Rachel Cusk, Second Place (I)

 

This evening, in preparation for a meeting of my book group coming up this Friday,  I finished re-reading Rachel Cusk's book Second Place. I had read it for the first time back in November and found it intriguing. Here are some of the preliminary notes I made at that time:

The Cusk book was inward and awkward and psychologically astute in ways that I have come to expect from her. The narrator is M, a middle-aged woman who has had a long-time fixation on a painter she refers to only as L, whose work spoke to her when she first saw it when she was a young woman. Now she's living with her husband Tony along a marsh on a farm of sorts that has an extra cottage called the Second Place. She winds up writing a number of times to the artist asking him if he'd like to visit; she thinks he would find the landscape inspiring, as she does. She also seems to be entertaining the hope that they will become friends, if not lovers. She hears nothing for a long time. Then she gets word that he is coming, and when he shows up, he's not alone; he's brought along a beautiful young woman named Brett. Most of the book has to do with the time he spends there, and the various disconnects between the narrator and L. There are subplots involving her daughter Justine and her husband Kurt, who have moved in just before L arrives. Justine is befriended by Brett, Kurt spends a period of time as a kind of assistant to Tony on the farm, and L navigates a series of psychological and physical crises, including a having, toward the end of the book, a stroke that radically re-shapes his life and the lives of all the people around him. The bulk of the book consists of interior monologue  rendered as direct address toward someone identified only as Jeffers. We're inside the narrator's head the whole time, but the conceit is that M is not talking to us, she's talking to Jeffers, and we are thus in the oddly oblique position of seeming to be listening in on the one-sided conversation. M is clearly a very intelligent and articulate woman who as a narrator and the conduct of her life is ruthless in pursuit of existential understanding. Her upbringing and the events of her life have led her to be suspicious of men on the one hand and family on the other. Her hopes and expectations of finding some formula for freedom and happiness in her life are more or less consistently thwarted by her own impulsive behaviors and insecurities. I liked the feel of the book as I was reading it, the way that the narrative never seemed to move in the ways in might be expected to move, but was insistently making its own way in its own time. It's the kind of book that would necessitate re-reading, and some not insignificant amount of study, to fully appreciate. I may go down that road, I'm not sure. At least enough to pull some quotes and think them over. Cusk has some interesting things to say about being a woman and about being an artist and about how hard it is to make sense of anything when you are in the middle of it.

I guess I'd say after a second reading that I feel the same way, only more so. There are, as Francis Bacon famously noted, lots of ways of to read. ("...some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested"). This is a book that I suppose can be read for pleasure. That's the way I read it the first time. I was intrigued by these particular characters in this particular situation, and I was reading mostly to find out what happened. Which was fine at the time. But on second reading, knowing what was going to happen, I was much more attuned to the multi-layered psychological dynamics of the characters individually and in their interactions with one another: M and Justine. M and Tony. M and L. Brett and Tony. Brett and M. Justine and Kurt. Tony and L. And so on. I feel like for me to fully grok what is going on in the book, I'm going to have to go back and start pulling quotes that relate to particular themes and laying them out on paper and making charts and graphs in order to be able to figure them out. In other words, to be the reader that this book needs me to be, I've got a lot of work to do, quite probably more work than many readers would likely want to sign up for. Cusk is a thoughtful, demanding writer, and my sense is that there are rewards to be had in meeting her halfway.


So fine. But wait, there's more. As it turns out—and this is something I did not become aware of until I was halfway through my second reading of the book—the basic plot of Cusk's book has been appropriated from Lorenzo in Taos, an early 20th century novel by an American writer I had never heard of named Mabel Dodge Luhan. (Apparently, in at least one of the editions of Second Place there is an endnote in which Cusk acknowledges the primary source that she is working from. But that endnote does not appear in my paperback version of the text, and so I wasn't aware of it until I started perusing the reviews of Second Place.) Cusk uses the scaffolding of that book's plot in much the same way that Barbara Kingsolver uses David Copperfield as the template for Demon Copperhead, which I put aside midway through in order to re-read Second Place. So if I really wanted to do my due diligence, I suppose I would need to read Lorenzo in Taos as well. Not sure that's gonna happen. Obsessive-compulsive as I may be, I have to set myself some limits, especially inasmuch as I have a stack of about twenty other books waiting for me on my nightstand.

Anyway this is my preliminary attempt to process Second Place. My tentative plan is to do some of that culling and graphing and charting, then talk with my group, and come back with some further thoughts next week. Till then...


 

Artifactual

 

 

 Artifactual

What's the point? What if
there is no point? What if
the pointlessness is the point?
At what point does whether
or not there is a point become
a pointless question to even ask?


Do you feel like you owe it
to yourself to be able to offer
some kind of explanation?
What is there you can say?
It is, as they say, what it is:
right there in black and white:


Why this and not that? Why not
something else entirely?
Fact is, I can't say. I'm not sure
myself. I am just trying to make
space for something to exist
where before there was nothing.

 

Process Reflection:

I have for some years enjoyed playing around with mark-making in various contexts. One of the simplest forms of mark-making is simply doodling, and at departmental and administrative meetings I found that doodling gave me something to occupy the part of my brain that was going quietly crazy while my left brain was trying to keep up with the flow of the conversation. It's a simple process: apply the point of the pen to the paper, and see what wants to show up. The stakes are low, and if what you have drawn doesn't pass muster, who cares? It still feels good while you are doing it. At least it does to me.

