I grew up with a record player.
And no, I didn't grow up in the 1970s (I graduated high school in 1992). My generation was the generation of cassette tapes and Walkman. But my father owned a Sears-model turntable, and in one of the great happenstances of my life, he held on to all of his record albums. So, in the 8th grade, I not only loved Guns-N-Roses and Megadeth, but I also adored Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, and Johnny Cash. I could recite the words to Michael Jackson's "Beat It," but I also knew every word to The Statler Brother's "Counting Flowers on the Wall." Those albums opened up worlds to me and my brother, and i can't imagine a greater gift that my father unintentionally gave me. These days, I wonder if the huge collection of books in my house will be to my son what those record albums were to me. Only those with more optimism than I believe that the physical book will survive the current e-book revolution. I'm saddened by this fact because, for the record, I adore books. I love their smell; I love their texture. I love the way print looks on a cream-colored page. I love the feeling of a book's spine on my palm. I love holding a book open while I run a finger down the page, eating the text. But facts, as they say in North Florida (my neck of the woods) is facts, folks. As Johann Hari writes in The Independent: The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books. I couldn't agree more. Our culture has made it easy to sink into the distraction. Smart phones. Smart pads. Netflix on Demand. You name it: a million Weapons of Mass Distraction are right at our fingertips. Reading, after all, is a contact sport, not a pasive activity. Reading, one has to wrangle with the words on the page. One has to make the words make sense, and this kind of mental activity is necessarily a solitary quest. As Hari rightly observes, "To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words." I'm not a believer in the good old days. I don't think they ever existed. I think that what we remember as the good old days are convenient fictions. However, I do believe that culturally speaking, we've lost touch with our desire for what Hari calls "mental silence." It's hard to imagine parsing through a difficult text like The Wasteland while texting a conversation with three friends, Yelping where you ate lunch, and listening to the manufactured ennui of contemporary pop music. Ultimately, I believe that e-readers have a place (and an important place) in our culture. I am the proud owner of an Amazon Kindle, and I've read numerous books on it. My current obsession with hard boiled/noir writing wouldn't have developed outside of Kindle. I just don't have immediate access to those books; Kindle allows that access. However, Kindle has a really crappy browser; so while I'm reading on it I don't feel the need (as I often do) to check my email messages or my friends' Facebook walls. I can't log into CNN.com to see the latest apocalyptic crisis facing the world. Reading on a Kindle is almost like . . . well, reading a printed book. Again, Johann Hari wisely observes" We have now reached that point. And here's the function that the book – the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once – does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. Perhaps one day, my little boy will discover a dusty shelf packed with books by William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Lynda Hull, Larry Brown, and Cormac McCarthy books. Perhaps my son will pull one down, flip open the crumbling cover, and lose himself there, as I did. And maybe, just maybe, these books won't be anachronisms, the kind of thing you can find only at collector's outlets. Maybe the demise of the printed book has been great exaggerated. Vinyl, after all, survives, despite the digital revolution. Even from my cynical perspective, I can always hope that books will, too.
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The end of Seamus Heaney's "A Personal Helicon" in many way sums up the way that I feel about the idea of inspiration:
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing. The image of the poet staring down into the darkness of a dank well certainly makes sense to me as poet. I think that most of us who continue to write do so to try to figure out the world, but we do that figuring out in our context. We--or, should I say I--become the Narcissus of Heaney's verse. But the crux seems to be the action of going to the well. When I think back to when I was doing my graduate coursework (between 2005and 2007), there were days when I wrote sometimes two or three poems. I could just sit down, & the words came from somewhere. Post coursework (and post graduate school), I've found that I rarely have that kind of productivity. That fact has depressed me in the past. However, now, I think I understand. When you're in the pressure cooker that is graduate school, you're thinking about poetry all the time. I went classes in which we read contemporary poetry & talked about contemporary poetics. I read my peers' poems; they read mine. In short, my life revolved around poetry. Outside of the writing community I had in graduate school, I've discovered that if I'm not reading well, then there's no way that I can write well. If I'm not nourishing my poetic voice, then there's no way that I can produce good poems. Scratch that. If I'm not reading, then I can't write. Period. That includes prose, for me, as well. Every so often, a student will stop by my office at school. Usually, some other faculty member has sent him or her to me. They shadow my door, clutching a stack of hand-written poems. I invite them in. They want me to read their work. I do. "Who are some of your favorite poets?" I often ask, expecting the Beats, or Poe, or maybe Jim Caroll. I'm always stunned into silence when the poet tells me, "I don't read poetry." If you don't read poetry, then you don't have a lot of business writing it, much less publishing it. Imagine trying to write a song when you've never heard any music. I know; I know: some hold this theory that an "authentic voice" (whatever that is) might be subdued by reading others' work. That's silly & demonstrably untrue. Great art emerges from great art. Which is not to say that reading good work makes one a good poet. Writing good poetry & finding your voice comes from practice, revision, & yes, failure. So, for me, the Muse or Inspiration isn't what's found at the bottom of Heaney's well in "A Personal Helicon." Instead, inspiration is the will to talk to the well. 2011 has been a year of writing disappointments, at least so far. I've gotten more rejection slips the past six months than I have ever in my writing life. Of course, I have been submitting to high tier journals; so that fact may have something to do with the rejection slips. I didn't get into a writing residence I applied to, a residency I was certain I'd get. I can't seem to write any poetry that doesn't bore me to absolute tears. I've sent out my full-length collection to several places, but I've hard nothing.
