But we should never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth. The booth was extremely popular. Though American society does not particularly support poets and writers, there is a secret dream and respect for the act of writing. Ten years ago when I lived in Taos, New Mexico, I rented a run-down adobe for fifty dollars a month. The landlord had been born in the house thirty-six years ago, hated it, and was now an up-and-coming middleclass insurance agent living in Albuquerque. He scorned anyone who chose to live in that environment. I loved the house with the zeal of a foreigner. I didn’t care that it had an outhouse, one cold-water spigot, and wood-burning stoves. I tried many times to be friendly to my landlord when he came from the big city in his big car, but nothing seemed to work. We were in two different worlds.
One day I received a very thick envelope from him sent special delivery. I thought, “Uh-oh! He’s going to raise the rent.” (Every time I made an improvement, he raised the rent.) When I opened the packet, the first thing I saw was an article torn from a local newspaper about a poetry reading I had given the previous week. As soon as I saw that, I thought, “Uh-oh! I’m being evicted.” Instead, I read a letter from Tony Garcia saying, “Dear Natalie, I see that you are a poet. Enclosed are twenty-five poems I have written over the last ten years. Please read them at your next poetry reading.” In my wildest dreams I never thought of using poetry as a way to connect with him!
One year ago I received a letter from a man in San Francisco who wrote that he had been pretty mixed up and joined the Coast Guard. He only brought two things on board with him: photos of his family and the poem I had written him three years ago at the bazaar in Minnesota. Now he said he was doing well, making money with computers. He asked me if I was short on cash and said if I was, he would love to send me some money. He wrote that he always kept the poem folded in his wallet.
Frankly, I have no idea what I wrote in that poem, but I hope it said something good about the huge maple trees above our heads that afternoon, the light on the lake across the street, the sound of roller skates, the distant playing of a sax, and how good it was to be there that summer in Minnesota.
Having a writing booth is excellent practice in letting go. Let go completely. Let yourself totally be a writer from now on.
A Sensation of Space
WHEN YOU WANT to write in a certain form—a novel, short story, poem—read a lot of writing in that form. Watch how that form is paced. What is the first sentence? What makes it finished? When you read a lot in that form, it becomes imprinted inside you, so when you sit down to write, you write in that structure. For instance, if you are a poet and want to write a novel, you have to learn to write full sentences and not leap from one image to another. In reading novels your body digests full sentences, the steady hand of setting scenes, knowing the color of the tablecloth and how the writer gets her character to move across the room to the coffeepot.
If you want to write short poems, you must digest that form and then exercise in that form. Try this: write a series of ten short poems. You only have three minutes to write each one; each one must be three lines. Begin each one with a title that you choose from something your eye falls on: for example, glass, salt, water, light reflecting, the window. Three lines, three minutes, the first title is “Glass.” Without thinking, write three deft lines. Pause a moment. Do another. Three minutes, three lines, the title is “Salt.” Continue in this way until that short thinking is a structure inside you and you can call it forth when that’s the form you need. Especially in a short poem, all words are used economically and the title should add another dimension to the poem rather than repeat a word already used in the body of the short poem.
Tony Robbins, the fire-walker, says that when you want to learn something, go to experts who have put in thirty years and learn from them. Study their belief systems, their mental syntax—the order in which they think—and their physiology, how they stand, breathe, hold their mouth when they do the task they are expert in. In other words, model them. So when you go to break wood, you are not you, you are the black belt in karate that you have been modeling, and your hand does not stop at wood but goes through it.
So this is good but it is very tricky. Form alone will not create art. For instance, we are taught that a haiku is a Japanese short poem form. It has seventeen syllables and is written in three lines. It often mentions a season and something from nature. Children in elementary schools all over the United States are taught to write these three-line poems, but in truth, they are not haiku. If you sit down and read a lot of Basho, Shiki, Issa, Buson, four of the greatest Haiku masters, in good translation by R. H. Blyth, you will see that, in fact, his translations do not even follow the form of seventeen syllables with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Japanese is a very different language from English. Each syllable in Japanese carries a lot more weight than it does in English, so in order to write haiku in English, just use three short lines. “Okay. I’ve got it. I’ve studied Blyth’s translations. It’s three short lines to make haiku, and I can skip the syllable count.” Yes, but then what makes it haiku and not just a short poem?
If you read a lot of haiku, you see there is a leap that happens, a moment where the poet makes a large jump and the reader’s mind must catch up. This creates a little sensation of space in the reader’s mind, which is nothing less than a moment’s experience of God, and when you feel it, there is usually an “Aah” wanting to issue from your lips. Try reading these, translated by R. H. Blyth.15 Take your time and pause after each one.
Among the grasses,
A flower blooms white,
Its name unknown.
