Of Palms and Palimpsests

 

To dream is not an evasion,
nor a waste of time or energy,
even if dreams fly
beyond the arc
of human consciousness.

To dream is to be in continual free-fall
to the unexpected, unanticipated next;
dreaming requires no notion or plan
—all is suspense, all is in suspension,
a readiness in unreadiness
or the scratching of a quill
over the sheet of foolscap—
archaic,
but only in the sense
that one might lack the ink
or the penmanship
in the non-present now.

There, we might glance
at our lively page
to find nothing written there, at all;
but the paper has been folded and eared,
screwed up and tossed,
retrieved and smoothed,
folded neatly, then unfolded,
creased in differing directions,
only to be undone back to flat,
worn, now and limp,
lacking enough integrity, perhaps,
for aerodynamic flight.

And all for a lack of direction,
a longing for flight
fighting reticence to height,
so that the dipped reed might record
a thought or trace a silhouette
—or otherwise leave a mark,
even if a splotchy blot

—Ultimately, the run-on sentence
is the avoidance of endings,
especially for those who
can’t figure out how to make a start,
or maybe it is all continuous starting,
without end,
Amen.

While wrapped in these ponderings,
in this landscape of dreaming,
there approached a form
drawing slowly up from a distance,
and soon there appeared a man,
riding an onager.

His gaze was steady and warm,
laugh-lines were in evidence,
and he greeted me like a friend.

Seeing the creased and blank sheet,
he said,

We embody the world we see,

an unfathomable array of beauty
punctuated by experiential pain.

Life is good, so we are taught,
and we can find ourselves

in this goodness as existential truth

even when the willow bends to breaking.

Don’t leave the canvas blank, my friend,
make your mark.

Don’t be afraid to create yourself,
be in the being;
as you have folded
and unfolded,
so all your markings
continue to amend and change.

Simultaneously, we each
know and do not know
where we are and why;
doing is all,
we invent as we go.

The words we utter,
and later record,
live on, even down to the dust
that is carried on the wind;
don’t die with your song trapped inside
—sing out, in full voice.

I’m making my mark, see?
he said,
touching his forehead, his lips, his heart,
don’t hesitate to make yours,
even if you don’t understand the significance
—the run-on sentence is the doing,
not the avoidance;
you can write and overwrite,
paint over and write some more—
it’s all continuous starting,
continuous writing,
without end,
Amen. 

He reached out and took my hand,
and held it for a moment, smiling,
before letting go,
but, as an after-thought,
reached out and touched my forehead.

Then, handing me a palm frond,
while good naturedly
slapping the onager’s flank,
forward and off on their page they went.

Looking down,
I saw that my page was full,
and that words were even running,
puddling in the creases,
accumulating in pools,
to run off the page
across the wadi,
or fly off the page,
up into the sky.

Both knowing and not knowing,
continuously starting,
we run, we fly, and we sing
without end,

Amen

© 2023 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen & songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

This Business of Poetry, Part 10: Concluding Remarks and Welcome to National Poetry Month!

Ten installments of a free on-line poetry course is probably enough. Now that we have entered the month of April, it is National Poetry Month, and time to get back to the writing practice!

I would like to make some concluding remarks, as I bid you adieu, to continue on your journey with words.

This is my first observation: no one can really teach you how to write poetry. Yes, there are many forms and there are lots of mechanics to the many forms, but these can be learned by reading poetry and by studying poetry manuals. (Whenever you see photographs of poets and writers, these images are almost always captured in a room filled with books and papers—they must be reading a lot!) Most poets have an internal music and rhythm that either conforms or defies predefined styles; either way, no one can tell you what you are doing is wrong. Refining and reorganization can be suggested, and I highly recommend you do this with all your work.

Next, the enjoyment of poetry is so extremely subjective that you should never consider you are writing for others—the most authentic work is that which you write for yourself, rather than to try appealing to a public that may never materialize. My personal notion is that poetry evolves from an individual’s deep interaction with the world of experience.