At some point I began, in the comfort and privacy of my study, trying more ambitious projects for which I felt the term "doodling" was reductive and dismissive. I preferred to think of them as black-and-white drawings. In some cases those drawings included some recognizable real-world elements. In many cases they did not. (Samples here and here.) I was primarily interested in exploring the ways in which these two simple elements, black and white, interact with one another, particularly in the negative spaces they create for one another. And the time I spent drawing began to feel a lot like a meditation exercise for me as well; I feel calmed and focused while drawing, and I'm often pleased with the results even when I can understand why someone else might not see them as being "art" in any sense of the word they might be familiar with.

The other night I happened to be in the mood to draw, but as it happened I had two sheets of blank paper in front of me rather than one, and while I drew I was also thinking about what to write for the weekly meeting of the poetry group that I host on zoom. So while I was drawing I began turning over in my mind the whole question of the value and worth of what I was doing, both as an artist as a writer, and as the words presented themselves I write them down, and as the movement of the lines proceeded I did that as well, more or less contrapuntally. The finished drawing is above. In writing the words, I was aware of trying to mimic, in a playful manner, in the sequences of the sounds the repetitive movements and patterns in the drawing. 

The next morning I took the lines I had written and did several revisions, of which the poem you see above is the product, but quite probably not the end product. I have yet to get feedback on the poem from my group. But it seems to me at this intermediate point that the poem is driving at something that I feel is at the core of both drawing and writing: they are disciplines based on a certain sort of magic, which is to make something out of nothing. And I do believe that what results from any particular exercise need not necessarily meet anyone else's criteria of excellence. It's quite enough for me that it makes me feel good when I'm done with it.
 

 

 

The Death of the Essay? I Think Not.

 

There has been a raft of articles in the last few weeks about ChatGPT and the threat that it supposedly represents to high school and college teachers. There's been much weeping and gnashing of teeth about how the threat posed to academia by artificial intelligence. The titles of many of the articles tend to be alarmist: "The End of English!" "The Essay is Dead!" Teachers are quizzing one another about What Is To Be Done. How will we be able to tell if the students are cheating? Do we go back to making students write essays by hand? Should we just stop having students write at all?

All of this hand-wringing is symptom of a much deeper set of problems that has been around since long before the advent of ChatGPT. And those problems have to do with 1) the ways in which schools have historically been teaching writing, 2) the purposes for which student writing have been employed, and 3) the lessons that students have been absorbing after being subjected to those practices.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that most teachers treat the essay as an evaluative instrument. The purpose of assigning an essay is to put the student in the position of being able to demonstrate whether or not s/he has learned something that the teacher has determined to be of importance. Not only is the content prescribed, but the form as well. Particular attention must be paid to the shape of the essay and to each of the paragraphs within it. The classic model is the five-paragraph thesis essay, a genre of writing that is not valued and pretty much does not exist outside of the confines of the classroom. (If you are in doubt about that, pick up any copy of Best American Essays published in the last twenty years and see how many five-paragraph thesis essays you find.)

In many cases there are other arbitrary rules. The writer must affect a kind of disembodied professorial objectivity. No use of the pronoun "I." No forms of the verb "to be." Each paragraph must have a topic sentence with the following sentences offering supporting details. And so on. Students who follow these rules are rewarded with A's, which they take to mean that they are good at writing. Students who don't follow the rules are penalized with low grades, which they take to mean that they are not good writers. Both conclusions are demonstrably wrong. But that is not the fault of the students, it's a fault baked into the system.

So what's wrong with the system? The problem is that it starts with a narrow, transactional view of writing and hammers it home early and often. Many students have, by the time they reach middle school, become convinced that the ONLY reason one would ever choose to write is when required to do so by a teacher. A student who has interiorized that attitude toward writing is exactly the kind of student who would be delighted to be able to turn over the grunt work over to a robot. 

I worked with a first-year teacher some years ago who shocked our English department by objecting to the school's plagiarism policy, on the grounds that he himself had plagiarized often in college, because he saw plagiarism as a very effective time management device. And if you squint at it just right, you can see the logic of his position. "I've a lot of demands on my time. Some of the things I have to do are getting in the way of the things I want to do. So why shouldn't I budget my time accordingly?" The simple fact was that he didn't see writing as something valuable for him, but only as something valuable for the teacher.

I spent most of my career as a middle school and high school English teacher trying to give students a different sense of the purposes and possibilities of writing. Part of that effort is of course to make the principled case that writing is ideally something that you do for yourself, in order to teach yourself how to think more clearly and more deeply about whatever it is that you actually do care about. Ask a room full of students of an age whether there is anyone who believes that it's better to be a thoughtless person than a thoughtful person, and it's unlikely you'll get any takers. I've asked that question every year, and I've never had any.

So what does writing have to do with thoughtfulness? A lot, as it turns out.

First of all, as almost all those who write regularly because they choose to understand, writing is generative of thought. Students assume, largely because their teachers have repeatedly told them so, that you must know what you are going to say before you write. (Teachers teach outlining for exactly this reason, and many require students to have an outline before they begin an essay or even a story.) But from my own personal experience, and from the testimony of many many writers, that is exactly wrong. If you already know exactly what you are going to write, there's not much point to writing it. On the other hand, if you simply make it a point of discipline to regularly put pen to paper (or fingers to the keyboard) and see what happens, you will often find yourself writing something you would never have thought of outside the context of the act of writing itself. If you are very lucky, you will find yourself writing something that comes as a complete and pleasant surprise to you.

