Body of a Dancer by Renée D’Aoust

Here’s something I don’t usually say: I majored in theatre. Normally, I opt for the also-true: I studied playwriting. But, really, the first gives a more complete picture. Like all the other playwrights, directors, designers, and stage managers in our program, I took classes in acting, in movement, in voice. I took stage combat where I learned to pretend to fight with a rapier and dagger. I took stage makeup where I learned to give myself realistic-looking wounds and bruises using latex and pancake makeup. I was no good at any of this. Worst of all was anything that involved me moving my still-awkward, recently post-adolescent body across a stage. The problem, according to the acting faculty, was that my brain got in the way.

At one point, I remember worrying myself into near-paralysis trying to remember whether it was natural to walk with arms and legs in opposition (right arm with left leg) or in tandem (right with right). Flummoxed, I wrongly opted for the later and went across the stage like some kind of retarded marionette.

This total incapacity for movement when I think anyone else is watching is my point of entry into Renée D’Aoust’s new book Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press). Unlike me, D’Aoust (pronounced “Dao”), who trained at the elite Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, is competent of mind and body. Her book is a series of essays that chronicles her immersion in New York’s strange world of modern dance.

To call this a memoir is reductive. It is a history of modern dance, a critique of Martha Graham, a rendering of the world of dance both inside and outside the studio. It is a memoir too, of course—D’Aoust’s own journey into and, eventually, out of the physically and emotionally arduous world of Graham’s modern gives the book its larger structure—but it is more than that. D’Aoust is not enough of a prima donna, it seems, to limit herself to the traditional constraints of memoir. Instead, a testament to her generosity as a writer, she spends much of her own memoir in the wings, ceding center stage to often tragic, often beautiful, always frank and fleshy renderings of the lives of the dancers around her.

In an essay called “Daniela Can Fly,” an Argentinian dancer leaps from the fifth floor window of her apartment. Leaps, not jumps. Flies, really, as the title suggests. D’Aoust goes out of her way to clarify that this is not a cry for help, hardly even a suicide attempt. It is an insane extension of the insane rigors of the dance. We see Daniela again later in the book, out of the wheelchair and back in the studio. This isn’t romanticized.

None of the people are romanticized. Ted, the subject of a later essay, “Holy Feet,” left Lutheran ministry in the Midwest to study modern in New York City. D’Aoust takes us with him on his new mission to bring modern to the masses. He could be, D’Aoust says, Lear’s fool, “the wisest one around,” and, like much of the book, Ted is comical in ways that subvert trope. The closest D’Aoust comes to lionizing a dancer is Liz, who, in “Theatrical Release,” succeeds where Daniela has failed. She uses a rope. It is a chilling moment, Greek tragedy to Ted’s Shakespearean comedy. The eulogy for Liz is deftly interwoven with the narrative of D’Aoust’s work alongside her and others in the well-known Kevin Wynn Collection, a professional high point for D’Aoust.

What makes this stylistic range possible is that D’Aoust approaches it all with a clear, steady gaze. Her prose is straightforward, even as it reaches toward lyricism. She avoids the clichés about dance and dancers, often going out of her way to unmake them. The second essay in the book, “Graham Crackers” begins with a line of dancers jumping across a crusted patch of dried blood on the floor.

Spilled blood,” D’Aoust writes, “is a regular occurrence in a Graham class. Since modern dancers dance barefoot, often the skin tears or burns from the pressure of contact with the floor. If there’s blood, Kristi gets the rubbing alcohol and paper towel and wipes the floor. She never uses gloves.”

D’Aoust studied at the Graham Center during the early 90s, “at the beginning of AIDS.” This is in the mix too.

Writing about dance, D’Aoust must render the physical movements with precision and clarity on the page. And she does, as in this moment, from “Theatrical Release”:

I had to drop to my knees at the same moment Stef kicked over my head; if our timing was off, Stef would kick me in the head or, worse, the neck. I waited as long as possible to duck, daring Stef to kick too soon, and Stef smiled, her legs so long, so powerful, she controlled me with her limbs. After I ducked, I reached both arms overhead. Stef pulled hard, while I jumped, from a crouch up into her arms.”

And, from “Island Rose”:

I brought my right leg down, made a quick turn while curving my arms overhead in Fifth position, took a step, and repositioned myself solidly into the same stretched, tilted shape. Every cell of my being reached through and beyond my arms, my legs, the theatre walls. All else was appendage. The center was the whole.”

The writing feels kinesthetic, beginning in D’Aoust’s own physical memory of the movement—in the deep places of the body, the spine and the gut—and expanding out toward the lyrical.

By the end of the book, D’Aoust has left Graham. She has left professional dance altogether, but her rift with Graham feels more pointed. In “Dream of the Minotaur,” she returns years later to see a performance by the Graham Company. She remarks that she is shocked by the ugliness and angularity of it all, by the lack of flight.

Modern now has too much irony, or maybe just cynicism, but it is especially hard to think where so much head-banging and meta-commentary can go but down into the dirt and into more earthbound movement.”

She is longing for ballet, of course, where she began as a dancer, long before New York and the Graham Center. But she is also longing for a version of modern made more in the image of Isadora Duncan than of Graham.

D’Aoust’s prose—and her book—exists between these poles. There is Graham in her language: bodily and plainspoken. There is Duncan in her scope: lyrical and large. A book about modern dance should inhabit this very pull between gravity and flight, between grit and grace. It is the beauty and problem of the form, and D’Aoust stands at the intersection taking the better impulses from both.

For those of us who do well to lurch across the stage, it is a particular pleasure to see all of this through D’Aoust’s eyes, to experience it through her physical memory. It is an exercise in physical and literary grace, an affirmation of the possibility of beauty in an age of irony.

*Full disclosure: Besides being a fantastic writer, D’Aoust is a colleague and a friend.

Embedding the video in this post eludes me, but you can watch the segment here.

The consequences of the book tax for print literature have been grave. Readership is way down and people aren’t buying books. They are, however, using the internet. Chile has the highest internet usage per its population in South America, beating out even Brazil and Argentina. The most frequent internet activity is checking one’s email. 9 out of 10 internet users have Facebook, but more and more of these users are also accessing their news online.

As a writer who is interested in publishing in both Chile and the United States, these statistics offer a practical lesson. I’m realizing that an important part of being a writer is more than just “knowing your audience.” You have to know how your audience is accessing what its reading. If I want my work to be read in Chile, print publishing is clearly not the way to go. Yet its hard to find online venues that pay authors.

This dilemma has guided me to the study of literary journalism and those writers whose brief but essay-driven prose have been published in Chile and Spain’s major newspapers. That is to say, good nonfiction is alive in Chile’s press.   In 1997, Jorge Teillier started a piece for Chile’s most read widely-read newspaper, El Mercurio, with an anecdote about his childhood: “Allow me to remember a summer afternoon in Lautaro, my childhood town….” Jorge Edwards published this opening sentence of his literary chronicle “The Legends of Mississippi” in the national newspaper El Pais in 1982: “We were in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, in the south of the United States, together for an international conference about Yoknapatawpha and William Faulkner.” Just today, guest columnist and director of the National Museum of Barcelona, Manuel Borga-Villel, published a literary essay about artist Antoni Tápies, also in El Pais, called “This Unspeakable Magic.”

Literary journalism does not have a very large market in Chile, but it is an appealing option for a writer abroad. Is it also a realistic option for nonfiction writers in the United States?

Works Consulted

Impuesto al libro, impuesto al conocimiento http://www.elciudadano.cl/2009/03/04/6354/impuesto-al-libro-impuesto-al-conocimiento/

Chile cambia “dictadura” por “régimen militar” http://www.museodelaresistencia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=394:chile-cambia-qdictaduraq-por-qregimen-militarq&catid=62:internacionales&Itemid=224

Internet Usage South America   http://www.internetworldstats.com/south.htm

Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

Oh, right.  I’d stopped reading because it hurt too much.  All the seconds Joan wouldn’t get to spend with her child, and here I am reading about it instead of spending time with my child.  That’s a hard line to tread, but it occurred to me that as mothers (and fathers?), we do it all of the time, and I’m sure Didion’s no exception.

Didion’s fears about being a good mother are ubiquitous, and she bares them.  What mother doesn’t feel inadequate? “I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents.” And if we don’t feel inadequate enough, plenty of people are ready to point out what they see as our faults.  Enter “The Autumn of Didion” by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic (but I found it through Byliner.com, which is like Pandora for CNF and which you should totally check out)  Flanagan seems to know what kind of mother Didion was, and she doesn’t paint a very good picture.  And that’s unfair.  There is every possibility that Didion and Dunne were exceptional parents to their daughter—gasp—while managing to work.  Maybe they weren’t.  But because parents are busy and value their careers does not immediately qualify them for Worst Parent of the Year.

Critiques of Didion’s mothering skills and social anxieties aren’t really here nor there when we’re talking about her work, though.  And a lot of people would agree with Flanagan when she said that Didion’s best works were Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.   I’ve not read her fiction, but The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights both seem to rely on the fact that Didion’s audience already knows her and has some baseline from which to draw in order to get up to speed tone-wise.  Because I think it’s Didion’s tone that her fans love so much. Flanagan says Didion’s the Hunter S. Thompson for women:  “She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair.”

