Word After Word

Minton Sparks, my new favorite poet, a stunning performance artist, based out of Nashville, said this during her one-woman show, referring to a difficult member of the family. I laughed so hard. I loved my own people all over again.

 I just got back from Nashville, where I was honored to be part of a symposium on women and class and low class and work.   Dorothy Allison opened up the week and Minton Sparks closed it; I cried at both and laughed at both. When I called home, my Ron Paul said, “Your accent is back already.”  Creasy greens, shelley beans, “where are you from, somewhere south of decent?”, “sipping on a storm,” “truth be tole she’ll be the death of Darrell,” men named Lonnie and John Jackson, “didn’t say hi nor bye kiss my foot,” and “the hell she did.” This talk made me feel down-comforter safe, it’s familiar and luscious and finely wrought as anything I’ve ever known.

I did not want to come back.

But I am glad to be back in my studio, writing (I have a new star chart going–ten days without missing a studio session and I get a prize. What are the prizes? New sunglasses. New tight jeans. New book. New pen. New digital camera. So I can illustrate the blog. There’s more prizes.) writing using my metaphorical seed money, my life’s work.

I’ve been talking a lot about how revising a manuscript is like dating, like relationship. How I have to go to the work in a good mood, in a friendly supportive mode. Just like I’d go to lunch with friends. I have to wait for the writing to ask me for advice, I can’t just roar in and force all these changes and focus on everything that is awful in the writing–the manuscript will fold under that pressure. It will run screaming in the other direction.

So my friend Elle,  who is also working on a book, said she read all this stuff I wrote about the relationship with revision and she has decided she is in a very dysfunctional marriage and she wants a divorce from her book. She says they are awful together. They are making each other miserable.  She says they do not enjoy each other’s company.

She’s funny. And she’s just carrying on.

I have friends who complain about their real human marriages too, but they love their spouses, very much, it’s just talk.

I told Elle how I read through my manuscript and wrote only praise to myself, made notes just on everything I liked. She thought this was the weirdest strangest thing she’d ever heard.

 It was very weird to do! I felt goofy and fake. It was hard!!

But I know having done this was the right way back into the revising. I know I am making better decisions (and having way more fun) staying focused on the strong parts. I’m working hard to trust this process of dating my book. I want to stay in love with it.

What I know so far is it’s important to ignore the flaws, just like in real relationship life. To work on it every day.  To surprise it with gifts (I have a new star chart!! I get prizes for ten days of writing. I can choose from an array!)  .  To listen to it. Really listen. Without judging. Without my own agenda.

Hemingway says: write the next true sentence. The next true thing. I’m off.

Reading poetry isn’t like reading at all, really. It’s more like making something in the dark with a mysterious playful funny friend. You don’t really know exactly what the two of you are doing, but you’re curious enough to follow the action line goes.

I always tell my students reading poetry is like tasting Tang or Jello crystals, or boullion: it’s intense. To make it into something that goes down, nourishes you, you add water by reading, reading, and reading the poem again. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense completely or at all. You keep washing over it, letting it wash over you. It’s slow.  Reading the newspaper is like eating dinner standing up. Reading poetry is making pizza from scratch. Even the dough. Maybe even the table itself. Maybe even the hands, the maker.

I want you to read my poetry but I wish you could hear it out loud, too. To fully appreciate a poem, you have to hear the poet read it, or someone who wishes they’d written the poem read it, out loud. And you have to read it silently over and over and be with it, like you be in church. Reverent, open to mystery. Comfortable with not knowing. Eager to sniff joy. If you just hear poetry read out loud, though, that’s no good either. It goes too fast. The poet reading gives all this breath and life and origination to the poem, and that’s so incredibly valuable and necessary, but you still have to have the page, the words, the time, the going over and over, the letting the poem go over and over you. Both are poetry.

