Monthly Archives: May 2019

15 posts

“Silence Is the Weapon”

poetry

Silence. It’s said to be golden, but it’s more than that. It’s a writer’s tool. It’s a speaker’s tool. For how writers use it in interviewing, let’s listen to biographer Robert A. Caro in his paragraph-sized essay, “Tricks of the Trade” from the book Working:

“Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. Two of fiction’s greatest interviewers—Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and John le Carrés George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking, and let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for myself, I have less class. When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write ‘SU’ (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of ‘SUs’ there.”

So simple, yet so difficult to do: keep quiet. Let silence do its work. And you don’t have to be an interviewer. You can be anyone trying to get anything out of anybody.

As for speakers, I give you the pause. The pregnant pause—so pregnant it’s in the third trimester. At poetry readings, a slight pause at a strategic point in a poem often does wonders for a work read aloud.

And we all know silence’s value in joke-telling. Some people are good at telling jokes, and those people all share one thing in common—a sense of timing.

They know when to wait. Pause. Shut up. Then they reap the benefits.

“The Nothing That Is…”

poetry

I write a lot of nothing here, but let’s put it more kindly: I often write how the poet’s job is to find something in nothing. As poster boy, Will Shakespeare will do. He wrote a lot of nothing, too, one pie-sized portion of it called Much Ado About Nothing.

When you think about it, every successful poem is much ado about nothing. The reason the reader relates is simple: He or she says, “Hey! I know that nothing, too!”

Man, I hate to give credit to existential viewpoints, but there’s always the sneaking suspicion that the universe is nothing but chaos, that there are no reasons to this madness, that mankind is left with the thankless job of cobbling his own useless order and code of conduct out of life, despite the mess. OK, maybe because of the mess.

No one knew better than good old Wallace Stevens. His life was a perfect example. Each day, the click-click-click of those black wingtips as he walked down the hard, shining floors of his Hartford, Connecticut, insurance company, sat behind his large polished desk, and performed his orderly job by mapping out mankind’s measurable follies for profit.

And each night when he stepped back into the windy world outside our windows? Like the Yellow Brick Road, people. Somewhere between Munchkin Land and Oz. Anything goes, from talking scarecrows to flying monkeys, because life isn’t Kansas anymore—in fact, never was.

Instead, Stevens saw a big, sprawling, populated nothing that no amount of insurance could protect us from, and if you like scary oxymorons, you might just win yourself a brief little broom of happiness and call it “a poem.”

One of my favorite examples of “nothing” as poem disguised in the charcoal eyes and carrot nose of everyday life? Wallace Stevens “The Snowman,” a perfect frozen dinner good any time of the year, warm or cold:

“The Snow Man”
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Rereading it, you find a lot of nothings and nots, bare places and beholds. Harsh? Maybe. But, being ever the contrarian, I can rephrase it this way: What good is life if we don’t behold the stark truths around us? Between stone teeth and corncob pipe, the snowman would tell us: “Not much.”

So behold the nothingness today and make something of it. It’s all you’ve got to work with, and the sooner you accept that and put a smile on it, the sooner you’ll make sense of your world.

Weird Works

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Sometimes, to find success in writing, an angle is in order. Sometimes that angle comes from your own unusual background. And sometimes, if your background is not terribly unusual, it comes from letting yourself go and writing the weirdly fascinating.

Weirdly fascinating can be fact or fiction. By now everyone knows how one can be as crazy as the other, so whether you are the reporter relaying truth (gussied up, as this is poetry we’re talking) or the artist amusing some Muse with your imagination, it matters not.

Weird works.

