How to Take a Writing Vacation

     It seems prudent to write about writing on vacation.  I say, DON'T DO IT.  In your canvas chair you'll sit in the mountains or by the sea thinking He Who made them and the lamb and the tyger will speak and that finally you'll hear Him in the voice of that beloved dead uncle you never met whom you've been listening for for years and years.  In the words of Sherman Potter, "Bullcookies"!  If it's not happening at home where you live and move and have your being it's not going to happen in Chatham or the Great Smokey Mountains or on the shores of Gitchigoomie.

     Take your journals, your pens, your crappy attitude toward your in-laws who will visit and leave their wet towels on your canvas chair and write every day but don't expect much and don't expect a breakthrough, to be struck by lightning, to see the white buffalo or the black swan.  Sleep, swim, tan, nearly drown, hike yourself breathless, get poison ivy, drink, smoke 'em if you got 'em but don't expect that cat named Kalamazoo to say a mumblin' word.
     Empty your head, change it, abandon yourself to lesser things for a while.  Your mind will work in the background, the unconscious, the subconscious as it always does.  Your're a goddamned poet.  You can't stop it.  But you can't start it either.  Back at home where the lawn needs mowing, where you need to give a spoonrest from Provincetown to the neighbor who (may have) fed the cats and cleaned the litter boxes at least once and the dryer is getting noisy and the 800 number caller from Newark DE is looking for your late car payment IS WHERE YOU WORK IS GROUNDED.  Somehow the poems live there in that stupid place you need a vacation from.
     I urge you (& myself) to learn to write wherever you are.  I also urge you (& myself) to abandon the notion that your magnum opus will arrive at a temporary address during that very week you've chosen to get away from it all when the poems are in it all.

     PS  I'm happy to be back and will be on vacation from the 7th through the 14th.  I will not have internet access and will not post during that time.  And, I will not write anything worth reading in between lobsters (although I actually did once but that took a dying sister to change the equation and I don't think she'll do it again).
     Really, I'm back.  See you later.

Poetry Readings, Part 2

Having trashed readings in the last post, I want to get into the readings I have enjoyed the most from the audience. They fall into two categories:

1. Those done by the best poets writing
2. Those with a theme, a plot if you will

Among the first I include readings by Charles Simic and Seamus Heaney. I might add Paul Muldoon and Adrienne Rich. These poets are the real deal. To be with them is to breathe rare air. You can exist on it for longer than twenty minutes and, for reasons I cannot explain, I think I could last ninety minutes listening to Simic.

Among the second I include two: Wesley McNair and Baron Wormser. I heard McNair read "My Brother Running" at The Frost Place and although some thought it too long, were bored by it, I was captivated. I have liked McNair for a long time and found the reading fulfilling, poignant. As for Wormser, I heard him read his scathing indictment of the more recent Bush presidency, "Carthage," in a private reading and, although I have heard him read several times, liked this the most because it did have a plot, movement from beginning to end. It held me.

So, there are readings that work. They are rare and you have to attend a lot of readings to find them. It helps to be lucky too. Additionally, despite my dyspeptic attitude, I do attend readings because that way I can support the writers who struggle honestly with this very demanding art. They deserve all I can give them.

So long for now.

Creativity-- NOT!

I often ponder creativity, most recently wondering how I can return to "creative writing" since my schedule was upset by my father-in-law moving in last November. It used to be that I could spend an hour uninterrupted early in the morning. Now I cannot stop listening for the clatter of his walker, his gruff voice barking at the cats, the slam of the bathroom door, the clank of his spoon on his cereal bowl.

I am a fan of the idea that creative action can occur anywhere and cannot now prove it in my own life. It is not for this reason that I'm looking at new takes on creativity although even a mild cynic could think so given that I am tottering on the edge of thinking/saying that poets should shed the notion of creativity entirely. I come to this not from desperation to justify my father-in-law's upsetting my schedule but from the notion that creativity, for the poet, is a formal organizing of chaos, a saying of the unsayable. This means that creativity is the making of cages, structures. It is a violent, radical subjugating of things to create a mimicry of Truth.

I thus come to the conclusion that the poet must know and practice the rules, ancient and modern, the craft comes with since creativity cannot exist outside of the very rules the very notion of creativity seeks to erase. Choose your slavery, choose your master and submit to its violence. I always wondered why poetry is so hard. The answer is two-fold:

First, it uses words for the wordless;

Second, it joins the abysmal with the sublime.

Except by faith it is an impossible endeavor.

I re-conclude that there is no such thing as creativity since the poet creates nothing new other than a fresh mimicry. This is not to belittle the poet. Well, yes it is-- but only from thinking himself a god. My experience with poets is that too many think they are the Creator of the truth they try to speak or, worse, they think their words are THE TRUTH. They are not sufficiently submissive to the violence of their art.

Worse is the poet who doesn't think he is trying for Truth.

The landscape would be drastically improved by poets practicing poetry and forgetting about creativity.

So long for now.

Another Take on What Workshops DON'T Do

Came across "Show and Tell" from the June 4 (I think) New Yorker magazine. Although it's largely a book review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing the author, Louis Menand, spends a good deal of time both attacking and, in the end, talking up (a little) workshops, particularly poetry workshops. Although his approach differs from mine he takes good swipes at the workshops and the notion that they really do anything for writers. What I like is his focus on the problem, as I see it, that "Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem." Where he uses the word "publishable" I would use the phrase "workshop-acceptable". The book itself looks at writing programs and how they have changed the creative writing landscape in the last several decades. It is no doubt worth the reading but I urge you first to read Menand's article.

Menand ends his New Yorker piece by affirming the value of camaraderie found in writing workshops and this I heartily endorse. As I have urged earlier here, if you are going to attend workshops, once you've gone to one or two don't go to learn anything more about writing but rather go to give as much help as you can to the other participants who are not as far along as you.

So long for now.