With a Coming Appetite
"strictly speaking, writing is always only writing, while life is . . . well, something else” (Thomas R. Edwards)
The kind of writing that we call literature was, and is, almost never asked for. There’s no call for it, as my grandmother would say. Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice—then it was asked for. Robert Frost wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—then it seemed as if it had always existed. Writing that’s asked for, by and large, is writing nobody wants to read (or write, despite Samuel Johnson’s saying “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”).
But why did Austen write her novels and Frost his poems? Nobody sponsored them. Nobody sent them an advance.
Graphomaniacs aside, does anyone need to write? I think the answer is no. But if someone wants to write, what do they need in order to? Two things only, Frost came close to saying: “the courage of insufficient knowledge” and “the wonder of unexpected supply.” The rest is only writing.
Two things poetry has going for it also go against it: it’s unpopular and it’s unnecessary. And yet it persists, right along with food, water, and shelter. Hickery dickery dock. Asked to define poetry in a word, five of the next ten strangers might say “rhyme.”
For a thing without value in exchange, poetry has remarkable staying power. But what is a poem? No more than 4,000 people anywhere at any time, if that, have ever agreed. Poems haven’t had to rhyme for 2,000 years, and yet many people go on feeling cheated by poems that don’t. Another thing poems don’t have to do is address great occasions, solemn moments, or deep feelings. But they had better do so.
Frost, when asked about the meaning of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” gave different answers to different audiences. “There are two ways of holding people,” he wrote. “Hold them, and hold them off.” It’s not for nothing that poets have been described as “irritable” since Roman times.
Feelings aren’t of much use in writing; words are. I’m 48 [now 66], and I’ve been writing poetry since about ninth grade. I’ve lived in Omaha and taught at College of Saint Mary for almost two years now. As it happens, my great-great grandfather, Jesse Lowe, was one of the founders, the reported namer, and, in 1857, the first mayor, of Omaha. I’ve known these things for thirty years, but have never written a poem out of knowing them.
I have written a poem from seeing a colleague smoke a cigarette at a party one night. In six years, I’d never seen him smoke, and I said so. “I don’t, really,” he said. “My wife and I smoke one cigarette each, in bed, before we go to sleep.” Out of that insignificant exchange I got the opening for “Accumulations.”
One cigarette before bed
a couple has learned to smoke,
one each, in bed, before they sleep
and dream dreams that sunder them, oh,
thousands of miles, thousands of times.
I wrote the rest that night in one go, and altered it very little before it became my first “important” publication in 1990.
It takes an abundance of hunger
to be able to do that, it must,
when the smoking lamps go out
without the aid of war.
You have read the book that closes
on bitter ash just once too often,
because it hasn’t made sense again
and again. Ash is supposed to be
the cleanest substance known to us,
and how can what is clean be bitter?
There was that experiment
the biology class did in high school:
the hands, the more you wash them,
the more interesting the culture
their lines produce in the petri dish.
And then at home, in some happy hour,
some patriarch, avidly mixing, discovered
that bitters makes the old-fashioned better.
For over a year now, the days have passed
without giving rise to that hour,
sugarless days, light evenings, dry nights.
Evidence mounted, favoring the bent of addicts,
like ice in the kitchen freezer,
until the arm that started the process
couldn’t lift away the made ice,
to make more. Everything is cubed.
The old lead green-eyed cat
that used to stop my grandmother’s door
sits on the windowsill stopping dust,
and stares at fulfillment
between what’s-his-name and the ceiling.
I am trying to believe in all
the test results I can, but a run
of accumulating negatives must end
in disaster, like those referenda
whose phrasing makes you think
more than twice before you say, I do.
Clean bills of health are getting
harder and harder not just to come by,
but to pay, and believe in.
Since something is wrong with us,
what’s another accident, or a couple packs
of cigarettes, while we wait
in the meantime for the next results.
After evading the question of what any particular poem of theirs means, poets are likely to be asked, “Where do you get your ideas for poems?” Some answer that poems begin with a thought (“I don’t have room for that”); some, with an image (“a troubled sky”); some, with a word (“plum”); some, with a sentence (“Names run like a shiver through me”). Frost said that his poems began with “animus,” a Latin word that can be translated as “mind” or “soul,” or, in courts of law, “intent.” “Irritation” may also serve. In one essay, Frost describes a poem’s coming to him as something to say in passing comes to us when we see a person we know walking toward us.
I’m not trying to oversimplify or quotidianize poetry (or any other kind of writing). Nor am I saying that any response we make to an exigency constitutes a poem. I’m saying that any response we give may be “cared into song,” as James Stephens wrote in “Strict Care, Strict Joy,” and become a poem. The onset of spring might occasion a response that you hadn’t thought you had in you, and so bring a new sentence into the language. Each of us has heard something said recently, or misread something, that struck us as unusual. I heard “long story short” abbreviated yesterday into “long short,” and I wrote it down in a pocket notebook. It might be the makings of something, and not at all necessarily a poem.
Two poems I had a good time writing came out of plain questions. “Before Titles,” in my first book, Tactile Values, started when a friend asked me, “What do you know about stories?” I said some things, and she said some things, and then we parted, and then I carried on the conversation in writing. The poem below, in my new book, A Bedroom Occupation, is a truncated essay on the art of poetry, an ars poetica. It started when I was asked by another friend, who doesn’t like poetry, “Where do poems come from?” The Roman poet Horace wrote perhaps the prime ars poetica, and many poets have followed suit.
Mine takes what theologians call the “via negativa”: saying what something is by saying what it isn’t. But saying what something isn’t presences that negated thing. Some linguists have used “There’s not an elephant in the room” as an example of that kind of evocation or invocation or provocation.
