KCRW Bookworm, Mary Ruefle on Madness, Rack, and Honey
Besides my emphatic love for her essays in this book, the wonderfully titled Madness, Rack, and Honey, I can't seem to let go of the exchange she and host Michael Silverblatt have after he asks her:
"Tell me, are poets different from other people?" (23:05 approx)
Ruefle's initial hesitance to say "yes they are," has haunted me, as the question itself has haunted her. My suspicion is that she's responding in part to poetry's reputation as something inaccessible to the average reader, and to say outright that poets are different is to commit to the cartoon perception of poetry in modern life: it's lofty, it's difficult, it's hyperbolic and stuffy and you simply cannot read it without a monocle, book propped just so on your escritoire, right hand grasping with pinky extended a snifter of brandy and left hand stroking your curled mustache.
If, with a Whitman-esque exuberance, she were to say, "Yes! Yes, we are different. We experience the world in a fundamentally different way," she has just raised the hackles of anyone who doesn't consider themselves to have this special, diamond-encrusted poetic inclination.
She doesn't want to insult or exclude anyone from this wonderful world of poetry, and saying that those who write it are different from those who may read it does just that--whether necessarily or not, we'll hopefully flesh out at least a little as this post goes on. And, perhaps an even greater motivation than her desire not to exclude anyone else, she doesn't want to exclude herself from them. Loneliness is a big thing in Ruefle's writing, and probably one of those fundamental experiences that do seperate the poetic writer from the rest-- because of the degree to which we understand and feel that loneliness, whether we want to admit it or not.
I'm interested, of course, because my own experience with poets and poetic writers has taught me that we are indeed a different sort of person, and the difference is rooted in just that: the manner and degree to which we experience life. A friend and poet once characterized it as having so many "feelers" in the world. I always envision these tiny, thread-like synapses extending from our bodies outward in all directions, reaching and reaching and reaching, receiving, receiving, receiving. Interpreting, interpreting, interpreting.
It's being aware that I am in a small room in an apartment building, just outside of St. Louis, surrounded by Missouri rivers and fields and hills and forests that extend and connect to eight other states, branching out across the Midwest, pulsing outward to the coasts, across oceans, circumnavigating the globe, simultaneously reaching up, up, up through the atmosphere, into the dark, foreboding vacuum that extends unfathomably and terribly far.
On the best of days, it feels vast and infinite and wonderful. One can extend as far as one's feelers, mysteriously rooted in the strange faculty we like to call "imagination," care to, almost weightlessly inspired by how unlikely it all is, and what good fortune that we may bear witness to it.
On the worst of days, it feels vast and infinite and terrifying. One feels shrunken and shriveled, condensed and crushed under the weight of all that's bearing down, the feelers hemorrhaging, sending such overwhelming signals that the only interpretation we can conceive is pain.
And yes--Ruefle is right about one very important thing in that first answer. Poets do have a particular facility with language. That's part of the understanding of loneliness I mentioned earlier, since how do we humans understand anything without somehow being able to articulate it. And the better we articulate things, especially the immense joy and beauty and pain and sadness of existence, the higher the degree of our understanding of them as well.
But this does make you different. It makes you weird. It makes you lonely. You only feel at home when you have the good fortune of stumbling across someone or something that is also able to articulate what you know deep in your bones about the world and life and meaning--someone or something speaking your language. A dear friend telling you about his experience of the world over coffee. A baby bird splayed out on the concrete, neck twisted, chest rising and falling with such horrible, panicked rapidity. The first sprouts in the starter box of your garden, somehow surviving the early-spring cold snaps.
It cuts you off from a culture that wants so badly to keep you contained in little boxes, to keep the feelers contained, because somehow the inevitable pain that comes with this kind of understanding has been demonized as something wholly unnecessary-- frivolous even. Self-indulgent.
But it also makes you beautiful. It makes you vital. It teaches you to love so much and so deeply. And it's what helps or even drives you to write. Because you know that there's all of this out there, and you can see the understanding of it getting lost somehow. And you feel yourself getting lost, too. You've got to go find it again, like Ruefle does in her poems. So many have lost it and found it, lost it and found it, then handed it to you, their wonderful words on the page forming the centralized nervous system to which the feelers are attached. They did the initial work for you; now you must do it for them, for yourself, and for everyone who is also a part of this swirl of life, but maybe whose feelers have been cut off by an alcoholic father, an incestuous uncle, an absent mother, a school who decided they had a disability, a government that told them they are not citizens--a world that shoved them into a box, and will keep transplanting them from box to box until they bury that last box in the ground.
It gives you a responsibility, a legacy to carry on--you must act as translator between worlds and languages. Ruefle is one of many, and you can tell in her heart of hearts she takes her task the right kind of seriously.
But does this task, almost undoubtedly self-appointed after years of cultivating and caring for those feelers, nurturing them and tending the wounds that will always come--does it separate the poet from the populace in a negative, you-shouldn't-admit-to-it way? I don't think so. I think the poet-as-translator holds true--we need them to help us make sense of the depth and complexity of experience, because of the way they receive, perceive, and then tell us about that experience. Does it make them "better" than everyone else?
I think, ultimately, that's a pointless question. The answer will always be subjective, and to answer it "yes" or "no" is to buy a little box and shove the poet into it.
All too often, we equate different as being "special" and therefore "better," when in fact, different as "distinct from" has no inherent judgement of value carried with it. It sounds hokey, but we would all do well to celebrate our differences, Ã la Walt Whitman and all his undoubted feelers, extending far and wide throughout the cosmos.
