The Question

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcJ7wKSLQvk

One of the pleasures of having a poetry book is that at poetry readings I am sometimes asked to trade copies with another poet. That’s how I came upon Water Chasing Water by Koon Woon. Our conversation also resulted in the review of Sparrow at Five Willows.

So here is the poem that spoke to me this morning:

THE QUESTION I WANT TO ASK

A command sets a thousand horses galloping
while a question merely drops a frog into a pond.
Elsewhere the required question is not the same.
Elsewhere they ask for rain, for harvests, and for newborns
to pick up the heavy plows.
Elsewhere there are infants to pick up, messages to scurry.
One nation is on fire, another in revolt, still a third one quakes.

I peer out at the pond. I am the dwarf of Socrates
looking at humanity, the midget of Isaac Newton looking
at the invisible gravity.
The frog sits on a single lotus leaf, its eyes pinhole cameras
to record its domain
from an ill-defined mosquito to a very deliberate water snake.

It has been ten years since the frog leaped from my mouth.
At water’s edge the water lilies have transformed
from buds to jungle foliage, and every cell in my body
has been washed and replaced.
Grassy fields have turned golden, then brown.

I ask the wind if it would listen.
Elsewhere the wind sweeps a fire across a prairie.
The pond now smooth as a bald man’s head,
swallows my question but gives no answer.
But I am no longer disappointed that it is so, and
the thousand horses that went galloping
return now of their own accord.

-Koon Woon

It Doesn’t Have to Be Good (2)

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CAM00264Yes, yes, I’ve used this post title before. It’s still the best advice I can offer anyone at the onset of a big project. Of an abstractly, potentially big project.

Here’s a line that I think I found in You’ve Got a Book in You, by Elizabeth Sims: “A year from now you’ll wish you had started today.”

The first thing you have to do: learn how to start.

I am always baffled by famous writers who claim they do not write every day. I don’t always “write,” I guess. (Okay, I always write in my journal, but not always on my current project.) But when I’m swept up in a project, I can’t seem to help thinking around it, reading around it, even scribbling around it. It’s as if someone has dumped a truckload of bricks on my driveway. I can’t get anywhere else without going past the pile of bricks.

A friend told me the other day that she has to work herself up into a kind of passionate fit before she can write. I do that, too, sometimes. I find, however, that a passionate fit is just a passionate fit (soothed by TV or Spider Solitaire or a heavy-carb lunch) unless I pick up my pen and start writing.

image borrowed from http://www.codercaste.com/2009/12/08/how-to-add-a-directory-to-your-path-environment-variable-in-linux/

If you want to write something, the first thing you might do is begin making a space for it. Write a little bit–even if it’s not “productive,” not “on task.” Just write. Write for 15 minutes. If 15 minutes sounds impossible (that would be anxiety, also known as fear), try 5 minutes. Even if you’re highly anxious, you can write for 5 minutes.

 

Let’s imagine that your project really is a truckload of bricks dumped on your driveway. Sure, you can work steadily for several days until the bricks are off your driveway and in the garden where you’re making a path. But you can also move them one or two bricks at a time, every time you see them.

Write for a few minutes. Then, try it again later today or tomorrow. Make an appointment with your passion. Show up (on time, with a good attitude!). Repeat. Don’t be surprised when you look at the clock and see that a half hour (or an hour or four hours) has slipped by.

Get proficient at starting your work, and the next time that passionate fit overtakes you, you’ll have a pen, paper, and a little block of time waiting for it.

 

Wendell Berry

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At his recent Seattle reading, poet Ted Kooser suggested that we read about 100 poems for every one we write. I decided I would try to take that seriously. Well, somewhat seriously, and I have been reading poems every morning, even while working on the novel.

Here’s one of the poems I read today — “The Peace of Wild Things,” by Wendell Berry. To hear it, go to this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cqb3rVWxNY

This kid…

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This kid is driving 9757_743315825754001_899414722477719495_n(1)me nuts.

My daughters don’t read my blog (though a couple of their friends do), so I feel pretty safe coming here to gripe about Emma, who is my excuse this morning for not working on my novel.

I don’t imagine that it is going to be all that shocking or even interesting to any of my readers to hear that a 15-year-old girl is in conflict with her mother.

This morning, driving her to school in total, aggravated silence, I thought about how Emma came into our lives. I thought about how, sitting in church one Sunday morning about three months before her birth, I broke down in sobs.

I already had two very busy little girls! I was 43 years old! My husband was even older! I was only one year into a tenure-track, full-time teaching job! Were we insane? What did we think we were doing? What if Emma’s birth mother changed her mind and we didn’t get her? After all this…angst! How on earth was this all going to turn out?

I was crying because I didn’t know the future and because I had no control over what little I did know.

I cried (a lot) this summer when my mom was so ill for pretty much the same reason. Whenever anyone asked my sister and I if we had any questions, I asked, “Do you have a crystal ball?”

Certainty, in theory, would be a wonderful thing. But it seems to me, sitting here in my writing cabin and avoiding my characters (who can also refuse to do what I want them to do), that we don’t really want certainty. Certainty, like the stasis my 19th-century American Literature professor used to talk about, is possible only in the grave. Life is change.

I will have to track down who said this (besides my friend Paul), but: The whole point of writing the truth is to write not what happened, but what it made you feel. 

What we want is to feel. What we want is to have our hearts ripped open. That’s why we have children. And that’s why we read novels.