Word After Word

The students are supposed to be writing ten minutes a day; most of them aren’t and I am wondering if I should “make” them. I have in the past: they had to put their handwritten pages under my door every twenty-four hours. Thirty days in a row.

Lot of paper, lot of bossing, lot of record keeping; but, students from that class still write to me and say: that thirty days of daily writing changed my life.

Does it have to be enforced? Can it work if it is enforced? Does it only work if the student figures out how to do it on her own?
I am wondering. Should each class start with the thirty days of writing boot camp? 

Snowflakes the size of popcorn, twelve degrees, windy, in the woods, sun shining in the south part of the sky, which is weird bright baby blue.

Fat sideways snow, like gnome pillows, flung, at night in streetlights, when the shiny black streets look like wet stone.

The third day of three days of snowing. It feels like an addiction—what will I do when it isn’t snowing any more? How will I live.

Silviculture is the care and maintenance and planting of forests.

Arboriculture involves the cultivation of ornamental and specimen trees, decorating with trees.

Fiction.

Poetry.

Write fiction. It’s daydreaming with characters.

Anything that complicates what you have is good.

People hoard their stories.

When my ex is out of town, I get to hang out with his kid, Jake, and this process—with all its inherent excitement and challenges and sweetness—is exactly like writing.

All this visiting has to be done very subtly, so that it is not like visiting at all; it has to seem like I am just dropping by. Jake’s seventeen. I’m not his mother.  When his dad’s out of town, all day I’m thinking about when I see Jake next and I wake up thinking about what I’ll make him for breakfast.  I love everything about it and it’s consuming. Just like writing.

This is absolutely the only way to approach the writing life! It’s your groovy seventeen year old son. It’s cool. You have to impersonate a cool person. It’s (the kid, the writing life) fully functioning and up and running…your role is to be there, in the background, not freaking out, but just making sure there’s some forward momentum. Your role is stealthy.  Just like with your writing. You can’t have a Big Plan, you can’t Impose Your Will and expect to have anything interesting happen. You lean into your writing life/stepson in order to notice what it has to show you today.  

Which this morning was Christopher Lee singing with Rhapsody-something about wizards and realms. “It’s so sappy but isn’t it kind of sweet?” Jake said, and he put his giant fists over his heart plunged them up over his head just like the lead singer was doing in the tiny You Tube window. Jake was fake-Stonehenge-raging, smiling and shaking his head while he angered the angels.Last night, when I was walking in to the guys’ apartment with truly excellent guy groceries (this is like all the research and planning you do for a story or a poem) Jake said he wanted to eat at The Grille. (Behaving exactly like an interesting short story in progress. You want what?) I set the groceries down. (My shopping mantra when I’m shopping for boy groceries: anything I would never eat they will love.) I emptied my mind of desires and expectations and plans. I knew I’d know what to do next as long as I didn’t think.This is like when the piece you are working on goes in its own glorious direction but it isn’t your plan! All that work! One hundred dollars of beef jerky, pistachios, and chocolate milk!

While I was staring at the groceries, waiting for inspiration (always best to have a soft smile on your face, so as not to strain or seem needy), Jake sidled up. He said maybe he could eat the groceries tomorrow night. (Jacob is much, much more thoughtful than a piece of writing. But if we quiet down and and be with the work, sometimes it offers assistance.)So I took Jake down to the Grille. He wanted to eat by dhimself and do homework.  Alone? I said. The evening was completely unfurling. I worried: this is not normal. What will people think? (These are the worries of a writer at work.  It never feels “right” as in orderly, what everyone else is doing. There’s always some uneasiness in writing.)

Then, I flashed on what all the other seventeen year old men of my town might be doing right now—I saw some hunched over desks, pouring over variables of some kind, I saw others and I felt lucky and I looked at Jake and saw he was lucky and we were good. I gave him twenty bucks and told him to call me a few minutes before he wanted me to get him. When he went into the Grille, his long hair and his long coat trailing behind him,  I felt like I was sending work out into the world, worried about it being rejected, but pretty sure it was brilliant, unsafe, hungry,  I knew I’d be so happy to see it again.

I want to remember this about the writing life. To treat it like a treasured family member I don’t get to see any time I want to. To not over-work it. Trust the plan that is unfolding, even if it’s so totally unlike The Most Other People’s Plan. See more what the kid/story has to say. Watch it carefully but not scare it. Never lecture it or hide from it. To lean into it, make it breakfast, not be hurt if it doesn’t eat breakfast—it is such pleasure to make.

Oh such a pleasure.

I can’t do Good Reads right now.

My former students keep telling me I will love it. And I’m sure I would! I think it’s a wonderful thing and I am happy it exists but I can’t take on another password. I don’t want any more passwords for anything. I liked passwords when I was seven and I had an idea it would be cool to let people in my room who knew the password.

I do want to know what my friends and students are reading and I am incapable of reading a book and not telling people who might like it all about how much better the world is because we have this book. (I shudder when I think back on my obnoxious Nathaniel and the Pilgrims phase. The Shadow Divers obsession. My ongoing crush on Floyd Skloot. I drive everyone I love crazy with Good Reads.) But I just can’t sign up for a Program right now.

I want time to read good reads and time to call you on my phone with a dial and no call waiting and ask you what you are reading. Or not. Sometimes I think this great pleasure—talking about books we love, spreading the word—loses much of its richness and value when it’s posted, clubbed, defined, anthemized, registered.