This alliterative fact of life came to mind while I was reading my June issue of The Sun. It includes a poem by Ellen Bass, a poet I’ve written about before. Ellen’s title, “Kiss,” leads one to the usual assumptions: namely, humans kissing (something they do quite well). Like Cracker Jacks, however, this poem is hiding a surprise inside. Take a look and see what I mean:

Kiss
Ellen Bass

When Lynne saw the lizard floating
in her mother-in-law’s swimming pool,
she jumped in. And when it wasn’t
breathing, its body limp as a baby
drunk on milk, she laid it on her palm
and pressed one fingertip to its silky breast
with just about the force you need
to test the ripeness of a peach, only quicker,
a brisk little push with a bit of spring in it.
Then she knelt, dripping wet in her Doc Martens
and camo T-shirt with the neck ripped out,
and bent her face to the lizard’s face,
her big plush lips to the small stiff jaw
that she’d pried apart with her opposable thumb,
and she blew a tiny puff into the lizard’s lungs.
The sun glared against the turquoise water.
What did it matter if she saved one lizard?
One lizard more or less in the world?
But she bestowed the kiss of life,
again and again, until
the lizard’s wrinkled lids peeled back,
its muscles roused its own first breath
and she set it on the hot cement,
where it rested a moment
before darting off.

Oh, man. I’m not sure I want to picture that, but it’s hard not to when the poet wields such a fine paintbrush. Kissing lizards? Well, why not, after some thought. This weirdly wonderful piece is infinitely more interesting than kissing humans, after all. If you want to be bored by that, just turn on your TV.

A Sense of Place

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In reading essays in Robert A. Caro’s Working, I was struck by the unanticipated similarities between fiction, nonfiction, and yes, even poetry writing. Apparently Caro was, too, else why would he write this:

“The importance of a sense of place is commonly accepted in the world of fiction; I wish that were also true about biography and history, about nonfiction in general, in fact. The overall quality, the overall level, of writing is, I believe, just as important in the one as in the other.

“By ‘a sense of place,’ I mean helping the reader to visualize the physical setting in which a book’s action is occurring; to see it clearly enough, in sufficient detail, so that he feels as if he himself were present while the action is occurring. The action thereby becomes more vivid, more real, to him, and the point the author is trying to make about the action, the significance he wants the reader to grasp, is therefore deepened as well. Because biography should not be just a collection of facts. Its base, the base of all history, of course is the facts, it’s always the facts, and you have to do your best to get them, and get them right. But once you have gotten as many of them as possible, it’s also of real importance to enable the reader to see in his mind the places in which the book’s facts are located. If a reader can visualize them for himself, then he may be able to understand things without the writer having to explain them; seeing something for yourself always makes you understand it better.

“Another point. Since places evoke emotions in people, places inevitably evoked emotions in the biographer’s subject, his protagonist. Therefore, if a biographer describes accurately enough the setting in which an action took place, and if he has accurately enough presented the protagonist’s character, the reader will be helped to understand the emotions that the setting evoked in the protagonist, and will better understand the significance that the action held for him. If the place is important enough in the subject’s life—if he was raised in it, for example, or presided over it, or maneuvered within it—if the place played a significant role in shaping his feelings, drives and motivations, his self-confidence and his insecurities, then, by making the place real to the reader, the author will have deepened the reader’s understanding of the subject, will have made the reader not just understand but empathize with him, feel with him.”

To fully appreciate the importance of bringing place to life, you need only think of your favorite subject, your particular area of expertise: yourself. What places have mattered most to you? What do they say about you? How do they reflect your concerns, interests, and fears?

One such place, surely, is your childhood stomping grounds. They reappear with regularity in your dreams, sometimes even populated with people from present circumstances.

Or your place of employment. Work long enough at a place and it begins to attach itself to you. How do you function within it? How do you make it work for you?

Not to mention (but I’m about to) your home, its surrounding grounds, its inner rooms. Walk in anyone’s house and you’ll begin to divine his or her interests. Books on the shelves. Pictures on the walls. Furniture style, cleanliness or lack thereof, colors, items on shelves and countertops, music playing, food cooking or baking in the oven, etc. Together, they fashion a composite of you.

The genre of writing matters not. Character and place are intertwined echoes of each other. For writing purposes, that means lighting, temperature, objects in place, colors, actions occurring (or not). Place can be brought to life with tricks in the writer’s toolbox shared by all genre specialists: figurative language, rhetorical devices, action verbs, specific nouns, imagery, and so on.

