Sister Dying, Poet Writes

My sister is dying and I am writing about it.  This brings me to one of those approach-avoidance challenges that artists, especially poets (I would like to think) must confront because of what we do.  Here’s how it goes:

Workshops are rife with people who write as therapy; indeed this is how most of us started.  I think it was Auden who warned poets to leave the therapy out of the poetry and I agree with him.  Thus the challenge is to write while impassioned without descending into therapy.

We write in our teens because we haven’t got a clue and we need one.  It’s crap.  It certainly isn’t something recollected in tranquility because there is no tranquility for teens. Later when that bastard wrongs us or that bitch throws us out and life doesn’t make enough sense, we write to right things.  That too is crap.  These are what to leave out, burn, blow up, deep six, line the bird cage with.  And for God’s sake don’t take this stuff to the workshops—write Dear Abby instead.

By writing a lot and thus learning to write one gets to know her/his own voice and method.  If you recognize your own voice and method while writing under stress and with passion, keep on keeping on for you’re likely on the right track.  If not, write what you must and then get on with other things, but don’t mistake it for the poetry it is not.  It’s right to value it, but value it for what it really is.  We write for various reasons, one of which is to vent, and should learn to value it for its genuine value without foisting it upon the poetry world.

I find my poems to my sister are pretty good, well-formed and ringing with my voice produced in the way I normally produce.  And they seem to pass one of my acid tests for all poems:

Does the poet sound like he really means it?

I recognize that another reader will determine whether I am right about this but for now I think I’ve got the right groove going.  I add that this also comes after writing thirty poems to another sister just a couple of months ago and that exercise may have prepared me for this.  As I so often say—write a lot and stay in practice.  After a layoff of several months it has taken me a good two months of writing daily (nearly) to get back into shape.

So long for now.

The Lie of the Art or How to Fail With Really Trying

Let’s see now--

*  Language is inadequate to Truth

*  There is probably no new Truth

*  Only a few very great writers have come near to Truth

*  Even the great ones have missed

*  The best art only implies Truth

Why should we care?  Why should we be careful?  Why not be the extraordinarily gifted monkeys we are and write willy-nilly all day long and at least have a chance that chance will be on our side?  (Given what I read that is currently taken for good poetry I’m inclined to think we’re already doing that.)

Here’s the case I make:

The inadequacy of the arts to truth is the very soil they thrive in.  As high as the bar is raised it will never be high enough and we, being who we are, will try for, must try for it.  We haven’t a choice.  By use of the carefully crafted and inspired implication we avoid the outright and specific lie.  We offer a general one.  The utmost care is taken so that we don’t damage the truth too much.  As poets aiming for truth we risk laying waste the grail by pursuing it.

Every word is a metaphor, an obfuscation of sorts.  The care we apply controls the unattainable some.  Our skill controls it some.  When we are successful we convey less untruth than is common.  It doesn’t sound like much but it is as great as it gets.

Consciousness of our certain failure should make us ever more careful to proceed with the greatest of care for in careless art, careless craft, lies the ruin of truth and you might as well be a politician and make some money.

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Writer’s Block—Shmock!

I’ve been away and not writing and would like to speak of writer’s block by saying:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING.

There will be times when you don’t write and the reasons will be legion.  I’ve been reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Richard Feynman’s The Meaning of it All and lots of the old and new testaments of The Bible.  I have transplanted hosta from the back to the front, trimmed the forsythia, planted a moonflower and a morning glory, advertised an electric portable three-wheeled scooter suitable of an elderly person on Craig’s List and put an old PC on Freecycle all while lamenting that I haven’t written a decent poem for months, maybe all year.  I’m not blocked.  I am busy.  I am not writing.

If you believe you are blocked then you haven’t learned to write or you’re out of practice as I am.  I return to my mantra:  If you’re going to write, then write and write a lot.  Unless you are brain dead you continue to gather what will become your writing.  Your mind never stops journaling.  I you are reading, thinking, observing anything new then your mind is expanding, lubricating itself and will deliver when it can.

Do not afford yourself the luxury of writer’s block.  There isn’t enough time.  Our art is based upon the fact that we’ll never get to the truth—that’s why we try—and there is therefore no time to waste in self-defeating lament.  As the song (Desert Pete by The Kingston Trio) says:  “Have faith my friend.  There’s water down below.”  I hasten to add that whether you know it or not, it still churns.

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Indian Summary

For reasons I’m unsure of I was recently moved to revisit Longfellow’s poetry, specifically “The Song of Hiawatha” which I had never read from beginning to end.  It is easy to dismiss Longfellow as a rhymey-dimey poet forgettable after high school and of passing interest as part of the line of American poets who interest us as in some sense ancestral to our own art. 

