Cy Twombly (1928-2011)

In the background of my years in Houston is this painting.  A painting like a soundtrack.  A score.  Like a song stuck in my head, turning and turning, that passage from white to color, those fragments of words and text, that beautiful room that could, even when I thought I knew what I'd see, surprise me and take my breath away.

Betweenness

Writing an essay on T.S. Eliot I came across this anecdote by the poet Donald Hall.   Just arrived in England, Hall went to interview the older, now very famous writer:

Then Eliot appeared to search for the right phrase with which to send me off. He looked me in the eyes, and set off into a slow, meandering sentence.  “Let me see,  said T. S. Eliot,  “forty years ago I went from Harvard to Oxford. Now you are going from Harvard to Oxford. What advice can I give you?  He paused delicately, shrewdly, while I waited with greed for the words which I would repeat for the rest of my life, the advice from elder to younger, setting me on the road of emulation. When he had ticked off the comedian’s exact milliseconds of pause, he said,  “Have you any long underwear?” I told him that I had not, and paused to buy some on my dazzled walk back to the hotel. I suppose it was six months before I woke up enough to laugh.

It’s a terrific moment of deadpan from a writer who had by then been turned from life into myth.  Famous, distant, calcified, he was well on his way to being the T.S. Eliot described by early critics.  As Hugh Kenner writes of Eliot’s early critical fate, and the way he’s often taught to high school students, “He has not been credited with noticing anything at all unless in a book.”  But this little moment – long underwear! – is a reminder of the surprise and wit that mark his early poems.  

I’ve been thinking about the kind of stubbornness, flexibility, resilience and just plain foolishness it takes to keep going as a writer.  A couple of years ago I met a well-known older poet at a party in Austin.   We were talking about how hard the “between” time can be, that time between just starting out, writing your first poems or stories or essays, just beginning to see the shape of your calling and the habits of your mind finding their forms, and that later (and this is purely speculative, and to be honest I’m not sure this is even really possible in the restlessness of artistic making) time when you’re settled into more fixed, established and less uncertain place.  The between time is in some ways a powerful place to be – possibility stretches before us.  But it’s also incredibly painful in the sense that waiting or uncertainty is always painful.   We lack control.  Or vision.   I’d like to think this is true not just for artists but for anyone who wants something larger than themselves.  I might say, I’m waiting for my manuscript to get taken, but what I really mean is that I’m waiting to claim that I’m no longer young in a certain way or I’m no longer a student or that I’ve made some contribution to the world.   

I go back to often to that conversation, the writer and I drinking together in the mostly unfurnished dining room of my friend’s house, when I’m feeling discouraged about a stupid rejection of one kind or another, not for anything specific that he said but the comfort I found at that time in his acknowledgement of how challenging this between time can be.   How much we want to be heard by those we admire and look up to that our fears are not unfounded, that our hopes are not impossible.    How much we want to know.    But how little older writers have to teach us Eliot seems to say.  They can tell us to get dressed, to bundle up, to prepare but in the end we’re on our own.  Our way might, as in Hall’s trajectory from Harvard to Oxford, resemble Eliot’s own, but his path as a writer and man diverges, as it must.   What reader who picks up Hall’s Without thinks of the High Modernists?    More than anything, it’s an anecdote that speaks to me about that beginning stage of a writer’s life, when he or she is looking, asking, hoping for a way, any way, to be set down the right road.  As if there is a right.  As if there is a road.

The Jetliner of Poetry

I've got new work in a couple of places. Only the poem in Anti- is available online.

Anti- (full text)
The Southern Review
Harvard Review

Other fun things I've been reading / listening to recently:

1. I heard Mike Scalise read the first part of this great nonfiction essay a couple of weeks ago, Exactly Where You Want to Be. He knows things. He loves The Roots.

2. Glenn Shaheen reading from his forthcoming book Predatory. Damn.

3. I have a huge crush on Adele's voice. I too have tiny desk concerts, but they're off-key and poorly attended affairs.

4. And it's not too early to order Marc McKee's Fuse. Imagine if your moral compass watched every Joss Whedon show ever made, twice. Imagine if you could save the fire from the burning building. Or, if you prefer the words of famous Polish poets: The jetliner of poetry triumphs over local trains of everyday existence.—Adam Zagajewski




And now a lie -- I'll try to be better about updating this.

Conversation @ Memorious

Here's the start, read the rest here

Contributor Conversations: Sarah Barber and Joshua Rivkin

In this twist on the contributor interview, we’ve invited contributors to enter into conversation with one another. In this first edition, Sarah Barber, author of the newly released The Kissing Party, interviews Joshua Rivkin, whose blog offers more links to his work.