Throughout history, poetry was a pursuit rather than a profession. Poets sent their poems to friends in letters or self-published small collections that would be given as gifts. A few people were able to establish a readership, but the work of most was not available to “the public” until long after the author’s death.

Today, many people have the idea that if they write poetry, they will be able to make a bunch of money or garner attention for themselves. This seldom happens, but if it does, the point of poetry is completely lost, because it is no longer a poet’s conversation with the experiential self.

MFA writing programs have created academic enclaves that tend to be ever so slightly elite or cultish. When you consider that the greatest poets of most ages never took a degree in the art of creative writing, it all looks a little silly and seems to have evolved for the sole purpose of keeping “professional” poets gainfully employed. The writing that results from the academic approach can seem, though it is not always the case,… well, academic, if not sterile or contrived—in order to appeal either to a general public (that may wonder, not knowing any better, if it need appreciate such work, particularly if it does not resonate with a truth that the average reader can sense) or to writers within the enclave.

The other end of the spectrum from the MFA program is the Poetry Slam; this is a live entertainment contest, held at a performance venue. Winners are chosen based on the judges' tastes, audience reactions, and the poets' "performances". These can be raucous affairs, far removed from the demeanor of a more traditional poetry reading. My father attended one recently; he was absolutely appalled. One woman read a poem my father thought was well crafted and beautiful, but she was shouted off the stage. The victor in this slam presented work that had popular appeal, but the work was rough and somewhat crude.

Perhaps there is a lesson in all this. I would say that poetry does not belong in any kind of ghetto. This is not to say that a writer might not become part of a movement, but the movement should never define the work or diminish the individual poet’s accomplishment.

If all you ever do is create a journal of your work, you have achieved something great. You are, after all, writing primarily to please yourself.

Should you decide to enter contests, you might get your work placed in publications, perhaps even win a small honorarium from time to time. Don’t make this, however, the object of your writing. Don’t be afraid to self-publish; this is the time-honored way for poets to expand their readership beyond family and friends. Here again, this should never be the object of your writing, and do not expect to really make any money.

Your poetry should be valuable to you because it is a testimony to your engagement with and observations of the world. (Off the top of your head, can you think of a person whose old personal journals have become published and recognized to be of value in modern times? I can: Leonardo da Vinci; a poet, a painter, a sculptor, an inventor and theorist—a renaissance man for all times!) Think of your writing as a gift that you give to yourself before all others, although you will share it more and more, as time goes on. Beyond this, who knows what can happen?

Your work amounts to the care you have lavished in conversation with yourself on your life’s journey. For that reason alone, it is priceless.

For now, best of everything to you, and WRITE ON!

This Business of Poetry, Part 9: Poet Perspectives on Poetry and Poets

So, we have been plying, even playing in, the desert places, living, observing, breathing, hoping to be inspired, developing our practice of making a daily note and jotting down ideas. This all seems well and good, but is this worth our effort?

Let us hear from poets about writing and the role of the poet.

Kenneth Rexroth, on making money as a poet:

None of us makes a living by poetry, although we think it one of the most important activities man has ever had or could ever hope to have, as long as society remains as it is.

T.S. Eliot, about the mind of a poet:

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

Dana Gioia on the compromise of poetry as art for poetry as job security:

Only a philistine would romanticize the blissfully banished artistic poverty of yesteryear. But a clear-eyed observer must also recognize that by opening the poet's trade to all applicants and by employing writers to do something other than write, institutions have changed the social and economic identity of the poet from artist to educator. In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.

Mary Oliver on what it means to be a poet:

Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, commenting that poetry is a language of philosophy:

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

Jack Gilbert, on the dilemma of modern poets.

A lot of poets don’t have any poems to write. After their first book, what are they going to do? They can’t keep saying their hearts are broken. They start to write poems about childhood. Then what do they do? Some of it is just academic poetry—they learn how to write the poem perfectly. But I don’t think anybody should be criticized because their taste is different from mine. Such poems are extraordinarily deft. There’s a lot of art in them. But I don’t understand where the meat is. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this kind of poetry. It won’t change my life, so why should I read it? Why should I write it?

