YOU ARE HEREBY REQUESTED TO SIGN UP FOR OPENING NIGHT SPRING 2011!!
"JUVENILIA 2: How it All Started"
BRING IN THE NEW YEAR RIGHT: words, voices, happy faces, entertainment, and YOURSELF in the Lime-Light, making everyone smile! Come on! Share with us how it all started! Why did YOU start writing, studying, reading, researching!?
THE DEAL: There are TWO options:
1) Way back when (longer for some of us than for others!), what did you read that made you want to write, research and/or study literature? What was that FIRST INSPIRATION, that initial inhalation that demanded you create and think, that turned your breath into the fire of creation, and landed you in this darn program? WE WANT TO KNOW!, and we want you to share it with others! This is your chance to present the text that first inspired you to step foot on the crazy and challenging path of being a writer, a scholar, a craaaazy grad student.
2) When you first started reading, writing, devouring, who did you want to write like, be like, think like? What text, what author, became your FIRST INFLUENCE, your initial mentor of style, your earliest guide in the subtleties of language? WE WANT TO KNOW!, and we want you to come and proudly present it for all to hear! Don't miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity to pay homage to your first literary influence while entertaining the graduate masses.
AND DON'T LIMIT YOURSELF! Was it Fraggle Rock? Green Eggs and Ham? Shakespeare? Lyrics to an old rock song that are engraved in your heart? What? Have FUN with this, be HONEST, REVEAL something!
I am immediately -- etymologically, without any mediation, any intervening interface -- pained, worn out, excluded in advance of the event. I haven't been to a poetics reading in years because they've all ended up being these "craaaazy grad student" things, and although no one would question that I'm a crazy grad student, my variety of crazy isn't one that makes me enjoy high-strung energetic communal whatsit. I mean, one of my strongest impulses in response to this note is to correct the phrasing to "Like whom did you want to write, be, think," and it's only after that that I say, I, uh, didn't really idolize anyone. I read a lot of people and liked them, but the sense has always been that I was taking in material I could use, not that I was going to emulate anyone in particular. And -- I truly, unironically, unproblematizedly, unreservedly like poetry readings that are just. . . poetry readings. Rows of chairs and wine in little plastic cups and 20-25 minutes of a person reading his or her poems. I'm correspondingly (conversely? correlatively? pick your vaguely geometric adverb) ugly-duckling out-of-place at things like this. I don't want to yell and cheer. I don't want to make people yell or cheer. I want to listen to some poems and maybe talk about them afterward over finger food. That's really where I am.
Wherever the roots of my being a poet are, their first quiet digging into the wet earth isn't a story that would ever want applause. They might be in O'Hara's "Why I Am Not A Painter," the first poem I ever really got into my head -- and a very urbane, understated, chatty-but-not-loud poem it is. My parents got me a copy of From the Other Side of the Century one Christmas, and I'll confess that at thirteen or whatever I was, I was pretty nonplussed by the vast majority of the poems in it, but O'Hara, and that particular piece of O'Hara's, lit something up in me that made me want to keep rereading it. One of many obscured but very influential ghosts in my closet, Frank O'Hara. Of course, for my parents to have bought me that tome, I must already have shown some interest in poetry, but I truly couldn't tell you how I did that. I read a lot as a kid, but clear through high school, I remember most of it being sci-fi and fantasy novels. Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys before that. I did read a heap of cummings at some point, but I'm pretty sure that was after getting the Messerli anthology.
So we could go farther back, to my love of puns from a very early age, or to the first poem (using the term, of course, very loosely) I remember writing, at about age three --
There once was a mouse
Who lived in a house
And never wore a blouse
We did have trouble keeping me in clothes at that age, too. I used to get my parents in mild trouble with base protocol by running out of the house naked, or so I'm told. I don't remember dodging clothes, but I do remember that poem. One of my earliest experiences with polysemic indeterminacy: I asked my mother how to spell "wore" and she freaked out because she thought I meant "war." The discomfort I incited there is probably a main reason I stopped after three lines.
But who didn't do those things as a kid? If I'm to point to puns and rhymes as the nascent moment of my career in poetry, I'd have to have a reason why every kid who plays those same games with words and sound doesn't end up a poet. A frighteningly lonely childhood probably contributed, no less affecting for my ignorance when I was living it of how frightening it should have been, because although I was very articulate from a terribly early age, I didn't have a friend until I was six years old. I didn't have two at the same time until I was about eleven or twelve -- sixth grade, anyway. I spent hours and hours and hours rearranging my collections of rocks and shells and costume jewelry and beat-up marbles and My Little Ponies, not really playing with them so much as examining them and trying out their possible relations to one another. You could say, this is twentieth/twenty-first collage thinking. You could also say it's the kind of things developmentally disabled kids do, though. Those habits of solitude may have been an alembic where verbal acuity boiled and thickened down into bright and tart and delirium-inducing poesis. Maybe. Not like I know. I wasn't old enough or at least wasn't aware enough to keep track of what my bizarre childhood habits were doing to my brain.
