On (badBad) Writing : In which I make a lot of unrelated confessions to Michael Martone

If I am writing this essay while I am standing up in the kitchen with the burner under the vegetables off while the jar of chicken stock I forgot to thaw this morning circles around and around in the microwave, its molecules rearranging, my lack of planning, my hasty shortcut making the kind of slow, wholesome, organic, mindful, zennish cooking after which I am always reaching impossible, is this essay destined to be bad?

I am making lentil soup.

I am thinking about writing and what am I thinking. I am thinking of unsculpted language and image, the lazy and unremarkable, the unpremeditated kind of language. Because I am already annoyed, because I have no soft music playing at a barely-audible volume, because I am wearing house slippers and looking from time to time over my shoulder at the sink, filling with water and suds while I hammer at the keyboard, does that make this a bad essay? Does circumstance doom the un-presupposing essay trying to get born in my overstimulated kitchen?

What if I digressed for a few paragraphs to indulge my loathing of Garrison Keillor, his homophobia and his exploitative pseudo-Americana radio program that is incredibly reductive and wrath-inducing, what if I tell you the sound of that thrice-married hypocrite’s voice makes my skin crawl; if that digression is just a brief descent into rage and does not, at the end of this essay, dovetail neatly into some revelation that displaces great volumes in the soul,– is my essay bad? (My sink just overflowed. I should learn to rein in my zealous hatred.)

The unpremeditated. The haphazardly-constructed. And so it could be said that as a reader I distrust human instinct, or I am interested in cleverness. As a writer it could be said that my unarticulated belief is that it takes effort and consideration not to be ordinary. Or that in order to be convincingly ordinary one must contrive to be so.

I am thinking about this again, rather than constantly. It is 24-or-so hours later (another feature of the bad essay: the stop-and-start?) I am wondering about tone as I narrate; the necessity of creating an inviolable narrator by positioning self at some distance from text; the self can be endlessly attacked and torn down; the narrator-free text takes some serious postmodern slash-and-burn techniques to discredit. (Hello Jacques! I like you!) I was reading R. Carver’s on writing and I started thinking about tricks and gimmicks, Carver’s “extremely clever chi-chi writing” which I have, above, basicallyconceded to trusting exclusively. I am wondering now about cleverness, about gimmicks. Was quoting Carver a gimmick. Is quoting another author, a more esteemed author, a reputable author, to make your point, a way of hiding? You are invulnerable. You stand “on the shoulders of giants”<—you borrow from what is commonly understood. To make yourself understood. (As common?)
However. There is this poem I am working on, Martone. It is so extreme a gimmick I believe I might be able to bring it full circle, back into “original” “brilliance,” but I am not exactly sure how to do it. On its own terms. Without redirecting the intention of the project back to something story-telling. Back to something lyric. (Which, suddenly, I am distrusting as gimmick. “To lie without advantage or disadvantage to oneself or others is not to lie; it is not falsehood but fiction.” [Rousseau] {<–gimmick?} ) ( < –Oh, just forget it.

[THIS SECTION REDACTED TO AVOID A LOT OF DRAMA ON THE INTERNETZZZ]

So now I have this volume of raw text, and I am (somehow?)(simultaneously?) trying to get it to transcend its own gimmick without lending it to some other gimmick – privileging, for example, lyric or narrative. Making it into something else. Or: something mine. What are the rules of such a project. What do I cut? How to I decide what to privilege, emphasize?

Which is all to say that I am having a strange intertextual exchange right now, Martone, migrating between “On Writing” and the poem, which I now think I can use Carver’s rules to navigate, and this essay, in which I am thinking the thinking alongside and between these two texts, while creating a third text, which is something I am extremely interested in. And which strikes me as probably interesting to absolutely no one, but potentially interesting to a lot of people if I can figure out how to cue the jump without being heavy handed, or just convey the enthusiasm I feel for this thinking-between-the-thinking. I’ll leave a space for you to respond to this below, if you choose:

Bad Writing: this essay? The poem? Carver’s “On Writing”? –Probably not Carver, actually, but maybe. I threw him in to round it all out, make it neat. Is neatness a trait of good-writing or ordinary-writing?

