“The writing of poems is wrestling with a question that is irresolvable and the poem is finished when you reach a stasis … Reading a poem is an act of faith and that involves abandoning oneself to something irresolvable.”
Category: Process
Homo aestheticus
Shell beads made 75,000 years ago
In Blombos Cave on the rocky coast of South Africa, archaeologists have been carefully excavating the earliest known examples of human art and jewelry – carved pieces of ochre and shells with holes drilled in them. It’s humbling to realize that we are heirs to an art-making legacy 75,000 years old.
For me, what is really important is here, for the first time really ever, we have evidence that people can store information outside of the human brain.
– Archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, NOVA: Becoming Human
I love the way Henshilwood articulates it, that art is most essentially this: information stored outside the human brain. Art makes the inner life tangible in the outer world.
Keeping things fuzzy
I don’t like keeping a journal because I like having things be fuzzy. – a writer friend
Whenever you begin with I remember, you retrieve a world. But how much precision do you owe the past? Artists who use their lives as inspiration must make decisions about how much to nail down the facts of their lives and how much to let the details remain vague, filtered, and even false. Science has shown that we can indeed form memory as early as two years of age; this will not come as a shock to most of us. But I find myself deeply reluctant to write down moments from that age, those priceless memories that have floated up from before my adult comprehension of time. Putting the whole-body experience of those memories in words is disquieting; it catches the experience in a net, pins it irrevocably to the graph of circumstance and later reconstruction. It paradoxically makes what felt real seem unreal.
Exactitude is at odds with memory’s talismanic power, and its shifting, felt nature. Memory is not fact, and does not want to be fact. Memory is, rather, a composition, a composite. Memory is experience and emotion together. This is why hearing someone else relate your history to a third party is disconcerting; the facts may all be in the right places, but the feeling is wrong. And just as concrete details can prove to be untrustworthy and amorphous over the years, so too does the emotional weight and meaning of memory change. It evolves as our emotional intelligence evolves.
In poems, this frangible world of memory is safe, because poetry is also felt, evocative, and not to be trusted with facts. A poem also lives in our emotional center, shifting its weight and its shape over time.
Early memories present like the koi in a leaf-filled pond. Not clear. More about movement than anatomical exactness. At their own pace, with a shape that is sensed and felt, but not caught. Poetry presents itself the same way, sometimes full-faced, more often gibbous.
What I learned this year, Part 2
9) When you first do something, you don’t have to be able to articulate why you are doing it.
10) For an avid reader, reading can become a substitute for doing.
11) Promote yourself. It feels super-awkward, but do it anyway.
12) Doubts don’t help you; they only undermine you. So, radically, quit indulging in them.
13) When I don’t write in my journal, I don’t write at all.
14) Not writing for even a day leaves me depressed.
What I learned this year, Part 1
In no particular order.
1) I can’t write Ted Kooser’s poems or Louise Gluck’s poems. I can only write my poems.
2) I can make them much better than I ever think I can at any particular stage of editing.
3) Forward momentum is the single most important thing.
4) I need to read poetry to feel consistently inspired to write it.
5) I don’t write for acceptance. I do it to have meaningful work, and to feel consistently alive. Of course I want acceptance from the rest of the world. But it’s really important to not get those two things tangled up.
6) I wrote about this previously, but it bears repeating: Don’t pursue the result of heightened awareness. Reach for the state of heightened awareness itself.
7) Writing anything generates motivation for writing anything else.
8) Writing anything generates motivation for doing anything else. In writing, I become real to myself. I become hopeful. My choices seem to matter. My life seems to matter.
Urban redesign
My writing practice these days is like Detroit. A lot of formerly vibrant space being abandoned, no longer receiving essential services. There has been talk for years of withdrawing to a city center, concentrating energy where it can still do some good. I don’t know how this is going to work out for Detroit.
But here’s my stripped down plan.
Start by making the best poem you can make.
Be merciless, be innovative.
Then, send it everywhere.
Then, put it in your manuscript.
When you have enough poems, arrange the manuscript.
Then, send it everywhere.
Ignore fads. Ignore trends.
Write only the best poems you can write. Write them every day. Never stop. Never pause long enough to question what you’re doing.
Never let rejection be anything more than a blip in this process.
Try everything.
After absence
I’m back. Where the hell have I been? In limbo. The let-down after finishing one stage of a large project left me non-functional. Kaput. Tapped out. Confidence-less. (And tangentially, TV-addicted.) It’s been awful trying to start up again. And no kidding, this is what separates the real writers from the wannabes: how fast you pick yourself back up. Right now I’m definitely on the “not-a-real-writer” side of that line.
It’s a big deal, how fast you recover from a knock-down, whether it’s from outside you or of your own making. How do you do it?
What’s been helping me in little ways: reading just a couple of poems; giving myself permission to write these uninspired posts. Being outside, where life has more of a chance to surprise you. Practicing the trance of wildlife watching. There are small rewards for patience, like the white undersides of a bird’s wings, in a flash before she retreats into a tree.