Every year I ask the students in my classes how many of them have had the experience of having what they thought was a good idea and then finding, when they try to write it out, that it's not coming out so well. All the hands go up. Then I ask How many of you have had the experience of sitting down to write and having the writing turn out to me much better than what you had anticipated it would be, so much so that it fills you with surprise and happiness? Once in a great while a hand or two will go up, but not often. And that's a shame. Because the reason most students have never had that experience is that their teachers have never provided them with the opportunity to do so.

A second reason that writing fosters good thinking is that writing makes thinking hold still, which allows you to reconsider and re-evaluate your first thoughts and at least potentially find your way to second (and maybe third or fourth) thoughts. Once you have something on paper that will hold still long enough for you to consider it, opportunities arise for you to revise your writing for the better. One of my favorite articulations of the power of re-vision is from David Huddle, in his excellent essay "Let's Say You Wrote Badly This Morning":

Revision is the hope you hold out for yourself to make something beautiful tomorrow though you didn’t quite manage it today.  Revision is democracy’s literary method, the tool that allows an ordinary person to aspire to extraordinary achievement.

I especially like that he links the revision of writing—and thinking—to the idea of democracy. A well-informed, well-read, thoughtful citizenry is at the heart of the whole notion of democracy. If people do not think clearly and do not understand what they are defending (or more often, these days, attacking), then democracy itself is in trouble. Q.E.D. (Yes, I am aware that he was not using "democracy" in its overtly political sense here, but the parallel still holds.)
 

The salient point, Allen Ginsburg notwithstanding, is that first thoughts are in fact very rarely best thoughts. I believe it's critically important for teachers to encourage students to put their first thoughts into words. But that's only one step in a multi-part process that might involve any number of followup steps. One that I often have my students rehearse is to ask them, once they have written something that they think works, to write at the bottom of the page, But there's another way of looking at it, and then go ahead and try a counter-argument on for size. The ability to shift your point of view and consider lines of thought different than your own is perhaps the single most important critical thinking skill students can be encouraged to develop. So why don't we give them practice in doing that?

Another very instructive followup step that students can benefit from practicing is simply to take something they have written—an essay, a poem, a story, whatever—and set out to cut it by twenty percent. The operative thinking and writing skill here is concision. If you can say the same thing in 240 words that you were saying in 300, that's a gain in forcefulness and clarity. It doesn't matter, really, whether you hit twenty percent on the head. What is important is that at some point in the writing process you spend time weighing each sentence, each phrase, each word and asking yourself Is this necessary? This is how one can become more thoughtful about what one writes.

Of course, none of what I am advocating for here makes any sense at all if you are simply trying to get an assignment—an assignment that you did not ask for and do not care about— over with.

I read a lot of commentary by teachers now about how they are going to have to change the prompts they are giving in order to make it harder for students to cheat. Well, how about this for a prompt?

Every Tuesday and Friday I would like you to hand in a "writing sample" that you have written on any subject that interests you. It can be in any form or genre you like: a literary essay, a personal narrative, a story, one or more poems, a dramatic skit, a chapter of a novel. The only constraints are that 1) it should be your own, current work (going back and pulling old pieces of writing off the computer is not acceptable) and 2) that it should represent a minimum of 20-30 minutes of time on task. Be aware of the fact that some of your classmates will do more.

I have employed this exact prompt for more than thirty years. The writing that resulted varies wildly from student to student. I do not attempt to "grade" these pieces of writing; I simply give the students written and verbal feedback about what I saw developing on the paper. Some teachers are entirely freaked out by the prospect of having students doing all different kinds of writing all over the place. How am I supposed to evaluate it? they cry. But now we're back to writing primarily as a vehicle for assessment. One obvious response to the question is to accept the fact that not every piece of writing needs to be assessed or revised. Revision begins with selection. Once a student has five or ten pieces of writing on file it makes all the sense in the world to ask them to pick one that they feel good about and work on it some more. And that's where any feedback they might get from their peers or from the teacher may be useful and relevant. Otherwise they write, they get a grade, and it's over with. No further thinking required or expected.
 

My purpose in using an open-ended prompt of this kind is to get myself as a teacher out of the position of being the one to determine what it is important to write, how it is to be written, and whether it is worth further revision. Making those kinds of decisions in advance for students has the effect of crippling their ability to think and write on their own.

Some years ago, an educational consultant named Everett Kline came to the school where I was teaching to speak to the faculty on the subject of "authentic assessment." At that point, I had been teaching for more than 25 years. Like most teachers, I had throughout my career put in an inordinate amount of planning time into designing assessments, none of which were particularly well received by the students. What Kline said literally blew the circuits in my brain. He said, "If you want to know what students know and what they can do, why don't you ask them?"

I spent the second half of my teaching career exploring the implications of that very simple and very powerful question. The prompt I wound up with above was one of the moves that I made in that direction. (There were others.) One of the unanticipated benefits of allowing the students to write what they wanted instead of what I wanted—at least some of the time—was that these "writing samples" gave me a great deal of insight into how their minds worked individually. I got to know what students were thinking and how they were thinking in ways that would never have happened had I been a traditional teacher in a traditionally organized class. That made me a better teacher, and I believe it made them better students.

And here's my point with regard to artificial intelligence: if students are given the chance and the encouragement to write in their own voices about what really matters to them, what possible reason would they have for wanting a robot to do that work for them?  It's not about AI signalling the death of writing. It's about giving students the chance to write about things they care enough about not to cheat.