Oh, bullshit.  Didion didn’t give us quiet days and flowers.  Didion gave us subtle malaise and powerful ennui, a palpable pessimism, and we fucking loved it.  We emulated it, we studied it, we lived through those darkened sunglasses.  We learned from it.  And I think Didion’s still teaching us.  Over at The Guardian, Rachel Cusk writes:

 Didion’s strategy, or rather her instinct – the instinctive response to chaos – is to repeat herself. She struggles to revive the form and style of her earlier book, to make it live again; she repeats anecdotes, and often sentences, word for word; she creates repeating prose patterns whose effect, in the end, is to confer the author’s own numbness on the reader. What she cannot do is master her own material: instead of grieving with her, we are watching her grieve. This is a piteous and exposing process, and one which places a moral burden on the reader. And it is here that Didion’s lack of humility comes back to haunt her, for by burdening the reader she is also making herself vulnerable to judgment. Early on, describing a set of photographs of Quintana as a child, she writes: “In a few she is wearing a cashmere turtleneck sweater I brought her from London when we went that May to do promotion for the European release of The Panic in Needle Park.” What passed in The Year of Magical Thinking as the camaraderie of husband and wife becomes, at a stroke, something more disturbing – a kind of parental attention-seeking that again and again drives Didion’s sentences away from their subject and back to herself. “Was I the problem?” she asks. “Was I always the problem?”

She’s right about the language, the repetition, the construction. But Cusk misses the point here.  Didion’s self-aggrandizement is a terrifying part of being a parent—never knowing whether you’ve done enough; or rather, knowing you’ve never done enough.  Blue Nights is about apprehension of an ending, and the fact that Didion can’t stop bringing it back on herself is more about a parent’s guilt than narcissism.

I guess Cusk wasn’t drawn into Didion’s grief, but I certainly found parts of this book startlingly sad.  I didn’t just watch as she grieved, because Joan Didion knows how to write grief.  She offers us so many tiny moments of her unbearable grief—the “sundries” box, are you kidding me?!  “Again, the careful printing.  The printing alone I cannot forget.  The printing alone breaks my heart”—that she avoids being drawn down too deeply.  As in The Year of Magical Thinking, she circles the subject, because it’s too difficult to linger there. She’s not melodramatic, but that’s never been Didion’s thing.  I do love that in this book she comes right out and tells us what it’s about:

When I began writing these pages, I believed their subject to be children…the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us…the ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear.  The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.  As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all…their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death…only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same.  When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

This is not in Didion style, and I think that’s why it feels so vulnerable.  My thesis advisor stressed that we are always evolving as writers:  “Do I really need to start this piece all over?”  “Yes!  You’re a different writer than you were two weeks ago.”  I think Didion’s style is evolving, and that fans of Didion like me (Didionheads? Joan Drones? Slouchers?) can appreciate where her work has come from and what it is now, and still believe we have things to learn from Didion.   Final words:  Quick read, sad, worth it.

On occasion, I’m struck by the similarity of something in the real world to something in a story I wrote.  Am I special person, like Tengo?  (I’m aware Tengo is a fictional character) Or did my sub-conscious give me the idea, which I used in the story, and then noticed in the real world?  I lean toward the latter.

I tried NaNoWriMo this year.  I failed.  I wrote about 1,500 words my first day, but decided they were so bad, and I mean really bad, that I couldn’t bear the thought of pounding out 48,500 more terrible words.  (NaNoWriMo seems to work for some people and that’s great)  I share this because in those first few pages, my main character hits a little girl with his car on his way to work.  It’s not his fault.  The girl darted out in front of him, but he feels guilty, and wonders if he could have prevented it had he been paying more attention.  

Like many of my story ideas, I stole this one from real life.  Maybe six or seven years ago, on my way to work, I saw a mother and her small child walking on the side of the road.  I was stopped at a traffic light, and made a mental note to go well below the 35 mph speed limit until I’d passed them.  Inexplicably, the girl ran into the street.  Luckily I was still a good twenty yards away and hit the brakes.  The mother grabbed her daughter, yelled at her, and I think mouthed an apology to me.  My heart pounded the remaining five minutes of the drive to work.  How easily my life could have changed if I’d been even a little distracted that day.

Like many things that are terrible in real life, but great for a short story or novel, the idea stuck with me, and I decided to try it.  A few weeks after I wrote those 1,500 words, a little girl was hit and killed by a car in my hometown.  And I feel guilty even mentioning this tragedy in a blog post. I know there is no connection between my writing a scene and a very similar scene happening in the real world, but it was still surreal and jarring to read the account in the local newspaper.