What’s in a Title
This month it was finally time to come up with a title for my manuscript-in-progress. And let me tell you, it was a fun-filled process of head-banging, hand-wringing and silent weeping. No, I’m just kidding, it wasn’t that bad. But it did keep me occupied when I was driving, washing dishes or trying to fall asleep.
A poem’s title functions as an introduction, and first impressions matter. You want the title to be as compelling as the poem is. Even more than that, you want the title to add an extra layer to the poem. The right title expands the impact of the poem with a kind of feedback-alchemy, as the reader finishes the poem, looks back up at the title, and maybe discovers it means something different now.
Maybe because a title is so small a unit, you can get away with even less laziness. As with every other element of the poem, you have to throw away the first four obvious choices, and then you have to throw away the next four clever choices, and only then do you start getting somewhere.
Some title techniques I’ve used and abused below.
“Untitled”
I used this on a fair number of poems when I was a teenager. Maybe this is why I’m unwilling to ever use it again, unless it actually has something to do with the subject of the poem. There’s just something painfully self-conscious about it.
Long statements or sentences used as titles
I love this kind of title, so naturally I’m no good at writing them. I especially love it if it seems like a completely different topic from the poem proper, and extra points if it’s funny.
Using the first line of the poem as the title
A respectable solution to the problem. But like any other technique, it can be a crutch. I’ve tended to overuse it, so now I back off when I’m tempted by this technique.
No title at all
You know, lots of terrific writers do this. Personally, I feel like I owe it to the poem to try to figure out its title.
“Sonnet,” “Villanelle,” “Poem,” “Song,” etc.
Everybody’s writing ghazals and pantoums these days. If you are in a writing workshop or MFA program, you have more than likely tried your hand at one or the other (or both!). I’ve read some brilliant examples, but dare I say, not all of these exercises should end up published? Yep, I just said it. The thing that makes it even worse for me is when the title of the ghazal is “Ghazal”. Sigh. It’s not necessary to point out the technique you used to write the poem because we all recognize it by now. Even if we didn’t, the intelligent reader will still perceive that there’s a poetic form involved. If you believe in the poem, give it a fabulous title to go with its fabulous self.
On the other hand, the idea of titling something “Sonnet” when it clearly isn’t is intriguing. It really all goes back to: does the title add something?
To come up with a title for my manuscript, I read through every poem and pulled out words or phrases that I liked, and then I combined two of them that spoke to the themes of the whole. But I should mention, before I get too smug, that I don’t know whether my current title will stick. I’d be interested in hearing what other people’s go-to title techniques are.
Organize Schmorganize
How do you physically organize your writing? Especially if you’re a poet, after a couple of years you end up with a lot of individual pieces of writing in ever-evolving states of completion.
I used to be a binder aficionado. I preferred black three-rings with clear plastic slots on the spine that I labelled “In Progress,” “Completed Work” or “Writing – Other.” And special write-on divider tabs that came in sets of 20 or more. Did I mention that as a child I used to keep all my used airline tickets in a plastic pouch to play “secretary”? So yes, my office supplies disorder (OSD) goes back a ways. But after about ten years of the binder method I realized that it was getting more and more cumbersome to put drafts away, I was letting the piles build up, and I was constantly losing good pieces of writing. Plus, who wants to spend hours hole-punching papers? Shorter: It’s not a good system if it can’t overcome my natural laziness.
So I took a page out of my friend Deb’s book, and switched to folders. Nothing cute, fancy, expensive, or hard to duplicate; just cheapo, manila, straight-cut folders. (1/3 and 1/5 cuts make me INSANE WITH HATE, but that’s another topic.) And as long as I keep them roughly alphabetized, it works as well as anything can in a small space. Want to group all the poems that need work, or all the poems that will go into a single manuscript? The folder method lends itself to the task.
The switch-over process was not pretty, but it was worth it. I’m still hanging onto my 5×8 card box to keep track of submissions though.
So how do you organize your drafts?
a) Folders.
b) Binders.
c) Fancy-pants options like this thing. (I can vouch for that thing. It is awesome. But I don’t use it for writing, because again, I’m lazy. Too much hole-punching.)
d) A giant misshapen pile on my desk.
e) All my drafts are electronic, you tree-killer.
f) It’s all in The Cloud, baby.
g) Organize? Organizing is for DILETTANTES. I compose my works of startling genius in a WHITE-HOT FRENZY. They are written in THE BLOOD OF MY VERY SOUL. Afterwards I fall to the ground in a STATE OF EXHAUSTION. Then representatives from Poetry, APR, and possibly AGNI, humbled and awed before my inhuman level of productivity, knock softly on my door and BEG ME FOR THE FRUIT OF MY BRAIN-TREE.
On difficulty
It's been a difficult month. It's not so much that I need to get back on the horse that threw me, as that I need to get back on the horse that I've beaten to death.
If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.
– Maxwell Perkins
On negative capability in both the writer and the reader:
the writing of poems is wrestling with a question that is irresolvable and the poem is finished when you reach a stasis … Reading a poem is an act of faith and that involves abandoning oneself to something irresolvable.
– Carl Phillips
And this is the one I like best, because it makes me feel slightly less insane:
A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.
– Roland Barthes