 

 

 

 

 

 

Midwinter Day (Mayer)

 

 

The name of the poet Bernadette Mayer has come to my attention several times over the years. Several years ago, for example, I ran across her listing of prompts for writing that has become something of a classic. More recently I read Rivka Galchen's piece in the New Yorker this December in which surveyed Mayer's career (she passed away in November of this year) and mentioned Mayer's book Midwinter Day, which I was able to find at my local library and started reading on December 20. Midwinter Day is a book-length poem, written about one day in her life, December 22, 1978, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of 1978. (She maintains that she wrote the entire book on that day as well, which seems on the face of it to be a physical impossibility, given the elaborate details of her rendering of not only what was going on around her, but what was going on in her mind as she considered each bit of incoming data. How she could have been experiencing all of that while she was writing is beyond me. But she says that's what she did.)

Midwinter Day divided into six sections, each of which takes us through one chunk of that day: her dreams as she's waking up, the morning she spends in her home with her husband and two children, and so on through the day. As it happened, I wound up reading the middle part of the book about December 22 on December 22. Much of the book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that seems to owe something to both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. There is a kind of manic omnidirectional energy in the poem, which keeps shifting in shape and in focus its attempt embrace everything going on around her and in her mind simultaneously. As might be expected in an experimental work of this kind, some of the passages are more reader-friendly than others. What I found most interesting were the instances in which she puts together inventories, some of which continue for four and five pages at a time. This passage, for example, gives an impressionistic rendition of her observations as she begins moving about her house in the morning:

From the bedroom, curtains blue as ink I stare at, red Godard floor white walls all crayoned, from the bed raised on cinder blocks at Dr. Incao's midwife's request so Sophia could be born, fake Indian cover Ray gave us for Marie American Indian and Ray's old real wool blanket and all our sheets her gifts,  Lewis' Aunt Fanny's crocheted afghan and Tom's old sleeping bag, the mimeograph machine and its cover, diaper rash ointment, from the walls a butterfly kite, a leaf on a ribbon from nursery school, mushrooms by Joe, an iris and a gladiola by Rosemary, the gladiola painted here, the stuck clock, the window faces south, laundry on it, closet doors hung with jackets, shawls, scarves and Marie's dress, closet floor boots shoes boxes bags baby carriers and my broken inherited chair, that's the airport, closet of stuff, carpet sweeper, another broken chair,from there I go to the kitchen sink you can sit on at the imagined forest window, two coleus plants too cold today, now a Wandering Jew, two related spider plants one is hanging, stones dead branches and collected pine cones, and old ghost and a Boston fern on the spooky refrigerator in which is the food, drawings of attempted faces by Marie that look like Cy Twombly, the dumb electric stove, George's red shirt calendar, soon it'll be over, the Lenox Savings Bank historical calendar, Pilgrims landed yesterday, winter begins today, shortest day of the year, Lewis and Harris with Marie in a Bronx corridor, little light, the African woman backpacking a baby, she's talking to a totem figure, a street scene by Rafael and a German altarpiece Rosemary sent, a crude drawing of a nude woman by Paul, a poster of a panda on the door to the former pantry now a house for two heaters one for air and one for water and the vents ducts and pipes for each, old flowerpots, the hall to the door to the hall, full of boxes of Angel Hair books, the broken bassinet now a toybox with turtles and cups in it, a small space full of brown paper bags and cardboard six-pack wrappers, broom, dishes and pots, fruit on the hood of the stove, bottles and jars, teas and books, medicines foods and detergents, binoculars, the dishwasher, vinegar, garbage, Lewis' mother's old Scotch kooler, spices, another of George's plaid shirts, coats on hooks, a red tray; to the deadpan bathroom, a woman by Matisse in yellow and blue and an ordinary mercator projection of the world, potty chair, diaper pail for cloth diapers, plastic bag of used plastic diapers, toilet sink tub, bath toys an alligator that swims mechanically and a shark with teeth that is a mitt and a sponge, hideous old curling rug lying in the tub after yesterday's flood, hooks on the back of the door, layers of clothing hanging on them, a mirror, ointments and pills, razors poisons and soaps, shower curtains; to the main room the living room, two leaping goldfish, cornflower plant, jade tree, Wandering Jew not doing too well, another spider offshoot, purple weed I don't know the name of accidentally growing in a pot of sedum, Christmas tree fern with a sense of humor, whiskey, the main collapsing table covered with things, rocking chair, small wearing rug on the golden wood floor, two couches with things on them, public school chairs with arms for principals at table, shelves of books and books in boxes, boxes of paper and stencils, two ring binders of photos since Worthington, my desk I steer and things, a standing lamp Nancy got us, a jacket by Joe and a blue shirt by George, a flower by Rosemary I don't remember the name of, a water color of a drapery by Rosemary done in Worthington, a drawing of Ted by Joe, a photo of Lewis by Gerard, pictures of the window out Main Street in different seasons, Main Street and Cliffwood Street, Our Lady of Perpetual Help-butterfly collage by Joe, a slinky male figure by Joe, a watch by George, some Kirschwasser, dead files and dead flies, magazines and library books, toys and balls, a stereo, four windows and the more frequent door. (32)

I'm sure some readers would find a passage of this kind to be exhausting, but I find it exhilarating, in terms of both its execution and its ambition. She comes closest to defining that ambition herself in this passage from later in the book:

I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering like a dream inciting writing continuously for as long as you can stand up till you fall down like in a story to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of the mind like memory. (89)

 

I like the way Mayer pushes the boundaries of the sentence in a way that mirrors more accurately than traditional syntax the way the mind actually moves and makes connections in the moments of everyday life. It seems to me to be indeed "a magical service for survival by the use of the mind."