Try it. Write about a place only, but with a character in mind. See how much you can flesh out the man or woman just by a setting important to him/her. You’ll see that Robert Caro, biographer, was on to something. More than he knew….

The Benefits of Laziness

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hammock

Whether you are Protestant or not, you’ve probably fallen victim to that “Protestant work ethic” thing. You know. The one where, as a kid, your parents or teachers or other adults berated you for being L-A-Z-Why Not. The one where, as an adult, your spouse, your friends, or your boss take over.

Please. How do they expect you to daydream? To ruminate? To wonder? To cut to the quick, how do they expect you to create?

Just because the body is doing nothing doesn’t mean the brain is lying fallow. In fact, the brain sometimes does 100 push-ups with one arm best when the body is at rest. The Chinese call it wu wei, which means “non-acting” or “non-doing” or, if you must, “acting without purpose,” all of which undercut what’s actually going on.

I mean, really. Unless you’re dead, something’s always going on upstairs, praise be. Writing doesn’t come in two days from Amazon, after all. Or from a pill, either.

It’s all on you. And though writing itself may be deemed “action,” the necessary first step is ideas—ideas that make you shout (like you discovered it), “Wu wei, this is fun!” because you’re doing a whole lot of “nothing” (accent on quotation marks, thank you) in style.

Raymond Carver knew. He was of the brotherhood. Read “Loafing” below and see what I mean. Yep. One of us!

Loafing
Raymond Carver

I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw —
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I’ve set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.

When the News Kills the Muse

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news

Sometimes it feels like you’re faced with an everyday dilemma of rock or hard place, devil or deep blue sea, Scylla or Charybdis. You know what I’m talking about: poetry or citizenship.

A steady diet of the news, it seems, is good for becoming an informed citizen (something all countries of the world need today, but especially the Disunited States), but not so good for creativity.

So what, then? Be selfishly artistic by ignoring newspapers, magazines, and all news media in general? Seek your Muse in the sand, ostrich-like?

Sounds appealing, I’ll admit! I say this only after reading in the New York Times that the Environmental Protection Agency (which no longer protects anything but corporate interests) is changing the math on air pollution effects on the populace with the goal of reducing projected number of total deaths.. Get it? Rules are relaxed, air pollution and pulmonary-related deaths go up, but reported deaths go down (and math is a wonderful thing).

Or how about the bacterial scourge that has struck citrus farmers in the southeastern U.S.? You have to feel for these farmers because it’s their livelihood, but the solution of treating crops destined for people with antibiotic spray (also approved by the E.P.A.) has raised all manner of alarms with health experts and scientists who are already watching killer “superbugs” rise in numbers due to a world awash in irresponsible application and distribution of antibiotics—to people, to animals, and now to plants.

Reading material like this is like a cold shower on the poetic mood. You feel more anger and despair than inspiration. Europe and Brazil have laws protecting their citizens from antibiotic spraying of crops, but I guess their governments are for the people vs. for the corporations. Make America Corporate Again (MACA). Teapot Dome and Tammany Hall are back, like the backwater infiltrating the late, great, supposedly drained swamp.

Which brings us back to the premise: Is a well-versed citizen abreast of the news and hopefully active in doing something about it antithetical to a creatively inspired artist? Not necessarily. Let’s not forget our old friend satire (it once lived in pens but is amenable to keyboards, too). Read some Voltaire. Sip some Mark Twain. These guys had little use for the powers-that-be and their timeless greed for power and money. They showed it through sharp, critical humor, relying on the pen in a world enamored of the sword.

One outlet I can recommend to activist artists is Rattle‘s Poet’s Respond feature. Every week, they set a Friday midnight (Pacific time) deadline for poems paired to something in the news.

Better yet? They’ll pay for it. Better yet than better yet? You’ll get a response by Sunday. That’s right: a 48-hour turnaround on poetry submissions. For writers, this is akin to partings of the Red Sea (only in this case, it’s the “Read Sea”).

