When I...

The other night, I saw Robert Pinsky  (poet laureate of the United States, 1997 -2000) talk about poetry on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.  Charming, engaging and passionate, he talked most particularly of his love of music and the importance of rhyme and tonality in poetry. As well, we saw a clip of Pinsky reading his poems with a live jazz band – his voice like another instrument riffing right along with the clarinet and the saxophone.  Pinsky says “I think the rhythms in a lot of my writing are an attempt to create that feeling of a beautiful, gorgeous jazz solo that gives you more emotion and some more and coming around with some more, and it’s the same but it’s changed, and the rhythm is very powerful, but it is also lyricism. I think I’ve been trying to create something like that in my writing for a long time.” (The Progressive)

"Samurai Song" by Robert Pinsky When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. When I had No supper my eyes dined. When I had no eyes I listened. When I had no ears I thought. When I had no thought I waited. When I had no father I made Care my father. When I had No mother I embraced order. When I had no friend I made Quiet my friend. When I had no Enemy I opposed my body. When I had no temple I made My voice my temple. I have No priest, my tongue is my choir. When I have no means fortune Is my means. When I have Nothing, death will be my fortune. Need is my tactic, detachment Is my strategy. When I had No lover I courted my sleep. Watch Pinsky recite this poem

I hear the music in Pinsky’s work. Notice Pinsky’s repetition of  “When I” at the beginning of each paragraph.  Read the poem aloud and you will see that this powerful and lyrical language, this repetition pulls you into the poem.  It’s what Jack Grapes calls “a sung verse… public voice, meant to rouse and inspire.” Mary Oliver uses the same voice in How Would You Live Then? --repeating “What if” and achieving a similar reaction in the listener. Read the poem aloud and you will feel the effects of the rhythm of repetition of What if.”

How would you live then?

 What if a hundred rose-breasted grosbeaks

     flew in circles around your head? 

What if the mockingbird came into the house with you and

     became your advisor? 

What if the bees filled your walls with honey and all

     you needed to do was ask them and they would fill

    the bowl? 

What if the brook slid downhill just

     past your bedroom window so you could listen

    to its slow prayers as you fell asleep? 

What if you painted a picture of a tree, and the leaves

     began to rustle, and a bird cheerfully sang

     from its painted branches? 

What if you suddenly saw that the silver of water was brighter than the silver

     of money? 

What if you finally saw that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day

     and every day --- who knows how, but they do it ---were

   more precious, more meaningful than gold?

Exercise:  Repeating the phrase  "When I "' or “What if” build a series of sentences that, due to the repetition of “When I” or “What if," become an incantation.  Vary the length of the sentences.  For example, "When I think of gin, I grin.  When I think of gin and grin, I reach for the bottle.”   Or, “What if I wrote the poem that’s been living in me all these years.  What if it got published? What if I had to go the publishing party and I had no dress.  What if I went naked” Of course, I’m am trying to be funny to lighten the burden here, but this is serious and valuable stuff.

Think of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. He repeats the phrase many times, varying the length of the sentences.  You can go serious with your tone, like Oliver and King, or be lighthearted, talking about chocolate ice cream for example. It's the exercise that counts. It's the rhythm and tone of your writing that will be the incantation. 

Throw Your Dream into Space Like a Kite

Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back: a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country. Anais Nin

When you wake up you gotta show the love in your heart. Carol King.

It’s the start of a New Year. We need to be awake to all the world has to offer us as artists. The Anais Nin quote came to me as I tilled the field of New Year’s Resolutions. The Carole King line floated across the TV screen. I learn once again that each moment offers a fruit ripe for the picking.

One of King’s backup musicians, Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar – acoustic guitar, conga, electric guitar, vocals reminds us that we are here “to serve the song.” Writers have to serve the story. Hence those long hours over a paragraph. What does this piece want to say? And, as one of the musicians says, “We are here to get people to feel.” How do we best do that, we ask, as we agonize over the appropriate word for the blue of our protagonist’s eyes. Are they azure, beryl, or blue-gray. Blue-green or cerulean, cobalt, or indigo?

As the year turns, I bow in the direction of my spiritual antecedents. I recite Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin and the Pslams to ground myself in the world that surrounds me. I love this moment in Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese:

                   Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

                           in the family of things.

By our words, we help ourselves and our readers to find our place in the family of things.

Two Last Minute Openings for the Winter Writing Workshop!

Happy New Year!

 

Didn’t receive books over the holidays?  Take a look at the following favorite book lists, one from NPR and one from The New York Times

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/30/166251839/best-books-of-2012-the-complete-list

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/books/review/10-best-books-of-2012.

