It’s customary at these events for the poet to make a few comments about each poem before he or she reads it. “This is when I wrote this poem,” or “this is what I was responding too” or “this is what inspired me to write.” I’m not going to do that. I’ll just tell you the title, read the poem, pause for a bit, then go on to the next poem. For one thing, I get more poems in that way. But I have other reasons, and I want to briefly tell you those too. I love narratives; I love movies and stories and novels and memoir. But I don’t write poems to tell stories. I write them to distill something. I usually don’t know what. I don’t know before I write the poem, I don’t know while I’m writing it, and I usually don’t know after it’s done. I work on a poem until it feels the way I want it to feel, and then I’m done. I work sort of like a blind sculptor, creating by indirect senses a visual medium that I will never see. For a number of years now, I’ve collected postcards. Not just any postcards; these are photographs that interest me. Some are of famous figures: musicians, artists, actors writers. Some are by notable photographers: Annie Liebovitz or Ansel Adams or Alfred Stieglitz or Mary Ellen Mark. To me, a photograph pulls something out of the stream of what we call time and stands there, asking for our response to it. It doesn’t apologize; it doesn’t qualify or justify; it doesn’t tell a story, except for the stories that we manufacture after we look at them. I approach poetry in the same way, both as a reader and as a writer. The writer has presented to me, as I will present to you, a crafted moment that instigates in the reader a certain experience. This experience belongs to the reader and the text and the event of their meeting. I have no interest as a writer in telling you what you should feel or what you should learn. I leave it to you to have the experience you will have. I’m happy to talk afterward about where your experience took you, about what you felt—or didn’t feel. But please not, dear heaven, about what the poem means, at least not in any definitive way. What a poem means is probably what interests me least. And so, as they say, take what you will, and leave the rest.
Yesterday I did some relief teaching—a spot, two-hour workshop targeted under a federal grant to help students in underrepresented groups. Because I didn't have much time to prepare, I cast about quickly in my mind and recalled a colleague a year or so ago who once described citation styles like MLA as “code.” In order for it to be accepted and do what you want it to do, you have to put it in the right format, just as you do with compute code. Because I'd been asked to deal with citation styles in my workshop, I thought of the code idea again, but free-associated to “code-switching” and the idea all languages and dialects as codes. So I tried to use that in the workshop to help the students understand that they have been learning and adapting to new codes all their lives: at work, at school, at home, in neighborhoods, peer groups, in moves from one part of the country to another. They could think of their grammar and usage handbooks, I suggested, as code books, containing the formats and special signs and symbols of academia.
All well and good, I said to myself at the end. Very clever.
But the more I thought about it, the more I felt troubled. Yes, it will help them in college to learn the code, but codes in language and in computer language don't just exist to be learned, followed, repeated. Language changes, and vision and ideas change, when someone dares to crack the code. That means not just learning how it works; it also means breaking it open, adding new means of manipulating it, extending it in ways those who came before never intended, never even imagined.
Throughout my time in higher education, most of the people I've met are eager to break the code in the first way, but very few seem willing to do it in the second way. The students I spoke with yesterday—especially those students—need to understand that if you don't crack this code, it can and will crack you, whatever it may give you in compensation for your willingness to submit to it. If making room for difference in higher education means anything, it has to mean that the code isn't just dispersed more widely; it has to mean that the code changes. It has to mean that we get to rewrite it. It's time to teach my students and myself how to crack back.
On the cusp of the new semester, I find myself scurrying around trying to put a syllabus together for the three sections of first-semester composition that begin next week. I've taught for something close to 20 years, and I can't seem to keep myself from my semiannual tinkering, but this time I feel good about one of the changes: no textbook. I am going to ask the students to buy a handbook for grammar, usage, and citation styles, but they'll be free to choose which one or to buy whichever used one they can find. I haven't ordered any.
This doesn't mean that I think I know it all. Plenty of good books about composition exist out there on the market, and some of the ones I've used have taught me a great deal. I'm not so sure how much they've taught my students. Because each book I've used has contained passages that I've had to ignore, work around, or contradict—all at a minimum of 30 bucks a pop for the students. The author gets his/her piece of the pie (often hard-earned, I know); the textbook company gets its piece; the school bookstore gets a piece and/or generates traffic for highlighters and school T-shirts and sweaters and lanyards. And I as a teacher get a ready-made chunk of material filled with “apparatus,” meaning good probing questions and sequenced assignments and themes and, more recently, on-line website tie-ins. Everyone goes away happy.
But after 20 years of teaching, if I can't produce my own “apparatus,” what the heck am I getting paid for? Shouldn't I have, by now, my own ideas and developed theories about writing and how to teach it? And shouldn't my assignments flow from those ideas, rather than whatever rent-a-theory I can find in the latest editions of a major textbook? I think so. Or at least it's time for me to put on my big boy pants and find out.
Small Disciplines
Behind the butterscotch-colored door of my home office, in the room where my computer sits, this empty web page has awaited me for months. I have grown easy with self-pity, gorging myself on Freecell and Solitaire.
I need the cumulative power of small disciplines, of moment by moment care and guidance. My discipline develops from a string of bits and pieces, beads and glass. Tiny. The discipline of drinking water. The discipline of cereal and toast for breakfast. The discipline of time for silence; the discipline of sleep. Like flakes of snow, these disciplines accumulate, pile into drifts, bend tree branches to breaking and feed waters that recarve the earth.