At the very end of the book Mayer employs a more traditional poetic form and diction to bring the poem, and the day to close with a praise song of sorts:

From dreams I made sentences, then what I’ve seen today, 

Then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory 

To seeing as a plain introduction to modes of love and reason, 

Then to end I guess with love, a method, to this winter season 

Now I’ve said this love it’s all I can remember 

Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December 

 

Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light 

That takes the bite from winter weather 

And weaves the random cloth of life together 

And drives away the long black night!

 

There are people who make it a point to re-read Midwinter Day every year in mid-December. I'm planning to be one of them. It turns out that in recent years there has also been an annual oral reading of the entire book that has been filmed and is available on youTube. There are lots of other resources available about the book as well, for example here and here.



 

Essay

 

 

 

Essay

A place to begin. An undertaking. An attempt at con-
        struction, picking up pieces, turning them this way

    and that. Squinting, weighing, wondering

         whether this one goes here or
                    there.

                                             How do we de-
        cide? Slowly something takes shape, a song

  insists on being sung. One voice, another, eventually, a choir.
                    A cathedral. Vocational

            therapy. We're in this together, we

        gather, we lean on
                    each other. We wander. We stand tall,

       we call out, we await the arrival
                    of the eyes

                       that, falling upon us, bring us,

                                            ever so briefly, to life.

 

 

Process Reflection:

Most people, hearing the word "essay," don't necessarily think about its derivation, the sense of the word that means "a trial" or "an attempt." But every work of art, and of writing, is in that most elemental sense an essay. The collage at the top of the page, entitled "Essay" is one of literally hundreds that I have worked on in recent years. The poem, a very "wet" recent draft with the same title, is an attempt both to generate some words about the collage and to mirror in its structure some of the observable elements of its architecture: the way in which disparate fragments and pieces come together, or, insisting on their unique individuality, resist coming together. One critical difference between the two "essays" is that the pieces of the collage, once glued down, are immovable, whereas the poem, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation, is subject to as many re-visions as I have the time and the patience to attempt.

           

 

 

Process Reflection

 

 Every Tuesday for the last five weeks I've posted something here that I knew in advance that I wanted to write about. In each case it was about something or somebody I had been reading (Renee Gladman, Mark Strand). I had a number of motivations for doing so. One was simply that I had gotten out of the habit of posting to Throughlines, but was not yet ready to give it up, so I figured I'd better get myself together and try to jump start it. I have learned from long experience that I work well, or at least better, when I am working to a deadline, either one set for me or one I set one for myself. So I made a preliminary decision, after my first Tuesday post, that I would put something up each Tuesday for as long as I was able to keep that up. So now I'm writing this on Monday December 9, and what you are reading at this moment is the byproduct of that subtle pressure building up: what I am going to have ready to post tomorrow?

A second reason for posting was that as a retired English teacher I find it hard to get out of the habit of talking up writers whose work I admire. It's my hope that at least once in a while someone might read about a writer here and be encouraged to go out and read that author on their own. I once read someone's snarky description of a well-known poetry critic as being a "bobbysoxer for the poets that she swoons over." I thought to myself at the time, Well, what's wrong with that? There are of course legitimate differences in how individual readers will respond to individual writers. The question of what is good and what is not good in any of the arts is always up for debate. But as a matter of principle I am more inclined to respect those who speak up on behalf of what they like—even if I am unconvinced by their observations—than those who seem to take pleasure in ripping others to shreds.

The third reason—and in my mind the most important—is one I have often written about before. Writing about what I read is for me a generative act: it helps me to better understand what I have read, and, on good days, to work my way into thoughts and realizations that I would not otherwise ever have arrived at. And now that I find myself well into my seventies, it serves the additional function of imprinting in my mind the essence of what I am taking away from the reading. I find at my age that when I don't write about what I have read, it fades much more quickly from my mind. That's always been the case; it's more so now. In recent years I have on more than one occasion found myself halfway through a "new" book saying to myself, "Wait a minute. I think I read this book already." Books I have taken the time to write about, however, tend to stay with me.

The same logic applies, of course, to writing more generally: writing about our experiences, writing about what we believe, writing about our dreams, writing about people we know, writing about our pet peeves, writing about what's wrong and how to fix it. So much of what we experience every day is subliminal, below the threshold of perception. We may be scarcely aware of what we actually do think unless we make it a point of practice to spell it out for ourselves. That's why I'm here today, and why I am planning to have something to post next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that. Given the world that we live in and its many distractions, it's easy enough to fall off the wagon, and I supposed at some point I will do that. Until I re-booted myself this November, I had gone sixteen months without posting anything to Throughlines. It's not that I wasn't writing, it's just that I was not posting any of it here. And I've come to miss that.

It's not that I'm under any illusions about failing my legions of followers. No one is going to suffer any intellectual or spiritual impoverishment in the absence of my reports from the field. The only person to whom this enterprise is truly essential is me. So here I am. It's good to be back.

