.) Still, I often find myself coming to my writing with a sense of guilt. (For that matter, even sitting down to read can be accompanied by that burden.) Other people lay claim to my time and attention. They see my writing, revising, and publishing as feeding my own vanity, rather than their needs and desires. There are dishes to wash, a garden to weed, a lawn to mow, walls needing paint. Looking to larger issues, some point to a world full of social injustices and programs that cry out for volunteer action. Somewhere deep in my bones I even carry that ancestral aversion to art for art’s sake, superfluity, escapism, dissolution. (Nowhere do they note how Jesus kept returning to the wilderness for prayer and renewal, leaving the fervid crowds far behind.) This is all complicated by the American measure of ultimate success – the almighty dollar. Its corollary, that a professional is superior to an amateur. Or that making the best-seller list is the measure of a great author. (No poets need apply.) (Inducing its own layers of anxiety and guilt: could I be making more? Have I sold out? Am I somehow now trapped by expectations?) Here, I could have been working overtime at the office.

All of this complicated by Samuel Johnson’s admonition, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” (Which may even be a grumpy acknowledgement that writing remains work, paid or unpaid. Or of his frequent status as a hack writer.)

To push this a step deeper, consider the practice of prayer. I’ve long sensed that poetry and prayer – or, from another perspective, art and religion – spring from a common root in antiquity. The spells, rituals, and restrictions that accompanied fertility, hunting and harvesting, and death lead to both pathways. (“And God saw that is was good,” in Genesis 1, has the meaning of “good to eat” – that is, nourishing – that soon evolves into morally and aesthetically good as well.)

I’m not alone here. For instance, Carmine Starnino, in “Lazy Bastardism: A Notebook” (Poetry, January 2010), admits a similar unease about both reading and writing and then says, “My first contact with poetry was the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary.’ Yes, they’re prayers, but they’re also pockets of linguistic energy … epic-accented statements … wonderfully archaic usages.” In his reflection, he argues, “Other prayers were loaded with religiosity, but uninterestingly flat,” and concludes, “Writing poetry is not, in itself, a prayerful activity. That’s because prayer is not a craft; it is the opposite of a craft,” one he sees as essentially secular: “poetry might even be said to be a menace to religious belief … because poetry, to work, needs to strip religious belief of its theological privilege.” To which he adds, “The best religious verse … flirts with faithlessness.” As he move on to other topics, he leaves me recognizing how narrow his understanding of prayer ultimately is and how much of his argument can be turned as a critique of poetry, as well. Many well-crafted poems, I find, remain uninterestingly flat – contrived and spiritless. Many hover well within the bounds of literary privilege. Read at weddings or funerals, they sound obscure and stuffy, as welcome as the parking attendant. Just as we struggle to define a poem within the range of writing today, so too does prayer run a range, from the unintelligible babbling of glossolalia (“praying in tongues,” in Pentecostal practice, as a craft, in some cases, to a raw emotional outpouring, in others) to intimate confessions to the formal Book of Prayer-type compositions of Starnino’s experience. At one end are those who pray for something specific (including a job, love, money, or healing), on to those who seek only to know God’s will and then to those mystics who sit silently waiting to listen to the divine voice in their hearts and bones. The tradition of English poetry, meanwhile, is prey to sermonizing, however secular or prosaic. Only when we break free of our prevailing orthodoxy – religious or artistic – do we truly “flirt with faithlessness,” finding ourselves defenseless in the face of ecstasy or despair, in the face of the one that cannot be named. This is the realm of epiphany, sacred or secular (or both).

I think Starnino loses the trail when he sees poetry as a craft, rather than a practice. Craft emphasizes a finished artifact, unlike practice, which embraces the activity itself. Practice can often resemble a hike in the woods or taking a trail up a mountain, with all the stages of attention or inattention that go with it. As you build stamina and endurance, you can also gain freedom. Whether mountain climbing, praying, or writing poetry, you may unexpectedly break free of the exertion itself – and cross into a state of oneness I’ll call the Zone. Others may discuss whether such moments of communion are epiphanies or a state of grace, or even secular or sacred, but when they come when I’m writing or revising, the lines seem to appear on their own, each move feels surefooted, the world around me appears as vibrant imagery and context. In this realm, I would declare poetry or literature to be a state of awareness, more than any artifact on a page or bound between covers. Likewise, the Zone may appear – it can never be summoned – in any of a number of disciplined activities. My wife experiences it while cooking and gardening; I enter it while dancing or singing, as well. Often, the Zone overlaps multiple ongoing activities: I jot the lines of a poem at a bend in the trail approaching a mountaintop.

I am left wondering why we cannot remain in the Zone long. Whether it would even be healthy. Whether we need some resistance or grit to balance the ethereal. Whether this reflects a basic mind/body, spirit/flesh duality.

Still, sustained practice is not easy. It remains work. Given a choice, the rational decision would be to sit back and devour great pages already given to us by others. (Or view great paintings or plays or films or dance productions and so on.) We can even ask, do we need more books? Who’s reading the ones we have now? I’m not speaking of all the junk fiction, junk movies, junk television, either. All that other kind of butt time. (Yes, I see a need for a slew of Creative Reading programs, more than Creative Writing, but that’s another facet of the work.)