The poem makes me uncomfortable, Martone. The poem makes me feel lonely. The poem is all crowded over to the margins and it is half-words and they stop and start, creep up to something grand and fall away. The poem is a disaster. (Is it a successful disaster.) The poem is wreckage, not text. It is the fat cut off the steak. Can you make a meal of that. Can you compare poems to meat, do poems nourish, is a poem a product of slaughter, et cetera.

The essay, because it is essentially about what I am doing-this-minute and because it is a direct address from me to you, feels like cheating. Is a piece about “bad writing” allowed to be bad, or does it trivialize the topic by participating? It feels like a gimmick, or easy, the essay. (Martone I took a nonfiction class from an adjunct in college. He assigned us some prompt—I don’t remember what it was; I do remember not understanding the prompt when I read it through, alone. I don’t remember if I was stoned when I wrote the prompt down in class or if I was stoned when I read it though both are likely or if it was a bad prompt. I do remember the instructor, who had terrible orange-blond (bleached) hair and big white teeth. His jeans were very light denim, which I distrust. He looked like he had lived in LA. He had written lots of good pieces for lots of magazines, none of which I can remember now but they were cool magazines, magazines with cultural cache, like Spin and Vanity Fair. Anyway, I couldn’t really get into the prompt so I decided to interpret it loosely and I wrote 5 pages of somewhat-inspired prose, which he returned to me entirely crossed-out but for the last sentence on the last page and then he wrote something really precious and terrible at the bottom, like that movie Good Will Hunting, something that was supposed to be a bold move like “Your story starts here,” but he was just this guy with bad hair and a leather jacket and I didn’t speak to him for the rest of the semester and came to class stoned a lot and he gave me a C—which I deserved, Martone—and I quit writing nonfiction, except for my blog which I wrote in all day every day. And I never really stopped reading it. Which is to say I read/read a lot of it. )

If I do not deliver to your feet an essay that is thoughtful, an essay that swims in rare seas among the fauna and flora of exotic language, I will fail. I will have failed. But Martone, I don’t know if you’ve noticed? I am not the prettiest girl at this dance. Which is a folksy sort of way of saying (Hi Garrison! I still hate you!) that I am not the best writer here, and it seems likely that the writers here are not the best writers of any other place besides here—so then, the dance keeps getting bigger so I should get used to my own clumsy moves. And just boogie? (Uh oh.) Having already failed I am at liberty to fail as hard as I like; this week I write badly on bad writing. All this terrible self-reference leads to bad writing. Feel free to cross out everything in this essay but the last sentence. (Martone I just remembered I ran into that adjunct over the holidays, at a house party, because the town where I went to college is small like that and no one goes out really, so when there is the odd party everyone comes out and you don’t want to see any of them. He didn’t recognize me. I was relieved, but not only.)

Though perhaps I’ll begin there, when I could not write. Nursing, I’d glance up at the window to the woods that pressed close around our house. That Spring, the trees shed a thick gold powder from their thin cones. I’d track this drift. Once, I looked up and the whole pane was filled with a blur of wings, thirty or more birds vibrating against the glass. Migrating finches. A solid color. Yellow.

Bhanu Kapil

I’m getting super-awesome at karate-chopping people out of my life. WHACK! Gone.

How To Lentil Soup (After Lorrie Moore)

before anything, you’ll need music. During prep, sway a little while you chop vegetables and listen to Beach House’s sublime new release Teen Dream —

Now that that’s settled!

Collect:

2 cups lentils
1.5 onions, coarsely chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
3 celery sticks, finely chopped
(lots of recipes like to call for 3 chopped carrots, though you find the texture of cooked carrots insufferable)
14.5 oz can fire roasted chopped tomatoes
1 bunch of dark leafy green of your choice, hand-shredded (you used Kale because Kale is your boyfriend but you would have sprung for $4 Swiss Chard if it hadn’t looked so wilted or Spinach in a pinch)

2T vinegar of your choice (most recipes call for red wine but use Balsamic, you like to live dangerously)
4c Water
4c Stock-of-Choice (Vegetable, Beef, Chicken)

Optional spices:

1t Oregano
1t dried Basil
2t Cumin
1t Paprika
Salt and Pepper to taste, obvs

Saute onions and celery in a few splashes of safflower oil. Reduce heat and add garlic and a few pinches of your dried spices of choice. Saute for another two minutes. Remember in the middle that you’ve forgotten to thaw the stock you made and froze yesterday. Pull everything off the burner and open the freezer to find that one of the two pasta sauce jars you cleaned and filled with stock yesterday split from the extremes of heat/cold. Curse yourself for not letting the stock come down to room temperature before pouring it into jars. Spend the next 20 minutes submerging the unbroken jars of frozen stock in metal bowls, then give up, remove their metal lids and defrost them in the microwave for 12 minutes. While you are defrosting, dance around the kitchen like so:

Gird your loins. Add lentils and tomatoes to sauteed vegetables and stir thoroughly, then add water and stock at the same time. Bring to a rolling boil, then reduce to simmer for at least an hour or until soup is thick and lentils are soft. During the down hour, threaten the dog with a bath. Change over the record player and vaccuum the apartment while you listen to The Cars. Write a few paragraphs of an essay about “bad writing” for a Mock-Essay class–digress into a rant about how much you loathe Garrison Keillor. Decide to be meta and leave it in. Check on soup. Make a list of homework assignments to finish after you’ve exhausted the kitchen of its distractions. Check the soup again–lentils soft. Definitely. Add kale and stir until softened; realize the lentils are, um, earthy. Remember that Thanksgiving your vegan roommate made shepherd’s pie with like 12 different grains and you cheerfully referred to it as “Dirtloaf” all night. Add vinegar and stir again.

Serve with lemon water, bread that you baked last weekend, and healthy drizzles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Congratulations! You win at life.

Wept through the end of F&Z tonight.

You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don’t realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don’t see how you’ll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. ‘Cessation from all hankerings.’ It’s this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why’re you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line — in one damn incarnation or another, if you like — you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You’re stuck with it now. You can’t just walk out on the results of your own hankeringes. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to — be God’s actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to — there’s nothing wrong in trying.” There was a slight pause. “You’d better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I’m talking about. You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.” There was another, slighter pause. “I used to worry about that. I don’t worry about it very much any more. At least I’m still in love with Yorick’s skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick’s skull. I want an honorable goddam skull when I’m dead, buddy. I hanker after an honorable goddam skull like Yorick’s. And so do you, Franny Glass. So do you, so do you.

JD Salinger

May he rest, rest, rest in

Been thinking about Darker Side of Light, a collection of impressionist-era pieces, mostly etchings, designed to hang in private spaces in the home, and really devoted to darker themes and methods of execution. An interesting contrast to the dancers and public scenes rendered in light during this period. Saw this show in the basement of the West Gallery when I went to the National Gallery in December. The walls were dark, the room lowlit and hushed. The pieces were tiny; you had to bend down and sort of look deeply inside them. They were gothic and lovely. I miss this show; I should have bought the catalog.

Also from this show, Max Klinger’s series of proto-surrealist etchings The Glove, which articulate in the strangest language possible, the retrieval of a man in love the glove of his beloved:

It is not hard to see how Max Ernst descends from this.

This show is going to be in Chicago for the next couple of months. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

You’re beautiful. But you’re wrong.

That is to say, let the other things be ours, but not joined and glued to us so strongly that they cannot be detatched without tearing off our skin and some part of our flesh as well.

Montaigne

Best Contemporary Lyric Poem – Brief

It’s obvious but I’ll say it anyway: I thought a lot about lyric for this week’s assignment. The more I thought about the definition of lyric the more slippery it got, the more lost and displaced I felt: if there are snatches of story in the poem, can it be a lyric? How much story makes a poem narrative? Can there be characters—if so, can they speak? Each poem I selected and discarded based on these constantly shifting faultlines I have erected only semi-consciously around “lyric,” “narrative,” “experimental.” So, down came the trusty ol’ Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and it yielded 29 columns of text on the development and theory of the Lyric Poem: “The fundamental aspect of lyric writing…is to produce an apparently phenomenal world through the figure of voice.” Holy damn! And, just a little further down the page, “The principle of intelligibility, in lyric poetry, depends on the phenomenalization of the poetic voice (which is) the aesthetic presence that determines the hermeneutics of the lyric…The speaker is a device for making the invisible visible. The poet-surrogate is replaced by the figurative voice, a mantic or shamanistic presence that makes the verbal world of the lyric a visible world to the mind of the reader.”