SB: I want to start off by asking you about “The Fingerprint Clerk.” There’s something so lulling about the opening and end of the poem and yet your choice to include Li Po and Bobby Fischer in the poem really pulls us back to earth in a delightful way. So I’m going to ask you to explain despite your “Don’t ask me to explain.” How did this poem germinate for you?

JR: The pleasure in writing a kind of persona poem is that the writer can step back and say, with perhaps a slight smile, oh that’s not me. So unlike the speaker, I’m happy to explain. Though I sort of imagine him as the kind of man who wants to be asked, if only to refuse. This poem started with an actual experience, which I then wanted to transform. I had to have a background check for a teaching job and while I was being fingerprinted (it’s all electronic now) I thought about how few rarely we’re touched by strangers. There was something at once strange and ordinary about this act. With a doctor for example, it’s often an ongoing relationship, and one in which one expects physical contact. But this experience had a kind of resonance: an act both coldly formal and highly intimate at once. What does it mean to touch a stranger? How does a fingerprint offer some kind of proof of one’s self? How do fingerprints mark at once both something individual and communal? As I started writing the character formed around these questions. I knew from the start that I wanted to write this from the point of view of the clerk; it seemed an occasion to move outside of myself, and within that voice, clipped and impersonal, a way to capture and collapse the distance between the intimacy of the action and the reserve he claims. I like how you say those quotes pulled you back to earth, I hoped those would be markers of personality and locate a sensibility for the speaker, a reticence to speak, to interfere, and yet perhaps revealing a kind of knowing and longing within the gestures.

SB: You’re right, of course, how rarely we’re touched by strangers—maybe even how rarely we’re touched by those we know as we spend more and more of our waking lives hooked up to all this equipment—but what really strikes me is the way your response highlights one of the things that drew me to your work in this issue, the combination of the strange and ordinary, as you put it. The domestic—touch, friends, objects—seems blended with the uncanny in your other poem from this issue, “Housewarming,” and I wonder if that’s something you consciously aim for in your work and whether you see it as a significant direction for contemporary poets?

JR: I don’t think I’ve considered it exactly in those terms before, but I’m really taken with your description of how the strange and the ordinary come together in my work, and I think perhaps more generally. Tony Hoagland has a terrific essay about Larry Levis in which he describes the poet’s metaphor making as an act of moving both away and towards at the same time. Even as a metaphor pushes away from what’s there, it returns and illuminates the thing the thing being described. Is the same true of seeing the strange within the everyday? Perhaps I hope that’s the case. That by moving away, either in imagination or metaphor or expectation, somehow the domestic, or really the relationships within that sphere between lovers, friends, family, will be understood in a new way.

Maybe there are two ways of considering it; one is seeing how ordinary the uncanny can be, and the other is to find the strangeness within the everyday. I guess I’m perhaps more interested in the later, and while I don’t think it’s something I aim for intentionally, I think it come from a kind of restlessness. Samuel Johnson said something to the effect of, “The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it.” The desire in my work seems to be one of transformation: to take the given world and see it, and beyond it. I think about poets and poems that I love—that opening of “Birches” where the speaker wants to imagine the boy swinging, or the embodied trees in Levis’s “Two Trees” mocking the man, or that turn towards that dream space in Mark Doty’s “Tiara.” They are all poems and poets who transform the landscapes they’ve been given, turning the mundane (ice storm, tree, funeral) into something extraordinary through acts of intense attention and imagination.

And while I’m not sure I could make a generalization about if this is a direction for contemporary poets, it’s maybe something ingrained in the act of writing. The turning of the world into language seems to be itself an act both strange and ordinary. The poem uses the material of the everyday to say what isn’t, or can’t be said, within the everyday. I feel like I’ve drifted far from your really insightful point, but I think finally I’m interested too in moments of shift or change, when expectations alter and surprise—that move to hang the bottles in “Housewarming” or that kind of faith at the end of “Fingerprint Clerk.” These seem like openings, occasions to be considered, and small windows into the mechanics and mystery of experience. Or at least that’s the hope.

... http://memoriousmag.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/contributor-conversations-sarah-barber-and-joshua-rivkin/

How We Know

Amy Hempel
“The Man in Bogota”

“The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge – though not, she threatens, for long.

“I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.

“I tell the woman about a man in Bogota. He wasa a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.

“Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.

“When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then – that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.

“Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.”