By the time some writers—particularly poets—are twenty-seven or twenty-eight they’ve often used up the germinal quality that is their writing, the thing that is their heart. Not for the great poets, but for many poets this is true. The inspiration starts to wane. Many have learned enough to cover that with devices or technique or they just go back and write the same stories about their childhood over and over. It’s why so much poetry feels artificial.

This is just a small sampling of comments on This Business of Writing Poetry. There is much more to be said, much more to be read, more to explore and experience, as a reader and writer of poetry.

I would just add that you should be true and authentic to yourself in all your writing—this is what will ultimately make your work meaningful to you and to your readers.

____________

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, 1919.

Fay, Sarah. “The Art of Poetry No. 91”, The Paris Review interviews, 2005.

Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture, “Can Poetry Matter?” Graywolf, 1992.

Oliver, Mary. Georgia Review, Winter 1981, p. 733.

Rexroth, Kenneth. “The Function of Poetry and the 
Place of the Poet in Society”, 1936. http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/poetry-society.htm

Ephemera

I have been reading a wonderful collection of lectures made by e.e. cummings at Harvard. I have only read a small sampling of cummings’ poetry, but I ran across this small Atheneum publication of what cummings called “six nonlectures” (reprinted by permission from Harvard University Press), delivered as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1953.

The lectures talk about cummings’ life and development as an artist. He makes very interesting observations about the role of the poet and trends that he was seeing in the society of his times.

I have been enjoying this small pocket book, but today I am writing about the little surprise I found folded within the later pages of the book. On mint green writing paper, someone had written a poem, using a fountain pen with blue ink. There is no title at the top and neither has the poem’s author identified her or himself.

Here is the poem, in its entirety:

The weather has thrown off its shawl
of wind, of cold, and of rain,
and it’s clothed in garments
of clear and radiant sun.

There isn’t a beast or bird
which in its way doesn’t sing or shout
the weather has thrown off its shawl
of wind, of cold and of rain.

River, fountain and stream
carry prettily
pieces of gold coin,
each one dresses itself anew;
The weather has thrown off its shawl
of wind, of cold and of rain.

What a delight, to have found this little book, in the early days of Spring, only to discover a little poem tucked within its folds!

I cannot help but make the observation that technology does not account for such delights as these.

If you are the author of this poem, let me know who you are—I would love to have a conversation with you about Spring and poetry, fountain pens and books!

This Business of Poetry, Part 8: What To Do In The Desert While You Await Inspiration

SO, here you are and the river is dry, now. You had tons of great material flow out onto the pages, and now there is nothing. Arrrgh! This is frustrating and unavoidable.

What does one do, in this situation? (You realize, of course, that this is the single most-asked question with regard to creative endeavor…) Well, I have a short, one-word answer that I can expand upon:

Live!

Ha, ha, cute joke, say you, what should we really do?

(sigh) So, I guess the expansion is required, and I had better supply one.

Even when you feel like nothing decent is extant in your brain, you should try to write something every day. Don’t kill yourself if you don’t like what you see. You might even pull out those poems that you haven’t been able to finish, for one reason or another, and rework those. If reworking gets irritating, stop and move on to other things, such as:

Hiking
reading
attending concerts
having coffee or tea with friends
housework
gardening
discuss current events with someone

One should fully engage in all the commonplace activities of life. This, after all, is the seed bed for all of life’s inspiring moments. Engaging in activities fully and wholeheartedly is about as inspired as it gets, as any zen practitioner would say.

I alluded to the word practice just now, and also in the last entry in this series. All of your writing is a practice, of sorts. Your creative energy and outpouring is all done in a specific medium, with a specific sort of way that you go about doing the activity, but this is an exercise of the mind, just as physical activity exercises the body, chants, prayers, songs or other devotions exercise the spirit. Each and everything that you do and experience, feel, see or hear is part of your existential databank. I cannot think of any better practice than expanding your horizons with ever more experiences.  Listening is a good part of such practice.

