Writing Through the Block

When the term “Writer’s Block” is mentioned it usually conjures up images of a writer who has just loaded a piece of paper into a typewriter.  She takes a sip of coffee, gently place her hands over the typewriter keys, looks out of the window—faced filled with joy and hope—inhales, and before she finishes her breath all youth and hope flee her face as she realizes that she has no idea what to write about.  She will stare at that empty page, maybe writing a sentence or two. But in a moment of fury, she will rip the page from the typewriter, crumble it up, and throw it across the room.  To add insult to injury, she’ll miss the wastepaper basket.

Or maybe you’re a little more modern and imagine the writer sitting in front of a computer.  A blank screen with only the cursor blinking as a reminder of all the words that are not being written.  Whole novels that will never be written!  The writer may type a sentence then madly hit the backspace key, all the while thinking that deleting something is not nearly as satisfying as crumpling up a page.

However, this is never how writer’s block is for me. In fact, I am somewhat hesitant to use the term, but I can’t think of a better one.  In the above scenarios, there is an assumption that writers work only on one piece at time. I suspect that this may be true for some writers of larger works like novels or memoirs, but not any writer I know (who has talked about the writing process with me).  I usually have a dozen poems that are currently in a state of revision and a couple short stories too.  If I sit down to my computer and I can’t think of anything to write, I will turn to a revision.

Because of my process, writer’s block, for me, is when I don’t have anything new to start, but I also hate what I’m currently working on.  I’ll look at a poem and the very words seem to rot on the page.  I look at a title and exclaim that “I can’t stand to even read the damn thing!”  I’ll wonder why I even thought I could be a poet in the first place.

I’m tempted to say screw it and go watch the movies saved in my queue.  But when I get inspired, it’s most often when I’m already writing.  I’ll be trudging through a revision of a poem that seems to call into question my very literacy, when suddenly I know how to fix it or have a new idea and start another poem.  I find that I’m rarely inspired while watching old episodes of Farscape.

Imagine how much I could get done if it weren’t for Farscape.

The trick with writer’s block is to keep your butt in your chair and to keep putting words on the page even if you hate those words.  Here are some tricks I’ve picked up.

1. Use a random word generator to get at least five words that you then put into a poem or short story.  I find that a large part of writer’s block is that I’m unknowingly stuck in a rut. These random words force me to write about something different and often provides enough novelty to get me interested again.  One warning, if you decide to revise the piece don’t be afraid of getting rid of those five words—they were only there to get you writing again.
2. Select a poetic form to write in.  I once claimed that “Whenever I have writer’s block, I punish myself by writing in a poetic form.”  Now I don’t want people to assume that forms are unpleasant, but I admittedly don’t turn to them unless I have no idea what else to do with a poem.  Form allows me to approach a poem from a different angle, to ignore meaning.  This often allows me to trim the fat or generate new text.  After I finish the formal draft, I have an idea of where to go.  Also, this method works for starting new poems.  I’ll use the random word generator to come up with words that I then use in forms like the sestina, villanelle, or triolet.
3. Keep something close to your desk to read.  I keep copies of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen close.  If I’m unsure of what to write, I will read a fairy tale—usually not one I particularly familiar with—and then try to rewrite it from a view-point of one of the characters or place it in a modern setting.  This method sometimes doesn’t work at the time, but the fairy tale will often stick in my head until a few weeks later when I use it for a new poem.
4. Keep a reading journal.   I assume that if you’re writer you’re probably a reader too.  Writing about what you read is helpful in that it allows you to think critically about writing.  Also, the nice thing about a reading journal is that you can be as petty and mean to that beloved author as you like without worrying about anyone reading it and realizing what an awful person you are.
5. Finally just write about writer’s block.  Sometimes in exploring why you can’t write you’ll realize that the next step that a poem or a story requires is just something that you don’t want to do and have been avoiding.  For example, I’m working on poem that requires some serious research; however, instead of doing it, I’ve written a blog post.