What's going on? This too, saith the Good Book (or maybe somewhere else), shall pass. But that passing feels like a mental kidney stone. I have been writing, however, working on a novel. I hate to even type that sentence. I mean--how many people do you know who say, "Oh, I"m working on a novel." Those same folks spend their time playing video games and watching Dr. Phi. That's probably an unfair assessment. Nonetheless, I am writing a novel, a story I've had in my head for quite a while now. It's quasi-literary, quasi-detective story. I'm trying to do what writers like James Lee Burke and Michael Lister do: plant one foot firmly in the terra firma of literary, character-driven fiction & another foot right in the middle of the seedy downtown of Detective Genre Fiction. I'm impressed by writers like Larry Brown & Harry Crews, too, artists who can write compelling, character-driven fiction but who aren't afraid of a gun going off somewhere in the story. Aside: why am I writing a novel? Answer: because I don't have any new poetry to write. Even Seamus Heaney leaves me silent, & he's the poet I most often turn to these days for inspiration. I have around 120 pages or so of usable prose, but every time I write 40 pages, I find myself backtracking to rewrite 20 pages. I wonder if this is the nature of beast, so to speak? It's hard to believe that not fifteen years ago, I considered myself a really good prose writer. I was in my early 20s, & I'd written a longish, talky book about four guys in a band. The name of the band & the name of the novel was "Mystery of the Egg." I've still got a good portion of the manuscript somewhere, but it's terrible: page after page of four guys talking about life, death, sex, drugs, sex, rock-n-roll, sex, drugs, liquor, sex, God, sex, rock-n-roll, & sex. I remember sitting down to work on that book & feeling as though I knew exactly what I was doing. Now, when I sit down to work on my current project, I feel lost a lot of the times. I worry if the prose is crisp, if the action moves, if I'm telling a good story, if the narrative makes sense . . . you name it, & I worry about it. I realize that this self-consciousness isn't helping me. At the same time, however, this hyper criticism makes me think about the book all the time. Was it Harry Crews who said that a novel owns you when you write it? I worry that I'm too much a poet to be a novelist. But at the same time, even as I typed that sentence, I'm not even sure what that means. Am I too focused on the lyric moment to effectively unfold a complex story? Do images trump narrative for me? I don't know. But I do keep writing, & maybe that's the key. Natasha Tretheway hits a homerun over at Poetry Daily today with a pantoum that pretty much blows my mind.
Though I went through a phase in which I was trying to write a lot of formal poetry, I rarely do so these days, prefering to try to find an organic shape for my poetry rather than beginning with a preconceived idea of what the poems should be. However, I remain impressed by the skillful, artful use of form. I'm particularly interested in forms that repeat lines or words. French forms like the sestina, the villanelle, and the canzone fascinate me. A well-written sestina like Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina" dazzles me, and not only because the form is so hard to write well. I'm also taken by Bishop's ability to use the repetitive form to underscore what's happening in the poem. Like the repeated pattern of the sestina form, grief circles back on itself & keeps landing on the same images time & again. Tretheway's use of the pantoum, a Maylasian form is another case in point. "Rotation" is a perfect marriage of form & content. Tretheway imagines her father as a waning moon, turning away from her as he recedes into memory. The careful repetition of the lines mirrors memory, how the speaker returns to this moment again & again. The repeated lines also suggest a kind of mirroring between father & daughter, just as the stanzas mirror each other. On a related note, I have a pantoum in the newly-released Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees, an anthology that incudes some wonderful poetry written by a host of talented poets: Al Maginnes, David Graham, & others. I highly recommend it. [T]he function of poetry, like that of science, can only be fulfilled by the conception of harmonies that become clearer as they grow richer. As the chance note that comes to be supported by a melody becomes in that melody determinate and necessary, and as the melody, when woven into a harmony, is explicated in that harmony and fixed beyond recall; so the single emotion, the fortuitous dream, launched by the poet into the world of recognizable and immortal forms, looks in that world for its ideal supports and affinities. It must find them or else be blown back among the ghosts. The highest ideality is the comprehension of the real. Poetry is not at its best when it depicts a further possible experience, but when it initiates us, by feigning something which as an experience is impossible, into the meaning of the experience which we have actually had.
George Santayana, “The Elements and Function of Poetry,” Aesthetics and the Arts (McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968), edited by Lee A. Jacobus Thank you, Jim Finnegan, for the quote. |
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