Well, I may be going soft but I found “Hiawatha” to be awfully good, occasionally moving and very, very interesting.  And I hasten to add that I am richer for the experience, hated to see the noble savage paddling westward at the end of the poem.  I really had no idea that he departed with the arrival of the white men, priests and the weight the moment carried as I read it.  Of course I’m influenced by my own understandings but I value that they must be entirely differrent from those of Longfellow’s contemporaries and are still valid, which is sort of the point of this post:

Whatever we bring to the poem today is valid and what we may intuit about the departure of Hiawatha upon the arrival of the white men is deep, profound and somewhat saddening in light of what we know today.  The bigger point is that the great poems stand the test of time and remain valid irrespective of who reads them and how time has changed things.  They are new because we are new.

And it took Longfellow to remind me of this.  Go read “The Song of Hiawatha” and enjoy!

So long for now.

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10,000 Hours to Greatness

If we can believe Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, then you’ll be an expert poet after 10,000 hours of practice.  This boils down to 19.23 years at ten hours a week or two hours five days a week.  This is a lot of writing but it gives you some idea of the amount of effort it takes to get to the top of any craft or art.  That’s part of the reason the air is so rare among the best.

I first began writing verse in high school and I got into it because I liked it and because I thought it was easy.  As time went on I was seduced away from my simplistic view of it and into poetry’s thrall and the wicked amount of work and study it takes to write real and really good poems.  If it’s easy, you ain’t doin’ it.

Hugh Ogden was both a mentor and a friend.  He was also an excellent poet.  Over lunch I asked him what the most difficult part of being recognized as a good poet was.  He replied that people didn’t appreciate the amount of time and effort it took to become successful; the amount of blood and sweat and disappointment that precedes good writing.

When I tell you to write a lot, I mean WRITE A LOT.

When I tell you to write often, I mean WRITE OFTEN.

When I tell you to read a lot, I mean READ A LOT.

Don’t wait for inspiration—it will come.

It is difficult to learn to let the poem have its own way, to let the gods lead and it takes a whole lot of writing to learn this.

Calculate how many hours you’ve spent writing and how many more it will take to get to 10,000 hours.  Don’t include pondering, planning, reading—just the time spent actually putting words to paper.  Then figure out how many hours a day you need to put in to get to that ten thousand.  Then do it.

The only way is to write, so WRITE AND WRITE AND WRITE, GODDAMIT!!

Technorati Tags: Poetry,Hugh Ogden,Outliers,Malcolm Gladwell,poet

Write, By God!!

I’ve been reading Thomas Merton lately and, while I don’t really find his poetry particularly interesting, I find his criticism appealing.  I want to look at one of his points:   That you are writing for God.

DON’T GO AWAY YET!!

It is my experience that when the writing is right the conscious act of writing is only part of the process.  Look to Frost’s “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader” to understand what I mean.  I’ve said and heard it many times:  The poem has a life of its own.  It’s true.

Merton tells us that we are writing for God and whether he feels a poet is genuinely writing for God has a lot to do with how he regards the poet.  Having said this I remind you that Merton is surprisingly charitable to many poets who I thought might not meet this standard.

I come down here:

When the writing is right, the gods will lead your work.  Whoever your gods are, they will lead you.  This brings me to Seneca the Elder’s wonderful:  “ The fates lead him who will; him who won’t they drag.”  If you will let the fates lead your poems, they will and you will be the better writer for it.

I have grown to greatly respect Thomas Merton for a variety of reasons but right now he ranks high in my personal pantheon for recognizing that the arts and the gods are intimately affiliated and that this redounds to the enhancement and glory (I hesitate at that word!) of both.

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When It’s Hard, It’s Good

I’ve been reading a lot of Thomas Merton lately and in The Thomas Merton Reader in the essay “Poetry and Contemplation” he is very stern about what poems should not be written.  Be advised:  He speaks of Christian poetry and I am speaking about poetry in general and thus expropriate his idea and apply it more generally than he might be expected to do.

Merton writes of poems written from mere intention-- that is poetry merely willed by the poet-- as being better off not written.  There is a necessary indefinable aspect of poetry without which it is not genuine.  This aspect is at once ineffable, inspired, Providential, unspeakable and without it the poem is inauthentic.  The poem simply cannot exist wholly at the will of the poet.  The poem is beyond the poet’s control and until it achieves that, and the poet achieves the ability to let it happen, the result will be less than desirable.

Fortunately, it is the out-of-control part that makes continued poetic effort possible.  It is because the poet is trying to speak illimitable truth in limitable language that he must never be satisfied and will always know the joy of being unfinished, of being able to say it better.

Do not get me wrong—I strongly advocate practicing writing, practicing forms, writing a lot with or without inspiration because, as I have so often averred, the craft of the poet demands and warrants fully as much practice as the concert pianist who labors over his keyboard hours a day.  But, as with the great pitfall of workshops,  what is thus produced is practice, not the final product.

Without the practice you are unlikely to make the best possible attempt to at least believably indicate the presence of truth in your poems and, without the accretion brought to the poem by the ineffable, the poem will ultimately fail.

As Woody Guthrie shouts:  It's a-hard, and it's hard, ain't it hard, great God…

It’s hard and, by God, it’s great too.

So long for now.

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