Five minutes later, rifling through tshirts in my closet, I was struck rather forcefully by the thought that the Mary Jo Bang poem I’d chosen to write about just wouldn’t do; the best lyric poem I’ve ever read is Jorie Graham’s “Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne”.

In The End of Beauty, a book whose influence on me as a reader and writer I probably could not articulate with enough passion, contains several studies of giants in cultural mythology and imagination. Through the pages pass the ghosts of St. Theresa of Avila, Penelope at her Loom, The Lovers, and Adam & Eve—made luminous by and in constant dialogue with our ideas of woman- and manhood, innocence, purity, wisdom, possession of self and other, etc.

–Apollo and Daphne is kind of your standard-issue love-gone-awry myth: Apollo makes fun of Cupid; Cupid takes his revenge by making him fall in love with Daphne, who only wants to hunt; Apollo literally chases Daphne, who runs to the mouth of the river Peneus, of which her father was the god, and begged him to intervene. Peneus turned Daphne into a laurel tree to save her, Apollo made the Laurel his tree, and everyone lived happily ever &c. The story is introduced in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology as a story Ovid—a Roman— alone could have told. “A Greek poet would never have thought of an elegant dress and coiffure for a wood nymph.”

The first read I made of “Self Portrait” is a feminist repurposing of Apollo and Daphne. A scrutiny of the object/subject relationship in art and between lovers. (Mulvey’s Gaze is kind of my jam.) Can there be a self, a complete Self, that is— if we’re using Graham’s bits of broken glass as metaphor, — assembled in the gaze of an Other? “How he wanted, though, to possess her, to nail the erasures,// like a long heat on her all day once the daysounds set in, like/ a long analysis.// The way she kept slipping away was this: can you really// see me, can you really know I’m really who…” –and, perhaps more to the point, is that self distorted? “He kept after her like sunlight (it’s not what you think, she said)/ frame after frame of it (it’s not what you think you think)”.

I liked returning to it again for this essay because I found interesting threads of ideas that helped me to reconceive the poem. I thought a lot through this reading about how the laurel tree—an obvious choice in the image system of the poem, as the myth lends it directly—is abandoned, and instead the “self” of Daphne is portrayed as a constantly shifting, readjusting flock of birds: “but the air the birds call in,/ the air their calls going unanswered marry in,/ the calls the different species make, cross-currents, frettings,/ and the one air holding the screeching separateness–/ each wanting to change, to be heard to have been changed—“ Note, also, the recurrence of who in the poem, the call of a flock of birds suggested so deftly, not a bit of plunking-down in the poem.

I became really interested in the poem as a Self-Portrait. I wondered at the feminine and masculine aspects of a (dis)unified self that could be at work in the poem, particularly when I read “present tense without end, slaughtered motion, kingdom of/ heaven?—// … (is it a squeal of brakes is it a birthcry?) // (let x equal forever he whispered let y let y…) // as opposed to that other motion which reads Cast it upon the ground/ and it shall become a serpent (and Moses fled before it),/ which reads Put forth thy hand and take it by the tail/ and it was a rod in his hand again—“ how are these Masculine and Feminine aspects of self going to work on the dis-unified self with tools of linear history, linear language? (How and) Can the dis-unified Self be re-un-made in the world that is articulated as linear?

And how on God’s Earth can Graham cram all that history, all that physics, all that gender theory, and all that genuine pathos of a multiplicity of selves crying out, the shattered bits of experience all winking in the sunlight but never reassembling, into a three page poem? Graham seems to be able to pick up an idea left behind several stanzas ago with very little stage direction and weave it directly back in to the immediate drama of the poem – these ideas don’t ever really resolve themselves; that doesn’t seem to be the point. This poem is a study. It begins and ends in mystery.

Now I’m thinking about Ovid’s Metamorphoses and lyric poems and now the tradition of lyric in Rome. The Greeks developed and championed the Epic poem and Horace totally concurred with this hierarchical privilege of the Epic over the Lyric, a form much more suited to “the work of celebrating gods and heroes, the champion boxer, the victorious steed, the fond desire of lovers and the cup that banishes care” –but the fabulous irony is that actually the lyric poem thrived in Rome, and so it came to represent the Roman contribution to poetry. Figgers.