Ultimately, just because you don’t like what you’ve written isn’t an excuse on not staying in your chair and continuing to write.

Animals in Poems

Yesterday, I started reading Wait by C.K. Williams, while it is too early for me to say whether or not I would recommend the book, for the most part I’ve enjoyed it.  However, there is one poem I going to nit-pick, “Rats.”  Perhaps what frustrated me the most was how much I liked the first section.  There the situation is set up, during a drought two river rats show up who “sallied into the garden/ to snitch the crusts/ we’d set/ out for the birds//But still, who/ knows in what filth/ and fetor and rot/ down in their dark// world they were/ before?”

The conflict between humans and nature is one of my favorite subjects to read about.   This preference maybe in part because I wanted to be a zoologist when I was a child and watched any nature documentary I could get my hands on.  Two of the best poems that deal with this subject are William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark,” and Maxine Kumin’s “Woodchucks.”  In these two poems you have speakers who encounter animals, and this confrontation makes the speakers realize something about themselves and their relationship to said wildlife.

In Stafford’s poem, the speaker comes across a dead deer that has been hit by a car.  The speaker points out, “It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:/ that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead,” showing that he is concerned with the welfare of wildlife.  But as he is about to roll the doe off the cliff, he discovers that “her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting/ alive, still, never to be born./ Beside that mountain road I hesitated.”  Ultimately, the speaker is able to do nothing and pushes the doe off the cliff.  While brief, “Traveling Through the Dark,” shows how even those who care about animals may not be able to save them.  It may be dark and fatalistic, but it ultimately shows the complex relationship humans have with nature.

Kumin’s poem is even darker. In the “Woodchucks” the speaker is actively trying to exterminate the animals.  We see the speakers justifications, “They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course/ and then took over the vegetable patch/ nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.// The food from our mouths, I said, righteously.”  Kumin does a wonderful job of showing the brutality of the speakers actions from the very fist line, “Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.”  She ultimately shows how people justify brutality (whether it be against animals or other human beings), and we in turn understand how we ourselves may justify violence.

As I read “Rats,” I recognized similarities to “Woodchucks.”   I was interested in seeing the conflict between the speaker and the rats develop.  In the second section Williams expands the breadth of the poem to a global scale “we’re frightened./ The planet all/ but afire, glaciers// dissolving, deserts/ on the march.”  At this point I’m still with the poem, even excited; as global warming increases animals are losing their habitats and more people will encounter them, and I’m glad that someone is writing about it. Williams mentions a president and CEOs denying global warming, and while I’m suspicious of overtly political poems (specifically when it is used to alienate those that are on the other side of issue rather than to persuade them), in this case it still seemed pertinent to the poem.  Then I read the lines “The rats// rove where they will/ now; shining and fat,/ they appropriated/ the whole lawn.”  Oh, I thought as I read this, the rats are only metaphors for politicians and CEOs.

I couldn’t help but feel that a disservice had been done to the rats, the actual animals.  As Williams establishes in the first part of the poem, the rats are river rats who show up because they’ve lost their habitat.  Humans have driven them to this confrontation.  I think that it is unfair to compare them (or any animal no matter how disgusting one finds them) to politicians. As habitats are destroyed humans are going to find themselves sharing spaces with wildlife, and some of these animals maybe repulsive to us for whatever reason.  I don’t think animals should be condemned due to our preference for other cuter or prettier species.

Of course, part of the reason I being so hard on “Rats” is that I just don’t like when poems conflate humans and animals, whether it be on a psychological or spiritual level.  One of the things that I learned from all those nature documentaries is that human beings cannot know what the internal life of an animal is nor should we judge animals by human moral standards.  It is mistake to give the animal human emotions—it belittles the animal.  The rat is not a thief just because you left the bread crumbs for the birds.