It is always good to take a break, to treat yourself to a change of scene. Any activity that feeds your senses is bound to open you to new channels of thought.

This Business of Poetry, Part 6: Trial and Error, Blank Pages and Failures

So, now, we get on to the writing.

To the writing.

Writing.

And there is all this yawning space on the blank page or screen.

Waiting for you to write.

To write.

Write.

And that, in a nutshell, is all there is to it! (She says, with a false breeziness.)

Writing.

To write.

What that means is that you have to take what has been on your mind, in your mind, over your heart and between your ears, and the silent music that is there must form words that become a music that can be transcribed from your mind to the silence of the page or the screen—for what we are talking about is silent music that moves mysteriously into different silent venues before taking flight as sound. What you may be doing is a kind of translation from the music of your mind into the speech that you have been trained to use and understand.

Easy?

HA!

Here is an example of an idea I had that has never quite made it to completion. This past November, I got an idea. The idea was the title (this happens from time to time), and the development was supposed clarify my idea artfully. HA!

--* White Out *--

That was the idea. I was clear about what I was trying to achieve. The problem was, all I had was the title. The rest of the words were not finding a pathway onto the page.

I had, I suppose, a certain expectation that now that I had the idea and the clarity, the words would pour out. But they didn’t.

[I will digress for a moment to talk about the revelatory experience that can be an aspect of writing. This is an aspect that cannot be taken for granted. It is an aspect that cannot be overlooked. If you believe in something we will call, for the sake of discussion, “Divine Creation” and that life is somehow an integral weaving of communicative energies, then it can only seem natural that, if nothing else, your writing is a “note to self” of a sort.

I have done some work that I felt sure I had conceived and crafted, only to read it later be astonished at what bounced off the page at me. What I am saying is that the messages that bounce off the page can frequently be other than what you thought you were meticulously crafted. Be prepared for this. Be prepared to be amazed.

On the other hand, be prepared for this to be an unusual circumstance.]

So, the words weren’t pouring out, and I thought, gee, I guess I should make the words happen. So, I began…

“White Out” – Draft Notes

white flakes, snow moon

purify widening circles

like waves, rings

cause the negative cast

to surrender shadow to void

wideness of truth

“White Out” – Draft 1

If light is as easy as breath,
and liquid as the sea of stars
shining over the south seas,
then I can believe light wills
its journey to  fill the darkness

to white out and thus

cause each negative cast

surrender its shadowy mantle
for the wider array of truth.

If light is as easy as breath,

wrapped in the mantle of light

we shall be blind  to differences,

keener to our similar roles,

being, as we would, all of us,

points of light, pointing to one light

Light reaches out from a sea of stars…

…

    …

        …

 UGH!

No, this was not flowing. It was not feeling good. When you feel like what you are doing isn’t working, it is best to move on and come back to it.

(sigh)

So, I came back to it several days later. This time, I was armed with an epigraph that I thought might be helpful in channeling the proper words onto the page.

“White Out” – Draft 2 Notes

Epigraph: John 1:51

And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending…”

“White Out” – Draft 2

One star,

one light;

one night

gives flight

to possibility.

Sparks fly,

moons sigh,
singing tales

of probable fails.

Positives shout:
white out
instances
of differences
to abiligility.  [yes, this is a neologism…]

Star lighting,
fly sighing,
shout outing
among any snowy shores…

…

    …

        …

(sigh)

No. It was just not happening, so I abandoned that draft.

I came back later.

“White Out” – Draft 3 Notes

What if an angel came in answer to a prayer? – refigure the piece as a question.

“White Out” – Draft 3

Moonlight frames her
as she scans the field.
Her visibility perturbs her not

[and then I remember a similar line in a Wilfred Owen poem,
            which disturbs me, but I keep going…]

--shameless self-promotion
is neither desired nor needed needed nor desired;
she is well-known,
if little understood—

outstanding in her field…

…

   …

      …

I now realize that I am writing about an owl. I ended up writing two poems called Night and Day from that material.