Let’s just talk and be friends and have “my space” be the living room where we talk about books and food and basketball and boys and everything else that is good, no password needed, just come on in.

On telephones. You could call someone at home and hear what he had to say. I thought it was working really well.

Now, you can’t call people’s houses—no one has phones at home. They’re phones are out slumbering in the car, off, comatose in the bottom of the purse, vibrating dysfunctionally under the sofa cushions.  You used to be able to call someone up on the telephone and it rang normally and the person answered. Now,  you have to go over to their house and help them search for their cell phone.

You used to be able to hear full sentences on the phone. Now, we don’t get all the words a person is saying. Some of our words are left out, as though we are all of the sudden redacted versions of our former selves.

Before, we got wherever our phone was to talk, and we talked. Maybe we were doing something else, too—typing, cooking, making a list—but mostly we were talking.  If someone wanted to know what we were doing they could easily see: We were on the phone. Now, everyone is driving and talking on the phone and walking and talking on the phone and the talking is a tic, a side-note, a by-product of other activity. It’s like being on the phone is holding our place, the place our whole self used to be, just fine, on its own.

I’m having trouble with the cell phones. We aren’t connecting at all.  If I have one on me, I feel like an tagged creature on Mutual of Omaha. I feel like a rhino when I try to use the tiny phone, too—it’s this whole seductive little sinister world in my palm and my paws are so big and clumsy.  I like a phone that has the same proportions as the human head. I like a phone booth, a conversation in a room designed for a conversation. I want all the words. And I want them in places designated for telephone conversations. So many cells, proliferating out of control.  I miss the nuclei. Cell phones are dismantling us, I’m afraid, syllable by syllable. I feel old and whole and calm, hello.

When I came out as a face blind person, the struggle was to explain to people that I didn’t recognize them. This is always superbly hard because I don’t know right away who a person is. I have to figure it out.Now that I am out, people keep asking me, “How did you know it was me!” Usually, they just want more information on a mysterious and confusing and difficult-to-understand disorder. But sometimes I hear in the way they ask the question an accusation. I thought you were supposed to be so face blind.Face blind people often have highly developed compensation systems. I recognize people all the time. Not the human face. Every day, I can greet many, many people. By context. It’s hard work, it takes a lot of concentration and a really good memory and a very sensitive system.  So, the other day, I was walking in to the doctor’s office and this friendly person who clearly knew me, a student, was coming out of the doctor’s office. She said “Hi Heather” and I said “Hi,

Eat is for eat, drink is for drink, Dr. Zhou says. She has helped a lot of people use Chinese medicine and common sense to get over IBS and a host of other ailments. I know she is right about eat eat, drink drink. One thing at a time. There are so many things that we THINK have to go together but they do not, such as bad luck and disappointment.

So yes. I’m trying to eat more slowly. More focus on chewing. But I can’t imagine breakfast without poetry.

And last week, four people asked me for suggestions of poetry to read (and there’s the Good Reads invitations—I’m sure Good Reads is fabulous but right now taking on another Web Thing feels akin to adopting a new puppy. I can’t set up any more accounts, record any more passwords, I just can’t right now. I know Good Reads is good. It’s like fiber. I’m scared of its thickness, the bulk.)

And, I found myself prescribing (I am certified to perform this procedure) poetry to three more people: first Bee, whose cough lingers, who is writing songs again. Then Marlena, my Bulgarian friend in

(Then a basket of student emails—what can we read over break? Good students! I hope I replied. If not, here we go.)

A poem a day is good, but all the poem-a-day books I have (except for Billy Collins Poetry 180 series) are too bent on Representing Poetry so you have to pick through all the boring Necessary Inclusions to find the good poems. I say just read wonderful poems.

If you just want to read poetry, and not study it, you want to choose poems who stand on their own beautifully. (Poetry Daily is good.) This doesn’t mean they’re easy poems, it just means that you can read them with your cereal and tea and not start the day frustrated, pretentious, idiotic, or stuffed. Good poetry meets you half way.

Poetry is like photography.  Diane Arbus says: a photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

(I’m always in the mood for that type of experience.)

Like a tuning fork, a good poem sets the tone for the day.

Poetry for Breakfast

Kay Ryan

Wang Wei

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Naomi Nye

Gary Soto

Poetry for Marlena

Tomas Transtromer

Eavan Boland

Sharon Olds

Elizabeth Bishop

Adam Zagajewski

Poetry for Musicians

Billy Collins

Rumi

Naomi Nye

Richard Brautigan

James Tate

Robert Bly Leaping Poetry

Pablo Neruda Love Sonnets

David Tucker Late for Work

Mark Halliday

Jim Carroll

Van Jordan

Poetry for Former Fiction Students

Marie Howe

Beth Ann Fennelly

Mark Jarman

Tony Hoagland

Van Jordan

When you ask a poet for suggestions on who to read she will give you a different list on any given day.  (Ally, tell me who are you reading, who’s good?)

Couldn’t the entire thing (instead of the nine page manifestos I’ve created for my bands of pupils) simply list the seven notes of Enlightenment, as the Buddha described them:

energy, joy, concentration, attentiveness, mindfulness, curiosity, equanimity

Isn’t that what every course wishes to present, to develop? Isn’t that every good syllabus, boiled down to seven words?