anapoetics

"a tiny handful of her closest friends"

Portrait of a closeted writer:

The cost of caring about something you know you will most likely fail at is that you will look a little ridiculous in the eyes of the people you love. So you dissemble.  You tell people at a dinner party that you’re a teacher, a lawyer ....

"reassembling an outcome"

From a post by Edwin Torres on the Harriet blog:

When does the poem come to you in the midst of your event? At what moment do you let it steal or scrape off the words you were using for your personal moment to suddenly appear in your artistic moment?

"fraught with poetry"

From "Heaven is Not Verbose: A Notebook" by Vera Pavlova in the April 2012 issue of Poetry.

Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened.

The comparison to adultery doesn't resonate, but I do like the idea of committing poetry on the sly, in between the rest of life, and having it be that real. 

"the presence of the total self"

An interviewer asked poet Philip Levine "whether, while writing, he had ever entered flow, a state of mind in which time seems to stop."  His response:

I don't care for your phrase "the flow" because of certain implications that aren't true for me. I use the term "fire," as horse racing maniacs use it (I was once one): a horse is said to fire when suddenly it finds all the speed it's capable of.  ....  I don't remember ever "entering the flow"; I remember "firing."

....

When I'm getting nothing I accept getting nothing because I know that getting nothing is what you do when you're not getting something; it is an essential part of the process. Or so I believe.

I believe the state which we call inspiration does not depend on any outside force, the muse, etc. We may feel the power of another force, but I believe the power we're feeling is the power of the presence of the total self. We feel like someone else because we are so rarely totally ourselves.

Levine was just named U.S. poet laureate, replacing W.S. Merwin.

"digging in the loose soil of a new story"

This week's New Yorker has an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri: "Trading Stories: Notes from a Literary Apprenticeship."

"the heat of the bullet may have sterilized the embedded fragments"

The New York Times had an amazing article Saturday on the Arizona shooting and the trauma doctors who helped the victims.  The article slowed down what must have been a frantic series of events. Or perhaps doctors do slow tasks down in concentration.  One of these victims died, the other lived, and it was all decided by where the bullets landed:

"I had her heart in my hand.  We filled it with blood.  It still didn't want to beat.  So, it was over.  We're finished."  ....

He followed the possible trajectories .... He ran his fingers down her intestines, making sure there were no holes ....  "I have held every piece of her organs in my own hands," he said.  "Her heart was in my hand, her spleen was is in my hand. Her liver was in my hand. There is no better scan than that."

[slightly paraphrased]

Intimacy like this has to be non-judgmental.  These doctors must have moments of great clarity in their work.  The article brought tears not just for the victims and for the event, and for the country, but for the window into the peace of what a doctor sometimes does, mastery without judgment. 

Or maybe I'm flat-out wrong and there's nothing peaceful about it -- emergency surgery in a trauma center with no time for thought, only decision.

"some periodic hunger"

In my library I have a copy of On Louise Glück: Change What You See, a collection of essays edited by Joanne Feit Diehl (U. Mich. Press 2005) (part of the "Under Discussion" series).  The collection includes an interview with the poet:

[M]y life varies most dramatically around the issue of writing. And I write, the last decade or so, in an increasingly bizarre way, either in a sustained furious blitz or not at all.  These rhythms are completely independent of the issues around earning a living:  they have nothing to do with available time or available solitude.  When I'm writing, I write anywhere: hotel rooms, airplanes, exercise classes, elevators, grocery stores, in the blank pages of class texts.  I can also, ample evidence proves, not write anywhere: the bucolic serene, the pure uninterrupted privacy of the empty room do not reliably help me.  They tend, in fact, to do the reverse: any attempt to make a ceremony of the fact of writing, to prepare for it, to create, in the house, that shrine at which the work is done—such attempts have, generally, completely silenced me. They are, for me, far more taxing, far more frightening, than the demands and pressures of the classroom, the obligations and structure of daily life.

This fact seems to me quite liberating: in the one area most crucial to me, the area of writing, I need not make my life perfect—to do so only makes the art less likely.  Liberating and an immense relief: I am simply in the hands of something, some periodic hunger.

"tolerance for uncertainty"

From a Sonya Chung essay on teaching writing:

The thing that I feel I cannot exactly teach, but can only hope to model and emphasize to student writers, is this tolerance for uncertainty; for a life that is indeed characterized by uncertainty. As when you learn to drive a stick shift, there is a kind of “friction zone,” where your inner imperative to write and your tolerance for uncertainty cross each other, and the energy balance of that intersection either sets you off into motion, or you stall. 

As a teacher, ... I try to give student writers enough “gas” to help them manage and master the friction zone, so that they come to know that feeling of ignition, of takeoff, both bumpy and smooth, and develop a liking for it, an abiding passion, even an addiction.  

In my other life I have a professional blog that I have been writing for almost seven years.  I know that feeling of addiction. It is what has kept me posting on a regular basis for all that time.  But what prompts an inner imperative to ripen into an addiction?