I recently attempted meta-fiction in a short story.  The first few pages are ostensibly in third-person, though there are hints that suggest otherwise.  About a thousand words in, one of the characters directly addresses the narrator.  The story continues in first person, with the narrator occasionally commenting on how he will turn the conversation between the two characters and him into a short story.  Then, in a previous draft, I shifted again, and revealed an autobiographical first person voice behind the narrator:

I wrote to explore Eryn and Harold, two fascinating people, two fascinating characters, and I inserted myself for triangulation, to put something more at stake, adding the element of self-aware story-telling.

I decided to do away with this second shift because it felt too blunt, too jarring.  But I realized, in writing this fiction, that I’d ended up, at least partially, explaining why I write.

I took these great moments and added and changed and emphasized and cut and rewrote and made a story.  I gave some of my lines to Harold.  I pretended to see Eryn as perfect, despite being keenly aware of her flaws.  I made a story because the reality failed to live up to expectations.  The actual ending was even less satisfying, even more anti-climatic.

…much like the ending of this blog post.

Last month, I wrote about Sarah’s story, which I found handwritten on the flyleaves of a used book I bought online. That post includes a transcript of what little she left for the amateur internet sleuth, so I won’t belabor the details here. But there are a couple highlights that, if this were a TV mini-series, would surely appear in the “Last Week on…” montage that rolls before the theme song:

1. Sarah met and fell in love with a man named Mike. Mike was a park ranger who, according to Sarah’s friend Stu, had started an Outward Bound program in Seward, Alaska, where Sarah’s story takes place. According to Sarah, Mike was “her second half.” He “changed [her] life… gave [her] pure love.”
2. Sarah misspells his name when she writes it out. Instead of Michael Adrian Vanbeek, the standard spelling of the two given names, she writes “Micheal Adrain Vanbeek.”
3. She writes in vague terms about the loss of the relationship. Twice in the draft, she approaches this subject and then jerks away from it, like she has accidentally brushed against a wound.

Mike Vanderbeek is the one who looks like he's being attacked by the guy in the jean shorts.

Since I didn’t have any helpful information about Sarah, I began by googling Mike. I made the rookie mistake of starting with his full name, both Sarah’s rendering and the spelling-corrected version. Of course, this yielded no real results. Then I tried “Mike Vanbeek”—too many results. Then I tried searching “Mike Vanbeek” and “Outward Bound” together. Here where it got interesting.

Google suggested that maybe I meant “Mike Vanderbeek” and Outward Bound, and it showed me what I would find there. Mike Vanderbeek, as it turns out, started Outward Bound’s Alaska program in Seward. He was indeed a park ranger, an advanced mountaineer, and he would’ve likely been in Seward in the summer of 1997, when Sarah sets her story. All of this fits, but all of this information is found around the edges of the articles. For Google, the thing you need to know about Mike Vanderbeek is that he is dead.

In the spring of 1998, the year after his brief affair with Sarah, Mike Vanderbeek was working at Denali National Park as a volunteer climbing ranger. Two days before the end of his term there, as the ice routes were getting soft and dangerous, he was descending the heavily-traveled West Buttress of Denali ahead of approaching bad weather. About 100 feet above his position at about 16,500 feet, Venderbeek and his climbing partner Tim Hurtado saw a Canadian climber fall from a ridgeline, plunging toward Peter’s Glacier 8,000 feet below. Vanderbeek, an experienced climber but an inexperienced rescuer, along with Hurtado hastily climbed back to the point from which the Canadian climber, Daniel Rowarth, had fallen. They found his ice axe but couldn’t see Rowarth. Visibility was low, and the weather conditions were worsening. Gusts at the summit ridge were reaching 70 miles per hour.

Vanderbeek fell from just below this position. Image credit: Wildernesscapes Photography

Vanderbeek and Hurtado began down-climbing across treacherous terrain, descending a steep slope without first stopping to rope up. When they did, finally, decide to anchor themselves into the mountainside, their position was already precarious. They were on a 400-foot sheet of 45-55 degree blue-water ice, and as they moved toward a rock that they could use as an anchor, Vanderbeek fell, sliding down the ice and off the ledge toward Peter’s Glacier. The official report allows Hurtado a vivid memory: “Hurtado heard the sound of nylon on ice. He heard nothing else and shouted for Vanderbeek and received no answer.” Hurtado anchored himself to the ice with an ice screw and waited for help. The weather hampered the recovery effort, but Rowarth’s body was eventually found. He had died in the initial fall. Vanderbeek’s body was not recovered.

I imagine Sarah receiving this news. She is returned from her Alaskan adventure the previous summer. Returned to Seattle or San Diego or Topeka. Returned to her apartment a few blocks from campus or her bedroom in her parents’ house. Returned from her tryst with the ruddy but awkward Denali climbing ranger, re-immersed in her real life. And she receives word. Maybe she gets an email from Stu.

