Why?
I read someone’s comment that it’s fun and illuminating to write an autobiography every five years, or every
ten years, and then compare them. I’ve never written one before, and I can’t imagine being disciplined enough
to do it every five or ten years Goddess! Never mind the creepy feeling of going to read something you wrote
such a long time ago, with no temptation or curiosity to draw you into the pages except for the mechanical
click of the date. And yet: I struggle so much to be serious about art, as a hundred Grim Angels echoed by
the spirits of laziness and self-pity dance around me, crying at me NOT to be serious. Everything that helps
even a little bit is so welcome. Thus, the day before my birthday, my autobiography as a poet.
(I don’t have an autobiography as a prosaist, a word that my word-processor’s dictionary tells me does not
exist -- but it felt unnatural to try this in Wordsworthian verse.)
The "I"
It turns out to be surprisingly hard to read and reread (revising) a piece that says "I" in so many places.
So self-centered, all revolving (gathering the spinning sugar?) around the axis of this "I." But if I wrote
in a you or a we, if it was a group manifesto or a confession to one particular reader, it wouldn't be an
autobiography. The genre demands that selfish and exclusive focus.
Mortification at allowing self-indulgence to become this rampant. I see why it's the tone (curt, witty,
self-ironizing) of Mayakovsky's wonderful "Ja sam."
1. The Story
Perhaps it is significant that I started to talk before I learned to walk, and commented on my failures
(and my successes too? I haven’t heard about that from the remaining witnesses): "Uh-oh!" as I fell to the
ground.
The life of this poet is uneven and full of breaks, like the life-line on someone’s palm. I started to write
as a kid -- I’d get a line in my head, sometimes a whole rhythm, and there’d be a physical sensation to it. I
can’t compare it with anything else (of many, many vivid physical sensations!), but it seems to be the same
one I still get, a sort of a mental tingle tied to a pleasure and restlessness. The early stuff of course
rhymed and scanned and was pretty bad. I showed some of it once to the Scottish woman (Mrs. Dorsey) who
babysat for us when my sister and then my brother were born, because she also wrote poetry (as I recall,
likewise rhyming, scanning, and pretty bad). She hmphed, staying right in character. At some other point an
adult (teacher? well-intentioned mother?) told me "You’re so good with words, when you grow up you should
write advertisements!" This was as appealing as being told, "Oh never mind your last name, when you grow up
you can marry a man with a better one." I changed my name, when I got old enough, but it was hard to find a
way of imagining writing poetry that didn’t end in use and abuse. I continued to say that I wanted to write,
though, even at moments when nothing else was in my favor, and that may count for something.
I was more nearly serious in junior high ("The clouds are milk in a bowl of blue soup”) and high school
(several surviving pieces), though
I knew nothing about how to write. Aside from my mental tingle and sense of music, such as it was, I
never revised, and I kept doing chunky metrical pieces even after I realized that they weren’t very good.
(Not to trash metrical verse -- just my implementation thereof.) A writing course with someone capable would
have been a great thing.
So when I got to college (spring semester of my first year) I took a class with the creative writing guy at
Haverford, and learned a lot more than I had known up to that point, even wrote the first poem I’m still
impressed with (“Come into My Garden”; I got an A on it too). Taking a class means you’re making a commitment,
it puts the writing on the same level as one’s history reading or French vocab list, it’s like getting paid
to sing or something. For some reason, that class didn’t send me into an easy phase of composition, or lead
me to think that I should take another writing class. I guess I figured that was the whole curriculum. Once I
encountered some Great Russian Poets in my junior year I was spoiled for writing for quite a long time,
figuring, "if I have to be that serious (Tsvetaeva! Mandel'shtam!), I don’t think I can do it," I don’t have
that much faith in myself. Or at least: I sure can’t afford to do it, who’s going to support my as I dream
my pipe-dreams? I had the dream of going to Santa Fe after graduation to wash dishes and write great poems,
but it was an idea so fantastic as to be hardly tempting.
