The terrible thing about public schools is they take young children who are natural poets and story writers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk “about” it.
The Red Wheelbarrow
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens4
“What did the poet mean by the ‘red wheelbarrow’? Did he mean a sunset? A chariot? And why was it ‘glazed with rain’?” So many questions. He meant nothing so much as a wheelbarrow, and it was red because it was red and it had just rained. So much depends on it because poems are small moments of enlightenment—at that moment the wheelbarrow just as it was woke Williams up and was everything.
Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader’s job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels. Instead we should go closer and closer to the work. Learn to recall images and lines precisely as the writer said them. Don’t step away from their warmth and fire to talk “about” them. Stay close to them. That’s how you’ll learn to write. Stay with the original work. Stay with your original mind and write from it.
We Are Not the Poem
THE PROBLEM IS we think we exist. We think our words are permanent and solid and stamp us forever. That’s not true. We write in the moment. Sometimes when I read poems at a reading to strangers, I realize they think those poems are me. They are not me, even if I speak in the “I” person. They were my thoughts and my hand and the space and the emotions at that time of writing. Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh. That is how writing is. Instead of freezing us, it frees us.
The ability to put something down—to tell how you feel about an old husband, an old shoe, or the memory of a cheese sandwich on a gray morning in Miami—that moment you can finally align how you feel inside with the words you write; at that moment you are free because you are not fighting those things inside. You have accepted them, become one with them. I have a poem entitled “No Hope”—it’s a long poem. I always think of it as joyous because in my ability to write of desperation and emptiness I felt alive again and unafraid. However, when I read it, people comment, “How sad.” I try to explain, but no one listens.
It is important to remember we are not the poem. People will react however they want; and if you write poetry, get used to no reaction at all. But that’s okay. The power is always in the act of writing. Come back to that again and again and again. Don’t get caught in the admiration for your poems. It’s fun. But then the public makes you read their favorites over and over until you get sick of those poems. Write good poems and let go of them. Publish them, read them, go on writing.
I remember Galway Kinnell when his wonderful Book of Nightmares first came out. It was a Thursday afternoon in Ann Arbor. I’d never heard of him, much less could I pronounce his name. He sang those poems; they were new and exciting for him and a great accomplishment. Six years later I heard him read again at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He’d read that book so much in those six years that he was sick of it. He ran through the poems, put down the book, and said, “Where’s the party?” There was nothing dangerous for him in them anymore. The air was no longer electric.
It is very painful to become frozen with your poems, to gain too much recognition for a certain set of poems. The real life is in writing, not in reading the same ones over and over again for years. We constantly need new insights, visions. We don’t exist in any solid form. There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever. Don’t identify too strongly with your work. Stay fluid behind those black-and-white words. They are not you. They were a great moment going through you. A moment you were awake enough to write down and capture.
Man Eats Car
THERE WAS AN article in the newspaper several years ago—I did not read it, it was told to me—about a yogi in India who ate a car. Not all at once, but slowly over a year’s time. Now, I like a story like that. How much weight did he gain? How old was he? Did he have a full set of teeth? Even the carburetor, the steering wheel, the radio? What make was the car? Did he drink the oil?
I told this story to a group of third-graders in Owatonna, Minnesota. They were sitting on the blue carpet in front of me. The students looked confused and asked the most obvious question, “Why did he eat a car?,” and then they commented, “Ugh!” But there was one bristling, brown-eyed student, who will be my friend forever, who just looked at me and burst into tremendous laughter, and I began laughing too. It was fantastic! A man had eaten a car! Right from the beginning there is no logic in it. It is absurd.
In a sense, this is how we should write. Not asking “Why?,” not delicately picking among candies (or spark plugs), but voraciously, letting our minds eat up everything and spewing it out on paper with great energy. We shouldn’t think, “This is a good subject for writing.” “This we shouldn’t talk about.” Writing is everything, unconditional. There is no separation between writing, life, and the mind. If you think big enough to let people eat cars, you will be able to see that ants are elephants and men are women. You will be able to see the transparency of all forms so that all separations disappear.
This is what metaphor is. It is not saying that an ant is like an elephant. Perhaps; both are alive. No. Metaphor is saying the ant is an elephant. Now, logically speaking, I know there is a difference. If you put elephants and ants before me, I believe that every time I will correctly identify the elephant and the ant. So metaphor must come from a very different place than that of the logical, intelligent mind. It comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant.
