pen ink river

...a new outlook or approach or attitude toward the creative writing life I said I wanted and have been trying to lead, to make my primary focus this past seven or eight years. This realization after a week in the rain forest on the east shore of Maui in a solar-powered cottage with rain water gathered for showers and water pumped from a stream in the gulch for every other need. After a week of simple, calm, peaceful, non-striving living in between bouts of run-around touring in the rental car—beaches, the north coast, the road to Hana, Haleakala at 10,000+ feet. So what does this have to do with writing?

I came back home, to western Oregon, and immediately felt turned off, almost repulsed, at the state-of-the-art, at what it takes to get one's words and one's voice out there. The turn-off was exemplified by inbox e-mails from poetry competitions and writing websites and the latest rejection from the Oregonian Sunday poetry column. So much ego to get one's preciously crafted words out there and then what? Who reads them anyway? Those are the immediate return-to-my-reality thoughts I had.

What if I stopped, stepped outside what I thought I wanted and took a completely different view? Dug deep down to sort out why it is I thought I wanted to speak and be heard. Found some way to connect in a moral, meaningful way with community that is somehow outside or beyond the very tiny world I continue to believe I inhabit sitting here alone, at this desk, fiddling around with words.

I had hoped to do such soul-searching during the time we were in Maui. But instead, it was the wind, the sound of the afternoon windward rains on the palm fronds. And it was the moon, full and rising over the slopes of Haleakala. And it was the stars—more than I've ever seen before because there is so little electric light and no power poles on our side of the island. And the sun, setting then rising, and us too, getting up with it as the light returned each and every day. While there, I wrote in my journal more than once that I felt words were failing me or perhaps I was failing the words. But maybe it really isn't either. Words had somehow fallen out—of favor, of my ego-need to record without fail what my tiny window-on-the-world self was experiencing. Words—and my often desperate engagement with them—somehow moved from center to the sidelines, lost their allure, their luster and sheen as I moved from doing into being. For me, there was a divine contentment in simply that.

So now what? And what next? How to get outside the ego that often fuels the artistic endeavor? Is meditation the only way? And then how to write what I want, what tells my story, my truth and not feel disappointed or depressed about the state of the art, the state of recognition in the corporate-dominated publishing world of today? Or how to embrace other media, other art forms, if the words fail me or I fail the words? It isn't necessarily an all or nothing, rather a continuum. How to explore and move forward with that?

Posted by peninkriver at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Words to ponder from Ezra Pounds, ABC of Reading:

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.

AND

...music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance;...poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Ho hum.

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By Theresa Eiben on the Poets & Writerswebsite:

A chapbook is a small, thin booklet, often handmade, but not always. Chapbooks generally run about 16 or 32 pages. Fold 8 sheets of standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper in half, staple at the crease, and you have a rudimentary chapbook. The origin of the word is either "cheap" book, sold at newsstands during the era of Penny Dreadfuls ... or "chapter" book, because of its scant number of pages. There is now a long history of very fine bookmaking attached to (usually) poetry chapbooks, and some people collect the rarer ones.

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Finally, in the current issue of Poets & Writers, someone takes a stab at telling the truth. Joseph Bednarik, marketing director of Copper Canyon Press, pulls a few maxims from a 2004 NEA report about the state of reading and Gabriel Zaid's book, So Many Books: Reading and PUblishing in an Age of Abundance. The list reads like a blueprint of my own often recurring thoughts—edited below:

1. Production of creative writing exceeds demand.

2. MFA programs proliferate while literary reading steadily declines.

3. Publishers need financial help to get literary titles out there because sales don't support production.

4. Publishers can easily get thousands of manuscripts (with reading fees) if they sponsor a book contest.

He goes on to talk about what is wrong with this picture which is something on my mind as I try to diligently pursue the writing life. How there's a whole self-created, self-perpetuating industry pumping more writers and poets into a system and more and more writing for which there is next to no literary readership. He is appalled that many writrers currently enrolled in these abundant MFA programs don't read. As if it's enough as a writer to simply write. Bednarik's suggestion? Writers have to read, read, read. A lot.

A bloated "writership" for a dying readership. Great. Just when I settle into acceptance of the fact that I am a writer and have been dedicating my time, energy, days to it. How to rise above the discouragement? How to show up at the page and simple write?

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I start looking through the essay about James Schuyler, reclusive New York School poet—this week's assignment in the prose poem class. It's only ever interesting up to a point to me. So much veers so quickly into the pedantic, the arbitrary, the textual analysis of who really cares. I feel like this is one of those "sit up and pay attention" moments, that yet again, am I kidding myself this literary life is really what I want to do?