[So here is where I mention, casually, that everything you put down could actually end up being used and part of a completed poem someday, with patience and perseverance. So don’t tear the sheets of paper up and ball them up. Nothing need go to waste.]

I set “White Out” aside for a number of weeks.

In the meanwhile, my notebook records meeting minutes, grocery lists, calendar items and drafts of other poems that are now complete.

I return to my “White Out” – Draft 3 Notes,  thinking I can begin again.

(What if an angel came in answer to a prayer? – refigure the piece as a question.)

“White Out” – Draft 4

Complete white out
is what we need.

Answer our prayer,
if you dare,

Dear Angel,
do this deed;
prove wrong
the naysayer,
and all who clutch at doubt.

I feel you heed
by warmth of music,
and then you fall—
a daystar into the sea.

Your ribbon of flame
freezes the waters to ice,
reflection which blinds
as surely as viewing the sun
or sighting burning bush.

In white out,
deprived…

…

   …

       …

no. No. NO!  That’s not it.

(sigh)

Have I finished “White Out”? No. I have hopes.

Meanwhile, I have written a number of essays and other poems, have premiered a new piece of music, as wells as published some short interviews and a chapbook.  And I keep observing and reading and thinking.

You do what you do and the branches of the tree eventually bear fruit. Some of the fruit is easier to bring forth, but that is only normal.

Keep on writing!

----

Next time: Flow, Wherein the words flow onto the page

This Business of Poetry, Part 5: Practice and Meditation, continued—10 Poems That Have Changed Your Life

I spotted this book at a garage sale: 10 Poems That Will Change Your Life. The title was both intriguing and audacious. I disagreed with the premise implied by the title, but I had to read it—the price was right, and I needed to see what the choices were and how the anthologist asserted each poem’s significance as a “life changer”.

Let me start by saying that I completely agree with the idea that interacting with poetry can be a life altering, perspective changing enterprise. I firmly believe this. Czeslew Milosz’s poem “Dedication” positively aches with these lines:

What poetry does not

save  a nation

 or a people?

I believe in the uplifting and healing power of poetry. Poetry is, for one thing, a compendium of human history, of humanity’s struggle, resilience and survival, if not also of transcendence.

I am suspicious, however, of a programmatic approach—to me this smacks of didacticism, rather than a sincere attempt at guiding others toward portals and new ways of thinking. This, incidentally, is why I tend to read books of literary criticism with a skeptical eye.

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are among the most beautiful poetic testaments ever crafted, but if you know that Eliot was an elite member of the intelligentsia of his time, and that he was writing with an eye toward programming others of his rank to work in support of the prevailing Tory, oligarchic “power elite”, this rather colors one’s reading of the work, doesn’t it?

I will not write an apologia for Eliot; he was a class-conscious bigot who used his position in the publishing world to promote philosophies for the uncommon man, and that these philosophies were conveniently conformative and acceptable to what the ruling class wanted the public to think. There is no doubt that he placed himself in a position of authority among the intelligentsia, and allowed his work to be used as a political tool. While I find it repugnant that he used his undeniable talent and vision to promulgate a sociopolitical cultural agenda, I cannot deny that the Four Quartets are a brilliantly crafted collection of works. These poems are utterly beautiful, and the messages they convey (if you don’t follow up on all the references; these would require several volumes of annotation and particular readings of American and British history) are ultimately transformative.

What I suggest is that if you encounter this body of work by Eliot without benefit (or detriment) of the foreknowledge of Eliot’s cultural agenda, you are likely to have a much different, more uplifting and transcendent reading of the pieces than after you have read a biography of Eliot, literary criticism of his work by other authors and one or two of his plays, which positively ooze with disdain for the common man. It is too bad that Eliot set himself apart to be an arbiter and that his intended audience was so small and narrow. It is also too bad that one must have read so much beforehand to really understand what Eliot meant by all of what he wrote in those four final poetic writings of his career.