Instead of hewing to the small, during these flat times I pass through stretches where I can only exhibit the big. I speak in goals and outcomes and try to live year by year. I think now that to write, I must abandon goals and immerse myself in words. Each time I plot a destination, that necessary looseness tightens up, and every syllable labors to reveal itself, like trying to swing a tennis racquet with your arm locked straight, Frankenstein monster style. So much I write like that: stiff legged and hip locked. Easier in those instances not to write at all.
This goal-less notion pushes against all of everyday life with its deadlines and deal-designed exertion. But to write is to surrender to a deeper stream; to write is to drown and not mind. I’m learning that not minding is the trick. I’m learning to write by drowning in small, deliberate drips.
3 July 2008
Tools
I've had periods in my life when I talked about writing but never seemed to get around to doing any of it. I would spend days thinking about ideas for a novel or short story, or ruminating about an observation or insight I'd reached, but I never put anything down. I think I was waiting for the writing to arrive perfectly packaged, and the idea of how awful the writing would probably be when it first came out scared me. But I realize my words don't come to me clean and neatly arranged. I need a space to let the words muddle around, be silly, go running off in all directions, a place to put them while I take my time making meaning from them.
To accomplish anything with writing, I've found I need two essential tools: Something to write with (pen, pencil, marker, crayon, bloody finger) and something to write on. I've written with No. 2 pencils (smudgy and always needing sharpening), fountain pens (lovely to hold and look at but often blotty unless you use the best paper), Bic pens, gel pens, and fine tipped markers. These days, I use Uni-Ball fine points. They're fairly cheap, but they write smoothly and don't bleed too much. But each writer uses what works for him or her.
At any one time, I usually have about two or three notebooks going. When I want space for diagrams or schematics or verbal webs (more about that in another entry), I use a 9 by 12 inch sketchbook. I like the open, unlined whiteness, the heavy, smooth texture of the paper. But sometimes the size of the sketchbook feels cumbersome, and right now I'm carrying around instead a 5 by 8 1/4 inch, soft bound, lined notebook. It's easier to take with me when I go for a walk, drive the car, or even stash on a shelf near my desk at work. I also have a file on my jump drive that I can plug into a computer's USB port, then jot down notes, journal, or draft paragraphs or poems or bits of dialogue.
What makes a notebook so important? I don't know about other writers, but I find that words, ideas, images, and other bits and pieces fly through my brain all the time. Sometimes they come in whole sentences or paragraphs; often they only take the form of a list of words or even a single word; often I have no idea what I'm going to do with them. My notebooks are the places where these words accumulate like rainwater or snow. They gather and arrange themselves, pooling here and there or piling up in a corner or against a tree, and that's where most of them remain. But when I don't write them down, these words evaporate.
So I think every writer needs a place to let her words gather. It can be as fancy as a leather-bound journal from Barnes and Noble or as simple as a few 3 by 5 index cards paper-clipped together. I let whatever happens in my notebook happen: a short list, a doodle, a draft of a letter. My only expectation and criterion for success is that each day I put something--anything--down.
Crossing the Threshold
Let me begin with fundamentals, with why I think writing is worth doing.
I can go through an ordinary day: shutting off the alarm in the morning, climbing slowly out of bed to the sound of my wife still sleeping, then the accelerating motion of shower, ironing, breakfast, leaving for work too late. The hours slowly circling the clock, my evening run, talking (arguing) with my son on the phone, quiet time with my wife, dinner, TV, bed. I can settle into a string of ordinary days, and they're fine. Good, bad, but always fine. I have a good life.
But when I go to put a day or even a moment into words, something changes. It all becomes special. Not better or worse, but specific and significant. The moments, even ordinary ones, separate themselves from one another.The act of sifting through language to describe things changes them; it changes me. It helps me pay attention more, slow down; it helps me see.
I remember reading in anthropology books about rituals (like going to Mass) and rites of passage, experiences such as graduation or marriage in which our sense of ourselves and our place in the world shifts. Such a rite usually has three parts: the separation from ordinary life, the return to ordinary life, and--in between--the liminal or threshold state. In the threshold, the normal rules and values don't apply. The person going through the rite of passage steps out of the flow of the ordinary and gains a new perspective, a new sense of identity and of what's possible.
I believe that may be the most important use writing can be put to, and that's what I'm about: using writing to exit the stream of everyday thinking and examine my life and the world. So I've titled this site Threshold Writing because that's at the core of everything I want to talk about.
Of course, thresholds can be scary--I know they often scare me. So I also want to use this site to develop and share strategies for dealing with that fear. I'll be using a process that involves what I call the six acts of writing: examining, writing, naming, playing, reframing, and shaping. They are the ways to a healthy exploration of writing for self-awareness and spiritual development. I'll explain what these acts involve and offer exercises for you to try related to each of them. Those who want to explore with me further will have the opportunity to sign up for group or individual workshops with me.
But most importantly, I want this space to pursue the aspects of writing that have intrigued me since childhood. I hope you'll share my journey, and I'd love to hear from you. Let's see what happens.