I don't doubt I want to write; after this five years of solitude, of hard work, of testing myself, of fairly regularly showing up at the page, I think it's finally edged into a "have-to." But the study of literature, schools and fads and trends and the self-referential preciousness of a bunch of people who deified their creative life in New York City: do I have to care about that? Do I have to go back to school again to get another degree to gain admittance into the leagues of those who teach and thus have time taken away from being one who writes?

Oh, I now know I'll slog through the essay, put my judgments aside and use the poet's actual work as exemplar to edge me into something original of my own. But there is truly so much in this literary life I do not care about, that bores me, that doesn't hold my interest. So much writing that doesn't grab let alone turn me on. I now know I don't have to like all of it. Personal taste is just, personal, and discriminating. But I do wonder, why this reaction to the academic over and over again in my life. It isn't that I'm jealous, that I wish that life had been mine. I think it always comes back to that life outside the ivy walls has forever been more interesting to me. The living of a life, which is what I thought writers and artists were always all about. Could all this banding together in schools, all this industry of analysis and publish-or-perish, of categorization and collection of even one's bad teen poetry, one's every scrap of lists and letters simply be a way for people to break out of the isolation that a truly creative life is? And make some kind of living, fashion some kind of work for oneself (however onerous and boring and time-wasting) in the process?

Posted by peninkriver at 07:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From Sam Hamill’s editorial on the Poets Against War web site:

“One thing we as poets can do is build stronger intercultural bridges. The better we know and talk with one another, locally and internationally, the more difficult misunderstanding becomes. Poetry is an important bridge. Our poetry absolutely blossomed in the last century, in a very large part thanks to the influence of poetry from all over the world. That cross-pollination is essential to us and to our allied poets abroad. We need to know what every “they" have to say. We need to reaffirm ancient values and the practice of compassion. We need to remind people lost in materialist culture that, yes, poetry matters—just as it always has. Maybe even more, because it crosses boundaries more efficiently than ever before. And the real subject of poetry is character."

Hamill also writes:

“Success? Success is one man laying down the gun. Success is one human being finding one breath of insight or solace or compassion through a poem. Success is a way of life, not a product...Tides begin to change one drop of water at a time."

Posted by peninkriver at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just finished reading most of The Smoking Gun's six-page indictment of James Frey's alleged memoir, A Million Little Pieces. I haven't read the book; it isn't a memoir that would ever appeal to me. But what is clear from TSG's research that had not been fully explored in the few mainstream media news articles about the controversy around the book is that Frey wanted to write fiction and initially did. Fiction doesn't get published these days but memoir does. So, when his fiction was passed up he was miraculously able to tell his real-life amazing recovery-from-addiction story. And lo and behold, Oprah and many others fell for it. America loves those quick fixes for what is broken. And now Frey sits at the top of the heap, fat, happy, and rich.

There is much that's troubling to me about this story and the brouhaha it has engendered. This feels like yet another major example of lying—under the guise of creative license—being tolerated if not sanctioned in our American culture. More and more these days, it seems convenient to ignore the ethical dimensions of a falsehood when your untruths make you—and others in the publishing gravy train—piles of money, our obvious Mammon.

More disturbing to me, as someone who writes, is the feeding frenzy around memoir as a writing genre. I think somehow it is tied into the proliferation of writing programs nationwide, too. My hunch is that many enrollees aren't necessarily true writers, people dedicated to the art, the craft, the life. I think they are those who feel they have a story to tell and why not tell it just like James Frey did, why not join the party and be the next the memoir du jour. All you have to do is tell your story, honestly or not. Storytelling, that's what I think people crave. Not writing as hard work, let alone art.

There simply can't be this many true writers. I increasingly believe writing is a calling, a talent, a gift resident in a combination of DNA and luck. Like the other arts, it requires energy, dedication, training, apprenticeship, constant practice, endless humility and revision. Only because many of us know how to write (hold a pen, touchtype a keyboard) for other tasks in our lives does writing even seem like something anyone can do. This might also explain the exponential growth of all these low-res writing programs. Otherwise, why wouldn't there be the same number of low-res graduate programs for painting or sculpture or musical composition?

So the equation goes like this. Anyone can write. Everyone has a story to tell. James Frey did it and he made a lot of money so I can, too. More fuel to the dumbing-down-of-culture fire. Discouraging to those of us trying to actually do writing-as-art.

Posted by Nancy Flynn at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)