I’ve heard dozens of poems about encounters with deer where the speaker has an epiphany, where that animal’s only reason or purpose for being in the forest is the spiritual enlightenment of some suburbanite on hike.  While these people may love and value the animal, they still have a paternalistic attitude towards it.  They may wish to protect them, but at the same time they feel that the wildlife is there serve them.  The writing about encounters with wild animals that I prefer is when the speakers recognizes that what they feel is not necessarily shared by the animal and questions what effect, even those who care for wildlife, they have on the animals they’re encountering.  We may love nature, but our very presence, no matter how loving or well-meaning, maybe harmful.

As I said at the beginning of this post, this is mostly a nitpick and otherwise I’ve enjoyed Williams’ book so far.  I suspect that I’m being a little unfair here, but I still think rats are far superior to politicians.

Much cuter than a politician.

“On Returning to Tent Rocks with Friends” is Published.

New Mexico is different from any other place.  ”But,” you may say, “that is true of all states.”  I agree, dear reader, but I doubt people from Ohio ever have to explain that Ohio is part of the United States.  Unfortunately, us New Mexicans must often explain that “No, we are part of the United States, not part of Mexico,” and really that is just tip of the iceberg.

New Mexico is currently celebrating its bicentennial.  One of the many events honoring New Mexico’s 200 years of statehood is 200 New Mexican Poems, an awesome online anthology that you should check out.

I’m honored that my poem, “On Returning to Tent Rocks with Friends,” is 1 of the 200 hundred.

Finding Poetry in the Potato Room

So far this month I’ve been talking about poets with established reputations, but I want to discuss a poet whose work I enjoy, but who only has one book out.

A couple of years ago I was able to go to the AWP conference in Denver, and the book fair was my downfall. Every time I walked through the room, I inevitably bought a book or literary magazine or several of each.  The fact that I wouldn’t have come across some of these books otherwise was the driving force in my purchases.  I would see an intriguing cover of a book on a small press’s table, and it seemed to say that this was my one chance to take it home, feel the pages between my fingers, and read its text.  I said no to many books, but I a few I could not resist.  One was Something in the Potato Room by Heather Cousins.  I originally walked away from it, but the cover with the scalpels and the anatomy diagrams stuck in my head.  I kept wondering what was in the in the potato room, and did people actually make houses with rooms devoted to potatoes.

Something in the Potato Room is a book length poem that has seven different parts.   This book is the winner the 2009 Kore First Book Award.  The thing that strikes me about the book is how it’s different from anything else I’ve seen.  In the narrative of the book there is a speaker who is growing disinterested with her job, but who buys a house with (spoilers!) a skeleton in the potato room.  Cousins does a wonderful job of catching the sense of malaise that an office worker feels,  “Typing. Coping. Balanc-/ ing the museum accounts./ Some days there wasn’t/ much work. I often sat/ at my desk and wished/ my fingernails would/ grow.”  In fact, this passage reaffirms why I cannot stand clerical work.

However, Cousins is also able to capture the surreal and grotesque.   Particularly when the skeleton starts to grow flesh: “Underneath the quilt, a/ red vine was growing./ Slithering.  Crawling up/ his arm…was it the sort of weed/ that needed to be uproot-/ ed dug out, its white/ heart held in my palm?”

Often with poetry there are issues of accessibility either the poems has layers upon layers of meaning, which takes the reader considerable work to get at, or it’s meaning is readily obvious to any reader.  While this is an over simplification, it does seems that poetry is often presented in this either/or fallacy.  Yet Cousins book is both accessible to any one (the plot is easy enough to follow),and has layers upon layers of meaning that rewards the careful and diligent reader.

When I first read the book, I thought that it was about depression, how it alienates you from the world.  As I look at it again, I can’t help but feel it is about the artistic process: how an artist works in solitude, starting with a discovery that they eventually flesh out, until the art goes out into the world. I’m sure the next time I read the book I will find an other level.