She begins to write everything down, but she doesn’t write this down. She wants, I think, to insert herself into this story, but she knows better. She knows better than to co-opt tragedy and call it hers. But what she feels is hers: the real loss of something that was, maybe, less realized than it might have been, something that, in retrospect, seems sweeter for being lost. Grief and tragedy are not hers, but a proximity to death is. And she tries to write it, but she stops short of the heart. She keeps her distance. She puts it back on the shelf.

And then what? Years later, maybe, she takes it down. She is married now; there’s a baby asleep upstairs. She is going through the old boxes of books that she moves and moves again without ever purging. She’s just gotten a Kindle. They’ve just bought their first house. Out with the old. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, but when she picks up the book that she wrote in she realizes that this is it. This is the part of her past that she is now, at last, ready to expunge. But she thinks it would be merciless to throw this away. Mike is buried under ten winters of snow and ice. He is a stratum in Peter’s Glacier 8,500 feet above sea level, leaning into the cold side of Denali. He is wholly dead already. So, instead of killing him again, she turns him out into the world, a cold mercy. Better, she thinks, the quick-moving waters of commerce than the landfill. And maybe she is right. Maybe Mike’s new life on my bookshelf is a kind of rebirth. Not immortality, of course, because I will forget him there too. But better than another burial, at least.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

In the review of Something Urgent I Have To Say To You, Daisy Fried fires off a few warning shots in the direction of Herbert Leibowitz (the unsuspecting biographer of Williams).   With gumption, she relishes what the co-founder of Parnassus: Poetry in Review must have missed in the poem, The Last Words of My English Grandmother, saying:

“To misunderstand this is to misunderstand — at least partly — the life.”

 

Now, whether or not I agree with Fried content-wise (and more or less, I do), her tone strikes me as strident.  Her rhetoric, although worthy of our deepest reflection and respect, is not a shut window or a locked door.  Moreover, while I can resonate with the Philadelphia moxie that sizzles off her tongue and that flares from her fingertips, I can also offer this feedback (as she has offered me her own feedback).

Ms. Fried — we all miss things, but for you to rub Mr. Leibowitz face in it by suggesting that he may have missed “the life” he’s trying to approximate on the page — that seems… ahhh… overly aggressive!

My argument has been and will remain that the lives of others are never fully grasped or comprehended.   That’s what makes them (philosophically speaking) OTHER.

We miss.  Ooops!  We lose sight of the maneuvers that Williams makes in his most potent verse (although we try to isolate and analyze them).   We miss, as Mr. Leibowitz has missed, how the husband to Florence Herman, wrote for a variety of reasons, many of which elude all readers and all writers — and this, as Ecclesiastes so aptly portends, is “nothing new under the sun.”

To live this way — to acknowledge the mutual and interpersonal misunderstandings between us — is, “at least partly,” [sic] to stand under the authentic nature of a sacred life…

I guess what seems so irksome to me is the presumption that literature and literary criticism ought to be an elite discipline in which only poets-in-residence from Smith and Bryn Mawr may participate.   On the contrary, Northrop Frye broadens our interpretative horizons when he notes that…

many of those who find it easy to write by an act of conscious will are those who are primarily concerned to say what is most readily acceptable in their cultural surroundings — in other words they are hack writers.   Poets who can  at will produce verse on approved moral, religious or patriotic themes seldom make a deep impression on the history of literature… (Words With Power, p. 52).

Of course, none of this repartee is meant to claim intellectual superiority over anybody, or to refer to Daisy Fried as a hack.   Far from it.  By the same token, self-deprecation and humility are not always the shortest routes to a moral high ground.  Nor are they automatic conduits to a stimulating cultural exchange.   And I wanted to make peace and not feel the burden of upholding this MFA program for exercising poor syntax.

The point is, whatever our cognitive, emotional and familial resources, lovers of poetry ought to feel welcomed to the party.   We ought to feel as if the splendor of the tradition outshines those who make it into the latest Billy Collins anthology and reflects off the wrench which has been thrown again and again into lecture halls mechanizations.  Let me emphasize  the combined celestial and corporeal banquet that we — the Herbert Leibowitz’s, the Daisy Fried’s and the Scott K-P’s — join in progress.   The reason for the feast is not simply that some may discern nuances in taste and texture, but that we’re starving!  Starving for news!

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something

that concerns you
and concerns many men.  Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, a late poem by Williams, delivers all the goods, hits all the right notes and casts all the shadows necessary for us to realize that lives will be missed, missed entirely…   Moreover, if we’re fortunate enough to have an audience for our life-product (our poems, our short fiction, our creative non-fiction, etc.), the famous words of Dana Gioia in Can Poetry Matter? require a follow up.   Gioia wrote,

A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.

