Words in air

There was a great piece on All Things Considered last night about the relationship between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop based on the letters published in Words in Air edited by Thomas Travisano. It is definitely worth listening to, which you can do here.

At one point in the broadcast, talking about Bishop's approach to writing, Jacki Lyden points out, "It wasn't unusual for her poems to take decades to write." I can relate to that.

The poem "Getting On" took close to 20 years to write. I started it before my divorce from my first wife. It was a way for me to explore what was happening between us. I guess I just kept exploring until the poem made sense to me.

Over those 20 years, the poem did not go through any major changes. The metaphor of a migratory journey and the disconnect between the two migrants was obvious from the beginning, as was the general direction of the move from east to west. The images in the poem had sort of all come together over a period of a couple of days that were more or less spent journaling about the history of a failed relationship.

So why did it take 20 years? For one thing I never really had an end to the poem. I thought I did multiple times, but I would let it sit and then go back to it and pick it up and find the ending flat. So I'd rework the images and the lines in the entire poem. I'd take out what I thought was deadwood. I'd rethink this word and then that word. I'd change the cadence, the line breaks. I'd rethink the allusions. And it was all an effort to understand where the poem was going.

During those 20 odd years, my enthusiasm for writing, my energy for making it work, my success, and even my desire to write fluctuated wildly. The one thing that stayed constant was the poem. Then, shortly after I completed the manuscript for my book, I sat down and wrote the end of the poem. It was effortless. It was as if the words were in the air all the time.


the Grandpa's note: I don't really know how to tell the story of my writing career, other than to talk about the things I write. To be honest it helps me when I think about what I do. So thank you, Lilly. And thank you, Braja. I know this probably isn't what you were asking for, but it helps me to put it down. I have one poem (I consider it my best poem) that actually took forty years to write. But I also have some other poems that people have said are pretty good that I basically wrote in an afternoon, or less. I'll talk about them, too.

Just do it

I really like it when people do fun things with words.

I found the following on Gawdess's Viewfinder 365's blog this morning. She was writing about glasses.

when I was a kid
I wore them because I had to
now I wear them because I need them

And here's how Braja at Lost and Found in India headed her post I saw this morning:

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

When I taught freshman English so many years ago, I used to start every term with a story about how I learned to dive.

I didn't learn to swim until I went to college, but then I never spent much time at pools after that. Then one year, when my oldest son was about 10, we suddenly found ourselves one summer with enough time and money to afford a family membership at the local pool.

I'd take the kids over two or three times a week in the morning for their swimming lessons and then we'd spend a couple hours just hanging at the pool. Mainly I'd sit in a deck chair at the edge of the pool reading a novel and watch the kids enjoy themselves in the water.

One day I heard my oldest son shouting at me "Hey, Dad! Look at me!" I looked up from the book but didn't see him anywhere. "Up here! I'm on the diving board!" I looked over at the diving board at the end of the pool but didn't see him. "No! Up here! The high dive!"

I looked up. There he was on the back of the high dive. "Watch!" he shouted and ran forward jumping when he got to the end, legs kicking, arms flailing, splash coming.

He bobbed up out of the water and swam to the edge where I was. "That was great," I said.

"Now you do it!"

"Maybe later. I'm kind of busy right now." (Hey, I was an English major in grad school. So it was actually work.)

"Oh c'mon, Dad. What's the matter? Chicken?" Of course, he said it in that quiet ten-year-old voice that turned every head in the pool in our direction.

Well you can't let your kid call you a chicken in public, so I closed the book and stood up. "Okay," I said. "Keep an eye on your brother while I go up there."

I walked to the end of the pool and started up the ladder of the high dive. About half way up, I remembered I've got this fear of heights. So I stopped, looked up, saw there was nothing to hold onto once I'd get there. Then I looked down, and there were both of my sons standing over by my chair beaming up at me and pointing. So, like an idiot, I went on up the ladder.

I walked out very slowly to the end of the board and looked down--a long, long way down. I don't need to do this, I thought. I don't need to prove anything to a couple of little kids. So I turned around and figured the best way down was the way I came up -- on the ladder.

I hadn't noticed before, but some kind of big truck driver who used to play linebacker in college had come up the ladder behind me. There he was at the top of the ladder, waiting his turn. I thought about saying, Excuse me, but I need to go back down. But before I could get the words out, he said, "Go ahead, buddy, jump."

So there I was, standing at the end of the high dive, looking down -- a long, long way down -- at the pool below, confirming for myself that, yes, I have a fear of heights. I was wondering what makes you stop before you hit your head on the bottom of the pool? And what if a big gust of wind caught me just as I jumped . . ."Jump, Dad!" both boys yelled in unison.

I looked over to where they were standing, and a crowd had started gathering there, some of them shielding their eyes with their hand, and I though I was hearing scattered cries of "Jump, jump." Then I heard somebody laugh.

I looked to the left, and there was the lifeguard sitting on his high chair chuckling at me. The lifeguard was laughing at me. What does that mean when the lifeguard is laughing at you? What's he going to say when you fall into the pool and drown. "Oh I'm sorry. I was laughing so hard I couldn't even get out of my chair." Pretty soon, though, he took pity on me. "Just hold your hands in the air, close your eyes and fall forward," he said.

What? Do I know this guy? Was he in a class I taught? Did I give him a bad grade on a paper? "What?!" I shouted at him.

"Just close your eyes, raise your hands, and fall forward. It won't hurt."

Now when someone tells you it won't hurt, you know they're not telling you the truth. But then I heard the truck driving linebacker behind me muttering. I couldn't tell exactly what he was saying, but it was something like, "Go ahead and jump, buddy, before I come out there and throw you off." I decided it was better to put my fate in the hands of the lifeguard.

So I closed my eyes, raised my hands over my head, and fell forward. For exactly .018 of a second, it felt exhilarating. But then I hit the water. The lifeguard had lied. It hurt. Oh yes.

But at the same time, I felt this wonderful sense of accomplishment. I swam over to the side, pulled myself out of the water and stood facing the beaming face of my son. "That was great, Dad. Do it again!"

Now here's the really stupid part. I thought, Yeah. Why not? Of course by the time I got to the base of the ladder, he'd run off to play with some new found friend. But that was okay. I wasn't doing it for him.

The second time hurt too, but not as much. And the third time hurt a little less. By the fourth falling forward, I kept my eyes open. It's a wonderful feeling to see the world turn upside down like that while you're in free fall. And it didn't hurt, either.

I must have fallen forward another 20 times before we left the pool. Then that evening, I went back over after dinner and fell forward some more. From then on, every chance I got, I would go off the high dive. Of course, I never became an Olympic diver, but I did get to go off the high platform once at the Ohio State varsity pools. (Quite a bit higher than the high dive at the neighborhood pool. We're talking cliff diving in Mexico.) That was a thrill.

Then I'd tell my students, "That's kind of what learning to write is like. You close your eyes and fall forward. Just do it. It may hurt a little at first. But you'll eventually come to actually liking that you can do it."

And that's what I like about the Blogosphere. All these people just falling forward. Just doing it.


And take a look at today's spotlight post (the link's over in the right sidebar) for a nice turn of phrase.

You're going to like this.

Maybe they're Not The Rockefellers, but Rene's posts are absolutely rich. If you've never been to her blog, don't waste any more time. Use the link and head on over to her "big bowl of quirky with a side of sass." You're going to be glad you did. I guarantee it.

A Phun Place

If you haven't been to Phils Phun yet, you should go. Then anytime you need a respite, you'll thank yourself for doing so.

This one's worth the visit.

If you haven't seen the blog Lily's Life yet, what are you waiting for?

Which would you choose?

Here's an entry I made in my poetry journal I don't know how many years ago.

“… for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he [the poet] giveth a perfect picture of it in some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done. So as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind, an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description: which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul, so much as the other doth.” (Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry.” )

For Sidney, poetry had two primary functions—to delight and to teach—which made it superior to both philosophy and history. Philosophy presented truths and virtues unadorned, plainly, which made them non memorable. History was restricted by the necessity to show what was done rather than what should be or should have been done. That does not mean that philosophy or history do not have their value. But poetry can do what neither of them can. Sidney uses Christ’s parable of Dives and Lazarus—the one in hell, the other in the bosom of Abraham – to illustrate his point. Christ could have given a straight forward definition of greed or of virtue. But the lecture would not stay in the mind in the same way as the images of the stories he told. Because they delighted, they could also teach. [A particularly interesting phrasing and one that might bear more explication when looking at 20th century poetry is that philosophy teaches those who are already learned. Poetry teaches the innocent.] To illustrate his point about history, he asks where one would look for virtue -- to a historian's representation of Alexander, considering the historian is bound to tell both good things and bad things that happened, or to the poet’s representation of Ulysses or Achilles.

With Apologies to Yogi

Proof it's never over until it's over. Thank goodness for people who like what they do.

Hip Hop and words

There's something interesting happening on You Tube style Web sites. Here's another one exploring the way cultural language shapes the personal world. It's on a site called ill doctrine.

Novel starts

Mommy's Nintendo is looking for a beginning to her novel. So that's prompted me to think about beginnings. Beginnings are tricky. They're also exciting. They're tricky because they're elusive. Nothing's more daunting than a blank page, and nothing's harder to get down on that page than the opening scene. But there is a trick to it. Forget the scene; write the first sentence. The rest will follow.

Hemingway said he began by writing the truest sentence he knew. I'm not sure that's accurate. On the other hand, Hemingway revised constantly and slavishly. So who knows what really happened to that first "true" sentence? Did it eventually end up in the middle of the story? Did it simply get crossed out? But the point is, nothing follows until that sentence is written.

And that brings me to the exciting part. Once that sentence is down on the page, the possibilities are limitless. The story can go anywhere. But at the same time, the final inevitability that is the end of the story is already there. What lies ahead is the fascinating journey of getting to it, the exploration of limitless possibilities. Who wouldn't want to write? And what do we get when we're done exploring? T. S. Eliot told us at the end of "Little Gidding":

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I have a couple of suggestions for Mommy's Nintendo if she want to use them:

1) Everyone standing around me thought I was a vegetable.

or

2) I have become totally irrelevant.

Feel free to ignore those sentences or to take one or even both and run with them, MN.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

S and I began reading the TE Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom last night. In the introduction, Lawrence states that what we are about to read is a highly subjective account of the Arab revolt and that he has placed himself -- without apology -- in the middle of the narrative in a way that does not necessarily conform to reality. He goes on to say that others, some of whom he has not even mentioned, would tell the story differently. But this is his story, and when the others are ready, they can tell theirs.