Word After Word

Every writer I know wants big chunks of time in which to work. I’m off teaching for the summer, and then some–I have time now. And, as I’ve suspected, time is good but it is not everything! It’s not exactly what is needed. When I have a whole big giant Tuesday or a freckled loamy looming Saturday ALL HOURS FREE FOR WRITING I tend to falter, freefall, get cranky, and lose my way completely. I want more time when I don’t have it. What IS this all about?

Resistance.

You have to have something to push against, I think. It’s a Capulet thing.

So, I’ve spent this week with Tons O Time getting very, very little forward movement on my project–I’m writing about the same amount as when I have two hours in the early early mornings and a full teaching load. (Comparing myself to some other professors, but not all, this whole Sabbatical Choke is very common.) 

Today, I invented a new way of working. It’s called One Hour At a Time.  At the top of the hour I eat almonds. Make tea. Serve more almonds. Get very very clear about just what it is I will accomplish in this hour. (This is the hardest part, drawing a little square around the work, and going in to that spot super focused.) I pretend that’s all I have: one hour. I am better able to get out of time when I have less time. Time focuses us. But it can also swallow us whole.

Time isn’t the thing.

Getting out of time–losing track of it–that’s what we are after and it’s harder when you have Big Time–it’s like trying to lose Goliath. And when you have little time, little tiny time–it’s so hard to slip into that space. For me, an hour is a good amount of time to run for, to eat for, to write for, to have coffee with a friend for, to bathe or swim for. I love An Hour. It’s like the denim jeans of Time. It fits so many occasions.

Whole days, whole summers, six months–it’s like the Coronation Dress of Time. You will never feel like it’s the right occasion for this Time.

I am learning how to stitch a row of hours together.

Send almonds.

In the summer, it’s hard to leave the house without sunglasses, water bottle, and a book of poetry.  Three things that are slim and provide protection and sustenance. Here are three new poetry collections perfect for July:

Mary Jo Bang’s ELEGY.  Devastating poems about her son’s overdose. They’re very intense but what’s so astonishing about this book is how Mary Jo Bang captures the weirdness of grief. Grief isn’t sadness. It’s derangement, and interesting. Amazing poems and the book reads like a novel.

Beth Ann Fennelly. UNMENTIONABLES. I fell in Love with Fennelly’s work when she read, goddess-style, at my college a couple of years ago, when her first book came out. Here, kudzu, Faulkner, running, women and painting, being an artist, and desire co-mingle. It’s like gazpacho. And it keeps getting better each time I read it. I love these green glorious poems.

Marie Howe THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME. Our teacher, Abigail Thomas, suggested we read this book. Howe writes about her kid, New York, bad friends, purposeful misunderstandings, regular days, kind of stabbing at things I walk right on past. She’s very funny. Like the other two books I am suggesting my poetry students read, these read straight through beautifully, they are clear narrative poems–this is a book that walks around on its own. You read it in a park, a bed, a car.

Pandas: what are you reading?

It was trying to escape, I suppose, that’s why I covered it with my hands, but this is a real, giant, edible, white morel. There was an ash borer type bug living inside. Emerald green.

My dog, my father, and my mother are all the exact same age. They’re like my untriplets. I wish they were differently spaced so I could learn one thing at a time, and apply it, with great grace. I want a different preparation. They each have bad backs, bad hips, trouble remembering, and they sleep wide continents during the day. I have my favorites.

Last year, I stood with the writers on the beach, and we burned our fears and regrets and hatred in a pyre. Some loud unritualized men interrupted us, and mocked us.  Fortunately, we had enough regrets to stay focused—we had a lot to burn.

This year I cleared the week and weekend to devote myself to writing the end of Part Two. I had no party invitations, no rituals, nothing but a grumpy girl to hang out with, that would be me. I can barely stand her. I felt afraid, and scared, and full of regret. I hate the book—who would ever read it? I’m stuck in between difficulties: break-ups and breakdowns, what is right for my father, what to know. And I’m sad as heck—a friend died. A kind, brilliant, generous man, forty-five years old. He loved

I should do something solsticey, I keep thinking. I’m ignoring something important. I’m afraid of something—movement. I love the light, but in a way there’s too much. And this day is a death day: now it just gets darker, little by little, the rest of the year, falling into darkness. It’s not a celebration I’m looking for. I just want to stand somewhere other than where I am standing now: so, take a step. Any step.

“First, there is the barrier between image and language,” writes Irving Yalom in Love’s Executioner. “Mind thinks in images but, to communicate with another, must transform image into thought and then thought into language. That march, from image to thought to language, is treacherous. Casualties occur: the rich, fleecy texture of image, its extraordinary plasticity and flexibility, its private nostalgic emotional hues—all are lost when image is crammed into language.”