But don’t worry about metaphors. Don’t think, “I have to write metaphors to sound literary.” First of all, don’t be literary. Metaphors cannot be forced. If all of you does not believe that the elephant and the ant are one at the moment you write it, it will sound false. If all of you does believe it, there are some who might consider you crazy; but it’s better to be crazy than false. But how do you make your mind believe it and write metaphor?
Don’t “make” your mind do anything. Simply step out of the way and record your thoughts as they roll through you. Writing practice softens the heart and mind, helps to keep us flexible so that rigid distinctions between apples and milk, tigers and celery, disappear. We can step through moons right into bears. You will take leaps naturally if you follow your thoughts, because the mind spontaneously takes great leaps. You know. Have you ever been able to just stay with one thought for very long? Another one arises.
Your mind is leaping, your writing will leap, but it won’t be artificial. It will reflect the nature of first thoughts, the way we see the world when we are free from prejudice and can see the underlying principles. We are all connected. Metaphor knows this and therefore is religious. There is no separation between ants and elephants. All boundaries disappear, as though we were looking through rain or squinting our eyes at city lights.
Writing Is Not a McDonald’s Hamburger
SOMETIMES I HAVE a student who is really good right from the beginning. I’m thinking of one in particular. The air was electric when he read, and he was often shaking. The writing process split him open; he was able to tell about being fourteen years old in a mental hospital, about walking the streets of Minneapolis tripping on LSD, about sitting next to the dead body of his brother in San Francisco. He said he had wanted to write for years. People told him he should be a writer, but anytime he sat down to write he couldn’t connect the words on paper with the event or his feelings.
That is because he had an idea of what he wanted to say before he came to paper. Of course, you can sit down a
nd have something you want to say. But then you must let its expression be born in you and on the paper. Don’t hold too tight; allow it to come out how it needs to rather than trying to control it. Yes, those experiences, memories, feelings, are in us, but you can’t carry them out on paper whole the way a cook brings out a pizza from the oven.
Let go of everything when you write, and try at a simple beginning with simple words to express what you have inside. It won’t begin smoothly. Allow yourself to be awkward. You are stripping yourself. You are exposing your life, not how your ego would like to see you represented, but how you are as a human being. And it is because of this that I think writing is religious. It splits you open and softens your heart toward the homely world.
When I’m cranky now, miserable, dissatisfied, pessimistic, negative, generally rotten, I recognize it as a feeling. I know the feeling can change. I know it is energy that wants to find a place in the world and wants friends.
But yes, you can have topics you want to write about—“I want to write about my brother who died in San Francisco”—but come to it not with your mind and ideas, but with your whole body—your heart and gut and arms. Begin to write in the dumb, awkward way an animal cries out in pain, and there you will find your intelligence, your words, your voice.
People often say, “I was walking along [or driving, shopping, jogging] and I had this whole poem go through my mind, but when I sat down to write it, I couldn’t get it to come out right.” I never can either. Sitting to write is another activity. Let go of walking or jogging and the poem that was born then in your mind. This is another moment. Write another poem. Perhaps secretly hope something of what you thought a while ago might come out, but let it come out however it does. Don’t force it.
The same student mentioned above was so excited about writing that he immediately tried to form a book. I told him, “Take it slow. Just let yourself write for a while. Learn what that is about.” Writing is a whole lifetime and a lot of practice. I understood his urgency. We want to think we are doing something useful, going someplace, achieving something—“I am writing a book.”
Give yourself some space before you decide to write those big volumes. Learn to trust the force of your own voice. Naturally, it will evolve a direction and a need for one, but it will come from a different place than your need to be an achiever. Writing is not a McDonald’s hamburger. The cooking is slow, and in the beginning you are not sure whether a roast or a banquet or a lamb chop will be the result.
Obsessions
EVERY ONCE IN a while I make a list of my obsessions. Some obsessions change and there are always more. Some are thankfully forgotten.
Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.
I have my writing groups make lists of their obsessions so that they can see what they unconsciously (and consciously) spend their waking hours thinking about. After you write them down you can put them to good use. You have a list of things to write about. And your main obsessions have power; they are what you will come back to in your writing over and over again. And you’ll create new stories around them. So you might as well give in to them. They probably take over your life whether you want them to or not, so you ought to get them to work for you.
One of my obsessions is my Jewish family. Every once in a while I decide I’ve written enough about them. I don’t want to sound like a momma’s girl. There are other things in the world to write about. It is true that there are other topics and they do come up naturally, but when I have made a conscious decision to not write about my family, the act of repressing it seems to repress everything else too, simply because I am spending a lot of energy avoiding something.