The work stands on its own and transcends the purpose its author made for it. I treasure these works because of their unintended message to me.

Returning to my thoughts on 10 Poems That Will Change Your Life, the well-intentioned author of this small anthology spends much of the space in the book telling us how the ten selections were life altering for him. If you remove that commentary, the biographies of the authors of the poems and the suggested further reading, then this book really offers very little for its retail price of $14.00 plus applicable sales tax. You and I could spend that much money on a much larger anthology or on the collected works of a single author, then to mull over the work on our own, without being told what to think about it.

I considered the selection of poems offered, and wondered at it. Yes, there are some interesting selections. Whitman’s Song of Myself makes total sense. Mary Oliver’s The Journey is also a powerful statement. But out of all the 27,000 lines of poetry by Rumi, why select Zero Circle?  And, if you are presenting one poem by a Persian poet, why then take a selection from another Persian poet? Why not represent a Chinese or Japanese zen poet?

The small sampling in this thin volume is a highly subjective one, and while the dust jacket claims they are “astonishing poems” that “can inspire you to live what you always knew in your bones, but never had the words for”, I wonder. In fact, I think the book failed to do that for the original owner, which is why I found it at the garage sale. Ultimately, the book failed to do that for me, as well. Why should I care about how the anthologist experienced these poems?

I long ago came to the conclusion that individuals cannot (although they try to do so) buy or sell personal experience. The people who try to sell their own experience to others are false prophets; the people who try to buy someone else’s experience are abdicating their own. The publishing industry should heed this, if it wants to survive.

To his credit, the anthologist does acknowledge his small sampling to be a starting point, but I think he missed something by not proposing a next step, which I will do now: to create a practice around the poetry that inspires you.

How would such a practice work? You could start with a short list of poems that have inspired you. Copy them into a notebook and think about them. Recognizing that such exercises are naturally subjective, write what you think about the poems, cite reasons why you love them and why they inspire you. Use this as springboard to your own thinking, thought process, analysis and writing.

A friend of mine told me that she had shown her work to a mentor who offered the criticism that too much of her life was reflected in the writing!!! Well, for heaven’s sake, your writing is a subjective experience, and it should be—it is your experience!

When asked by someone “What should I write?” the author advised, “Write what you know.”

Amen.

___________

Next time: Trial and Error, Blank Pages and Failures

This Business of Poetry, Part 4: Peak Experiences, the Abyss and Everything Between; Writing as Meditation Practice

Last time, we talked about experience and awareness, as well as how the poetic mind engages with experience in reflection.

This time I want to make it crystal clear that every kind of experience is fair game for the poet. When everything is not “coming up roses”, that may be as good a time as any to think and write about what is happening in your life. Peak experiences are fabulous, if short lived in the scheme of things and infrequent; one peak experience may have to do for a lifetime. We may experience many more moments of pain, sorrow, horror or otherwise abysmal moments; writing about these can help us through crisis and toward healing.

Rumi is the best selling dead poet ever! The ecstasy of his revelatory conversational relationship with Shams, and the agony of Shams’ departure were the food that fueled, during the next twenty or more years of Rumi’s life, no less that 27,000 lines of poetic text and additional prose, recorded by amanuenses.

Carlo Gesualdo, an Italian nobleman of the late Renaissance period, is known today for two things: he was a murderer, and he wrote some of the most tortured chromatic music for choirs to sing. Those pieces that were secular undoubtedly settings of texts he wrote. Here is an example of one from Volume IV of Gesualdo’s collected madrigals for five voices:

Io tacerò

Io tacerò, ma nel silenzio mio,


La lagrime i sospiri, 


Diranno i miei martiri. 


Ma s’avverrà ch’io mora, 


Griderà poi per me la morte ancora.



(I will keep quiet, yet in my silence, 


My tears and sighs, 


Shall tell of my pain. 


And if I should die,


Death shall cry out for me once again.)