Stories That Could Be True

One of my favorite poets is William Stafford. In 1977, he published a volume of new and collected poems entitle Stories That Could Be True, a title which I have become fond of over the years for reasons I'm sure he would not have anticipated. Because I've reached the point in my life where that title strikes me as being something of an oxymoron. I've come to understand that all stories are essentially fictions, even and perhaps especially when they are presented as—or intended by their narrators to be taken as—"true stories."

To tell a story is essentially to make a selection of events and present them in a sequence. It would not be desirable, even if it were possible, for any storyteller to include every detail in narrating an event. When I woke up this morning from my dream, what had I been dreaming about? Something about a basketball game? Or walking in the rain in the park? Both at the same time? No sooner had eyes opened than the dream was beginning to fade. I could attempt to recreate it now, but to do so I'd have to invent details that I've already lost, and those details of course not be "true."

The crow cawing outside that woke me up, did he caw once? twice? repeatedly? Was there in fact a crow there at all, or did I just put that in for verisimilitude? Was it perhaps a female crow? How would I know? (Or did I perhaps imagine or make up the whole thing about the crow?)

Did I raise my hand to my face before I took off the covers? Did I scratch my nose? On which side? With which finger? Did I use my right hand or my left to toss the covers aside? Which foot hit the floor first? Was I still lying down when the foot hit the floor, or had I already sat up. When I sat up—if I sat up—was there a cramp in my leg? Which leg? Which muscle? And how painful was it? How would I be able to quantify that pain in a way that would be "true."

You see the problem. Just to tell the story of getting up this morning, if I were to try to capture every detail, would take me all day, and I would not even get to the part about making breakfast. much less eating it. And inevitably I'd get some of it wrong, or leave some of it out. There's information I don't have access to. There's stuff I've forgotten. There's other material I might choose to leave out because it either seems extraneous to the story or it reflects on me personally in a way that I would prefer not to share. That dream, for example, might have been about something else, something potentially embarrassing or compromising that I might not want you to know about. It was only a dream, I know, but still.

Then there's my writerly desire to craft the story in a way that makes for good reading or good listening. I might want to select my details in order to reinforce a particular narrative arc. I might want the language to move in a certain way. And that leads us to yet another fundamental and inescapable reality in storytelling: stories are made up of words. Words are sequences of sounds that line up single file, one word after another. There's simply no way that words can accurately re-create the simultaneous multidimensionality of lived experience. As Stephen Dobyns, no slouch of a poet or storyteller himself, has observed

The main problem with turning the world into language is that it's, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing that it wants to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become, it is always a diminishment of the reality described.

I had a colleague at a school where I used to teach who considered himself to be an evangelist for what he called objectivity. He labored mightily to impress upon his students the need to stick to facts when they were writing. He strove to be "objective" himself when responding to student writing, and was often highly and publicly critical of other teachers in the department—myself being one of them—he considered to be overly encouraging of subjectivity in student work and overly subjective in their evaluation of it.

I didn't agree with him then. Twenty years later, I still don't agree with him, and I think I understand more clearly why. The fact of the matter is, we are awash in subjectivity all day, every day, all the time. As human beings, we make sense of the world by telling ourselves stories. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just the way it is.

The problems arise when we lose sight of the fact that those stories are, almost by definition, fabrications. Over time and many repetitions, we become so invested in the stories we tell that we come to believe them, and to act, and think, as if they were true. This is the case with almost every religion. It's the case with local and national politics, where people's attachment to their own particular versions of the stories they believe to be true leads to the kind of toxic vituperation that seems to be dominating the news cycle not just here in the United States, but in Britain, Italy, Hungary, China, India, the Phillipines... just about everywhere.

Even at family gatherings on holidays, with family and friends, it's easy to forget that the stories we tell one another are merely today's version of what we think happened, or what we remember, or what we think will make people laugh.

This last weekend I was at Santa Sabina for a writing retreat run by William Stafford's son Kim, who is poet-laureate of the state of Oregon himself. He's a terrific writer and master storyteller, and he gave those of us at the conference many short writing prompts by way of encouraging us to connect with our own stories. One of the prompts had to do with recalling a time when you did something you weren't supposed to do. (This is a very good writing prompt, one that I have used—in a slightly different way—with great success over the years with students at all levels from elementary school through adulthood.)

So, I took a shot at it, and this is the poem that I came up with:

Balance

Walking home from school I stopped at the five and dime
for a Milky Way. On the way to the register at the back
of the store my eye was caught by a glint of metallic red light
from the tray on the counter to my left, a display of gyroscopes
with a diagram showing how it worked: you would wind
the twine around the stem, place the foot of the device
on a flat surface, and, holding the top steady with your finger,
yank the string, and then the little red wheel in the middle
would spin and the gyroscope would stand by itself, freed
for the moment from the constraints of gravity. Seeing that
Mr. Harvey was busy ringing up an old lady in a red dress,
I snatched a gyroscope and slipped it into my bookbag.
At home, I sat in my room watching the gyroscope
spin and spin, a thing of wonder and beauty, until suddenly
my mother walked in. Where did you get that? she said.
When I told her, she marched me out to the car, drove me
to the store, and made me give it back and apologize.
I told Mr. Harvey I was sorry, even though it was a lie.

If you were to ask me if this were a true story, I'd say yes. But in the writing of it I found myself making a lot of strategic decisions that were in essence falsifications.  For example, the name of the store was (I think) The Variety Shop, and it wasn't exactly a five and dime store. But for the sake of compression in the story I didn't want to get into all of that, so I just used the generic term "five and dime." (A term which also serves to set the story in the not-very-recent past.)

