Pen to Paper

 

 

 

 

 

Craft Talk

 

 

I did not know then (nor, for that matter,

do I know now) how to do what it is

I’m doing, other than to try to use my pen

to lure whatever creatures may reside

just out of sight onto the blank page and

into the light. Not unlike a guitarist

fingering notes at random until a song

begins to take shape as if by accident,

or a poet jotting lists of random words,

only afterwards making note of the echoes,

overtones, emergent patterns, misdirections,

dead ends. After which what remains may,

on a good day, take on a life of its own,

and turn out at last to be a pleasant surprise.

 

Quarter to Twelve

Quarter to Twelve

A strident sun overseeing what might
be desert, what might be sea. Rocks
just here; on the horizon, perhaps, hills.
Something breaking up in the middle
(where it all began, where it always
begins): buckthorn bursting into bloom,
grackles harassing wrens, or maybe
some kind of business with an axe.
Over on the right, a building? A book-
case? A mirror? All of the above?
The whole surrounded by a wall:
contents under pressure. The light
doing its definitive work. The day
nearly over, or just about to begin. 

Process Reflection:

It's been a while since I did a pen-and-ink abstract. Wound up doing this one yesterday. It's small, maybe 4" x 6". As usual I had no idea what it was going to turn out to be as I was doing it. I started in the middle drawing more or less random shapes, and worked my way around, ending with the circular figure in the upper left. I was aware, as I worked, of wanting to break up whatever patterns were emerging as I worked, which is why I went to some horizontals in the lower right and then to some verticals and right angles in the upper right. By the time I got to the upper left all I had left to do was circles, so since it was looking landscapey by that time I decided to do a sun thing.

But I kind of liked the way it came out. And today when I was trying without success to get some traction on a poem, I put that work aside and thought I'd just try to work out from the drawing and see what words showed up. I was conscious of wanting to have the poem have some of the same shiftiness that was present in the picture, as well as some of the same continuity. The title just popped into my mind somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth draft.

Looking at the picture as it will appear here, I notice that it appears a little lumpier than it would if I had taken it with my regular camera than with my iPhone. But you can kind of get the idea of what it looks like.

Drawing as Exploration

Put the point of the pen down

somewhere in the upper left

corner of the paper, and move

your hand, leaving a mark, an angle,

a curve, a line that moves away

and then comes back to connect

with itself. So now there's a shape,

and that shape sets the direction

for the next, which must of necessity

be similar or different, larger or

smaller, closer or farther away.

Now there are two, now three,

now twenty. Along the way questions

arise. How long, for example, before

whatever patterns begun by accident

should by design be broken? How much

of the surface should be inked, how

much left white? How close to the edge?

What about the negative spaces?

Inking is another story, silent, automatic,

eye and hand in motion, mostly

without thought. Music can help

to mark the time, set the rhythm

and the feel. It will take longer

than you think. Often the pen tip

starts to fray, or the ink dries up.

Switch pens. A pen with a big tip

makes the work go faster, but

if your hand strays it's harder

to correct the mistake. Hold

your breath, pay attention, learn

to trust your hand. When

the drawing is done, touch up

the tiny white spots with a fine-

tipped pen, and you're done.

Step back and see what you've got.

-->

Twenty Questions

The other day there was an interesting post on Tumblr a list of questions that Paul Thek used as “Teaching Notes” for a class that he taught at Cooper Union from 1978-1981. I have always been intrigued by inventories of this kind—lists, list poems, brainstormed possibilities—both as artifacts in themselves and as challenges to me (and, once upon a time, to my students).

I have had in my files for more than 40 years now a poem by Donald Justice that goes like this:

Twenty Questions

Is it raining out?
Is it raining in?
Are you a public fountain?
Are you an antique musical instrument?
Are you a famous resort, perhaps?
What is your occupation?
Are you by chance a body of water?
Do you often travel alone?
What is your native language, then?
Do you recall the word for carnation?

Are you sorry?
Will you be sorry?
Is this your handkerchief?
What is your destination?
Are you Aquarius?
Are you the watermelon flower?
Will you please take off your glasses?
Is this a holiday for you?
Is that a scar, or a birthmark?
Is there no word for calyx in your tongue?

I find this poem to be, well, charming. It’s playful and purposeful at the same time. There are elements of structure in it (the framework of the game of twenty questions, the sense that there is a conversation going on between strangers who speak different languages, the suggestion of a seduction taking place) combined with elements of (apparent?) randomness (“Is this your handkerchief?”). It’s a kind of verbal collage. The poem has a logic, individual lines undercut or redirect the logic in ways that are surprising. The poem creates in a short space an implied world, a world in which certain facts are established but most are left open to question.