While my relationship with Heather Cousins’s poetry has just began, I look forward to reading her books as they come out. Before I go, I wish to leave you with my favorite lines from the book: “Life/ doesn’t stay still, and/ death doesn’t stay still ei-/ther”

“The Scars Left by Water” is Published

I just wanted to share some good news: the anthology La Llorona has just come out, which features my poem “The Scars Left by Water.”  The poems and stories in this anthology all deal with the legend of La Llorona, the weeping woman who haunts the water ways of the American South West and Mexico.  The anthology also features other great writers such as Jennifer Givhan, Richard Vargas, Jules Nyquist.  If you like folklore and good writing you should check it out.

Rediscovering Plath

In my last post, I mentioned that Wilfred Owen is one of the three poets who brought me to poetry—who without which I would’ve probably gone down a sensible career path.  In the year following my high school graduation, I discovered all three of these poets—though my memory remains foggy on the order in which I did so.  However, one of the poets I had read before and dismissed, so it was more of a rediscovery, really.  The poet was Sylvia Plath.

While I love her poetry, I dread talking about Plath.  She is one of those poets who everyone—including those who never read her work—have a strong opinion of.  Her suicide loams over her poems—it is the lens through which many people read her work, which is mistake.

In high school, I picked up The Bell Jar not knowing anything about Plath.  And had I read the book in that state of ignorance, I would have probably enjoyed it.  Unfortunately,  I read the introduction, which was plumb full of biographical details, and how they connected to plot points in the novel.  Instead of reading this book as I would other books, with my focus on the characters as they exist in the book and the themes as they relate to me, I read as though the book was way to understand this woman who had been dead for over thirty years.  The introduction changed my focus in such a way as to narrow the meaning of the work to the point that it no longer had any relevance to me.  I did not like the protagonist, and I thought that meant I did not like the author.  Novels should be read to better understand ourselves, the world in which we live, or at the very least for entertainment.  They should not be read to understand the author unless you are scholar or related to said author.  By focusing on Plath’s biography, the editor limited the scoop of her work and framed in such a way that made it easy to dismiss.

Similarly, the first poem of Plath’s that I read was “Daddy,” unfortunately it was in a class discussion framed by biographical details.  Other students denounced Plath as bitch for speaking so cruelly of her dead father (they all loved and respected their own fathers); the poem was dismissed as a crazy rant (one student reading it breathless and at a fast pace to great effect).  I’ve heard people dismiss her work because she suffered mental illness and committed suicide, who in the same breath would sing the praises of Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, and John Berryman.  It seems that people read her poetry (or at least a couple of anthologized poems) as though they were suicide notes, and they’re angry at her for committing suicide.  And I am sad to say that for few years, when I needed her poetry the most, I believed her detractors.

Back to that year after my high school graduation, I had ended up with a faux-leather bound book titled The Treasury of American Poetry.  I tried to read it straight through, but somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century I gave up.  I started to flip to pages at random.  One day I flipped to Plath’s poem “Cut.”  As I read the first two stanza

What a thrill—

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of hinge

 

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush

I was reminded of the time that I had cut of the tip of my finger with sewing scissors.  The strangeness of staring at bit of flesh that was once a part of you but suddenly is something else is described perfectly in “Cut.”  Also, the poem contained an objective, surprised, and even curious tone, not the hysterical one that I had been taught to expect. After I finished that poem, wondering how far I’d been mislead, I read the next poem in the book: “Lady Lazarus.”

“Lady Lazarus” has been cited as proof that Plath’s suicide was really a cry for attention.  By framing her death this way, people dismiss both her writing and her suicide (as though there is hierarchy of suicides with “cries for attention” at the bottom and gunshots to the head at the top). The only relation that the poems in her book Ariel and her suicide have for us, the reading public, is their author and the proximity in the time which they occurred.  These poems like all works of art should be judged on their own merit not by the life which the artist lived.