No time to read? Download books to Audibles, pick up the CDs of another at the library and listen as you drive.  During my frequent drives to Portland, I have been listening to a long and engaging book called The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. As I listen, I am pulled from the present dull reality of driving on Route 1, back to 12th century England and the power and intrigue surrounding the building of a Gothic cathedral. And as I react to the tale, I am reminded of the simple principle of good story telling: keep your hero in jeopardy. Let him emerge for a moment; let the listener breathe a sigh of relief and POW! Hit him with something unexpected. Sometimes I can’t stand the tension and, without thinking, reach out and turn off the CD, my heart pounding, full of rage at the antagonist. The power of a well-told tale!

Sampling books is a good way to stay up to date without feeling overwhelmed by the numbers. Open a book and read a chapter. You can do so in a bookstore or in a library, or online at Amazon.

Other thoughts and suggestions. Read Hilary Mantel, an award-winning author of historical fiction. At this moment, I’m reading Wolf Hall about England under Henry the VIII. It’s riveting.

And for a great book about the craft of writing, being an artist, or living like an artist, get a copy of Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.

Are you making resolutions? Check into this website http://www.brainpickings.org and read the resolutions of renowned artists, including Marilyn Monroe. On the same web site, you can read about the routines of renowned writers. It’s always bracing to read these. Here is E.B. White:

I never listen to music when I’m working. I haven’t that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn’t like it at all. On the other hand, I’m able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There’s a lot of traffic. But it’s a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me. A girl pushing a carpet sweeper under my typewriter table has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken my mind off my work, unless the girl was unusually pretty or unusually clumsy. My wife, thank God, has never been protective of me, as, I am told, the wives of some writers are. In consequence, the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man — they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.  (My emphasis)

Happy New Year!

Listening to Christmas

As we begin to embrace both the sorrow of the Newtown massacre and the joy of Christmas, it is good to return to the classic holiday stories. My class of five and I sat around our fireplace yesterday morning, rain falling outside, our meeting room festooned with a tree, two mangers and several bright red Santa Clauses carved out of walnut. The wind bustled, slap dashing against the windows as we read Nabakov, Dickens, Truman Capote, and Russell Banks. And listened to Dylan Thomas reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales. 

Our spirits came together as we heard Truman Capote in A Christmas Memory tell the story of his Christmas as a young boy in Monroeville Alabama, living with relatives in a big house. His close friend and constant companion, a sixty-year-old female relative, looked like “a bantam rooster.” At Christmas, they gathered their pennies (they are quite poor) and made thirty fruit cakes, distributing them to “people who have struck their fantasy” like President Roosevelt, the local bus driver and Haha Jones who supplied them with whiskey for the cakes. Buddy’s companion is full of wisdom. She reflects, “there’s never two of anything.” And, toward the end of the story, she says,  “I’ve always thought that a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord….But I’ll wager that at the very end a body realizes that the Lord has already shown himself. That things as they are – her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.” Words like this calm our spirit and heal us. Read Capote’s story aloud to your family and friends, and smile.

And then, revisit A Christmas Carol and remember the transformation of Scrooge once he was visited by the spirits. After his encounters with the ghosts,

“He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.  May that be truly said of us, and all of us!  And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!”

If you have another moment, listen to A Child’s Christmas in Wales, read by Dylan Thomas. This tale will make you laugh and you will marvel at the music of the language. Listening together with friends and family will bring you close.

Happy Holidays and let’s keep the radiance of today in our eyes and rejoice in our loved ones.

Give yourself a gift for the holidays. Join my Method Writing class which begins January 17th in Rockport, Maine. Here's the flyer for the class:

The Writing Life

I am a writer, writing coach and teacher and I haven't been posting recently because I am pursuing my MFA in Fiction which involves rewriting my novel, writing critical essays analyzing plot, point of view, voice, structure. Having turned in 12 chapters of my novel, and learned a tremendous amount about writing from analzying writers like Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nabokov, I am back and ready to share my new found knowledge.

For the New Year, I'll be launching a series of posts on the Writing Life, mine and yours. I'll post three times a week, one longer piece, one piece with quotes and links, and one piece with exercises. Let's start with a juicy quote and a link to my favorite writers' web site.

Steven Pressfield (www.stevenpressfield.com), author of The War of Art, writes weekly about the writing life, with emphasis on getting published, staying on track, and going the distance. If you have a moment, read The War of Art. It might change your life. It changed mine! And follow Steven weekly.

From Wendell Berry, the poet, one of my favorite quotes about working as an artist:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. 

Next post, I will give you a couple of exercises to baffle your mind! Until then, keep writing.