My adult life as a poet began with that brief flowering and satisfaction, one poetry prize which was nice, and
a year of occasional verse as “Applebee” in the Bryn Mawr/Haverford college paper, but interspersed and
followed by lots of zombie time. A barely-living corpse, a tenuous thread of life, staggering forward through
time, lurching. There were moments when I’d surface from the swamp of Other Things and come to life for a few
weeks or months, other moments when I was breathing through a long, long straw from under some pretty dark
swamp (or fen) water. All this did teach me a lot about the other things that contribute to a poet’s life (a
real conversation with someone else, writing in a journal, other kinds of creative work, walking, reading,
observing, staying alive: there were times I must have been alive after all, though I wasn’t writing anything
to speak of, and it’s that aliveness that’s the main thing).
What made me try again rather than simply dying and rotting away like any decent carbon-based life form was
turning 32: the age my mother was when I was born. This always seemed the natural boundary for childish
aspirations: after that I would have to get serious, as if, you know, a sort of echo of my own life would
come into the picture. (Maybe there will be something like that, or unlike, when I hit 45, my grandmother’s
age when she had her last child? "Now I am really a grown-up." Ha.) I went on sabbatical in the spring of
the year I was 32, and said I would start each morning by writing for an hour or even two, as long as it took.
It was hard to start, since I was emerging from the dark tunnel of early motherhood as well as trying to
resurrect a voice and hand, and the poems were not-so-great. Then (by March, say?) I started to get some worthwhile things, a feeling of
rhythm, writing muscles flexing and getting stronger. The satisfying and arrogant confidence that if I have
an idea that’s any good I can sit down and write down something halfway decent, sometimes even recognizable as
a piece of art on the first try. (Maybe it's that the demons had gone drinking with that anal internal editor
enough times that they could be friendly and cooperative?) A few times I got a buzz of an inspiration and
lulled it (lelejala) for a few hours or days, then put it down on paper into the shape I had foreseen;
it felt a bit like tapping into the eternal Source of Poetry, imitating Orpheus. As if the real poems are all
up there and one can get a hand on the string of one by being sufficiently engaged, or something.
Since then, there were other times when I was only suspendedly animated (especially the year Mislav was sick,
though I did write just a few rather
nice poems, I think, as a kind of immune system reaction against the hard and grim atmosphere; also,
differently, the months before and after Raian was born -- I suppose I could claim my creative energy was
diverted into another classical arena). And there have been times of real emergence into the air (a week or
two in summer of 1996, and many
days of the first part of 2002).
Trying to keep the discipline of writing Often, of staying alert to my mind, of the fingers and keyboard or
the hand, pen and paper (a whole different topic: why a fountain pen helps, and has helped me since I started
to use a cheapo one at 13 or so: I don’t know, it just does, maybe because Pegasus sprang from the blood of
Medusa) (who is the Muse, anagrammatized and with a few letters ADded).
It is hard, hard, hard to stay alive when everything else tells you that it’s not serious. Why would you need
to breathe if you can do all the important stuff without breathing (or -- with an occasional gasp)? Even my
good impulses point to the dishes that need washing, the papers that need grading; I get an idea that jazzes
me, and wait-and-wait until evening, at which point there’s no energy left (oh they are picky, these shreds of
inspiration, or the hunting-dog demons who bring them in their teeth), or wait-and-wait for a few days and
even scrounge up a time with some energy, but find that the idea has turned to wood in the mean time.
So even writing this self-absorbed-article-of-faith is a kind of leap: maybe I’ll die tomorrow (and maybe I
won’t notice it either, since it’s that limited, non-terrestrial, air-breathing "I" -- I might not know it
until years and years later, looking back and taking a sudden vestigial deep breath that will ache in my
unaccustomed lungs). Maybe I'll have to resurrect myself over and over again.