For me I found a lot of strength in “Lady Lazarus,” here the speaker of the poem is sarcastic—“Peel off the napkin/ O my enemy./ Do I terrify?”—sexy—“Shoves in to see// Them unwrap me hand and foot—/ The big striptease.”  By the end of the poem the speaker has been objectified and reduced to ashes, but, like a phoenix, she is reborn: “Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air.” Even when society has reduced her to nothing, the speaker still has the power and the ability to come back.  At that time I needed to see that when one is seemingly powerless, there is still the opportunity to come back and make sure your anger is felt.

Perhaps that is the largest resistance to Plath’s poetry—the anger directed at some very traditional roles.  She is not afraid to show the ugliness of the world around her, and she tears down some of society’s sacred cows.  To say that she was hysterical is an easy way to dismiss her without actually listening to what she has to say.

 

Up All Night With Wilfred Owen

As I mentioned before, I love horror movies, but I also have an overactive imagination.  To say the least, this combination often leads to disaster.  Growing up my bedroom overlooked a ditch, and I was convinced that La Llorona was going to get me.  I can’t stand to leave my blinds open at night, because of all those horror movie scenes shot from the point of view of the killer looking into the victim’s house (I’m convinced that half of all the victims in slasher films would still be alive if they had good thick drapes).

Right after I graduated from high school, my grandparents had me house-sit for them.  Now mind you this was the house I had grew up in, and my mother and I had only moved out a few months before.  Still, it was a creepy house, and somehow having my old bedroom empty made it all the worse.  I sat in the den, the TV on to keep my imagination engaged on something other than the half-human monster I suspected was waiting outside for me to open the curtains.

After midnight, cable fails to entertain.  I was stuck between infomercials, bad reality TV, and some forgettable old movies.  I ended up watching Behind the Lines.  Behind the Lines is a fictionalized account of the time that Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen spent in a military hospital.  At the time, I didn’t know who those two poets were.  I just started watching because I was interested in World War I (All’s Quiet on the Western Front was a very important text for me during my teens).

Wilfred Owen

At the end of the film, when the Doctor learns about the death of Wilfred Owen, the poem, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” is read:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

And builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him, Behold!

A Ram! caught in a thicket by its horns,

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

and half the seed of Europe, one by one.

As soon as I finished listening to this poem, I ran around trying to find a piece of paper and pen.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find them until I’d forgotten most of the poem.

This poem, I thought, was lost to me forever.  I didn’t know the name of the poet, the poem, or even the film.  Mind you this was before I really started reading poetry.  I felt that I should—I’d been writing it for years—but nothing I read caught my attention.  Yet when I’d finally heard a poem whose very words cut through me, reverberated from my head to my finger tips and toes, it was lost to film credits, only chance would allow me to find it again.

Or the fact that the channel that showed the film, replayed it two more times that night.  I always feel that when a television channel shows the same movie repeatedly that they are being cheap and lazy, but that night I was thankful to the television executives.  I watched the film again, pen and paper in hand, so that I could record a few lines of the poem, enabling me to find it with a quick internet search.

There are three poets that I consider responsible for getting me interested in the craft; Wilfred Owen is one.

Often poetry is presented as this elevated art that contains only the highest emotions, the best people, the most beautiful scenery, and the deepest thoughts.  It is something that only us mortals can aspire to, but never hope to, truly understand, which, as any one who has read a lot of poetry can tell you, is bullshit.  However, this poem was a revelation.  In the last two lines when Abram slew his son, I heard the anger and bitterness that Owen must have felt, that thousands of young men felt, as they were sent to die in a war they did not understand.  This poem wasn’t some grand denouncement by some figure of mythic proportions, but real anger that a flesh and blood man felt.  At that moment, I discovered that poems could be about ugly truths.

Take the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” which has one of the best descriptions of both the exhausted tedium and the sudden chaos of war:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

This poem does not relent, making sure that you understand the horror this moment holds.  Then Owen finish it with the lines “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.”  The Latin lines are from Horace and mean “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”  Owen is calling bullshit on the perception that war is honorable and beautiful.

When morning came, I left the house that I grew up in changed, not yet understanding that one small poem had changed the world, well mine at least.