In van dunque, o crudele, 


Vuoi che’l mio duol e’l tuo rigor si cele. 


Poi che mia cruda sorte 


Da la voce al silenzio ed a la morate.



(Thus in vain, oh cruel one, 


Yearn you for my pain and your harshness to be hidden. 


Since my cruel fate 


Gives voice to silence and to death.)¹

I get the feeling Gesualdo wasn’t a fun guy to be around.

Emily Dickinson could write of pain:

Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect

When it began, or if there was

A time when it was not.

It has no future but itself,

Its infinite realms contain


Its past, enlightened to perceive


New periods of pain.

But she also of  an envisioned joy:

Me! Come! My dazzled face

In such a shining place!

Me! Hear! My foreign ear

The sounds of welcome near!

The saints shall meet

Our bashful feet.

My holiday shall be

That they remember me;

My paradise, the fame

That they pronounce my name.

The point I make is that life’s joys and pains can most assuredly be commemorated in your writing, from among an infinite combination of words. All that is needed is the courage to explore the landscape of your dreams and feelings and experiences. And it does take courage.

After tragedy, some people find they cannot express themselves. I know I have difficulty; the writing that results can seem stilted or desultory, unfocused. This may be due to depression or a feeling of numbness. The Canadian writer, Mordecai Richler said, bluntly,

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustrations that it creates.

Maxwell Perkins, who was editor for Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, put it this way:

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

There is truth to this; while you write, you are committing bits of yourself to paper or to a digital screen. There is an element of self-emptying to writing that may ultimately be medicinal, but it could be difficult to arrive at that point. I cannot cite any document or study that will prove what I say; all I can tell you is that I have experienced this for myself.

How do we process our joys, tragedies and terrors through writing? Well, it cannot be too obvious that we need to write. You need to write something everyday in order to see results and completions over time. Author Ann Lamott puts it this way, in her wonderful book Bird By Bird:

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

Elsewhere, she also said:

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

The hardest part of writing is letting go (or committing) so that you can “throw yourself away,” as Perkins suggested, even if what you are letting go of is what you love the most or has given you the greatest pain.

Writing must be practiced just as any other skill is practiced. How do I do it? Well, to start with, the size of my purse is dictated by whether it will hold a simple composition notebook; I tend to haul one around with me all the time. It has a pencil stuck inside it. I write everything in the notebook: dreams, meeting minutes, ideas, shopping lists, ideas for poems and actual poem drafts. This is my practice, anytime, anywhere. You never know what will happen; every place can offer inspiration, and anything you write down could be further developed later.

Simply put, writing and refining what you write is the practice—and the meditation. Whether you end up with anything you would want to publish is not the point.

________

¹ English translation by Matthew Smyth

______

Next time:  Practice and Meditation, continued—10 Poems That Have Changed Your Life

This Business of Poetry, Part 3: Thought, Word and Deed; Metaphor and Imagination

“What you seek is like music. It sweeps you aloft so that you are moving in glory among the stars. Take time to find the unseen.”

--from A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Last time, we explored the question of what sort of person might be a poet. Now, let’s turn our attention to the poetic existence. Such existence is all about mental attention and where you turn yours.

There are certain mental activities that take place within both hemispheres of the brain; music and poetry are among these activities. Engagement with what is through the lens of possibility might also be a way to describe this. (Flights of your fancy pass through landscapes of dream and imagination; where do they lead you?)

I am sure these are bold statements to make, without recourse to scientific data, neurological comparisons or a degree in biochemistry, but my intuition tells me this is so.

We go about our daily activities, some reflexively or by rote, some by thought and plan. Throughout our days, we may follow a daily routine that seems tedious, and yet each day is different—there is always something irregular punctuating the regular activities. We think, we speak, we act and we witness; later our minds review these actions and happenings, categorizing, analyzing and judging. This is the activity of the left hemisphere of the brain, the center of language, logic and order.