Maybe the energy it takes to jump over all the blocks becomes part of the necessary energy for taking flight?
The blocks become something presicely like a block, for taking off from into a race -- handling inspiration as
if running with a hang-glider, becoming a human kite. (Is that just something Linda Clare, queen of creative
block-juggling, said to me?) A kind of self-resistance as weight training, a limitation that becomes a place
to stand and resist. Whenever I realize that I have been barely alive, I am so relieved to be still alive
that I can’t even spend too much time on regret. Instead, it’s time to sing and party.
2. What I Write about
I can’t add up and summarize exactly what it is that jolts me -- I don’t know until it does it. I can look
at the old stuff and say what has worked before: sometimes imagining what this or that historical or
noteworthy figure would say in situation X or Y. I got a lot of mileage out of those ideas in 1994, when I
was also working on a book on Tsvetaeva, who does persona work a lot.
Or -- love. The classical temptation into verse -- because it pulls you out of yourself, and the whole world
is changed the same way in which I aspire to alter the world with language. (Love is much easier and more
effective than language, but poetry is at best a spell for love.) Often there wasn’t even a particular
person at the source of a "love" poem, it was just the easiest way to move into a tempting space, open myself
into the temptation of space. What would I say to You, oh Being who makes me thirst to live vividly, if I had
You captive across a café table, and we had already ordered coffee?
It has to be something that incites me, and this can create another kind of block: how can I be writing about
this silly topic? Or -- even more often -- this is so self-centered, who on earth would care about it? Or --
of course -- this is so trivial! Though I have gotten much better at ignoring the anti-Museal voices, and
not regretting the price
of ignoring them.
Or -- the snitty voice of good taste and Measure will declare that this is so exaggerated! But I know from my
own experience, even my experience with the terrifying Russians, that I for sure don’t want to read about some
ordinary person with ordinary emotions -- I can go into myself for that (well, in my array of ordinary moments
I can). So I try to write as large as I can, the thoughts are no less true writ large, and surely more
interesting.
3. How I Write
There are three ways (speaking of the experience and how I analyze it now -- perhaps it was different
before). First, a phrase or an idea zings into my mind, seems to waken an echo. I sit, or lie, or walk
along, holding it in my mental palm, letting it send out its echo, its little sonar, like a bat or a whale
calling the other bats or whales (or -- to bugs and plankton). What else accrues to it? Sometimes I can lift
the idea, twist it like the paper cone that structures a serving of cotton candy. The melting sugar of
whatever else the mind holds flies into spun strands, they can move in several directions. Sometimes it wants
to be a multi-part poem; other times the strands seem to fold around the stick in a single direction. (The
others would be -- conjoined at the head? Like bunches of baby carrots at a farmer's market.) So then I have
this rough and sticky idea: to amount to anything, it has to be written down before the strands melt or
congeal, or gather too much dust and lose their attractive stickiness. Often a version at this stage gives a
false feeling of satisfaction and completeness -- and once it hits paper and ink looks extremely sketchy,
needing lots more stick-twirling to create links and integuments. With a written draft (usually in a notebook:
the journal is a perfect place for maybe-drafts, though the back of an opened envelope can be even better,
more properly provisional) I go to the computer, with its promise of provisionality even greater than a used
envelope temporarily reprieved from the recycling can, and continue to spin. Often this makes a good draft --
sometimes, it even takes shape at this point (rarely, the good draft, then stored in the folder labeled "good,"
is almost the same as the original scribble: this is usually a reward for discipline, recognizing the import
of the snakes who bite their tails in my dream). Sometimes the draft withers, and nothing comes of it -- or
one or two living strands (animated sugar!) will reemerge later in another piece.
