Roget Ebert:
As I fell into the rhythm of the words, as I savored the way Dickens was planting his signposts for the development of the plot, as I watched him create unforgettable characters in a page or two, I felt a kind of peace. This wasn’t hectic. I wasn’t skittering around here and there. I wasn’t scanning headlines and skimming pages and tweeting links. I was reading.
What I am going to do, is take some time every day to read. I believe I’ll make it a practice to read in the room without the computer and the Wi-Fi.
I interpret “…the room without” as the rest of the world. My first daily read for the summer: Moby Dick. (It’s my first time.)
On April 1st, US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan held a video discussion with a handful of community colleges to kick off National Poetry Month, known on Twitter as #napomo — or #napowrimo to those celebrating the month by writing poetry.
I kept an ear on the conference while doing some busy-work. Here are a few partial quotes and paraphrases I managed to capture:
- “In order to write well, you must write a lot.”
- It’s important to have a defended space in which to write: people walk through a garden without fences, even if they didn’t mean to.
- “We’re not hearing from you. Have you answered?” (She was addressing technical difficulties with the link to one of the colleges, but I heard something deeper in it.)
Reading
- You need to read — read a lot — the entire spectrum: “It’s useful to read things that irritate you as well as what you like…It’s important to read outside your taste.”
- Think of your brain as a fish tank, and the fish are ideas and thoughts. For those fish to be well, the water has to be aerated all the time. Reading everything and anything plunges oxygenated language into the tank of your brain.
- “Our brain tissue is stained by really powerful voices like Emily Dickinson.”
- “Are you hungry to speak?”
- Don’t be impatient to know too much about your voice — have a lot of tolerance for yourself and your experiments.
- Eventually, one is kind of reduced to one’s voice: “Sandblasted enough, the shape of you starts coming out.”
Inspiration
- When you sit down to write, don’t worry about inspiration — “it’s a dirty trick to think you have to wait for inspiration.”
- You have to start, and inspiration may find you, or it may not at all.
- “I always find disagreement particularly provocative, to take exception to something.”
Editing and Revision
She read her poem The Other Shoe:
Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.
If the undropped
didn’t congregate
with the undropped.
But nothing can
stop the midair
collusion of the
unpaired above us
acquiring density
and weight. We
feel it accumulate.
- “A short poem, but it took a lot of work to get to it…”
- Unless you are Rimbaud, you better figure that you are going to be doing a lot of re-writing.
- The Other Shoe had nine or more previous versions. (She flipped through them quickly; one included an illustration.)
- “In order to make a poem look unworked, I have to work at it a lot.”
- “I don’t find necessarily that my first thought is my best thought at all. Just a first thought…out of which a good thought might grow.”
- She immediately forgets what she writes, which allows her to re-read as a stranger: “I have a bad memory, and have always thought of it as a great advantage.”
- “This is a patient art, in order to gain some excellence in it.”
- Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose” took 12 years?
- It took Ryan seven or eight years to find a last line that she liked for her poem He Lit a Fire with Icicles.
Questions & Answers
Student question: “What role do other readers play in your revision process?”
Kay Ryan: “Excellent question! None!”
- She keeps her own counsel.
- Her partner, who died recently, had been the only one to read pre-publication versions of Ryan’s poems: “If she didn’t tell me the bad things, I couldn’t trust her when she said something was beautiful.”
- It’s dangerous to listen to other people and their feedback.
- Working through errors yourself can take you in the direction you need to go.
- On workshop poems — “good in some sense that is incredibly boring.”
Clear Points
- Don’t court obscurity, don’t be consciously intentionally obscure.
- “We have plenty of confusion and ambiguity in this world…Try to get something important across…Try to make clear points.”
- “Publishing is an act of communication…to make someone else feel or think very much as I do.”
- When writing a poem, make sure the substance is in the poem, and not stuck in your mind.
- “Is everything you need to understand the poem available in the poem?”
- Poetry — the most exciting, exacting, demanding work she’s ever found to do with her mind.
- “Every sort of experiment can be a useful experiment.”
Note: If it’s in quotes, I’m 99% sure it’s something Kay Ryan actually said. The rest is stitched together from my short- and mid-term memory.
Note #2: I know, I know: bullet points. Sorry! I’m just trying to get this published quickly, and crafting it into a better format will just delay that.
Leap Before You Look
The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.
The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.
The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.
Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.
A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.
– W.H. Auden (December 1940)
Summarizing a recent study:
…the tactile disadvantage extends to the conceptual domain. That is, we seem to be slower at recognising when a word is tactile in nature than we are at recognising whether words are visual, to do with taste, sound, or smell.
The researchers had dozens of participants look at words on a screen, presented one at a time, and press a button to say if they were related to the tactile modality (e.g. ‘itchy’) or not. Some words were tactile-related whilst others were fillers and related to the other senses.
The same task was then repeated but with participants judging whether the words were visual-related, auditory and so on, with each sense dealt with by a new block of trials. The key finding is that participants were much slower at this task in the tactile condition than for the other senses. This was the case even when words were presented for just 17ms, which is too fast for conscious detection but long enough for accurate responding.
…
Connell and Lynott say their findings provide further evidence for the tactile sense having a processing disadvantage relative to the other senses. They think this is because there’s little evolutionary advantage to sustaining attention to the tactile modality whereas there are obvious survival advantages with the other senses, for example: ‘…in hunting, where efficacious looking, listening and even smelling for traces of prey could afford an advantage.’ You may think of pain and damage detection as reasons for paying sustained attention to the tactile domain, but remember these are served by spinal reflexes. ‘We do not wait for the burning or stinging sensation to register with the attentional system before responding,’ the researchers said.