THERE’S A REASON IT’S CALLED WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Perfection: the goal. The end of craft. The essence, completely uncovered. Yet writing is never perfect. Can never be. Not even in its own era, its own place, its own vernacular. So we’re working within a field of potentialities, choosing one aspect over another. Liquids at play. The words themselves will change over time. Energy fields. Northern lights. Sunsets. The mind and flesh, mixing.

Consider a square grid sheet neatly intersected, and then place yourself at the center, where the four quadrants intersect. Take the horizontal line and name it for one continuum, say “highly emotional” at one end and “completely rational” at the other. Now take the vertical line and apply another continuum, say “public” at one end and “private” at the other. As if we could actually measure any such qualities and then scale them on the grid. (We could even consider this as a color field, with white/black as one dimension and red/green or blue/orange as the other.) We could even consider this as a kind of Chinese checkerboard, but stepping outward. The point is, you have to move: to stay at the center produces a muddy gray: nothing unique emerges. The fulcrum remains static and lifeless. As one proceeds away from the center, a kind of balloon or blob may appear on the grid: you’re working somewhere between selflessly emotional and rational, for instance. Or maybe it’s highly focused. In an art – and possibly other areas of life – I see the goal being to move out to an arc from the ends of the horizontal and vertical axis lines – somewhere along an optimal and growing frontier of two qualities. Beyond that, however, destruction awaits. An orchestral conductor, for instance, can emphasize a work’s inner rhythms or its singing lines – or, more likely, arrive at some combination – while counterpoising them with architectural structure or emotional outpouring. The choices determine whether the result is an orthodox repetition of familiar security or an insightful and exciting (and even disturbing) revelation.

So there’s the question of when to stop, on a given piece. When we’ve depleted ourselves. Or when we’ve moved on. Or when it’s more or less accomplished what we set out to do – the less ambitious works having more prospects for success than do those that attempt to soar closest to the sun. Or when the piece moves off into the marketplace, one way or another. Or when we die or grow infirm. Or when we realize we’ve completely missed the mark.

My focus here is primarily on poetry and fiction, although the concepts can be readily expanded outward through all of the arts and probably into a number of other fields as well.

WILL THE REAL ME PLEASE BRAND UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Branding, we’re told, is everything. It’s not just marketing, or even just a product. It’s the whole lineup. A slogan for differentiating one Big Box Store or high-end boutique from another (including everything inside). Even academia wants a label as a way to file a writer or artist away for easy reference, however awkwardly into one slot or another. It’s ultimately a word game, with or without an actual referent. But what if you’re a misfit, as many truly are?

In literature, the labeling relates better to those who stay within a genre or stick to a manifesto or particular technique or remain in a specific locale – an Oklahoma gothic mystery crime writer, for example – than to my favorites, especially those whose work ranges over many subjects and forms and continually grows. Likewise, I’m bewildered by how often the labels applied to them are downright erroneous, if not simply glib. Or matches one part of their output while ignoring all the rest.

This turns up repeatedly when I attempt replies for those who wish to pigeonhole me. I do what I do. The writing goes where it goes, and the revisions follow. I try to be faithful. So far, I’ve been a part-timer and non-commercial. Neither by choice, but both by fidelity. My opportunities for literary writing (in contrast to the daily journalism that’s paid the bills) have never been that easy or as sustained as I’d wish. I’ve envied those who set out knowing the direction they would pursue for a lifetime, those whose work presents a continuous focus and tone. Especially those who mature as they progress, rather than repeating a facile formula.

Looking back over my poetry and fiction from across the years – and, for that matter, across the continent – I’m struck by the ways so many of the pieces differ, at least outwardly. How varied the subject matter and approach. Here I keep intending the plainspoken, direct, clearly focused piece, and keep winding up with Mixmaster compounds and distillations. Maybe my mind’s rarely that unified; instead, a multitude of mental and emotional activities have kept occurring simultaneously and the most I could hope for is some convergence. Besides, so much of my writing has arisen in some opposition to my daily employment, with all of its own dulling repetition – my writing keeps veering toward the “experimental” fringe, if only in reaction to the daily grind of news stories and headlines. Or, in the past decade, obituaries. Through much of my adult life, I’ve felt torn and uprooted, from Ohio and Indiana to the East Coast and then Washington State and back again. To say nothing of my love life and social environment. The nature poems stand in contrast or discord with the police blotter love poems or, in turn, with my current home setting. That, before I even consider my fiction or the genealogy or Quaker expressions.

(Have I performed the daily journalism to pay the bills while I pursued my literary endeavors? Or had I pursued the literary work as a way of keeping my journalism skills sharpened? What started as one wound up the other, and then shifted back again.)

The writing, in turn, has been an attempt to bring some understanding to all the eruption I’ve experienced. The turns in the road, the setbacks, the advances. A quest for understanding and, if not clarity, some meaning or permanence. I tend my personal journal because I forget so much, and often record observations I will not comprehend until years later. Am baffled, because I have yet to define my mission with a label that sells. Write, then, to discover myself in this morass.

Still, I’m open to suggestions. If you can.