A second way is: just sit and start writing about something. Usually this is mere wheel-spinning, or a kind
of stretching/weight-lifting, and I’ll never use any of it (jotting of local details, or at best an appealing
idea -- that may have been besieging me in my “real” life -- but I haven’t yet found a way to embody in words,
an axis of conception). Sometimes it will surprise me, the demons will like some part of it and come out to
dance. And of course a line or two can be good and find a purpose in some other piece. (A poem as a failed
or aborted version of another, very similar, that is meant to exist. As if one’s the twin that withered in
the womb, no one suspecting its existence. Or the withered one survives as a line or two -- a secret mass of
tissue from that other possibility, hidden in the living body of the one that was born.) The point of this
second way is merely to engage in writing: sometimes I’ve already written a couple of good things that day,
and want to make sure that the vein is dry; sometimes I haven’t written for a couple of days (weeks! months!)
and wonder whether I can wake the impulse; other times I have time to kill and figure what the hell. I am a
writer, right? And what does a writer do? (How you be a writer is to do writing.) If anything comes through,
unexpectedly, I’ll feel a flicker (energy that feels like opening a window in the mind to see something drift
or fly in) (the cat on the back of the couch catches sight of a bird).
Finally, and most rare, I can get an idea that jazzes me from the moment I feel it. I can tell it’s going to
bring something, it’s probably something like seeing a fishing hook shake, and I either write it down the
first chance I get (in these cases, all the drafts tend to share the same energy, even if things change I lot
while I’m working on them), or else I hold it in my mental palm for a day or three, letting the idea gather
lint and sugar strands, before I sit down -- sometimes straight at the computer -- and entrust it to words. The
cycle "Yseult" came in
that way, over a few days and evenings where it felt like a nest of unhatched bird's eggs; it was the first
big poetical thing I had ever written, and that experience had a wonderful sense of power and confidence,
almost like being Tristan in his coracle with the harp: I’m powerless against the elements, but what power I
still carry with me. The feeling would have to be conveyed in music.
The worst feeling in the world is getting a hit of the third kind of inspiration (or even the first kind), to
put it off in certainty that it will be great when I get to it, to put everything else (Everything Else!)
first. Then when I get to it I find it dead and desiccated, I left it too long and it turned to wood. (Story
of trying to write while working full time, or while taking care of little kids. Beware, all you young poets
who say "I want to be a college professor, because then I can also write....") This must be why Pushkin and
his ilk conceived of the state that favors inspiration as a "holy laziness" -- you create and defend space,
you preserve the clearing, for inspiration to enter, because otherwise it will be choked out by weeds, or
saplings, or other plants, valuable in their way but not liable to flower into art. Of course, Pushkin and
his ilk were Gentlemen, and someone else set their tables for them and herded and plucked the geese from which
they got quills. I'm hobbled, among many other ways, by a vision of the world based on lower-middle class
housekeeping, observed in my female ancestors and internalized to perfection -- and it's a lifestyle that fed
and clothed and raised us. Compared to that certainty, how can wifty poetry compete? Tsvetaeva is right ("Art
in the Light of Conscience").
A note on writing as physical experience: wheel-spinning and even weight-lifting don’t take too much energy, but
really writing (more than one poem -- say if it goes on for 2-3 hours) is exhausting, physically as well as
mentally, and not just for the writing hand, or its wrist, arm, shoulder. I shake after a bout of writing
(with a very fine tremor) as if I’ve been lifting and carrying heavy boxes of books, helping a friend move house;
as if I’ve had a cup or two too much strong coffee. That's probably a sign that I'm not really in shape; if I
wrote that long and that seriously more often.... Or the sign of an ecstatic experience (a "creative frenzy"
-- doesn't that sound fun and Dionysian? -- something that leaves a chemical residue, a bit like chewing laurel
leaves) -- a standing-outside-yourself, temporary emergence from ordinary incarnation, or brief reprieve from
the ordinary and temporary experience of incarnation.