I say, Amen!

And yet, a little “tact” [sic] goes a long way.   There’s a finesse to misunderstanding a poet, a poet’s biographer, a astute columnist, a reckless barking blogger — and I hope we never stop practicing.

Peace–

I had never heard of this brand until recently.

About a week ago, I spent a Saturday evening drinking scotch, telling stories and having some laughs with a small group of people who all happen to be smarter than I am. Our hosts had some music on in the background, and I recognized a particular piece. In my typical self-deprecating manner, I pointed out how I loved the piece (Ravel’s String Quartet in F major), but my primary association with it was that it signified the title sequence of The Royal Tenenbaums. So as opposed to, you know, being a genuinely cultured person and knowing specific compositions by name, I only recognized the piece because of a movie. I didn’t have to make that connection out loud for everyone– as I said, they’re smart people– so our host, being a good natured person, smiled at my idiocy and proceeded to tell us a bit about Ravel’s history, alluding to some criticism he’d received as a composer and telling us that he’d died a virgin. Which was cool– I love that she knows stuff like that.

When I think about the evening, I think about it in two ways. First, as I said, it was lovely, and I went home glad I’d chosen to go. It was warm and cozy, the conversation was good, I laughed a lot, and I got to know one of the people a little better. But now that I’m writing about it, it’s changed. That’s what happens, right? We make decisions about how to convey scenes. As I’m thinking about the night through the filter of the music conversation, I can point to the various moments that exemplify my opening comment about the others being more intelligent than me. Two people were bantering in Russian, someone alluded to their time teaching at an Ivy League school, someone quoted an obscure passage from a Vonnegut novel I’ve never read, so on and so forth. Now, that doesn’t mean there weren’t penis jokes– even classy people like those– but as I drove home, the moment of noticing the music, and particularly noticing why I noticed the music, caused my mind to travel down a little rabbit hole and land in a room where all I could think about was why I like the art and pop culture that I do.

The experience of hearing the exact moment in that movement that I adore– the part that makes the whole piece for me– reminded me of a scene from The West Wing. It’s something Sorkin does often, weaving a piece of classical music into a scene where it’s not just in the background, but instead the characters themselves are experiencing it and commenting on it. This works because all of the characters on the show are insanely smart and well-rounded, which we’re willing to suspend our disbelief about because we’d like to believe you have to be brilliant and kind and hard-working to work at the White House. I thought about how the characters on the show appreciate classical music and play basketball and toss around religious, philosophical, and literary references on a regular basis, and that’s part of the reason I enjoy those characters. I’m drawn to the characters on the show because I like them. That’s not so bad, right? Except that I’m drawn to the characters on the show because I want to be like them. My love for the show reflects ambition and longing and covetousness. Which is sort of pathetic, right? But also kind of hilarious.

It comes down to this: I want to know obscure statistics off the top of my head and debate gun control in casual conversation and have witty repartee with friends & coworkers. I want to be able to speak quickly and intelligently about any number of topics, to work long hours without complaining, to be slightly flawed but basically kind and good and nice-looking.

Now, this may seem a little obvious. It’s not like I’m observing something new. Advertising & marketing have been playing off our collective insecurities forever, and the entire fashion industry is built on it, among others. But I’d never really held it in my hands and turned it this way and that in the context of pop culture or art. Have you? Have you thought about why you like certain films or plays or books? And I don’t mean in the big-picture sense that we usually care about, how the thing broke the rules or said something profound about human nature or expressed a worldview you hadn’t considered. I mean, on a basic level, why do you like the things you like?

I followed the rabbit hole deeper. I started thinking about the movies and books and columns I can’t get enough of, and how many of them I relate to because I aspire to have certain characteristics. I read Anne of Green Gables as a kid and identified with Anne-with-an- ‘e’ because I wanted to be more outspoken like her (guess the pendulum really swung the other way on that one, eh?). I like Good Will Hunting because Will knows everything but he comes from nowhere and works hard. I read columns by Bill Simmons and Katie Baker and John Buccigross because I (still, ahem) want to be a sportswriter. I read various literary websites because I want to pretend I’m a writer. I devour books about mountain climbing because I think I’d want to do that. And so on and so forth.

This is part of why people watch reality television, yes? They like to watch rich people because a) they want to be rich and famous and b) making fun of rich and famous people makes them feel better about their own lives. Or they like to watch Top Chef or Project Runway and imagine they could have done a better job at a given challenge than professionals who’ve been working in that field their whole lives. Now, is watching Hoarders the same? No. Do people like Dexter because they want to be serial killers? Probably not. Not everything we watch or read is because we admire the protagonist or narrator. But it seems that a significant portion of the pop culture and media that we consume, we select because we just wanna be like them, whether we’re making that decision consciously or not.

