What we feel most…

On the big bulletin board to the left of my desk:

Assorted postcards (most strikingly featured: a manatee, a hummingbird, a fishing spot on the Cape Cod Bay)
A list of 50 literary magazines that pay
Another of phone numbers for my office-mates
A luggage tag from American Airlines
A couple of yellowing cartoons from The New Yorker
An ancient photo of my niece and nephew
A Groupon for a month of unlimited classes from a local Yoga Studio
Several quotes, lifted from periodicals and programs, to comfort and inspire (Emerson, Thoreau, Helen Frankenthaler, Whitney Balliet, and Margo Jefferson)

And poems—
poems peeking out from behind poems—
poems I had to have in my sightlines because they got to the bottom of how I think and feel; because they expressed exactly-but-exactly what I hadn’t known I thought or felt, better than I’d ever be able to say it myself—

poems from Yeats, Ponsot, Ryan, Rector, Haas, Gerstler, and Laux, to name only a few—

poems about living, and poems about writing—

“Memoir” by Vijay Seshadri—
And “The New Song,” by W. S. Merwin—
and “The Problem of Sentences,” by Linda Gregg—

and here’s Czeslaw Milosz, the last stanza of “Ars Poetica”:

What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
As poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
Under unbearable duress and only with the hope
That good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

And from Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegy #9:

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
Bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most, column tower… But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing…

And today I’m adding a poem to the board (thanks to Dinty Moore, who posted it online this morning). I’m typing it out to feel the words in my fingers, pinning it smack in the middle of everything, to remind me how important it is to get it right, and how impossible, and how that’s the reason we keep trying, isn’t it?

Here, from Jack Gilbert, who died yesterday, who left us his poems, this one among them:

THE FORGOTTEN DIALECT OF THE HEART

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Show and Tell…

A week or so ago I stumbled onto TriQuarterly Online, and into a trove of “video essays”—and I was intrigued: What could this mean, what might this be? I looked and listened to a few: Joe Bonomo’s beautiful  “Beatle Girl, Where Have You Gone?” ; Angela Mears’ astonishing  “You Are Here”; Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s  “The Lightning”—lyric and mysterious; and Dinty Moore’s compelling  History, which breaks the rules to mirror the writing process itself, the metaphor discovered and revealed in a kind of collage, whereas the others feature a writer reading aloud over a static, single image, the one that inspired their essays in the first place.

And who came up with the constraints? According to an interview on Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, editor John Bresland gets credit for the project, and it’s he who says: “We basically set out to scare the bejesus out of writers by altering the rules of literary engagement. No printed words, just voice. And no continuous video, just a static image animated by thought. The idea was to get writers to explore the range of possibilities that digital media affords. In retrospect, it’s not a huge surprise that writers can make sense of the image.”

Well, no, it wouldn’t be: Think Rilke and Barthes. Consider more recent work from Geoff Dyer, Judith Kitchen, Mark Doty, Guy Davenport, Patricia Hampl, and Charles Simic—to name only a few—some of whom who have included the ‘inciting’ images for their readers in their published work, many of whom who have not—who are willing, determined even, to let their readers recall or conjure from their own imaginations.

Not that there’s anything wrong with providing an image. Not that providing an image cannot deepen the experience of the work; nor would it be fair to say that an essay couldn’t be just as rich, just as nuanced—only differently—if its audience were left to her own devices.

I should admit straight out: I loved TriQuarterly’s video essays—loved hearing Bonomo, and Wilkinson, and Mears, and Moore, fine readers all, and both voice and image enhanced my experience, though in the end I’d actually have liked to have seen the words on the page. I even closed my eyes, imagined them there, and admired them—the words—for making music and pictures in sentences and paragraphs: for their allegiance to the image at hand, and also for the ways in which they departed from that image, whatever it was. That was worth seeing, yes—that was something I might not have taken into account had I instead, as is usual for the reader, been encouraged to come up with my own associations. Still, how not to wonder and hope—and, in the case of these four writers, conclude—that these essays were meant to hold up as essays; that they are written, albeit written to be heard.

And why would that scare the bejesus out of anybody? Isn’t all writing meant to be heard? Aren’t writing and reading aural in nature? Leonard Michaels wrote that “sense follows sound.” And Louis Menand, in his intro to Best American Essays 2004, said that writing is closer to singing than speaking. And it’s Donald Hall who insists, “You hear a poem in your mouth.” Which must be why we have all been advised again and again to read our work aloud. If a public reading is a treat for writers and readers both, it isn’t exactly a radical idea, is it? So who said it was? you ask.