It’s like when I decide to go on a diet. Right after I make that decision, food seems to be the only real thing on earth, and as I drive the car, run down the block, write in my journal—all these actions become ways of avoiding the one thing I suddenly really want. For me, it works better to give food and hunger a space in my life, but in a friendly way so that I don’t destructively devour twelve cookies at a time.
Just so with writing about my family. Give them a few pages and they will take their place in the Hall of Obsessions and allow me space for other topics. Try to squelch them and they turn the corner in every one-horse-town poem I’ve ever written—even an Iowa farm wife begins to sound like she’s about to make blintzes.
I learned once from a recovering alcoholic that at parties alcoholics always know where the liquor is, how much there is, how much they’ve drunk, and where they are going to get their next drink. I have never cared that much about liquor, but I know I love chocolate. After hearing about an alcoholic’s behavior, I watched myself. The next day I was at a friend’s. His roommate was making brownies. We had to go to a show before the brownies were out of the oven. I was aware that subtly throughout the whole movie I was thinking about those brownies. I couldn’t wait to get back and have one. When the show was finished, we coincidentally met some friends who suggested that we go out some place to talk. I saw myself get panicky: I wanted those brownies. I made up a quick excuse why we had to return to my friend’s house before we went on with the evening.
We are run by our compulsions. Maybe it’s just me. But it seems that obsessions have power. Harness that power. I know most of my writing friends are obsessed with writing. It works in the same way as chocolate does. We’re always thinking we should be writing no matter what else we might be doing. It’s not fun. The life of an artist isn’t easy. You’re never free unless you are doing your art. But I guess doing art is better than drinking a lot or filling up with chocolate. I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren’t writing or are having trouble writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.
There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it. It is not getting sidetracked, thinking you shouldn’t write any more about your Jewish family when that’s your role in life: to record their history, who they were in Brooklyn, on Long Island, at Miami Beach—the first generation of American Goldbergs—before it all passes and is gone.
Katagiri Roshi says: “Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another.” Yes, but it’s better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become an alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.
So perhaps not all obsessions are bad. An obsession for peace is good. But then be peaceful. Don’t just think about it. An obsession for writing is good. But then write. Don’t let it get twisted into drinking. An obsession for chocolate is not good. I know. It’s unhealthy and doesn’t help the world the way peace and writing do.
Carolyn Forché, a poet who won the Lamont Poetry Award for her book The Country Between Us, about El Salvador, said, “Change your innermost obsessions to become a political writer.” That makes sense. You don’t write about politics by thinking you should. That will become doggerel. Start caring about politics, reading about it, talking about it, and don’t worry about what it will do to your writing. When it becomes an obsession, you will naturally write about it.
Original Detail
THOUGH THIS IS a short chapter, it is an important one: use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else. Even if you transplant the beveled windows, slow-rotating Rheingold sign, Wise potato chip rack, and tall red stools from the Aero Tavern that you drank in in New York into a bar in a story in another state and time, the story will have authenticity and groundedness. “Oh, no, that bar was on Long Island, I can’t put it in New Jersey”??
?yes, you can. You don’t have to be rigid about original detail. The imagination is capable of detail transplants, but using the details you actually know and have seen will give your writing believability and truthfulness. It creates a good solid foundation from which you can build.
Naturally, if you have just been to New Orleans in the dripping August heat and have sucked the fat out of the heads of crayfish at the Magnolia Bar on St. Charles Avenue, you can’t have the thick-wristed character in your story in Cleveland on a January night doing the same thing at his local bar. It won’t work, unless, of course, you are moving into surrealism, where all boundaries begin to melt.
Be awake to the details around you, but don’t be self-conscious. “Okay. I’m at a wedding. The bride has on blue. The groom is wearing a red carnation. They are serving chopped liver on doilies.” Relax, enjoy the wedding, be present with an open heart. You will naturally take in your environment, and later, sitting at your desk, you will be able to recall just how it was dancing with the bride’s redheaded mother, seeing the bit of red lipstick smeared on her front tooth when she smiled, and smelling her perfume mixed with perspiration.
The Power of Detail
I AM IN Costa’s Chocolate Shop in Owatonna, Minnesota. My friend is opposite me. We’ve just finished Greek salads and are writing in our notebooks for a half hour among glasses of water, a half-sipped Coke, and a cup of coffee with milk. The booths are orange, and near the front counter are lines of cream candies dipped in chocolate. Across the street is the Owatonna Bank, designed by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s teacher. Inside the bank is a large cow mural and beautiful stained-glass windows.