Meanwhile, the right hemisphere of the brain may engage with the remembrance of these activities in a completely different manner than the left hemisphere. This other hemisphere processes experience as imagery, symbolism, impression; reflections tend to be of the big picture variety, leaping from idea to idea in a more random manner. Shades, shadows, colors, sounds, shapes and silence that may have been among the daily experiences run through this entirely different filtering process.

Left hemisphere and right hemisphere register experience differently, and to that I say “vive la difference”! The right hemisphere has a natural tendency to lavish attention on much smaller details (moments of surprise, apprehension of beauty, tiny joys, slights, hurtful words from someone, seeing someone act in a mean or careless way and other seemingly useless bits of awareness that flow through our days). When the mind is engaged in this way, the person, embedded or immersed in experience, is likely to be completely sincere and guileless—and free.

Gaston Bachelard, a French mathematician and chemist who turned his attention to poetics (joining science, aesthetics and psychoanalysis) had this to say about the way our experience, embedded in the memory as imagery, transcends the original experience:

From the standpoint of its will to shape experience, the literary image is a physical reality that has its own relief. More precisely, it is the psychic relief, the multi-leveled psyche. It furrows or it raises; it finds a depth or suggests an elevation; it rises or falls between heaven and earth. It is polyphonic because it is poly-semantic. If meanings become too profuse, it can fall to word-play. If it restricts itself to a single meaning, it can fall into didacticism. The true poet avoids both dangers. He plays and he teaches. In him, the word reflects and reflows; in him time begins to wait. ¹

A very fancy and beautiful way to talk about a poet’s main exercise with regard to the images derived from experience: metaphor.

It may be unnecessary for me to offer this explanation, but etymologically, metaphor comes from meta, which means “transcendent”, and pherein, which means “carry”. The word metaphor means to “carry beyond”.  Aristotle assigned the sense of meaning for metaphor that we have today:

—

“The converted use of a word (metaphor) as the application of one word to signify another, where the former is usually used to mean something else.” ²

Why? Why is metaphor the poet’s main exercise?

We experience mostly in part, and even that part we cannot claim to truly understand or own. Our experience of something is not the thing itself. Metaphor points the way to a kind of definition—even revelation—that might make an impression on someone else, or perhaps offer an apprehension of the experience.

Even so, as beautiful as an apprehension may be, it continues to elude being the thing itself. One cannot buy or trade experience (although you wouldn’t know that by looking at self-help and spirituality sections of any bookstore or library). Your experience is your own, period. The prophet Isaiah sums this up rather well (Isaiah 55: 8-9 NIV):

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

This is so for everyone. If you want to try to make someone understand your experience, you have to communicated by using metaphors or analogies the other person might understand.

We’ve talked about the role of experience and the role of metaphor; what we haven’t touched on is why we would waste our time engaging in poetic streams of thought. Many people have addressed this in books about writing, literary criticism and psychology.

Ultimately, I think that we can boil all this down to a few essential reasons. Firstly, it is mental stimulus that is a byproduct of awareness; everyone needs to exercise the brain cells. Secondly, writing is therapeutic in the sense that the kernel you start with is a happening that captivates your attention and the exercise of writing helps you to work through that captivation (whether it is a positive or negative one). 

Thirdly, I think of writing as a meditation practice. I set aside time to do this (granted, sometimes I actually have to shove aside other obligations in order to make time for writing), and I allow my right brain hemisphere to explore, as uninhibited by the left hemisphere as possible. How I do this is an experience I can describe, but not impart in a way that would be useful for anyone trying to “learn” how to do it. Personal discovery of how to “get in the zone” is likely an integral part of the practice.

It may be a matter of, as the epigraph above suggests, taking the time to pay attention to “the unseen”.

___

¹ Bachelard, Gaston. L’Air et les songes (Librarie José Corti, 1962). pp 286-288

² Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher (London: Macmillan and Co., 1902), 77-79.

___

Next time: Peak Experiences, the Abyss and Everything in Between,
Writing as Meditation Practice

… Meanwhile, when something catches your attention, write it down and keep thinking about it!