What’s not to like? To arms, citizen poets! You can have your news cake and write it, too!

Breaking the Rules

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Rules for writing, poetry or otherwise, are as plentiful as mosquitoes during a wet July. One such dictum, come down from Moses, it would appear, is never to use clichés. For one, you’ll have to remember how to get an accent aigu on the screen. And for another, you’ll be considered a lazy writer using lazy phrases in a lazy way.

Unless, of course, you want to break the rules. Purposely. With panache. Isn’t that what rules are for? Breakage? Run-arounds? Clears and dig-unders?

Surely that’s what the poet Ronald Wallace had in mind when he composed the following ode (of sorts) to clichés:

Blessings

occur.
Some days I find myself
putting my foot in
the same stream twice;
leading a horse to water
and making him drink.
I have a clue.
I can see the forest
for the trees.

All around me people
are making silk purses
out of sows’ ears,
getting blood from turnips,
building Rome in a day.
There’s a business
like show business.
There’s something new
under the sun.

Some days misery
no longer loves company;
it puts itself out of its.
There’s rest for the weary.
There’s turning back.
There are guarantees.
I can be serious.
I can mean that.
You can quite
put your finger on it.

Some days I know
I am long for this world.
I can go home again.
And when I go
I can
take it with me.

And take it with him, Wallace did, fashioning success from mistakes connected elephant trunk to elephant tail, start to finish.

What a great lesson. Creativity über alles once more (even when you have to remember how to get an umlaut on the screen).

Phrases and Clauses and Words, Oh My!

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Syntax. It sounds like a levy the government collects on bad habits: smoking, drinking, voting for radical leftwing socialists who care more about people than corporations.

But, no. Syntax, accord to Merriam, Webster, and their Indian maiden friend Sacagawea, is “a: the way in which linguistic elements (such as words) are put together to form constituents (such as phrases or clauses), b: the part of grammar dealing with this.”

And though we might frequently forget the meaning of syntax, we all use it each time we put pen to paper or key to screen. Voila! With our eyes closed and our throat humming “Camptown Races,” we produce not only phrases but clauses (take that, Santa)! Who says actions speak louder than words? Try syntax without them!

Anyway, all this throat clearing is by way of introducing a short Ron Padgett poem inspired by (wait for it…) syntax! You heard me. Grammar. A topic as dry as drought-time wheat. Further proof that anything can inspire poetry, in the right hands choreographed by the right brain. To wit:

Syntactical Structures
Ron Padgett

It was as if
while I was driving down a one-lane dirt road
with tall pines on both sides
the landscape had a syntax
similar to that of our language
and as I moved along
a long sentence was being spoken
on the right and another on the left
and I thought
Maybe the landscape
can understand what I say too.
Ahead was a farmhouse
with children playing near the road
so I slowed down
and waved to them.
They were young enough
to smile and wave back.

You might think a poetry prompt called “syntax” would be a nonstarter, but you would be wrong. Why? Because you probably forgot about the metaphors jangling around in your satchel. See how quickly (Line 4) Padgett takes syntax and fashions from it a landscape.

Landscape as a prompt, you say? Easy peasy. And just like that, Padgett’s off to the races with 17 lines ending with a lighthearted take on kids and innocence in a world distrustful of both.

Not bad for a day’s syntaxing, wouldn’t you say?

Epiphany Enclosed

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Thanks to James Joyce, the word epiphany has been co-opted from the church by the world of literature. In A Poet’s Glossary, Edward Hirsch says this about the word:

“From a Greek word meaning ‘to appear.’ An epiphany is a sudden spiritual manifestation, a luminous or visionary moment. Epiphany means the manifestation of a god or spirit in the body, and thus the Christian epiphany is literally the manifestation of Christ to the Magi. James Joyce (1882-1941) secularized the term so that it came to mean a sudden manifestation of spiritual meaning, an unexpected revelation of truth in the commonplace, a psychological and literary mode of perception. It disrupts the ordinary, a moment out of time.”