There’s a game being played here, and, as often happens when we see a game, there’s at least the possibility that we might ask, can I play too? I’ve had my students write “Twenty Questions” poems; the results are always surprising and interesting to read. There’s something about not having too much in the way of a pre-set intention that frees them up. So here I am, working on this post, and here as well the task is to come up with something to say. So I think I’ll play. Here goes:

Twenty Questions

Did you hear the thunder this morning? What was up with that?
Shouldn't there be an easier way to get those sneakers clean?
Have you seen my sweater? What are we going to do about
Elizabeth? Can you tell me what you have in mind? Don’t you
Think we’d be better off if we just stayed home? What is that crow
So upset about? Is there a reason why you need to be doing that
Right now? How many times have I asked you to stop?
If I get done in time, would you like to come with me
To the basketball game? Why are the newspapers still covering
That story? Would you care for some peppers? Is my scarf
Too much? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to fly a plane?
What do you think you’re doing? Isn’t there a statute of limitations
On that? When is the rain supposed to end? Can I ask you a question?

Okay, so there’s a draft, created in the moment and lightly edited as I set this up on blogger. I may go back and work on it more later, but for now it serves the purpose. What I noticed as I was writing was that even as I was just pushing forward certain elements of voice and tone kept asserting themselves more or less in spite of me. I’ve remarked before how every collage—every work of art, really— is in some ways of necessity a kind of self-portrait. And that certainly applies to this poem. It’s a little bit odd. It’s a little bit random. But it was fun to write. How about you? You want to try?

Notes on Collage

Over the last few years I've spend hundreds of hours making collages of various kinds. I've also made an effort to familiarize myself with the work of other contemporary collage artists, and to archive their work on tumblr and Pinterest, as for example on this board, which has nearly 5000 examples. I've been making an effort lately to try to articulate some of what goes on in my head as I'm working. This is what I've got so far.


Considerations:

• You are always working in two dimensions within a rectangle. It's a grid. You can work against the grid, with it, or, most often, in some combination of both.

• Variables include the shapes (both positive and negative), the colors, the number and the relative sizes of the elements.

• In terms of number of elements in the collage, there are challenges at both ends of the spectrum. I've seen very interesting collages that are composed of only two elements. On the other hand too many elements can threaten to overwhelm the eye.

• Text can be included as a formal design element, as a vehicle for the introduction of a concept, as another kind of contrast to color and shape, or to signal seriousness of purpose or lack thereof.

• Colors can be coordinated or contrasted.

• Juxtaposition can go in many ways: one on top of another, edge to edge, overlap, or with space in between.

• There is an inherent element of randomness and playfulness in collage. There are tradeoffs. Things that don't work for me: 1) complete chaos on the one hand, 2) overdetermined, message-oriented, pictorial stuff, 3) incongruous combinations: eagle heads on cacti, cars with boobs, people with apples where their heads should be, etc. I like to work in a zone of semi-abstraction, one the elements of the collage create a field of energies that are like a nonverbal conversation. I don't generally like explicitly narrative collages, but I do like collages which function, as in the best abstract art, as independent universes whose idiosyncratic rules distantly echo our own, and which invite the viewer to think about what those rules might be in this particular case.

• There is a very large intuition quotient in the creation of a collage. You put it together piece by piece, and every part of the process—the selection of the elements, the decision whether to tear or cut or both, the placement of each piece, the configuration and extent of negative space—is made holistically and without explicit strategic planning. Sometimes, very rarely, I will lay out the major elements of the collage first before I start gluing, mostly to make sure that the last pieces don't look just stuck on top. But more often I start, as I do when I'm drawing abstracts, by gluing down a single piece somewhere on the paper and then simply building from that, linking the additions via placement, color, and shape as I go along. Given a pile of materials—and of course there is always an element of selection, however arbitrary, in the makeup of the pile—it is not completely off the mark to say that once I start working the collage builds itself.

• On the other hand, it could also be said that every collage is in effect a kind of oblique self-portrait at a particular moment in time. I'm the one who has collected and selected the materials. I'm the one who has decided, even if the decisions have been intuitive rather than strictly rational, what goes where. And each collage reflects my inner sense of what juxtapositions feel right and complete one another. The collages I make now don't look much like the collages I used to make. I'm a different person; they're different too.