So what does this mean for those of us who write fiction? Do you find yourself creating characters who, despite being desperately flawed, have personality traits or interests that in some way reflect your own ambition or longing? Poets, do the speakers of your poems who aren’t you do this as well? In other words, how do we exploit our own shortcomings or silly insecurities and make them serve a function in our work? I wonder if it’s even possible to do so consciously, or if they just work their way in naturally and we notice them during revision.

In the Robert Lopez interview of Issue 69 of Willow Springs, Lopez says:

I tell students that you have to cultivate your fears, your perversions, your peccadilloes, your compulsions. You have to use that stuff because it’s ultimately going to make the work vibrant and come off the page. All the stories we tell have been told a million times before. Nobody’s going to come up with a new story. It’s all the same old thing; somebody is losing something, somebody wants something, somebody is afraid of losing something, somebody is afraid of wanting something. We can’t not write those stories. We cultivate the strange things that make us unique, and that uniqueness is what connects us to other people. Otherwise strangeness is just a freak show. Like what you see on Jerry Springer.

Does the same principle apply for characteristics we admire or covet? Do they make the work more vibrant? Or, because so much of what we find interesting about our characters is their damage–their fucked-up-ed-ness, to steal a phrase– is it more about exposing the damage than it is about examining what we aspire to be? Again, it seems obvious to say that it’ll be a mixture of the two: maybe you love & admire the toughness of your character, but that toughness comes from being damaged in some crucial way, and the damage is more interesting, harder to figure out, harder to write. Or is it?

So says Daphne Williams Fox, the grand-daughter of William Carlos Williams, as she responds to the new Herbert Leibowitz book on her famed ancestor.   Leibowitz suggests that the Rutherford physician had an unconsummated affair with a Dadaist artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — and with names like these their mere introduction to one another probably sucked all the oxygen from the room.   And can you imagine what might have passed for flirtatious chatter between the two poets, The Mind’s Games?

If a man can say of his life or
any moment of his life, There is
nothing more to be desired!  his state
becomes like that told in the famous
double sonnet — but without the
sonnet’s restrictions.  Let him go look…

Looking, of course, is always an option, and Williams undoubtedly engaged in the activity a lot.  His optic nerve never grew tired.   A coastline?   “Today small waves are rippling…”   Tomatoes?  “Green/ in one basket and, in/ the other shining reds.”   Violets?   “Once in a while/ we’d find a patch… big blue/ ones in/ the cemetery woods…”   An old brownstone church?   “Among a group/ of modern office buildings…”   Look!  Look!  Look!   And finally–Look!

But what happens when someone looks back?   When the writer as observer or as imaginator becomes the one who is seen and known and, as Daphne admits, “open to interpretation”?   My sense is that creative writing, as a discipline, has no clear-cut answer.   Nor does the practice of crafting a simple declarative sentence that is true come with an operators‘ manual.   No safe place exists for us — not even the library, not even the local delicatessen.   Those people behind the reference desk are always watching.  Those slicing lunchmeat have built-in baloney-detectors.   And so, the conundrum that fascinates Leibowitz in telling the tale of William Carlos Williams is also the issue that Leibowitz himself may encounter some day.  (He can only hope!)

Something Urgent I Have To Say To You stipulates that a poet’s subject matter cannot help but raise a window shade on what really happened behind closed doors.   If Williams succumbed to certain philandering urges, for example, poems like Chanson and excerpts of Classic Picture might help to decipher the code.   Daisy Fried, in her New York Times Review of the biography, addresses this aesthetic and offers an insightful critique.  Way to go, Daisy.

Still I have to wonder whether speculation, neither confirmed nor denied, about the Pulitzer Prize winning author’s trysts really have a place in appreciating the following:

This woman!  how shall I describe her
who is wealthy in the riches
of her sex?  No counterfeit, no mere
metal to be sure–

yet, a treasury, a sort of lien upon
all property we list and transfer.
This woman has no need to play the market
or to do anything more than watch…

Oh baby!  Someone, please call the National Inquirer!  Chanson, in just two measly stanzas, has revealed a little cleavage in the way we know what we don’t know about a person.  Where is Geraldo Rivera when we need him to dig up a little dirt?  And what about this?  What is this but some cryptic pre-nuptial agreement between two star-crossed souls?!!

A woman’s brains
which can be keen
are condemned,

like a poet’s
to what deceptions she can muster
to lead men

to their ruin.
But look more deeply
into her maneuvers,

and puzzle as we will about them
they may mean
anything

***

Now that’s just plain bizarre — and well within the context of the 1955 Greenwich Village milieu, when a female might aspire to the mentality of poet through simile alone.   Today, of course, we would have to capitulate to the obvious every Classic Picture:  whether or not women still fuss with their hair, as Williams observed, at least one woman’s brains are inherently poetic — Mutatis Mutandis!