Poets are well-versed (heh) in epiphanies. They consider it an essential part of their toolbox. The a-ha moment, after all, is often the spark to a poem and catnip for the Muse.

But what if the epiphany doesn’t come from within? What if it comes compliments of another person, someone who knows better, someone hellbent on overcoming our stubbornness or ignorance?

Ah, yes. That, too, is the stuff of poetry. For Exhibit A, I give you the always dependable Seamus Heaney:

The Skylight
by Seamus Heaney

You were the one for skylights. I opposed
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof
Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

Saying Goodbye to Your Books

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books

Books are family, some extended and some immediate, but if you are a writing bibliophile like me, your bookshelves are groaning and your day of reckoning is nigh.

Marie Kondo aside (thank you), Judgment Day usually comes in the form of a move, specifically a variety known as the Downsizing Move. While my wife does battle with the dragons known as clothes and sentimental junk (read: stuff saved for the kids, who will not want it), I take arms against books—a thought previously unheard of.

While looking over my shelves, all manner of questions come to the fore. Why do I still have this book? Will I ever read this book? Will I ever reread this book? Even, how on earth did this book get here?

What’s more, I’ve learned a lot about myself. Let me count the reasons why I’ve collected books over the years:

The books are a history of me. That’s right. I find myself remembering when I got the book, why I got the book, how I got the book. Donating or selling these books will be like tearing a chapter out of my own book—my life’s history, a.k.a. The Story of Me.
The books haven’t been read yet. OK, fair enough, but is the desire still there? In confronting myself with this question, I often have to be honest and say no. Why did I buy it, then? Mood purchases. Phase purchases. Impulse purchases. Whatever it might be, I have to face this question and be honest if I hope to give it the old heave-ho.
The books speak of time and place. Oh, man, I loved that trip to Miami Beach! The one where I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises by the pool. And what about the strange week’s vacation at Old Orchard Beach, the one where I read that little-known “beach read” called The Charterhouse of Palma? Man, did I love those books, almost in a sentimental, geographic kind of way! How can I part with them now? Wouldn’t it be like a divorce between time and place?
The books are pretty. They’ve long been evicted from the already-cluttered coffee table, and they’re so big they lie on their big sides, but these coffee table books look first rate because, well, they’ve only been opened once—the day I got them. How can I part with such masterpieces in mint condition? What kind of cruel tyrant am I, anyway? And what about those cute little Penguin paperbacks with their black spines, each calling out the name of a beloved author from Russia’s Golden Age (Turgenev! Tolstoy! Lermontov!)?
The books might be worth money. It’s incredible how many first editions I have on these hallowed shelves. What? Donate riches to the library book sale? No doubt they’d be plucked from the pile by some savvy overseer of sales who will sell them for personal profit! So I search on eBay and discover, verily, that the same first edition as I now hold in my hand sells for a range of prices: $5 to $599. Welcome to eBay, Online Field of Dreams! (And how does one do eBay, anyway? Doesn’t it involve buying stock in the United States Postal Service?)
The book was a gift. What? Donate a book that Aunt Mae gave to me for my 12th birthday? But, but… What if Aunt Mae, in her dotage, visits us for Christmas next year and asks how often I’ve reread that Tom Sawyer she bought me? What if she takes a moment to scour the bookshelves for its place of honor, then casually quips, “Ken, I can’t seem to find that copy of Tom Sawyer I gave you when you were a lad. Can you give me a hand here?”
The books will come back to haunt me. I often wonder about future me, reaching for a book that has always been there. You know, the initial confusion while I’m having trouble finding it, searching on high shelves and low only to discover that Nefarious Me (Past Tense) has dumped it in the name of downsizing or, worse still, the trendy (at the time) name of Marie Kondo. It will seem like I’ve downsized my heart (see Grinch comma green) and not my home!

True, some books will make the cut, and no book should wind up in a cardboard box of the new, smaller home’s basement, but still, these Days of Biblio Reckoning are terrible things. They do not spark joy so much as rebellion. They spark an uncivil war within the conflicted, bookish heart!