4. Imagining an Audience
Okay, I write mostly for myself. I write so this self won't die. Tsvetaeva said that as soon as you
finish a lyric poem (a short one), you die right then -- the minute you sense that you have finished it! -- and
don't come to life again until you've got your next poem started. There's something to that as well. "Wow,
that was great, but can I do it again?" You try again, you fail, or not, and draw conclusions. Each poem is
a bead on an invisible string (of intention? of breath?). (What would a necklace of beads strung on breath
look like? You see.)
But I love it when other people read my stuff, especially if they like it. I want them to want more; I want
reactions or comments; I want them to see me through the writing, and to feel themselves called in a similar
way. Barthes is right that writers write because they want to be loved. Getting translated into another
language is so much fun, as flattering as having someone come over and hand you a portrait of you they drew
without telling you they were going to or asking you to hold still. If I already care for the reader, I want
to express all kinds of profound and moving things, and win or ornament the reader’s love. If a poem was
written for one particular reader, which doesn’t happen all that often between here and eternity, then of
course I want it to seduce, convince, delight, perplex, and MOVE that reader -- but if it wouldn't work for
other readers too, then it probably won't work for the particular addressee either. Now and then I write one
I think will work only for me -- usually, it’s emotionally satisfying but nothing special artistically -- and
don’t show it to anyone.
5. The Muse
I hadn't thought of this mythological figure in my own writing (the generative phrases or themes that
popped into my mind didn't seem to have any origin outside that mind), until I gave a paper on Tsvetaeva and
vampires on an MLA panel with my friend, the wonderful poet Barbara Ungar. She assembled the panel and named
it "The Erotics of Inspiration: Female Poets and the Male Muse" -- or something like that, you can check back
MLA programs, it was in 1995. And of course they accepted it, how could they refuse such a perfect MLA panel
title? And it was probably mocked in right-wing media, but I don't read them so I don't mind.
During Barbara’s workshop on "Courting Your Muse" at the Women’s Writing Retreat the next summer in Paradox,
NY, we did an exercise where we had to come up with our anti-Muse. Mine turned out very like my grandmother,
complete with Edinburgh accent. I realized that she didn’t so much want to squelch me (though there was some
of that, "I thought someone had trodden on the cat," to keep a child from getting too full of herself and
thereby cause the universe to explode or something): she was mainly concerned that I wouldn’t have a good
life if I went off into Lit-Land, that it is a kind of madness, dangerous and irresponsible. There'd be no
money, no friends, no husband for sure though probably lots of louts; my family would be neglected and then
probably abandon me. A little extreme: why does being a poet have to be so damn extreme all the time, rather
than just at the crucial moments? But I recognize that sort of protective defensive pose, inherited from my
loving ancestors, in other crucial decision-making junctures in my life (go to the grad school that offered me
best financial aid, so I can emerge without taking out more student loans!).
We went on to try to imagine our Muses, and I came up with a fellow rather like Vladislav Khodasevich (in his
Parisian period, of course), a thin and down-at-heel aristocrat in poor health and with poor posture, reduced
to smoking only three cigarettes a day, looking pretty threadbare, and stuck with this flippant American poet,
who was his only and not-very-dependable source of existence. The Male Muse poems from 1996 and after are often
about this guy, though he flickers into a variety of ages and positions. Sometimes he doesn't even smoke, even
the three impoverished cigs a day, though he always has glasses (classically, in heavy Socialist frames).
Since then, it makes a great deal of sense to me that the Muse be a figure one wishes to woo, one who can at
least in theory motivate or incarnate one’s erotic attraction to the universe, who can channel both the wish
to write (oh please bring me to life today!) and the attention on a listener or reader, an other, that makes
utterance possible.
6. What I Hope Happens Next
I want to publish a lot of stuff. Why not, right? I want to write a LOT of stuff. I want to read a lot too, and listen to wonderful Other Poets read, and to lie in the hammock while it’s still so hot, and to bake ] apple pies for my friends and family. Read this, please, with patience and indulgence.
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