Poem-A-Day #359 : List 2011

List 2011

The Submission
Absolute Monarchy
Conscience
Inside Scientology
Paradise Lost
Book of Secrets
Rules of Senility
The Swerve
Incognito
Something Happened
Into the Silent Land
Paradox Lost
Stone Arabia
The God Species
A Machine, A Ghost, and A Prayer
Persistence of the Color Line
The Grief of Others
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch
Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness
Einstein's Dreams
Medical Apartheid
River of Shadows
A Sideways Look at Time
A Natural History of the Piano
Do Justice to Someone
I may Be Wrong, But I Think You're Wonderful

Into Silence

Tonight I went to a poetry reading by D. A. Powell. At one point he said something close to the following:

You write yourself into silence.

Which reminded me of this quote by Rilke:

This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?

Both speak to the deep need to get something out. Powell was discussing that feeling when you reach the end of a project. That sudden moment of having said the thing you needed to and knowing you were done.

Rilke is talking about the inner drive of writing. That NEED. He seems to be saying that those who cannot answer the question with a strong 'yes' should get out of the game. I agree. I have little patience for writers who don't feel it strongly.

I've been thinking/dealing/facing that silence lately. I have this novel sitting here that I should be editing but can't bring myself to even look at the computer file. I've re-named it thinking I could trick my brain to opening it and starting the hard work that must be done to get it published. But no...

I've contented myself with submitting poems and short stories to journals. It's kept me feeling busy though has done little to make me feel 'better'.

That word is a trick. I'm not so sure I know what feeling 'better' about my writing 'career' would look like. Or feel like. You will notice that I put sarcasm quotes around 'career'. Picture me using my fingers to make the quote sign.

It isn't that I don't think of myself as a writer. It's that I ONLY think of myself as a writer. That it's scary when I feel less like the thing I define myself as. I wouldn't characterize this as a 'block'. That would imply that I have no ideas or have stopped writing. This is not the case.

Ideas are piling up. They flood. I wrote a ten page poem in January and early February. The plan for it is to stretch to at least 30 pages. So, I am definitely 'writing'.

Maybe it's the book reviews. The books are, for the most part, not so great. I've read 6 books. 3 have been good. Of those 3, only one was great. The other 3 were kinda terrible. I'm writing 200-word reviews that are insipid at best. BUT, I am getting paid to do them. So few can say they get paid to write that I feel bad hating on it but there it is.

I don't even know that this is the problem.

Powell also discussed the changing form he uses in his writing. He said that after a project, meaning a book, there is a moment where you have to figure out how to do it again. How to find a new music. 

Perhaps this is just me finding that new music. The long poem I'm working on calls back to the long work I did when I was in undergrad. It is loosely based on a poem from then as well. It has roots in an idea from then.

All of this is to say that I have come upon a great silence in my work. A strange void where not much is getting said. I am trying to work around it by submitting and re-thinking past ideas. The story I sent around was 10 years old. The poem I have chopped and elongated was 11. Neither were bad ideas or work, they have found a second life while I attempt to navigate whatever dark water I have stumbled into.

Whether it's ok or not. Whether the music can be found. What this silence I've found is. And what my answer to it will be. Those things are left for the moment.

I was telling JG today that I am ok with ambiguity. And I am. But I need to discover what exists inside it before I can actually LIVE with it.

Re-Read : The Witches

The Witches
Author: Roald Dahl
Publisher: Jonathan Cape (1983)
208 pages

I was 9 when The Witches was turned into a movie by Nicolas Roeg and Jim Henson. It was 1990. It was Jim Henson's last film. If you've never seen this film, you should. Angelica Huston is great in it. And, talking mice!

Talking about Jim Henson makes me all misty-eyed and sad. It's like a very real and raw wound. At the age of 9, Jim Henson dying was like a family member dying. It was an odd first real moment of dealing with death.

The Witches is not particularly sad, but it is definitely dark and it for real touches on death more than once.

What I remember loving about Dahl is that he never once takes children for not understanding complicated concepts, like death. He assumes they understand. He expects them to. Reading Dahl is being taken seriously for the first time.

For those who've never read this book here is a quick run down. A boy is orphaned while on vacation in Norway and goes to live with his grandmother there. She tells him about witches. The parents' will requests the boy be raised in England because which is what he is used to. The grandmother and he move. Once there she becomes ill and her doctor recommends a vacation tot he seaside. Once there they uncover a plot to kill all the children in England by turning them into mice. The boy is transformed and must save the day while a rodent.

At the end the boy is a mouse and he and his grandmother decide to spend their remaining years alive fighting the witches of the world.

That ending is what I have always remembered about the book. The boy and his grandmother have a very frank discussion about her being old and probably near death. He asks how long mice live and a really sad talk about a few years follows. Both are upbeat though, because neither wants to go on without the other.

Sad and beautiful.

It gets me misty-eyed the same way talking about Jim Henson does. If I had to pick two people, who are not relatives, who shaped my world-view they would be Henson and Dahl. Henson taught me about kindness, education and love. Dahl said that was all well and good but there are dark things out there so be ready to kick their asses.

Re-reading The Witches reminded me of the simplicity of the work. And how good a writer Dahl really was. He manages to take a very basic story of children taking on the world and infuse them with a magical sense of realness. Close to what the world feels and looks like to a child. Scary and amazing.

And that's what we lose as we get older. The amazing is replaced with more scary. I think we all would do good for ourselves to remind us of the amazing. Everyone go pick up a Dahl book. Read it. It will take you only a few hours. Then go watch an episode of Sesame Street or The Muppet Movie. Then watch the video below. It will make your day better. I promise.

Re-Read is a sometime article where I go back and read a book from my childhood over and examine the threads that I find in my current adult life.