I don't in fact remember if it was a Milky Way I was after; it probably was not, since I got my candy bars, when I got them, not at the Variety Shop, but at the Gristede's market down the street. I included the Milky Way by way of trying to establish the age (and cupidity) of my main character, which is to say, a younger, somewhat fictionalized version of myself, and also because I just like sound of the syllables. (It could have been a Hershey Bar or a Three Musketeers, right?) The part about stealing a gyroscope is certainly true, but all of the details about their placement in the store and the diagram are invented, as are Mr. Harvey (I have no idea what the name of the store owner was), the old lady, and her red dress. The cash register was by the front door, not in the back. The conversation with my mother is invented as well. She did see me with the gyroscope, and she did make me take it back, but that's about all I remember, and in the absence of memory we fall back upon imagination.

The last line is a particularly egregious case of calculated misrepresentation. I put it in there because I wanted to make a point about my conflicted relationship as a child with parental and ethical expectations (which I would certainly not have been aware of as a child but am certainly aware of now), and also because I wanted the poem to have a punch line at the end. I was hoping, when I read it out loud, that people would laugh.

And they did, although I had, and have, mixed feelings about that, for reasons that should be clear at this point, because the writing of that poem gave rise to the writing of this post. I was very aware in drafting the poem of the somewhat treacherous ground I was traversing as I tried to be true to the experience I had as a child but also true to my sense of what might make for a dramatically effective poem. I was also ruefully aware, both in the writing and in the aftermath of it, of the essentially glibness and shallowness of the poem, as compared to the power and depth of many of the poems that I most admire, and many of the poems that my colleagues read the same night I read this one.

I would say that "Balance" as a poem succeeds in terms of its own limited ambitions. It's smooth. It's deft. It's clear. It meets the requirements of the prompt. And it successfully conveys some elements of the truth. It presents itself, like all other stories, as a story that could be true. But, like all other stories, it less true that it purports to be.

Is it Necessary?

We all have a limited number of hours on this planet. If we are going to dedicate ourselves during those hours to some particular endeavor, whether it be writing or art or music or public service or the accumulation of wealth, it would behoove us to spend that time doing work that needs to be done, that creates value in our own lives and, ideally, in the lives of those around us.

One of the questions that keeps recurring in my life as a writer has to do with what might be called gravity, or weight, or perhaps necessity. While I certainly respect writers who have taken it upon themselves to do the daunting and at times discouraging work of trying to get the words right, to construct poems which are thoughtful and well-crafted, often of late I have found myself looking for something more elusive.

A large proportion of the poems and stories and essays I read—and, alas, perhaps an even greater proportion of the ones I write—might be described as being entertaining or amusing.  But as a reader and as a writer I am always hoping to find my way toward a poem which is not merely artful or clever or funny or apt, but in some sense essential.

Last week I went to a poetry reading sponsored by the Marin Poetry Center at the Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael. The featured poets were Troy Jollimore, whom I had head of before, and Lynn Emanual, whom I had not. Jollimore read first, and I enjoyed his poems, although they seemed mostly to be the kind of poems that would come across better on paper. Lynn Emanual's poems, on the other hand, had a dramatic quality to them, and as she read them the words seemed to embody a deep authority and to convey an immediacy and sense of seriousness of purpose that I found to be very impressive. The poems felt, well, necessary. You could sense that they had been important for her to write, and it felt, at least in that moment, like it was important that I had gotten to hear them.

I wound up buying a copy of her New and Selected Poems, called The Nerve of It, and I spent the most of the next day reading and re-reading her poems. One of the ones I like the best—which she had read the previous night—was this one:

The Dig

Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the Rock
gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at the café
where they drink their thimblesful of hot tea, beyond the valley
with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of irrigation,
and someone incising a dark furrow in a field, some plowman's black
gutter opening through the green, she is waist deep in this open grave,
staring at the delicate puzzle of my feet. Beyond her, in the shadow
of Tel el-Hisi, daubing and dampening the earth, another woman finds
the faint brickwork of a floor spidering the dust, on the hearth's
wedge-shaped arc of shadow, a scattering of charred millet.
Nothing else for miles. Nothing but this bluff of ruin,
one decapitated tower, one "window" staved into the brick,
the bouganvillea crawling across a wall dragging its bloody rags.
She is standing here thinking she cannot bear the way this foot—
my foot—wants to step out of the earth.  I don't care. I am using her
to leave the grave. And so we go on. We go on until we cannot go on
deepening my grave, and the trowel hits stone and I lie staring
while she makes the earth recede, reaches in and pulls me out,
my jaw wired shut by roots, my skull so full of dirt that suddenly
the intricate sutures come loose and, in her hands, the whole head opens.
In the shallow setting where I lay is the small triangular sail
of a scapula, the ribs like the grill of a car. She bones me like a fish.
She lays the little pieces, the puzzling odds and ends, into the dishes
of shellac and formalin. One carpal still wears the faint blue
stain of a ring. Wearily, I lay my reassembled head,
sutures rich with glue, against the wall of a filled beaker.
A fine sweat of bubbles on my chin. All night, through the window
of my jar, I watch her mend with glue and wire, the shallow
saucer of my pelvis. We are nothing. Earth staring at earth.

I'll resist the temptation to do a detailed line-by-line analysis of this poem, because I know from my own readings that such analyses can be tedious to read even when they are thoughtful and well-written. But let me just say a couple of things.

First of all, there's the sheer audacity of the piece, the daring leap of the imagination that begins in line fourteen, when it becomes clear that the voice in the poem is that of the woman whose body is being excavated. Then there's the surprising twist that at least in her own mind she's the one in charge of this operation: she is using the archaeologist as the instrument of her resurrection, watching with approval as the broken pieces of her body are being reassembled and mended. Finally, there are the startling last two sentences, which shift the point of view in such a way as to open up the poem vertiginously.  Suddenly, it's not "I," it's "we." That "we" asserts the identification not only of the digger and the dug, but of the writer and the reader, and of all of us. We are nothing. Earth staring at earth.

And that, my friends, is of course the simple truth of the matter, even though it's a truth most of us manage to keep out of the range of our vision as we go about our daily routines, as if we had all the time in the world, as if we were in the world but not of it.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I know, children or adults, who regularly read poetry on their own. And most of those people are themselves writers. I would venture to guess that if you were to ask the average person why they don't read poetry, they'd say something like "I can't understand it," or "I don't have time," or "Poetry doesn't do anything for me."

William Carlos Williams famously observed—in a poem—that "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." If there's one necessary function that poetry can serve, for those who do choose to engage with it—it is to retrieve to our consciousness the simple truths that we so easily lose sight of. And that's what makes this poem so powerful to me.

I'll close with the last sentence of "Like God," the last poem in The Nerve of It, which suggests yet another simple truth about the unspoken contract between writer and reader:

                                           You
did not choose to be in the story of the
matron whose bosom is like the prow
of a ship and who is launched toward
lunch at the Hotel Pierre, or even the
story of the dog-on-a-leash, even though
this is now your story: the story of the
person-who-had-to-take-the-train-and-walk-
the-dark-road described hurriedly by
someone sitting at the tavern so you could
discover it, although you knew all along
the road would be there, you, who have
been hovering above this page, holding
the book in your hands, like God, reading.

Merwin

W. S. Merwin passed away this week, dying peacefully in his sleep at the age of 91.

I have on many occasions in the past had things to say on this blog about Merwin. (If you'd like to take a moment to review them, you can just type "Merwin" in the search bar at the top of the page.) Merwin was an outsized presence in my life. Even though I never met him personally, I saw him read on several occasions, and as a writer and as a human being he was an inspiration and a mentor to me. He was not only a highly original and deeply resonant writer, but he was as well the model of a human being who devoted all of the energies of his life to doing good in and for this world. He spent the last twenty years of his life on the island of Maui doing the work of restoration: taking land that had been stripped and used up for sugar plantations and painstakingly re-introducing native Hawaiian plants to heal the land. That work is documented on the web site of the nonprofit foundation he created to support this work, the Merwin Conservancy. He was a committed and eloquent spokesman for a view of the world which is under siege every day by politicians and businessmen and me-firsters of every stripe who seem to have lost all sense of shame or perspective. Here he speaks of what is at stake:

I believe that our real superiority as a species is not our intelligence itself but the quality of imagination and compassion (in itself perhaps, one of the blessings of language) that allows us to care about the welfare, suffering, survival of lives far from our own, and not immediately or obviously related to our comforts, our prospects, our acquisitions. Whatever we may call the sympathy that involves us with the fate of victims in war zones half a world away, the sonar torture of whales, the mutilation of women and the tortures of bears in Pakistan, or the last members of a species of rainforest honeycreeper, this regard for life apart from our own is something that, so far as I know, is unique to our species. We can glimpse ancestral forms of it in the family and group behavior of other animals, but its broader emergence is a mark of humanity. It is our talent and we have developed it in our own way. It is something that we cannot altogether account for. But if we do not live up to our gifts they do us no good. And what this gift demands of us constantly is a change of heart. What hope there may be depends upon whether or not we can believe in such possibility.
 
from the forward to Remains of a Rainbow: Rare Plants and Animals of Hawaii.

Several of Merwin's poems have worked their way into my life in ways that no other writer's poems have ever done. I'll post two of them today. The first is one that I committed to memory many years ago and which is still perhaps the most powerful tribute to intellectual humility (and the power of wonder) that I have ever encountered in print. (Note: the word maoli, used here as a personification, is a Polynesian word that means what is native or natural or true.):

Search Party 


By now I know most of the faces 
that will appear beside me as 
long as there are still images 
I know at last what I would choose 
the next time if there ever was 
a time again I know the days 
that open in the dark like this 
I do not know where Maoli is 

I know the summer surfaces 
of bodies and the tips of voices 
like stars out of their distances 
and where the music turns to noise 
I know the bargains in the news 
rules whole languages formulas 
wisdom that I will never use 
I do not know where Maoli is 

I know whatever one may lose 
somebody will be there who says 
what it will be all right to miss 
and what is verging on excess 
I know the shadows of the house 
routes that lead out to no traces 
many of his empty places 
I do not know where Maoli is 

You that see now with your own eyes 
all that there is as you suppose 
though I could stare through broken glass 
and show you where the morning goes 
though I could follow to their close 
the sparks of an exploding species 
and see where the world ends in ice 
I would not know where Maoli is

The second poem is a kind of answer to the question that faces us on those occasions when we find that the world has failed us: how should we respond? Merwin's answer to that question is indicative of the openhearted wisdom that suffuses all of his writing:

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
(from The Rain in the Trees, Knopf 1988)