Why I write

I drove to a friend’s house last week and there is a point in the drive where I crest a wooded hill and at the top clear the woods and make a slight turn and BAM all across the horizon snow-covered peaks. In the foreground there are fields, and a few traditional Swiss farmhouses, and below the village. It was a pretty day when I drove, in the mid-afternoon, and I topped the hill and the Alps bore down on me and I actually said “Wow” out loud. More than once. It can still do that, after ten years, that sudden panorama. It can still nearly stop my heart.

What would happen if I opened my heart to every pink-blue sunrise, every red-streaked sunset, every first crocus of spring? Would it burn up from the rapture of it all? Explode? Get stronger? Sometimes I look up at the Eiger and wonder how we even manage to move through the day at all rather than stand rooted to the spot – any spot, the Alps or the sunrise or the blossoming plum tree – saying wow wow wow over and over. If we opened the valve, really opened the valve, we’d be ripped from shore and carried downstream by the sheer fact of the world. How to open the valve just enough to be alive and not so much we’re uprooted? Or is that the living, the moment of feeling your roots ripped from the soil of the ordinary?

And it is that, that BAM that ripping that rapture that is the first time every single time that I’m reaching for every time I pick up a pen. I want to crest the hill, to clear the woods, to be brought face to face with the extraordinary and to realize, finally, that it is extraordinary and I want to take you with me.

Writers on writing

“Reality – if we use that word to indicate real life, and the way things really are – should always be viewed as a sheet of ice beneath which we, the writers (with our readers in tow) are swimming, trying constantly to punch through, so that we can breathe. With every sentence we write, we must be poised and alert to punch through and make the story better.” – Rick Bass

Songbirds and nuclear reactors and the horrible beauty of the world

How does one write poems in the middle of something like this? What good, really, are my words now? How do we make the words meaningful in the face of disaster – although, if we are already following the injunction to “write as if you are dying” the words should never be trite, the words would always be weighed against the horrible beauty of the world.

The horrible beauty of the world. I have refilled the bird feeder and the blue tits and the great tits are back, swooping down from the branches of the willow tree, pecking at the feed sticks, flitting away – those bright little song birds I am so happy to have lured to our patio. Meanwhile, entire villages are wrecked and gone – entire villages of the dead and missing. Radiation is leaking out of several reactors – and how does a sentence like that even exist? – leaking poison and here I am watching my songbirds – that’s the horrible beauty of the world, that these two things exist at the same time, that it is our duty to see both of them, to take them both in.

Stare at the horrible images. Watch the songbird out the window. Hold these two things simultaneously in your heart.

In defense of a good story

After The Glass Bead Game, my book club is now reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog – it’s a particularly interesting (and entirely coincidental) back-to-back. Both books ask the same Big Questions – what is the purpose of a life? – but in completely different ways. The eras in which the books were written show: Hedgehog is an engaging narrative with characters the reader is meant to respond to emotionally – in a word, a modern novel – whereas Glass Bead Game was all intellect – very much the German Intellectual novel of the last century. It was work for me to read The Glass Bead Game every night (I had hoped to read it in the original German, but that proved too much and after about 40 pages I switched over to an English translation); Hedgehog is a pleasure and it’s still asking the Big Questions. And because it’s a pleasure to read I’m engaging with the questions more than I did with The Glass Bead Game, which asked them so earnestly.

Did I just out myself as low-brow? That I’ll consider the Big Questions but only if they are wrapped up in a good story?

Or was it that The Glass Bead Game was neither fish nor fowl? I’ll read a philosophy book and I’ll read a novel but don’t give me a philosophy book pretending to be a novel. A story that is a story only to serve as the platform for an idea. Yes, I did just criticize the literary talents of a Nobel Prize winning author. But only in the context of this novel – I’ve read other works by Hesse and I remember being utterly, completely engaged – Demian stands out in my memory as a book I read again and again over the course of a year. But in The Glass Bead Game I think the story had to do far too much heavy lifting for the philosophy. The book was full of interesting ideas but it failed for me as a story, a story in which I connected with and cared about the characters as fellow human beings whose fates mattered to me.