• The ecology of collage: there's something inherently satisfying about up-cycling old, often discarded materials in order to make something new. One of the great masters of twentieth-century collage, Kurt Schwitters, was explicit about this:

I could see no reason why tram tickets, buttons, and old junk from attics and rubbish heaps should not serve well as materials for paintings; they suited the purpose just as well as factory-made paints… it's possible to cry out using bits of old rubbish, and that's what I did...

Example: 

This collage, which I completed in January, consists of eight elements placed in a roughly square configuration. They do not "mean" anything, either individually or taken together. (I make it a point of practice NOT to make collages which have a paraphrasable content or message. Any attempt to "interpret" them is more or less doomed by design and intention.) Which is not to say that there isn't anything to think about here, but that the thinking I am trying to generate is intuitional, nonlinear, nonverbal. I am going by feel. I put things together so that I like the way they look. But I am also interested sensing the energies that are set into motion by particular juxtapositions, and by the irregularities and disharmonies, as for example between the rectangular, gridlike elements and the soft, irregular torn edges of some of the shapes.

I have tried with some consciousness to provide lines for the eye to walk. There is for example, an arm which moves the eye up from the landscape, pointing to the people on the bridge, the same people which the eye of the bearded man on the old coin seems to be looking at. There are patterns of rectangles, but there are patterns of disruption in and among the rectangles. In the upper right corner there is a rectangular piece of paper holding a triangular shape framing a half-circle on which is superimposed a full circle, holding a face, looking at the faces of the other people on the walkway, facing us. The checkerboard is one sort of landscape plan, a playing field, which echoes the actual field below it. The upraised hand and finger belong to Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors basketball team, photographed at play on a different plane. The checkerboard in the center is a kind of abstraction and simplification of the lines the collage as a whole, a kind of playful mirror-in-miniature: the rigorous grid-like logic of the former both echoing and contrasting with the loose connectedness of the grid-like elements in the latter.

The whole collage is made of pieces of paper that 1) are in a certain tonal range of brown, grey, and black, 2) have been selected by me in a preliminary way at various times previous to the construction of the collage, and in a very specific way during its construction, and placed in square 6" x 6" format that was a given before any of the arrangements began. (That particular format is one of my favorites, both because I like the paper the pads are made of, and because the size constraint feels about right to me for the materials I most often use. It's also a convenient format when you are working, as I most often am, in a limited space.)

Perhaps it's only because I have taken the time to work all this out in words, but I have a particular fondness for this collage. Every time I make a collage it's a crapshoot. I'm just playing with shapes and colors and juxtapositions, and sometimes they come together in ways that are emotionally and intellectually satisfying to me. As I have said above, each collage is a world of its own, with its own internal harmonies and disharmonies, its own logic, its own set of unarticulated and preferably unarticulatable overtones or reverberations. Sometimes, it just feels right.

Reflections on Reading

I've been turning over in my mind, in an abstracted sort of way, some feelings and intuitions I have about reading. I thought I'd try to work them out here in some sort of rough form and see what they might add up to. I've been reading a lot these last few months. Partially that's because I'm retired now and at least theoretically have more time to devote to reading when I choose to do so. But it also has something biorhythmical about it; I've always been a binge reader of sorts. When I'm bingeing, as for example when I fall deep into a novel sequence (Patrick O'Brian's 21 Aubrey-Maturin books, Dorothy Dunnett's 8 volume House of Niccolo series, George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (five volumes completed of a projected seven), Karl Knausgaard's My Struggle (three volumes out of  seven translated into English so far), I somehow find time to read even when I don't have it. Sometimes a binge will start with reading one book by an author and then working my way everything in print by that author. That started way early, in elementary school with Walter Farley's Black Stallion books, Albert Payson Terhune's dog books, and the like. In late high school I read John Gardner's Sunlight Dialogues and then everything else he ever wrote. More recently, I read (and wrote about) a number of books by Alice McDermott. I've read every one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, and preordered the new one coming out next month. These are only examples; I could cite dozens, maybe hundreds, of others.

But here's the thing: not everything I read sticks with me. There are a lot of books I see that I know that I have read, but if you were to ask me, even a few weeks later, to tell you about a particular book, I'd be hard pressed to tell you much about the plot or the characters or basically anything at all, other than some vague impression of how the book made me feel while I was reading it.

The books that have stayed with me, the ones that live in my head, are the product of a different kind of reading than what I have been describing above. (On a binge I'm reading in big gulps, but it's a present tense experience: now and now and now. And when it's over, it's generally too daunting to go back and try to retrieve and fix the key ideas, to collect and organize my own thoughts, to place the world of the book coherently into the context of the world of my life, or vice versa.) What are the factors that contribute to a book being cemented into my consciousness, so much so that they become permanent fixtures in the furniture of my mind? Here's a preliminary list:

• Writing about the reading. When I take time during a reading to write about what I  am noticing and what I am thinking, I notice more, and I think more deeply, about the material at hand. If I am reading a book that strikes me as I am reading it as a book I want to think well about and remember, I will often begin a reading log expressly for that purpose. There's a tradeoff, of course. Keeping a log slows you down as you read. It colors the reading experience, and sometimes feels like it is artificializing it. Reading and writing and reading and writing is a much more deliberative process, and a reading purist might argue (and I've had students argue, when I've assigned them logs) that keeping a log is too much like work, and interferes with what I (they, one) might prefer to be the pure enjoyment of reading.

Keeping a commonplace book is an alternative, and perhaps less intrusive way of fixing the reading in your memory. In this case, you simply note (via pencil marks or post-its or whatever) passage in the book that seem particularly apt or interesting, and then, either when done reading for the day or done with the work entirely, sit down at a desk and write out the passages, either by hand or via a keyboard. This second-round slow-motion re-assimilation of the words themselves goes a long way toward fixing them in the brain.

One of the arguments advanced in favor of e-readers is that this process can be easily automated: you simply highlight the passages and they wind up being archived in the cloud (Amazon provides this service via the Kindle, for example). I'm not sure I buy it. It's nice to have those passages lined up and available in the event that you want to go back and re-read them, but without the actual work of writing or typing them out yourself, work that allows you to re-process and re-examine the work a second time, the opportunity to hardwire the words into your memory is lost.

• Discussion with other human beings. Here's a perception about my own experience that I believe to be true. I may be mistaken, or partially mistaken. But it seems to me that there are very few books I have ever read and remembered unless I made it my business to talk about the book with other people, and preferably people who have read the book themselves. Taking the same perception from the opposite angle, most of the books that I really have in my head are books that I assigned to my students and discussed with them, in many cases with different groups of students over a period of years, books like All the Pretty Horses. The Poisonwood Bible. Krik, Krak. Macbeth. The Merchant of Venice. Grendel. The Pearl. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Snow Falling on Cedars. The Sheriff of Nottingham. (Surprised you with that one? Check it out.) Those books are in my head to stay.

• Reading reviews and author interviews. I generally go at this backwards. I read the reviews after I have read the book, in order to a) not to have my experience of the book directed by someone else's framing of it and b) to be able to compare my preliminary notions about the book with someone else's, so that I can begin (or if I have been keeping a log, continue) the process of second-guessing myself.

• Perhaps the most obvious of all: Re-reading. Each time you read a book you are reinforcing the neural pathways already in place, and adding new ones. And books grow with you, and on you, when you go back to them. As Rebecca Mead writes in My Life in Middlemarch,

And as I continue to read and reflect, I also realize that [Eliot] has given me something else: a profound experience with a book, over time, that amounts to one of the frictions of my life. I have grown up with George Eliot. I think Middlemarch has disciplined my character. I know it has become a part of my own experience and my own endurance. Middlemarch inspired me when I was young, and chafing to leave home; and now, in middle age, it suggests to me what else home might mean, beyond a place to grow up and grow out of. (266)

It should be clear by now that what I'm gnawing on here is a pretty old bone: the distinction, in this case with regard to reading, between quantity and quality. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes slower is better. I was thinking to myself the other day that given the diminishing amount of time I have left in my life, I might be better off if, rather than continue my trips to the library, to bookstores, and to Amazon, to make it a project to go back and re-read the books—or at least some of them— that I already have on my shelves, so many of which have erased themselves from my conscious memory. 

Spinoff Questions: Which books are deserving of the kind of concentrated study and attention one might aspire to have in at least some cases? How do we make those calls? Are there some books, any books, that are so central that everyone should read them? (The members of the English department at the school I recently retired from have had some lengthy, and occasionally heated, discussions about exactly that question. For what it's worth, I'm in the camp of those who say nay.) How often, and how well, do you need to process what you read at an optimal level—with all the extra time and effort that entails—to be able to consider yourself to be reasonably well-read? And what would you be sacrificing in other areas of you life in order for you to be able to wear that designation gracefully? Inquiring minds want to know.