—SHIKI
Spring departs,
Trembling, in the grasses
Of the fields.
—ISSA
The scent and colour
Of the wisteria
Seem far from the moon.
—BUSON
The voice of the pheasant;
How I longed
For my dead parents!
—BASHO
That sensation of space is a true test of haiku. No matter how well we learn to write three-line poems, it takes much practice to fill those three lines with an experience of God. Basho has said that if you write five haiku in your life, you are a haiku writer, and if you write ten, you are a master.
We may write three novels before we write a good one. So form is important, we should learn form, but we should also remember to fill form with life. This takes practice.
A Large Field to Wander In
THREE SUMMERS AGO David took an intensive week-long workshop with me in northern Minnesota. There were twenty students in the workshop. Several of the students were teachers who had the time off; others were adults who had regular careers in other fields. They all had an interest in writing, though many were timid and very nervous the first morning of class. I gave them the usual pep talk about trusting their own voices and saying what they needed to say. Then we wrote for ten minutes, and went around the circle and read what we had written. People were shaking as they read, not necessarily because they had written anything earth-shattering this first morning, but because it is very naked to put your voice out there for the first time in a group of strangers. People read about their childhoods, their farm, how nervous they were. It was a regular beginning. Then David read in a very loud voice:
Masturbation. Masturbation. Maaaaaaas . . . Ma!
Ma! Ma! Ma! Mastur ba ba ba tion tion tion . . .
And so forth. It certainly woke everyone up.
David wrote little else on any other subject for the entire week. Now, on the basis of that kind of writing, one would wonder why I had a great belief in his ability, but I did. Right from the beginning he broke all rules of syntax, said what he needed to, and continued to trust his own voice to all our amazement. I also felt great energy from his writing and knew if he could harness it—why, he could even move on to other subjects. As he came to wri
ting groups during the next two years, I was impressed by his determination, and I loved his sense of humor (though at times I was the only one laughing in the group). It is true that often no one could quite understand what he was talking about, but I trusted the energy behind his words.
Often I have had students who were very coherent right from the beginning. They wrote complete sentences, were descriptive, detailed, and grounded. In Minnesota, in the heart of the Midwest, almost everyone could write like this. I heard stories about tornadoes, winters, grandmothers, but after years of that I felt there was nowhere to go in their writing. Because they did write well, they were unwilling to leave what they knew, to break into new frontiers and crack open their world into the unknown. I remember in one Tuesday-night class, the writing was so basically solid and good, I couldn’t shake them. I wanted them to foam at the mouth, becoming blithering idiots, and wander into unknown fields. At the end of the class, after they were eager to understand and didn’t, and I was eager to shake them and couldn’t, I suddenly stopped and said, “I know what the problem is! None of you have ever taken acid!”
Now, I don’t propose that LSD or psychedelics necessarily make a person a better writer. What I meant was at some point in our lives we have to be crazy, we have to lose control, step out of our ordinary way of seeing, and learn that the world is not the way we think it is, that it isn’t solid, structured, and forever. We are going to die someday, and nothing can control it. Don’t take LSD. Go to the woods alone for three days. If you are terrified of horses, buy one and make friends with it. Extend your boundaries. Live on the edge for a while. We act as though we were immortal, and are comfortable in that illusion. We don’t actually know when we will die and we hope it will be in old age, but it can be this next minute. This thought of mortality is not droll; it can make our lives very vital, present, and alert right now.
I trusted that while David was out there flying in his writing, he would land someday and make his vision clear to us who were living in the solid land of Minnesota. He would down-spiral and hit the mark exactly like a great archer. He had given himself a lot of space. If you begin too exactly, you will stay precise but never hit the exact mark that makes the words vibrate with the truth that goes through the present, past, and future.
The important thing is that David was determined and he continued. I was only half surprised when he just recently entered a master’s program in writing at the University of Minnesota so he could learn to write in full sentences and to write persuasive essays and memoirs, and so his energy could come home to roost. And it did with pieces like this:
Legs
BY DAVID LIEBERMAN
Looking at the photo of Gerald Stern and Jack Gilbert
on the cover of the Red Coal—
The way Gerald walks
I love him,
I love his body,
the way his legs fill the baggy pants,
make them stand like lions,
his walk like his mind is open and
spinning on all the juice of Paris,
shimmering legs, like Art Deco,
like slender tanks,
legs with mind.
I love Gerald Stern walking in Paris 1950.
And myself walking in the Mission, San Francisco
February with Don
and the young Mexican men and the women too
challenging the universe with their legs.
Only in cities do you see this
where the body chemically absorbs
all of the power of the streets and
shops and cars and trolleys and noises
and the hundred ways they are organized
and disorganized in sound and vision and smell
and it all comes up like steam
from the subway grates
and is collected in men’s bodies
and liberates their minds.