Well, over at TriQuarterly you can find “On the form of the Video Essay” by Marilyn Freeman, in traditional font, in which she quotes Theodor Adorno, harks to him again and again—“The essay’s innermost formal law is heresy,” he wrote—as if to imply that the video essay is a ground-breaking form: That to write from an image is novel; that to read the work out loud is an act of dissidence! For goodness’ sake, as if none of us ever heard or aspired to read an essay on NPR. As if nobody ever gave or attended a lecture with power point, and before that slides.

Images as inspiration and/or illustration have been around as long as any of us, and reading aloud is truly nothing new.

Am I thrilled about publishing online? Yes! And delighted by the possibilities of mixed media. Also keen, thanks to TriQuarterly, to come up with a video essay of my own. But to pretend this is revolutionary—dangerous or cutting edge—I’m not buying it. Why do we insist on sensationalizing the genre, as if it isn’t already sensational? As if it isn’t already challenging and brave to write as well as we know how about what we see, feel, think, remember, experience?

And it’s for that, that I applaud these writers; kudos to them and TriQuarterly for using new media effectively—for finding another way to celebrate the essay, to deliver it in all its original integrity to an audience with more sophisticated outer if not inner resources.

Now—go on over to Youtube and check out “Girl,” written and recorded  by the Beatles in 1965, before the music video was a twinkle in your eye. Consider the sylph in the field of flowers: Does she detract from the song? Make it better? Up to the audience, I guess, though in the end I’m certain the words and the melody carry the day, how about you?

The Mindful Writer…

I confess: every day I wake up, start the coffee, feed the dog, and log onto Facebook—
where, most mornings, I find Dinty Moore, who posts daily, not about what he ate for dinner, not by way of self-promotion (more often than not he’s promoting somebody else)—and not because he doesn’t have anything else to do (among other things, Dinty directs a writing program at Ohio University, edits Brevity Magazine, and, until very recently, sat on the board of AWP). Even so, there he is with a quote for the day, meant to inspire, delight, amuse, best of all to connect us to each other and back to the work—
and he never repeats himself. Never.

But most of you know something of Dinty, who’s not only one of the most generous writers and teachers around, but among the most versatile, too. The author of The Accidental Buddhist and Between Panic and Desire, he’s written across genre to give us a couple of indispensable books about craft, a novel, and an anthology to boot—

and now, here’s his newest, The Mindful Writer, 59 ‘chapters’ arranged in four parts—

The Writer’s Mind
The Writer’s Desk
The Writer’s Vision
The Writer’s Life—

in which he explores the relationship between mindfulness and writing as each practice informs the other in ways we might not have considered.

A tall order, right? The stuff of volumes, in fact. And yet The Mindful Writer is small enough to fit in your pocket, your bag, your glove compartment, your sock drawer—you never have to be without it: as reference, as balm, as talisman; to refresh, encourage, comfort, and instruct. It’s a trove of treasures from the likes of Thomas Mann, Raymond Carver, Chuck Close, Martha Graham, Hayden Carruth, C. S. Lewis, Charles Baxter, Junot Diaz, Flannery O’Connor, Anton Chekhov, Joan Baez, Ben Yagoda, William Faulkner, and Ursula La Guin, to name only a few.

But why don’t I whet your appetite, hmmm?

Here’s Stephen Dunn: “Your poem effectively begins at the first moment you’ve surprised or startled yourself.” (The Writer’s Mind)

And Allen Ginzburg: “Catch yourself thinking.” (The Writer’s Desk)

A quote from E. M. Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” (The Writer’s Vision)

And from Ezra Bayda: “Your difficulties are not obstacles on the path, they are the path.”

And see, if all we got were the quotes—Dinty having done our homework for us—dayenu, as they say in my tradition: it would have been enough. However: We get Professor Moore as well; accessible, insightful, funny, and true, cheering us on like the teacher and friend he is.

So about Dunn, he writes: “…And don’t despair the false starts: just scratch them out and move forward.”

And he riffs off Ginsburg to say, “That thought is a line of a poem, the beginning of a story, an essay.”

Forster prompts him to remind us: “Only through writing—moving sentences, adding imagery, adjusting syntax—do we arrive at what we really think…and thus, what we really want to say.”

And Bayda’s wisdom provokes him to confide: “Here’s what I tell myself on the days that I am blocked, on the days that I can write nothing, on the days that each new sentence I put down seems even more mundane than the last. I tell myself, “Don’t worry, man, it is just a bad stretch you need to get through, and then you’ll be okay for a while.””

All this, all these gems as delivered and considered by Dinty, some or all of it bound to resonate with some and all of us—writers, artists, citizens of the world—on any given day. And what’s more, to make us feel grateful (I’m quoting the author) for the “challenge” and the “gift.”

As they say in your tradition, Dinty: Namaste.

And thanks goes to you.