One of the women in the group mentioned during the discussion that Dostoyevsky also asks Big Questions, perhaps most notably (but certainly not exclusively) in Crime and Punishment all within the framework of a story peopled by characters who are vividly alive. You care about them, you hate them, they repel you, whatever – but you respond to them emotionally as a reader. So here is where I defend myself against my own charge two paragraphs back: story matters. If you are writing a novel, story matters. Characters matter. These things matter because I think that we as readers are most open to examining the human condition when we feel our connectedness, our underlying unity, with the character experiencing the action. Through the portal of connection and caring we find our way into the story and are open to what the story has to teach us. This is not the same thing as saying we need to read about characters who are just like us, not at all – shoot, Watership Down is about rabbits, but damn if you’re not rooting for those little bunnies with all your heart by the end of the book. And it’s because somehow – and here is the magical, the ephemeral thing – the author has shined a light on their essential humanity (yes, the humanity of the bunnies too) and through that light our own humanity as well. If I cannot get inside a story the characters will always be Others to me, out there in that book, I will always be aware of their identities as constructs, and I won’t see what is happening to them in the full light of their – and thus my, our – humanity.

Fiction can be edifying, can shine a light on our own interior world or a spotlight on the world around us – think about books as divergent as Catcher in the Rye and A Half of a Yellow Sun – while still being a marvelous story full of people about whom the reader can care, deeply. It is not a zero-sum game by any means, edifying or entertaining – indeed if you are an author you had better not be approaching it as a zero-sum game.

Story has to matter, otherwise just write a philosophical essay and be done with it. There has to be a reason why we choose story; why we as humans have always chosen story as the way to grasp and examine the world and to tell our essential truths. Of course story matters, and not just the ideas contained within it.

Story is everything.

Reading Wallace

My poetic education has been spotty. As a reader, but above all as an American poet writing as part of a tradition of American poets, I have some appalling gaps. One of the poets of whom I am far too ignorant is Wallace Stevens. I am familiar with his most familiar poems, the ones that might have been anthologized or taught in a survey course, but the vast body of his work is unfamiliar to me. Unforgivable, really, for an American poet, and so my project for this year is to read a Wallace Stevens poem each day. I’m currently making my way through Wallace Stevens Selected Poems – I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t just start with Collected Poems and be done with it, because the selected poems will not get me to the end of the year, other than that I had the Selected Poems on my shelf already and international Amazon orders are reliably slow to arrive.

By reading a poem a day, rather than trying to swallow the book whole, I find I’m able to reflect a little about each poem – I’m even keeping a journal of sorts. I hope this slow emersion in his work will allow me to really get to know it rather than just be able to say I have read it. And I’ve noticed in the past week or so that after finishing my poem for the day I want to read more. One poem is not enough. But rather than jumping ahead, gulping down the poems and perhaps losing this reflective approach to them, I move backwards to re-reading.

Today’s poem, “Farewell to Florida,” was the first taken from Stevens’ second collection, Ideas of Order. This is from my reading notes:

The brief chronology included in Selected Poems notes that from 1925 to 1933 Stevens “virtually stopped writing poetry.” I’m curious if there will be some sort of recognizable shift, a change in his voice and style.

Curious because I am definitely recognizing things now. His cadence. The use of rhyme. Repetition. And the colors. The Harmonium poems, at any rate, are bursting with colors: “rosy chocolate” “gilt umbrellas” “Paradisial green” “swimming green” “brilliant iris” “glistening blue.” And those are all just from section I of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”

The colors are there in this poem, the first included from Ideas of Order, and the use of rhyme. Clever internal rhyme. And the curling back of repetition, the almost-repetitions, the repetitions-with-a-twist. The assertive I voice in section III – “I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools/Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness/Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms” – feels new. Stevens didn’t avoid the I voice entirely in the Harmonium poems, but it appeared rarely (at least in the ones in Selected Poems). It feels like possibly a new experiment on Stevens’ part. I shall have to read more of the Ideas of Order poems to see if it appears again.

Sometimes I start my day with the poem and sometimes it is the last thing before going to bed, but it’s becoming my practice. Some people meditate, some people jog, I read Wallace Stevens. There are worse habits to have.

