Shantytown

 

Shantytown

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
                     - Kevin Wilson

On the other side of the equation are two peeled apples. The first is sweet, the second deliberates quietly with the kettle and the spoon. It's a predictable dilemma: one of us has to go first. How long can we expect the rain to last? Hard to say. But at least the furnace no longer belches flames, and streets are no longer flooded. If you want my opinion, nine crows is three too many. Grind your teeth all you want, it's not going to help you with the dishes. Across the road, the sound of hammering on someone's roof; it must be close to Easter. Do you follow me? The thing about mathematics: it's structured, at least until you start asking questions. Better to close your eyes, exhale, wait for what comes next. My sister Priscilla drank heavily, but she made a mean chocolate brownie, so we forgave her. Waking up from a dream sweating, breathing hard, tangled in the bedsheets. Later on, when it became clear that the sirens were never going to stop, we got in the truck and drove to Albuquerque. Quiet there, but no water to speak of. Watch out for scorpions, though. I keep asking myself if there's a better way to proceed. No answer as yet. Mercifully, the creek has carried the worst of the debris away. Staying on track is not as easy as it you might think it would be. You need a plan a, and a plan b. Diagrams help, but still. We didn't expect the earthquake, did we. No way to tell what's in store. Count to fourteen. Stop. Count back to zero. If you're going to drive, probably best to start early and stop frequently. Up at the silver mine there's a little shop with garlic fries and tasty milkshakes. Not cheap, but what are you saving your money for, anyway? There's a point beyond which even the bravest are unwilling to go. As for the silverware, you may as well just give it away. All these people wearing masks, as if it is going to do any good. Tribal rituals. That guy at the cash register, the one with the eyebrow piercing and the tats. I've had it up to here with lemon bars, with strip malls, with email chains. My mom used to insist that there's something in potatoes you can't get in any other food. Tell you what: you help me out this time, and next weekend I'll take you to Hudson and buy you that new pair of sneakers you've been talking about. Then of course there's Taylor Swift. For or against? You're supposed to steer clear of the third rail. They talk about the light at the end of the tunnel as if it were an actual thing. Vonnegut knew better. So do you. So do I.

Process Reflection:

This is a draft of a work in progress. I have a writing partner. Twice a month or so one of us comes up with a prompt and we both write responses to it. In this case the prompt provided by my partner was the sentence that appears in italics at the top, from Kevin Wilson's novel Now is Not the Time to Panic. What interested me about that particular sentence is that it makes a certain kind of sense using imagery and syntax that is offbeat and oblique. But many of the transitions between words and phrases are unexpected; at least to me as a reader they are. They probably make better sense in context, but as a standalone sentence it is interestingly enigmatic.

There's a pretty long tradition of writing in this vein, what I supposed might be called impressionistic or expressionistic writing, where whatever is being asserted in terms of paraphrasable content is subordinated to the sounds and shapes and surprises of the sequences of words themselves. John Ashbery, for example, made career of writing poems that unfold in such a way that every time you think you're starting to get what he's saying he pulls the rug out from under you. To cite but one example, more or less completely at random (from the middle of a poem called "Love's Old Sweet Song"):

                                                            Meantime, one comes
bearing an envelope that is fresh and blue, one salivates; even
it it's not a stay of execution but an order for the immediate putting into
effect of same there's something to learn. It's not like two cats
ignoring each other in the basement areaway. By that I mean it was
going to lead up to something and then did, quite quickly. Better
than scanning hirsute sands for plumes announcing the arrival
of reinforcements; in those cases one invariably skips forward to a
time in the near future when everybody is happy again and an engagement
ring slips onto a ring finger of its own accord.

Look at any particular phrase, and it makes sense. Look at them in the context of one another, and the sensemaking falls away. There's something on display, but it's not exactly clear what it is. Something about tone, something about feeling, something about a mind at work that isn't interested in showing your or telling you anything you might already know. The parallels with abstract art in general and collage in particular are pretty obvious. (Ashbery himself was a dedicated collage artist. On the side, so to speak.) I am of course no Ashbery, but I often find his approach to writing to be refreshing.

There is also a whole subgenre of prose poems that also present themselves as experiments in obliquity. Here's an example from Robert Bly:

 

A Rusty Tin Can
 

Someone has stepped on this tin can, which now has the shape of a broken cheekbone. It has developed a Franciscan color out in the desert, perhaps some monk who planted apple trees in the absent pastures, near the graveyard of his friends. The can's texture is rough and reminds one of Rommel's neck. When the fingers touch it, they inquire if it is light or heavy. It is both light and heavy like Mrs. Mongrain's novel we just found in the attic, written seventy years ago. None of the characters are real but in any case they're all dead now.

My original goal in writing Shantytown was to just get it going and then write whatever words came into my head, with the intention of undercutting the flow of logic often enough that it would be impossible to make literal sense of it. I used to do this exercise with my high school English students. The assignment was called "Stop Making Sense," and the instructions were to fill up a page with sentences that didn't mean anything, or that at least kept resisting the temptation to mean something. As it happens, that's a lot harder to do than you would think it is. Our brains aren't wired that way. Humans are pattern seekers, and are made uncomfortable when they can't get oriented, either in a world or in a text.

The passage above clocks in at 500 words, which is the initial goal I had set myself. Tonight, in preparation for a meeting of my poetry group tomorrow, I boiled it down into something Ashberyish that might work as a poem. Some time later on, my intention is to go in the other direction, which would be to expand it by another 500 words or so, and see what shows up.