I can think of lots of reasons for sustained attention to tactile sensation, but they probably don’t have any evolutionary purpose.
via Bobulate
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
from Repulsive Theory by Kay Ryan
Words once in common use sound archaic. And the names of the famous dead as well: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus…Scipio and Cato…Augustus…Hadrian and Antoninus, and…
Everything faces so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it.
And those are the ones who shone. The rest–”unknown, unasked-for” a minute after death. What is “eternal” fame? Emptiness.
Then what should we work for?
Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4, #33 (Translated by Gregory Hays)
William Zinsser:
The epidemic I’m most worried about isn’t swine flu. It’s the death of logical thinking. The cause, I assume, is that most people now get their information from random images on a screen—pop-ups, windows, and sidebars—or from scraps of talk on a digital phone. But writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?”
Hmm, I guess I’ve got some thinking to do.
via @WaltPascoe and @zoewesthof
There are “Books You Can Live Without“? Really?
The NYT’s Room for Debate blog makes this claim, and asked six book enthusiasts how they go about the task of choosing what stays on the bookshelves, and what should go.
My own attitude is closest to that of Joshua Ferris:
“Books are notes from the field, bound and domesticated, life brought into narrow focus. Get rid of a book? No way. Every one is a brick keeping the building standing. Books are my life. I leave and come back, and the books I find there tell me I’m home.”
I can only hope he’s joking about piling books on top of his wife — well, unless she’s into that kind of thing.
And Fred Bass, co-owner of The Strand Book Store, summarizes the economic conundrum that lurks within every book-purging project:
“When you’re all finished, think of selling your books to the Strand! Though we’ll definitely buy the quality books you plan on discarding, we really want the books you’re keeping.”
Final de Año
Neither the symbolic detail
of a three instead of a two,
nor that rough metaphor
that hails one term dying and another emerging
nor the fulfillment of an astronomical process
muddle and undermine
the high plateau of this night
making us wait
for the twelve irreparable strokes of the bell.
The real cause
is our murky pervasive suspicion
of the enigma of Time,
it is our awe at the miracle
that, though the chances are infinite
and though we are
drops in Heraclitus’ river,
allows something in us to endure,
never moving.
– Jorge Luis Borges (translated by W.S. Merwin)
Gary Snyder, quoted in the book “Where Inspiration Lives”:
Another key principle in this creative stewardship is waking up to “wild mind.” He clarifies that “wild” in this context does not mean chaotic, excessive, or crazy.
“It means self-organizing,” he says. “It means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating, self-maintained. That’s what wilderness is. Nobody has to do the management plan for it. So I say to people, ‘let’s trust in the self-disciplined elegance of wild mind.’ Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.”
From the back cover of Haiku Year:
“In 1996, seven friends agreed to write one haiku a day and mail them to each other. At the end of the year, they realized that their collection of simple, critical observations had given them a new way to look a the details of their lives.”
Examples:
Tom Gilroy:
The Smiths on
Starbucks’ sound system
another dream over
Rick Roth:
Bitter stamp taste
Licked for a letter
that will get no reply
Jim McKay:
People in cars
telling life stories
in red light glances
Tom Gilroy:
the father pushing
the kid on the tricycle
when it’s easier to tell him to pedal
Anna Grace:
at dawn
we fall asleep
mid-sentence
You can even post your own to their guest book.
From My Muse, My Self by Hazel Dooney:
“I am still both artist and muse. Because of my feminist upbringing, I used to interpret the role of muse with scepticism. It was, I used to think, related to looks, not intellect, and so inevitably ephemeral and ultimately destroyed by time.
Now I’m not so sure. In the muse that is myself, I am only just beginning to penetrate layers of 20-something years of tightly woven emotional, psychological and intellectual fabric that are enriched, not eroded, by the slow decay of the physical self.”
From Best Thought, Worst Thought by Don Paterson:
“What kills the writer, in the end, is the absence of a direct causal relationship between effort and reward. Thus it is rarely true *work*, in any way our bodies can understand. A free day, all the kids off to their grandmother’s, the house deathly quiet; half an hour’s meditation; a cafetière of Costa Rica in the study; no sound but the rain dripping from the trees in the back garden through the open window….And I cannot introduce two words to one another without them falling out immediately. Today, feeling exhausted, ill, overweight, the house full of yelling, my mind a roiling broth of fear and resentment and professional jealousy — a dozen problems I have pored over for weeks have been solved in twenty minutes flat. I end the day feeling worse than ever, as if I had accomplished nothing at all.”
From the Songs for Drella collaboration between John Cale and Lou Reed, which reflected on their time with Andy Warhol:
“No matter what I did, it never seemed enough,
He said I was lazy, I said I was young.
He said “How many songs did you write?”
I’d written zero, I lied, and said “Ten.”
“You won’t be young forever –
You should have written fifteen!
It’s work!”
….
Andy said a lot of things,
I stored ‘em all away in my head.
Sometimes, when I can’t decide what I should do
I think: “What would Andy have said?”
He’d probably say: “You think too much!
That’s cause there’s work — that you don’t want to do!
It’s work. The most important thing is work.
It’s work. The most important thing is work.”