These are not things I especially feel like spinning out at a stomping-clapping-hollering-aggressive grad student poetry party. I'll tell the stories (clearly!), but that's not the scene for me.
Nor is it a scene to talk about my first mentor, Kevin Prufer, with whom I can credit my entry into this whole mess of a life. Kevin is and has, as far as I know, always been a mover and shaker, publishing and publishing in major journals, thoroughly likable and even more thoroughly chimerical. He is a consummate player at pobiz, and so, not a welcome name at Buffalo poetics -- but when I took his workshop, totally as a lark, really (I was gone weekends to debate tournaments and looking for classes that didn't meet Fridays so I wouldn't miss tons), he just sort of acted like I was already a writer. Took me seriously from go, without any sense that this was even an unusual thing to do. I'm a much more irascible person and poet than Kevin, but professionally, that's where I came from, and I still see myself as a professional type of poet. A professional type, and then again, a mad, oracular type -- but not a social type. I've never wanted to sit around bullshitting with writers in bars; I didn't even encounter that scene until I'd already made a totally different way of being a poet for myself, out of my own tendencies and what I learned from Kevin, and when I got to the writers-in-bars thing, it seemed like just so much posing. Not that what Kevin does, and what I do by turns, isn't posing, but the AWP gladhanding is a kind of posing that, for me at least, runs its course and then you go home and you're yourself again. The pontificating in bars seems to me to bleed through the rest of a person's life. I can be a pretty insufferable know-it-all, too, but I just do it differently, and always have. So you might site my roots there, since that could be taken as a point where my being as a poet acquired some of its habits, but those very habits equip me atrociously to tell my story at one of these scenes.
It might be Kevin loaning me Lucie Brock-Broido's first book, A Hunger, and the recognition (much weirder in hindsight) that this person out there in the world wrote the way I was teaching myself to write. It might be reading and rereading and re-rereading Four Quartets I don't know how many times in high school and as an undergrad, and the inexplicable way that text still affects me. All the bombs, all the excruciatingly careful, paced philosophy, all the dung and death -- and what I come away with, every time, every time, is this beautiful, arresting pathos, this lambent pink cloud (and boy howdy am I not a pink-cloud person) that fills my chest and expands (me) outward. It might be the way that's the only thing I know of at all with which I associate the color pink that I like, and the way it manages to be so soaked with affect for me without being anything less than sharply, gravely, brilliantly serious at the same time. Lucie Brock-Broido and gravely beautiful experiences reading Eliot -- are also not the material for a scene like Juvenilia 2. The very diffusion of my sense of my origins precludes any performative value, even if any of the pieces fit the scene individually. And I don't especially care to tell my stories as my stories. In an arena like this, I'm talking about myself, so they're germane as they are, but if I'm talking to poets, I want to talk about poetry. With or without me. I don't want applause or grins, either; I want complex, extended conversations about these things. I'll have wine, but, honestly, not more than a couple glasses. And most the time I'd prefer tea. I am an old, old maid in my soul, and as far as being a poet goes, I'm even happy that way.
The past week or two, I've thought quite a lot about what I wish I had in a poetry community but don't. A friend asked me for whom I'm writing, along these lines, and I answered, for poetry. For the dead. If you want to be morbid (and, let's face it, I do love being morbid). If you'd rather not, you could say I'm writing for the canon, in its expanded and indistinctly-bounded incarnations, for literature as a presence with which we interact. After that huge, squishy encomium for Eliot: I'm writing for the tradition. Strange audience, my friend said, and it is, but I'm a strange person, so this shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone who knows me. The secret behind all this is that if we know enough and have a close enough psychic approach to the dead, to what they've done and how they might have done it and what it means to us and everyone between and everyone behind and everyone yet to come, if we have that kind of heightened sensitivity to poetry -- not to the poets, but to poetry -- we can almost sneak in and speak from the position of our dead. What I want that I don't seem to be able to find anywhere are living people who do poetry this way and who want to read my work, poems and essays both, and to respond from that usurped place. People who feel their arms linked through all our forebears'. Who have both feet in the grave.
I'm not sure that fantastic levels of isolation during one's formative years turn a kid into a poet, but I suspect that mine turned me into this particular kind of poet. And here I am stuck around all these alive people! It's almost as bad as being a ghost.
To dissipate such that one becomes a wrinkle in the world words pass through.
Refracting darkness into its waves.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment