I’ve been floundering a bit. Hard to explain it all, but then — this afternoon, in my email in-box — this arrived. I decided that I should put it where I will remember to reread it.
Happy 2022 to you. May this year make us stronger, wiser, better, and may we all live to write about it.
If you are still wondering what to buy the fiction-writer on your Christmas list, I am happy to recommend Alice McDermott’s What about the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
McDermott’s 2013 novel, Someone, is one of my favorite novels of all time. At some point I decided that where McDermott leads, I will follow, and I snapped up her craft book in hardback the minute it was published. For a few months, I was happy simply to own the book. But now that I’m finally reading it, it’s proved a great way for me to procrastinate getting my poetry book finished and my mystery novel revised. A series of lectures given at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference over a twenty-year period, What about the Baby? is utterly brilliant, chockablock with gems about stories, sentences, and faith.
Because in my writers group we often debate whether to cut a word or not, I wanted to share this passage, which is not McDermott but E. B. White of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. We all know his famous advice to “omit needless words,” but I don’t think I had read this elaboration that White, himself, offered a reader who objected:
It comes down to the meaning of “needless.” Often a word can be removed without destroying the structure of a sentence, but that does not necessarily mean that the word is needless or that the sentence has gained by its removal.
If you were to put a narrow construction on the word “needless,” you would have to remove thousands of words from Shakespeare, who seldom said anything in six words that could be said in twenty.
Writing is not an exercise in excision; it’s a journey into sound. How about “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”? One “tomorrow” would suffice, but it’s the other two that have made the thing immortal. (E. B. White, qtd on pp. 62-63)
McDermott surrounds this with her own notions about style, for instance about sound: “read your sentences out loud in order to discover your own sound: the rhythm, pattern, refrain, reprise of your prose” (63).
…of your prose, and your poetry.
I was just over at Salt and saw that they have three poems by Lucille Clifton — a one-of-a-kind human being and poet I was privileged to hear in person a few times. Salt had a Christmas poem by Billy Collins last week (also worth a visit), and in this week’s offering, keeping faith with the season, Clifton’s poems, “mary’s dream,” “a song of mary,” and “john,” i.e. John the Baptizer.
This past Sunday I attended my childhood church and there, too, the message was drawn from one of those leading-up-to Christmas passages in the book of Luke. I have to set the stage here a bit, if you’re to follow where I’m going (which is, my apologies, not quite clear even to me). The couple who now pastor the church are in their 80s. My parents would have loved them. This ministry is a definite calling for the Bakers, and it came quite late in life. So when “Sister Baker” (as we say) talked in her sermon about the angel Gabriel visiting Zechariah, to tell him his wife Elizabeth, “well stricken in years,” would bear a child, a precursor to Christ — well, she had a personal response.
Zechariah tried to tell Gabriel it just couldn’t happen. We’re too old, he said. So he had to be struck mute. As Sister Baker said, when God has a plan, if you can’t get on board, he may ask you to get out of the way. Then — this was her personal response — she added, “I sure hope Gabriel doesn’t show up and tell me I have to have a baby, at my age.” Everyone laughed.
I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, except for the last two days I’ve been wondering how I can work this anecdote into a poem. It’s easier to imagine a challenge for the fiction writers in my group:
Write a scene in which a character attends a church service and hears a message that makes him or her uncomfortable.
I hadn’t been too sure about this trip, but the church service itself didn’t make me at all uncomfortable. My brother and sister and their spouses were there (my brother said at lunch that he was surprised the church didn’t fall down); also one my of aunts (age 86), and about a dozen of my cousins from all over Southwest Washington. Lots of music. I did a complete flashback to my childhood and wept. Much has changed (the drums and guitars up front), and I knew only two of the people in their small congregation. But there was a time for personal testimony, and an altar call at the end — both could have been scripted from a service when I was seven.
I’ve been rereading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and this morning I underlined this line:
“our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost” (p. 6).
That’s kind of the space my thoughts are hovering over.
Here’s one of the poems from Salt:
mary’s dream
winged women was saying
“full of grace” and like.
was light beyond sun and words
of a name and a blessing.
winged women to only i.
i joined them, whispering
yes.–Lucille Clifton
Mostly, I’ve been wondering what’s calling me right now — what’s completely unexpected and calling me — and how to say “yes” to it.
One of the beauties of my pandemic-long poetry practice has been finding a poem by a different poet each week to use as a model—sometimes more of a jumping-off point—for my own work. This week it’s a poem by Gregory Pardlo who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for his book, Digest. After reading this NYTimes piece, and having a look at him at Poetry Foundation—“The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s ‘clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private’”—I’d like to read more.
In the NYTimes, Stephen Burt calls his style, “deliberately elegant in a modernist kind of way,” and Pardlo admits trying to lampoon academic language. It’s another vein that intrigues me:
But he also writes intensely personal poems—with scenes that describe shopping for groceries with his daughter or unpack his anxieties about fatherhood—and delivers funny and poignant dispatches from the front lines of gentrifying Brooklyn.
“He’s interrogating the everyday,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith said. “Another poet might be afraid to draw on so much of the true stuff that a life is made of.” (New York Times, April 22, 2015)
So here’s our poem:
Written by Himself
I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet
whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye;
I was born across the river where I
was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,
broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though
it please you, through no fault of my own,
pockets filled with coffee grounds and eggshells.
I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden.
I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion.
I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air,
air drifting like spirits and old windows.
I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry;
I was an index of first lines when I was born.
I was born waist-deep stubborn in the water crying
ain’t I a woman and a brother I was born
to this hall of mirrors, this horror story I was
born with a prologue of references, pursued
by mosquitoes and thieves, I was born passing
off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born.
I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves;
I walked a piece of the way along before I was born.
—Gregory Pardlo, from Digest p. 3
Find a recording of Pardlo reading “Written by Himself” here.
I want to know if this is the poet speaking, the “supposed person of the poem,” or is it a digest of voices, rising together?
I admit that I’m struggling with what I’ll write in response to this assignment. I mean, how do you follow, “I was born in minutes in a roadside skillet,” or “I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry”? How about “I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves”?
But I’m about to open my notebook and see what will happen.