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.

Technorati Tags: writer's block,arts,John Steinbeck,Richard Feynman,Craig's List,Freecycle,writing

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.

Technorati Tags: Longfellow,Indian,Hiawatha,poetry

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.

Technorati Tags: Robert Frost,Joseph Campbell,Thomas Merton,poetry,poem

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.

Technorati Tags: Thomas Merton,Woody Guthrie,poetry,workshop

The Ignorance of the Poet

There is a certain ignorance the poet must achieve if she is to write honestly; and it has various levels.  One is the ignorance of the outcome of the poem at the outset—the “no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader” Robert Frost tells us about.  This is axiomatic enough to be trite although we need reminding every now and then.  Another is the ignorance of truth as writeable—it cannot be written.

One of my pet peeves is the workshop leader who urges us to “write what cannot be written” and then lets us off as we think that the unsayable is something we’re merely afraid to say and that must be said.  This is therapy, not poetry.  Since the truth cannot be written, does not exist in words, what we try to do is create an experience of the presence of truth.  This is not doctrinal in any way although I do draw from Thomas Merton’s Inner Experience in my phrasing.

When I first read “time held me green and dying/though I sang in my chains like the sea” by Dylan Thomas (in “Fern Hill”) I was gripped by the experience of truth and became a devotee of it on the spot (although I tried not to be for a long time).  I can break down the words and phrasing all I want, interpret the poem all I want but I cannot speak, put into words, the truth of the poem for it lies outside its own words.  This is true with every great poem, the ones that move us in ways we cannot and need not explain and understand.  At best, we can only be present with the poem—but that’s enough, in fact it may be all.

I cannot tell you how to achieve this in your own poems but I can tell you that in order to write you must write a lot.  You must write beyond therapy.  You must write until you are unconscious of your knowledge.  As Matt in The Fantasticks says, “I defy knowledge and achieve ignorance.”

So long for now.

Technorati Tags: poetry,Robert Frost,Dylan Thomas,Fern Hill,Workshop,therapy

Witness This!

Although I write little of it myself, I often remark about poetry of witness, poetry that lives as a testament of something that is remarkable as it exists in the world.  I do not speak of poetry that takes a position, that is partisan, but poetry that looks at something and reveals it to us.   I site the poetry of Muriel Rukyser as an example—she is one of the great under-appreciated poets.

What little poetry of witness I have written is about war as I saw and lived it in Viet Nam and now we are engaged in war in Afghanistan and Iraq and with the access to expression so available in this electronic age an abundance of wartime literature is piling up.  Via two different sources I came to a NY Times story about contemporary war writing.  I urge you to pursue the link and the stories referenced.

It is difficult to write poetry of witness for it takes objectivity,  authentic knowledge and poetic skill.  It is not located close to inspiration on the spectrum of things that prompt us to write and so demands more conscious work at expression.   Yet, it is as witnesses that poets can be especially skilled; after all, observation is our thing although it so often is observation of the unseen.  Poetry of witness calls us to expose what is often readily visible but which remains seen by too few.

Much of the great value of this type of poetry is that it puts the poet at the center of society, a place poets have generally abdicated and, nature abhorring a vacuum, has been filled with less tasteful and honest literature.  So, I call poets to read the news, get into the issues despite the barbarous, despite the censure, despite the savagery of the opinionated who want to prevent us from revealing things as they are.

After all, what is your job as a poet if not to reveal?

So long for now.

del.icio.us Tags: Iraq,Afghanistan,Viet Nam,poetry,witness,society