In fact, the Baroness, as Elsa Von Fretag-Loringhoven came to be known, has finally broken into publication.   In 2005, bookstores finally felt brave enough to display Body Sweats; The Uncensored Writings of Elsa Von Fretag-Loringhoven in full view of their paying customers.  The title poem of the collection reads like so:

Body

Sweats

Mind

Rags

Agony

Unceasing —

Heartleech

Bloodseeps

Agony

Unceasing —

Life

Pollensweet

Diebitterness

Churn

Unceasing —

Figure

To

Flee —

Shape

Unceasing

Top

Me.

Well, there you and I have it.   And, as Billy Joel has sung, we have what we have on the basis of “our respective similarities.”  It turns out the condition of Ol’ Grand-Dad’s marriage is not important for Daphne.  She has this:  “Be patient that I address you in a poem, there is no other/ fit medium…”

Peace–

How Did Poe Trend?

So, as far as my participation in this barking.com blog goes, I’m noticing a trend.

It’s nothing overt or thunderously apparent.  It’s comprised of no damning data.  It’s unlikely to make a dent in the Internet reading habits of emerging generations.  It’s neither a threat to national security, nor a subject of prurient interest that might be ruled on by the Supreme Court… It does not resemble the plain nose on your face…

It is, however, near and dear to my face, which has no business being saved from even the slightest of humiliating experiences.   But I have observed that for several weeks now, my unintelligible musings have received zero comments.   That is, 0.

Now, whether or not this lack of cyber-dialogue corresponds to a blanket dismissal of my prowess as a writer or of my genius as an aspiring artist — Ahhh! – that is beyond the scope and the purpose of this brief soliloquy.   In essence, all I have to say can be summarized with a modest paraphrase of Rene Descartes:  “I write, therefore I am.”   Or, to embellish on this purloined dictum just a bit, there’s no one better than the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.   After turning away from a potentially lucrative career as writer, Merton became a priest, who morphed into a mystic, who eventually, in Seeds of Contemplation, understood his vocation like so:

“If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men–you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

We can’t be sure.  We can’t be sure why starting with the “self” may cause mild indigestion and vomiting… But it might be fun to re-categorize various modes of literature in terms of “Making Money…” or “Giving A Little Joy…”  or “Making A Noise In The World…”     For example, anything by James Patterson would be ______________.   The Zombie Killers, currently shelved under Non-Fiction, would be what? — “Making A Noise”?   John Grisham’s The Litigators may be screen-play-bound as well as unequally yoked with “Making A Noise…”   And finally, when Kathryn Stockett sat down to write The Help, I bet she imagined “Giving A Little Joy…”

Merton, upon graduating from Columbia University, prior to shaving his head

Am I being bitter?   Am I being?   Not at all.   I am Non-being.  Nada.  Zilch.  The Big Goose Egg.

I have 23 years under my ever-expanding belt as an ordained clergy-person.   I’ve graduated from two seminaries, spun out of the cookie-cutter, church factory and now, at middle-age, find myself writing.   But why?

Why write when everyone in the MFA program could be my biological off-spring (i.e., I feel frigging old)?

Why write when for decades I’ve produced sermon after sermon in which parishioners have either scratched their collective heads, picked their highfalutin noses or perhaps shuffled their toes out the door after finding the offense too great?

Why write when I’m trending so poorly on this blog, where only Sam Ligon will throw me a bone (and that, only now and then)?

***

No one should think of me or my penmanship now as sloppily nihilistic.   I may be sloppy and lacking in discipline, but I have a purpose that I have neither found, nor mastered.

I know of the card game in which players “shoot the moon” and thereby set their opponents back a certain amount of points by ostensibly absorbing all the point-cards (which is typically a bad thing).  Maybe there’s something like that going on.  Then again, I’d have to intend to others back and that’s not in my purview at all.

Not Me

Recently, I thumbed upon a poem by J. Allyn Rosser, who strikes me as a sensible and unambitious kind of bard — one that doesn’t know exactly why she’s writing, just that she has to.   Anyway, in (This Line Intentionally Left Blank), after setting the stage for some improvised kind of theatre show, something called, The Truth, the second of two stanzas reads like so:

believe me we wouldn’t
have resisted anything
but the truth
so instantly and universally
yet we sat there and waited
for something else
which you could say we also got
if you count the mime’s
unpleasant remark
so she wasn’t even a real mime
probably part of what was
clearly just a performance

***

Peace–