Still crazy after all these years

Sitting at the Grosse Schanze, this view that I never tire of. To the right the green wooded hill of the Gurten, in front of me in the foreground the spire of the Heiliggeistkirche and to the left the dome of the Bundeshaus, the tiled rooftops of the city below me, the window boxes of geraniums that are the hallmark of Bern and the backdrop to it all the snowcapped wall of the Alps, the Jungfrau, Mönch, the black diamond of the Eiger Nordwand. Even the Bernese come up here on a blue sky day, lean against the railing and stare out at that view. The hippest trying-to-be-jaded twenty-something will stop in spite of himself, watch a cloud forming around the peaks. I love this view, I’m crazy for this view, I can’t get over this view. This view makes up for Swiss-German, for my outsider status, for being a foreigner, for Swiss reserve, for being away from home and living my life between two languages, two countries, two cultures, two homes. This view helps my heart decide.

What I learned in Wellfleet

Wellfleet. I’m still trying to write about Wellfleet. About Wellfleet the town. About working with Marge Piercy. About the eleven other wonderful poets, amazing women all, who travelled the week with me. About what I learned; what I learned about poetry and what I learned about my life. 

It’s easier to write about the poetry, about the workshop experience. It was a juried workshop: we had to apply with an initial package of five poems (perhaps you remember my poem choosing angst?); the twelve of us who were ultimately selected then had to provide an additional ten poems prior to the workshop. We met for three hours each morning with each day devoted to a particular aspect of the craft: imagery, oral effects, titles, line length/line breaks, etc. In the afternoons we had assignments based on that morning’s work and we then workshopped these poems the following day. Each one of us had an individual conference with Marge, in the gazebo in her garden, during which she went over our fifteen poems in great detail and provided more general feedback. We capped off the week with a public reading in Wellfleet; Marge closed the reading with some new poems. There was a lot of work, but not too much, and Marge deliberately balanced the workload with us having an opportunity to explore and enjoy Wellfleet. (And may I say: I will be back with family in tow. Yes, you impressed me that much, Wellfleet.) It was a fantastic experience.

My instinct that I am good at this, that if I stick at this I will have some modest success, was confirmed by Marge, who gave me some very positive feedback. (She also suggested that I might want to consider abandoning altogether any further attempts at the villanelle; she’s nothing if not honest.) I have a good eye for the right detail and I’m generally good at titles but I could play with sound a lot more than I do. My use of the line break is generally on target, but when I fail, I fail spectacularly. I have a good instinct for revision. My best work speaks to my emotional truth; my weakest poems are those that I write because I think I should write about a certain thing or in a certain way. Much to my surprise, I have a pretty good reading presence. All in all, Marge’s message to me was: stick with this and you will be widely published. It was so rewarding to have my instincts confirmed. I do so much of my work and my attempts at growth and learning alone here in expat isolation; it is good to have those reminders that this is not a fool’s errand. 

Write. Just keep writing.

Clinging to life

A few of the apple branches on the wood pile are starting to blossom. They do not yet know that they are dead.

Breathe

I can always breathe in Arosa. After the car ride during which The Boychen refused to sleep even though we purposely left at his nap-time, after the last 40 minutes when Small Boy’s admirable patience finally deserted him and he began asking “How much longer?” every five minutes and then arguing with us over the reply, after the mad dash to the sport store for helmets and sleds five minutes before closing, after the unpacking, I can breathe. A person can breathe up there, can breathe in big lungfuls of snow and sky, can breathe in this:

Yes, a person can breathe up there.

What’s the difference between a bowl and a kidney dish?

I once wrote a story in which one of my main characters, a 13-year-old girl, wakes in her hospital room after surgery to discover that she has broken her femur so violently in so many places that metal plates and screws have been inserted into the bone to help it knit together. On hearing this news, she begins to gag – she is about to throw up. My second main character, a 28-year-old doctor with a backstory, searches around for “a bowl” for her to throw up in. (He does not find one, and cups his hands for her to throw up into; the gesture is meant to reveal his character.)

I’m currently reading Water for Elephants, and I read this line last night: “I turn as vomit explodes from my mouth. Someone is there with a kidney dish, but I overshoot…” Do you see how precise that is – kidney dish? The reader instantly pictures the curved stainless steel dish used in a hospital. The reader has a solid image in her head. A bowl? What is that? Tupperware? Glass? Something from the cafeteria? That – that precision, that detail and care, that research to get it right, that sharpening of every word – that is the difference between stories that stay inside the computer and stories that make their way in the world.

What’s the difference between a bowl and a kidney dish? All the difference in the world.