XX So you would know where poems come from, Susan? I can’t answer that. But if you ask the source of mine, I can. Not confusion, first of all, not beauty of the first degree, not emotion recollected in tranquility; not other poems and their poets; not animus against another coming toward me, howsoever the travel is taken; not by way of vision, nor by a vision; not by hope or wish, not in longing; neither through an image that encloses some complex in an instant, nor through vortices; not out of a spout conjoining sea and sky, nor in a fable handed down by a tractatrice who washed and set the hair of peripatetic Greece and marching Rome, that frantic seat, where Janus, looking before and after, could keep no peace; nor by strength of fields, snatches of song or scent, last breath, ash; not out of envelopes that hold affairs in grief; nor from joy at relief or possible despair; still less from the red-winged blackbirds’ dart of scarlet, orange; from saying saxifrage and persiflage, from cumquat leaves and blueberry, their waxen surface, gaugeless veins, that fruit bitter, this sweet, stem-end and blossom-end, plum-seam and peach-fold.
A healthy number of the words in that poem I took from other poems. Twenty words in the last four lines come from three sources: a neighbor’s saying the name of a plant in her hallway, a job at a blueberry farm, and a job at a shop called Fruit Country. When they recurred, I felt pleasure—not from the words themselves so much as from their “unexpected supply.”
The act of writing itself orders or invites or brings on that supply. We’re all supposed to have more of it than we think. Steven Pinker and David Crystal predict that we will grossly underestimate how many words we know. According to Pinker, of the roughly 500,000 words in English, the average American high school graduate knows 45,000. Knows, not uses. But this “most sophisticated” scientific estimate isn’t the point, which is that each of us has a greater supply of words than we think—and the “grammar-power” to use them.
More than likely, you already know that in writing you use words you didn’t know you knew, words you rarely if ever speak. You may read these words as marks of showing off. Many college students I’ve known do that. Big words, they think, are just another thing that alienates writing from them. Writing presses ideas, images, and relations out of us that, most of the time, to quote Hamlet, “fust in us unused.” The yield of this “unexpected supply,” or of this “insufficient knowledge”—how come I know that word? I couldn’t say what it means—may be small at first, and seem unusual. But we don’t need to get another education before we can start writing. Nor do we need another mind to write poems with, or another language to write essays in. The education, mind, and language we have are already perfectly inadequate.
No, the real problem in writing anything, really, is that language knows and uses us more immediately and thoroughly than we know and use it. Language will have us saying things we’ve heard said or read written in the blink of eye, to coin a phrase. Every writer faces the problem of pre-owned or used language at every sitting. But the way to come to terms with that problem isn’t by coining phrases and rejecting every suggestion that language gives us. Language never sleeps. It is older, quicker, and more durable than we are. I spent fifteen minutes on the sentence that begins this paragraph—all in a vaguely satisfying but almost vain effort to keep the available formulas from writing for me. This is the seventh draft of this essay. But for all that, the likelihood is very small that any of the sentences I’ve written here, especially the ones with quotations in them, have been written before. The same goes for most of the sentences we spoke yesterday. We’re always making fresh sentences, and we always have the tired ones to work with.
None of us is ever without language—contrary to the formulas we let say we are at times of grief, surprise, or joy. “In the beginning was the Word,” according to the Gospel of John. And so in the middle, and so in the end—for all of us. Genius has no monopoly on meaningful expression. The long-suffering writer, too, hasn’t done even half of the writing the world reads. Writing is also ordinary. I was amazed at how much good writing British and American periodicals printed—the texts of thousands of advertisements included—from 1890 to 1900 alone. And I just read a tiny sample of it. Of that, I’d say 80 percent of its almost unknown and mostly unsung authors have been that way for 100 years.
It can make you not want to write again, and it can make you want to write. “You’ll eat with a coming appetite,” our grandmother used to tell us, when we said we weren’t hungry. I think we write with a coming appetite. We’re all hungry.
XXIX Amy, I got your moving letter of a month ago, while I was stationary. What’s opposite of alone? Surrounded? Smothered? Tonight, let me be your opposite, quieter with each hour, softer, darker: just so. I have the city to myself, and my own worst enemy. Between us land lies, not water; still, like fish in poetry and proverb, I’m soundless too (except here), and fit for anything we might want to do. But it’s your turn now to read, and I write no children’s book. Do some of the things you paint make sense (I don’t mean common)—to you? Some I write make sense to me, or the sounds of it. Others don’t, I’m afraid to say: those make me against my will avouch: “I’ll quit, take up what can’t fail.” Nothing there. So here I am again, standing at my station. Yours too, with its “endless interruption and distraction”—as if a body could maintain itself, or a mind expatiate, or a soul monadize, in any other order. Life isn’t worth the taking, Emerson said, to do tricks in. But what I wanted to say was— I long to see you, your belongings and your empty bowl. Maybe I have things to put in it, mine as yours: “dreams, inhibitions, fears, fantasies, mistakes, neuroses.” Ad omnium. The listing, the sorting, never ceases; it’s the sorting out, the being sorted out, that hurts. And helps, in time. I like the place of your responsibilities, your “green hills and deep gardens”—their in-less, on-less, over-less, near-less-ness—under your bed’s lickerish shade. Heartland, my Iowa, my Amy, I come to Denver in twelve days. I’ll hold your palette while you paint. I’ll affect and interrupt you, model hand, foot, shoulder, face. I’ll put coffee in your cup and dinner on your plate. I have three days. Answer me, s’il te plait.