“Great artists attempt to communicate image directly through suggestion, through metaphor, through linguistic feats intended to evoke some similar image in the reader. But ultimately they realize the inadequacy of their tools for the task.”

I love this passage, and I think a lot about that “march”—getting the image in my head, in all its fleecy fullness, onto the page. But I don’t think we “cram” the picture into words. I think we use words—they don’t even feel like words when I am writing—to press the image out, to roll it out. Words aren’t thoughts, when writers work at this image level. They’re strings, pulling away the curtains, revealing only what is there, what was there all along.

(The Unfinal Assignment is below….a few posts down….here’s Kay’s response): 

“The voices of doubt were very aggressive. Lots of, “what’s the point? It’s not Friday.” Lots of ragging on me for falling behind and being sick. Not nice, these demons of doubt. It took me a while to stay still. I noticed I got up a lot for strange reasons before I could get started. Like, it was imperative for me to find the phone charger so I could charge my phone while I worked. This was not at all imperative, of course. The distractoid demons were full force. The mean ones kept chiming in “you screwed up. this is whack. this is pointless. don’t bother.” So I charmed myself. I charmed myself into the space, a desk in the downstairs facing a window with a view of spring green trees and sunlight, by lighting some candles, laying out feathers, amethyst and rose quartz and turquoise bears, and aromatherapy. I dabbed lavender and patchouli on my temples, back of my neck, wrists and third eye. I made myself tea, gorgeous tea, soaked rose, jasmine, and orange tea leaves. That is how I got myself to settle.  I tapped into that pregnant energy. I got my blue index cards out. Delicious blue cards. I began with a method on the blue card “sons.” Sons were quick to conjure. Lots of sons floating around. And then came Bob. I wrote a big lettered slow method on my friend Bob. It was golden to be with Bob, because he died when we were nineteen. After the method, I began to write poetry for him. I kept seeing him with long strands of wooden beads around his neck. which I never knew him to wear in life, but they really suit him.  The blue cards were great launch pads for poems. I wrote about the lads I lived with on the mountain in Oregon last fall. They wore thick sweaters and smoked pipes by the pond. All in all, a delightful time.”
I have these moments when I am so hungry to write, as though I wrote nothing for the last month. It’s always only the beginning.
 

Really, Toss It

Once I was in a conversation with an extraordinary and famous chef. She said something during the course of the chat that has always stuck with me. “Never hesitate to throw out anything. Just throw the whole thing out. Toss it. Don’t get obligated to the thing.”

In writing, I see my students and myself laboring over ugly, nasty, spoiled, or just plain dull concoctions. Really, we need to toss out more. We need to just move on.

Notice the famous chef didn’t say “Start over.” She didn’t say “Try it again!” She didn’t say “Always carefully read the directions and follow them to the letter!” She said only one thing: Toss it. Don’t get obligated to a failed dish.

In other words, when something doesn’t come out right, You haven’t messed up. You haven’t failed. You haven’t brought upon yourself an opportunity to self lacerate, self macerate. You don’t need a class, or easier recipes. You just need to toss it with complete and total joy and freedom. (We are afraid to do this. Afraid of waste, afraid of chaos, afraid of an empty plate, nothingness.)

But that’s what the famous chef is talking about it: freedom. If you aren’t able to move very quickly and sturdily past mistakes, you won’t enjoy cooking/writing enough to keep doing it frequently enough to see improvement, to keep the joy boiling. The freedom to fling the muffs out—out of your writing room, out of your vision, out of your life, your memory—that’s what is needed. Don’t file the duds. Don’t belabor or revise weak work, work that bores you, work that is heavy, forced, dull, tasteless. Burn it, fling it, throw it away. Don’t start over.

Go play: make a tasty snack.

The bad writing? Blow it off. Blow it all off. With a giant loopy grin on your face, fearlessly, hurl those fallen cakes, those sodden biscuits, that terrible swamp off rice. Away with it. Wanton waste. Get it away from you.

How did you get yourself to the desk?
I walked over to the Albion College atrium which is this room with
massive window walls, stage lights, a wooden staircase, pterodactyl
skeletons, and a wave simulatior
How did you keep yourself there?

I sat down, pulled up one of the tables and wrote, then spiraled then
wrote some more
What did you battle?

Demons, all sorts when I ripped the band aid off, self doubts, self
worries, thoughts of deserving the blame
How did you succeed?

Went slow, kept writing, addressed each demon in a way in the writing,
then wrote another game seen where the hero triumphed over the
villian, then spiraled, then wrote a story of all of us on the
Endeavor, plowing head first through a storm