Suzuki Roshi says in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind that “The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in its wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” You need a large field in writing too. Don’t pull in the reins too quickly. Give yourself tremendous space to wander in, to be utterly lost with no name, and then come back and speak.
The Goody Two-Shoes Nature
IN ORDER TO improve your writing, you have to practice just like any other sport. But don’t be dutiful and make it into a blind routine. “Yes, I have written an hour today and I wrote an hour yesterday and an hour the day before.” Don’t just put in your time. That is not enough. You have to make great effort. Be willing to put your whole life on the line when you sit down for writing practice. Otherwise you are just mechanically pushing the pen across the page and intermittently looking at the clock to see if your time is up.
Some people hear the rule “Write every day” and do it and don’t improve. They are just being dutiful. That is the way of the Goody Two-shoes. It is a waste of energy because it takes tremendous effort to just follow the rules if your heart isn’t into it. If you find that this is your basic attitude, then stop writing. Stay away from it for a week or a year. Wait until you are hungry to say something, until there is an aching in you to speak. Then come back.
Don’t worry. You won’t have lost time. Your energy will be more direct and less wasted. This does not mean “Great, I’ll stay away for a little while and then come back wanting to do it and I won’t have any more trouble.” There will always be trouble, but the embers of expression deep inside you will have had some space and air to really begin to glow. You will have made a deeper commitment and come back more fully choosing to engage.
It is also good to remember that if you have been pushing hard for a while—a few weeks, a month, a whole weekend nonstop—rest completely for a while. Do something totally different and stop thinking about writing. Go paint the living room that looks dark and ugly; paint it white. Try baking some of the desserts that you cut out the recipes for in your local newspaper. Put full energy into something else. Do your taxes or play with your kids totally for two weeks. You will learn about your own rhythm—when you need to write and when you need to rest. This will give you a deeper relationship with yourself. You won’t follow rules blindly.
I am thinking of the very close friend whom I traveled with in Europe for a month. She was very busy teaching during the year and raising her four-year-old son. This month in Europe she was determined to write an hour a day. It was very painful to watch her because she approached it as dutifully as she did her teaching, her evening cooking, her laundry.
As we talked, I found out she had never missed one day of school in her entire public school career. Even if she was sick, her mother insisted she go to school. We have been taught to follow rules and never think about the value of the rules. Over my six years in Minnesota I met several people who proudly told me they had perfect attendance in public school. I fail to see the real value of perfect attendance. Yes, schools receive a daily allowance from the government for student attendance, and there is virtue in dependability, perseverance, and regularity. These qualities should be taught, but not in a black-and-white way.
There should also be shades of gray and blue. There are dentist appointments, sadness over the death of a dog, Jewish holidays or American Indian celebrations, sore throats, a visit from your grandmother. Life is very big. There should be a flexibility in our daily routines so we have the space to feel how good it is to receive a public school education and learn to read words and form letters with our yellow pencils on white, blue-lined paper.
You need this flexibility and space also for writing. Writing asks you to be engaged. Yes, after an hour of keeping your hand moving, you will have several pages filled with words; but ultimately, you can’t fool yourself. You must enter the gray and blue and your feelings, hopes, dreams. Somewhere along you have to break through. If not in this writing session, then in the next. If you are bored fo
r years of writing, it means you are not connecting with yourself and the process. If you have a wish hidden below your Goody Twoshoes nature to be a writer but you make effort only as far as putting in your time, it just isn’t enough.
Sometimes you have to change something else in your life in order to go further. Writing alone is not enough. One night in the Milan airport, after we had each had a glass of wine, my friend asked me, “Well, do you think I’ll be a writer?” I had to say the truth. “Well, I think you will have a good life, bring up a good kid, and have a happy marriage. I don’t know if you’ll be a writer.” She slammed down her glass and said with more energy and original response than she had the whole trip thus far, “I’m not going to finish out my life cooking hot dogs on Sundays!” When the month was over she had firmly decided to quit her eleven-year-old teaching job, which she had been tired of for the last few years, and try something absurd that she had always wanted to do—be a bartender. Her writing the last days of the trip was full of vitality.
When I lived in the Midwest I loved to walk in cornfields. I would drive out to farmland, park my car, and walk in the rows of cornfields for hours. In fall you could hear the dry stalks crack. When I invited a friend to join me, her immediate response was, “But isn’t that illegal? Doesn’t someone own that field?” Yes, very strictly speaking that is true, but I didn’t hurt anything. No one ever seemed to mind, and on several occasions when I met the farmers who owned the fields, they were accepting of what I did and mildly amused that I took joy in their fields.
Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within Page 11
