The fact is, once we throw a word or any sort of communication into the wind, whether at someone specific or not, we no longer control it. Each receiver can find things in it, consciously intended or not, that I think are every bit as valid (and “true”) as what the transmitter THOUGHT he/she intended.
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NEGATIVE CAPABILITY celebrates Mark Twain’s birthday. Twain was born in 1835
and his writing advice is as good today as it was in his time. Her are 10 Twain tips for good writing:
1. Get your facts first. Then you can distort them as as you please.
2. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
3. As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
4. You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it.
5. Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write "very."
6. Use good grammar.
7. "There is one thing I can't stand and that is, sham sentimentality.
8. Use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. . Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.
9. The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.
10. Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.
I’m currently busy shilling my first collection of poetry, Two Faint Lines in the Violet, published by the wonderful Negative Capability Press. It’s fun. No, really! I get to do stuff like this, for example, in addition to my full time job, my three part-time jobs, and working on my next title, Glass Needles & Goose Quills: Elementary Lessons in Atomic Properties, Nuclear Families, and Radical Poetics, a book-length braided lyric essay.
In between, I pencil in dates with my husband while my cats look on, perplexed as to where the Brooklyn "kitty-spa" they once called home has gone.
I’m also trying to sell said home in order to move up to the Catskills to establish a physical presence for my business, The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative, a provider of online poetry workshops. But that's just the pretense. The truth is I've lived in New York City now for 30 years, and having been raised in the wide open spaces of northern Massachusetts, I’m craving space madly—specifically, horizontal space. If only I could lay Brooklyn on its side, I might be able to hold out a little while longer, though that isn't likely to happen, and even so, it would still be tight living. I want to raise a barn where we can hold residencies, readings, and retreats, and to sit outside at night and hear slightly more mellifluous sounds than sirens and the Mr. Softee truck.
Speaking of sound, I've been told that I have an unusually wide repertoire of voices. I used to lament this, thinking I had not yet found that one signature voice—“my voice”— a concept that gets bandied about often enough in writing workshops. But one thing I keep hearing from readers of Two Faint Lines in the Violet is how full of surprises they find it and, surprisingly, that makes me happy. One reader went so far as to call it a page-turner!
Since my book came out, some curious or perhaps simply polite people will ask me what it’s “about.” My go-to and perhaps evasive answer is that my poems are almost always about many things at once: cabinets of curiosities, composites of disparate experiences issuing from the throat of a composite persona.
Thematically, though, Two Faint Lines in the Violet is more or less a collection of volatility. The poems vary topically, but share an undercurrent of trouble. The wonderful Irish fiction writer Claire Keegan once advised me that our characters should always be in some sort of trouble, lest there be no tension. It’s safe to say this collection does not lack tension.
The first part, titled “The Daughter Element,” is reserved for the parallel stories of my father’s developing and dying from complications of a brain tumor and the decommissioning of a nuclear power plant that practically operated in his backyard. While many of the poems in “The Daughter Element” are quite personal, because of the gaze more often being directed outward than in, I think of these poems as social. The second part, titled “Inseparable Elements,” holds mostly poems of intense interiority on a variety of highly-charged autobiographical topics.
Some particularly curious, or perhaps, particularly polite people go so far as to ask me about my process. That question’s a bit more difficult to field. A poem’s genesis, for me, typically begins with the Wordsworthian spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Despite evidence to the contrary (this blog post, for example), I'm a pretty private person, so I tend to keep my feelings tamped down until they inevitably surface in search of air, an outlet, expression—a condition my former mentor Jeanne Marie Beaumont fittingly calls “critical mass.”
Robert Frost said: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, a poem must ride on its own melting.” Similarly, Richard Hugo suggests in The Triggering Town that a poem has both a “triggering” subject as well as a subject or subject(s) that the writer discovers along the way. All of these concepts could describe different "key frames" in my process.
The triggering event, however, need not be extraordinary; it might be as simple as something newly or acutely observed, or simply derived from a heightened sensitivity to a perceived change in my emotional temperature. After I’ve completed the first draft of a poem, that temperature seems to regulate to a point whereby I am no longer seized by the need to write a poem, though I am then likely to be obsessed by the need to edit it.
Suffice to say that when I start to write a poem, I’m usually trying to figure something out but I’m not even sure how to pose the question. But if, in the process of writing, I manage not only to formulate that question but also to answer it—even if the answer isn’t perfect or the one that I’d hoped to find—that's when poetry feels a little like magic.
WHY DO YOU WRITE?
July 9, 2014: ON WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION
This fall at the University of South Alabama, I will be teaching a course on Creative Nonfiction. I thought I would share this process – and ask if you would like to join in – and perhaps “soothe the voices shouting inside me, outside me, all around.”
Indeed, what text? How to choose? I think I will start with Writing Creative Nonfiction – edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard – though I shall dip into other texts from time to time.
One of my favorite essays of all time is “Why I Write,” by Terry Tempest Williams. (See: http://www.coyoteclan.com/) It often amazes me that readers bypass the author – as if who is writing is somehow a separate thing – for the article / poem / story being read. Terry Tempest is an ecological writing – and the sense of place is important to her.
Can’t you – in your mind’s eye – see your childhood bedroom with absolute fidelity? Can you see where the dresser was – maybe beside the window where you can see not only yourself in the mirror, but the monkey puzzle tree just outside? Can you see the bed you slept in? The closet with two rows of shelves?
I note that Terry Tempest Williams begins by situating herself in time. “It is just after 4:00 a.m.,” she says. “I was dreaming about Moab, Brook and I walking around the block just before dawn.” . . .
Here is the essay: http://rvannoy.asp.radford.edu/rvn/312/whyiwrite.pdf
You will note the repetition of the words “I write . . . “ pushing the essay forward: “I write to make peace with the things I cannot control.” And so forth . . . . This repetition is called anaphora – a rhetorical device that repeats a series of words usually at the beginning of a piece. If I count correctly, Williams says / writes the words: “I write” some 74 times in just two pages.
I ask myself this June morning why I write? What is it I want for my writing? No, Williams does not ask that. She does not say she writes to be published. She does not say she writes to be famous, to make money . . . . She even says that she writes “because it is dangerous, a blood risk, like love . . .
I had a professor at Tulane who had a stamp that said “Bull . . . . “ – and he would use it to indicate his thoughts about what a student wrote. Whoa! That gets a student’s attention.
So I want to turn the question “Why I Write” on his head and ask: “Why don’t I write? In a way, this is a lot easier to answer. I don’t write because I think I’m not good at it. I don’t write because I don’t want to appear stupid. I don’t write because I could never be as good as my friend Pat. I don’t write because I’m too busy and I don’t have time.
So, let’s begin. Tell me: Why do you write – or conversely “why don’t you write? I mean other than a grocery list or a check to your dentist.
And do you keep a journal? I bet you don’t know what you were doing on July 9 last year?
Terry Tempest Williams says: “I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.”
Tell me: Why do you / why don’t you write?
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