I do not know poetry as well as I wish I did. I’m polygamous when it comes to genre. But the poetry I know and love best, the work I understand most deeply, has come to me doubly—these are the authors I’ve read in their entirety, all the poems, all their prose, interviews and essays about them and I’ve heard these poets read their work out loud. Sharon Olds, Van Jordan, Beth Ann Fennelly, Li-young Lee, W. S. Merwin, Barbara Hamby, Joel Byrd, Nancy Eimers, Kay Ryan. These are my stars, these are how I can steer. You need both, the page and the performance, the time to soak in and the alive energy, the presence of the poet.

When you read poetry, go slowly and let there be plenty of room for what comes to you to be noticed by you. Don’t go on a hunt. Don’t go too fast. If you don’t read poetry habitually, don’t overdo it right out of the gate, or you risk reinforcing the myth “Poetry is not for me.” It is for you. You are exactly who it is for. Go very slowly, as you do in love, making space for your experience as you engage with the other, and notice what you see and please tell me something of what you saw.

Poetry is the king.

Memoir is poetry in prose.

I am one of poetry’s hobbies.

I said what do you really, really want to know about face blindness. What is the one thing. Audrey said it. “Can you see the scars on your face?”

I can see my face when I am looking in the mirror. I can see your face when I am looking at it. When I look away, try to summon an image of my face or your face, I can’t get a face. I don’t get a non-face. It’s just literally drawing a blank.  It doesn’t feel wrong, of course. I can remember Audrey’s hair, the blonde kitchen curtains of it, but not her hands or her feet, of course. In my mind’s eye, she’s not faceless, she’s just Audrey in all her Audreyness.

So, no. I can’t “see” my face with the scars unless I am looking in the mirror. Lots of times looking in the mirror, I do not notice them. Then one day, they’ll jump out at me and I am shocked I walk around like this, and sad that I have them, and I wish they’d disappear. (Then, they sort of do.)

It shouldn’t be called face blindness. It should be called face forgetfulness. Or prosopagnosia, which is a good word, and very like the disorder in that it’s difficult and off putting and no one has heard of it.

When my students leave the classroom, I say to them, “Make interesting choices.” They wrinkle their noses and look confused. We are all so good. We’ve made good choices. Now we can work on the next new front.

It’s time to revise my manuscript and I’m thinking about the approach. And how it’s exactly like dating. I think. I want to approach the revision in a friendly, upbeat, casual way, with great depth of purpose, but no expectations (limits, pressure, ultimatums). I can’t scare the book away. I can’t be unreliable for it. I am choosing to be affectionate and delicious. A partner for my book. A good partner. The kind I would want for myself.

In the past, I have approached Revising A Book with a very different attitude, one I would describe as terror-driven. I have revised by:

muscling the book to the floor

telling the book everything that is wrong with it and harping on these flaws

failing on a daily basis to see anything decent or funny or good or wise in the book

starting completely over, not even rereading the previous draft (a form of serial monogamy?) because i’m so terrified of its flaws and my ability to fix them

Now, I’m trying not to see the book as flawed, and in need of fixing. I’m trying to what I urge my students to do. Playful redreaming. Recreational loose reviewing. Experimenting. Trying little different things. Gentle moves.

I’m going on a love vacation with my book over Spring Break. We are recommitting to each other. There’s a ceremony and everything.

Writing by hand is, for me, the best way to tell the truth, to get it right. My school is in the middle of a responsible drinking campaign and the theme is “dare to dance sober.” That is exactly what it is like to write by hand.  It’s so naked and real and strange and wrong-feeling; no one else is doing it that way. It feels not how it’s done. But it is.

In my advanced fiction class, I have the students create a collection of linked stories, a chapbook. What works so well is they pick a set of relationships (see Chuck Close, below) and stay with them, and the work gets more focused and complex; each students’ stories fertilize each other.  I think peer feedback is more astute, too–we have more to say because we know the field the person is working, their town has meaning and resonance.

So it finally hit me today. The problem in my multi genre course: no towns. Each piece is a one-off. We’re not feeling the depth and coherence we would in a typical workshop. I hate how all-over-the-place it feels. Next time I teach multi genre, we will each pick a site, a zone, a place, like our hometown, or boys. And write the heck out of it, and into it. The chapbooks at the end of the semester will be amazing focused scrapbooks; the genres will change but there will be this wonderful grounding.  I can’t wait to try it.