Carrying on,
CQ
Showing posts with label books and reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books and reading. Show all posts
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Monday, February 11, 2013
Right Train / Right Time
From NPR's Picture Show Blog: 100 Words: In A Russian Arctic City.
At any point in time, we are at a confluence of sorts. That is to say, at every moment in our lives, we are taking in and processing multiple stimuli, which sounds awfully clinical, but there is a great deal of humanity at work as well. We hear the rush of the train in the distance. We feel the wind kick up dirt around our ankles on the platform. We watch a child, wide-eyed, watching the world around her then out of wonder and fear reach up for her mother's hand. We feel the softness of our clothes against our skin, but are barely, if at all, conscious of them until something's out of place. We see the numbers and hands on the clock face and it gives us a sense of order. We catch ourselves, and wonder why we're watching/thinking what we are.
The human part is what we do with it all--what we make of it. What does it all mean, man? On some level, we process no differently than a cat on the windowsill, watching the birds outside, feeling hungry. But the cat isn't going to make conjectures about the emotional state of said birds. He isn't going to wonder why he's in that particular window, watching those particular birds.
In our reading life, too, are we always at a nexus. What we've read before informs what we're reading now, and if we're reading multiple books at the same time, it's no wonder those things come to strangely (and then again, not-so-strangely) inform one another. And of course, this thinking extends well beyond the reading life to the entire artistic life, then even further to life as a whole.
I worry, in times like these, that I only make sense to myself. It's a matter of finding the right words. I feel like we all know these things, somewhere in our bones, but it's a matter of being reminded of them. Maybe that's what artists, in fact, are--The Great Reminders.
When I was an undergrad, in a poetry class we talked about Dave Etter's "A House by the Tracks." I can find neither train nor track of this poem online, so here's a snippet from me own personal hard-copy archives (Thanks, DC):
Snow falls, stops, starts again.
Santa Fe Wabash Seaboard
The freight train earth cracks in two.
Nickel Plate Nickel Plate
There are curses on the courthouse wind.
B&O L&N
South of town a farmer has been shot
by a hunter with a Jim Beam face.
Illinois Central Illinois Central
(piggyback piggyback)
. . .
I could make some very human conjectures as to why this poem has always stayed with me, but for our purposes here, suffice to say it first implanted the idea Ruefle mentions of developing consciousness coinciding with the perfect ripeness for a particular book/poem/sentence/photo/painting/moment. Etter uses passing trains to punctuate the speaker's lines, and the result is exactly what it had to be for the poem to be successful (which, as Richard Hugo would point out, is complete nonsense but also true).
The point, to which I'm always long on getting, is: sometimes, we find the Right Train at the Right Time.
Let's get back to those photos on the way to and in Vorkuta, Russia. The piece as whole, the photographer says, has a great deal to do with bearing witness to a painful past (my interpretation of his 100 words). Here, I'll enter, saying Yes, we all must bear witness to an often painful past, and that past informs our present and likely our future. The present moment is the intersection of that past with everything currently happening around us and in us, and the interplay of those things cannot help but affect what will come next.
And now, we're going to bring in The Dude. Because what isn't The Dude relevant to?
I've been reading The Dude and the Zen Master, and it has proved to be the Right Train for me at this particular moment in time, with all its connections, implications, and extensions. A good deal of what I've read so far has been about the vehicles we use to move through life (how fucking appropriate, right?). I want to share with you some passages from pages 37-39:
Jeff: So even if you're dealing with a topic that's not joyful, that's painful or sad, or whatever, if you approach it out of a joyful, generous, loving place, then everything comes out in a freer way.
And not too much later, Bernie comes in:
No matter how hard we try, situations come up that we'll want to separate from and leave behind us.
But if you are going somewhere else, let me say this much: At least change the boat and the oars. Say I get to the other side, what do I do? Well, I got here thanks to this beautiful boat with this set of oars, so I'll just hold on to them and carry them wherever I go. Isn't that weird? Now I've got the burden of carrying around whatever got me here.
Holy fuck. Mind = Blown.
But I knew this. I've learned it before. And I'm always having to relearn it.
Be reminded of it.
The toppled train car on the way to Vorkuta, surrounded by the bones of the people who built the tracks.
My own not-so-beautiful, rickety boat full of holes I'm always scrambling to patch with what feels like limited resources, surrounded by miles and miles of open water.
Why would we choose to carry these things with us? Because it's so damn hard to let go. We like to hold on to what got us here, safe and familiar, and we could go through our lives without ever having to learn how to use a new vehicle.
Then, we break down. And we end up staying in one place.
So do we abandon the things that got us here? Maybe in some cases, for our survival, we have to. We can't carry the falling-to-pieces boat over the mountains by ourselves, stopping every few feet to pick up the scraps and place them back in the hull. I'll fix it, we tell ourselves. You'll see. One day, I'll be able to fix it.
Maybe what we really need to do when the boat is falling apart is let it go, let it rest beside the water we just crossed and find another way of moving through the next part of our journey, where we may need a train or car or bike. Or maybe, just our own two feet. And a friend to talk with, with whom to kill the time. Maybe once it's off our backs, we can stop seeing only the splinters and holes. We can see it for essentially all it is--what got us to where we are now. It needn't be more than that.
I don't know if all of this would have meant what it means to me if certain things weren't swirling in my atmosphere. Then again, maybe we're always at the perfect ripeness, the right state of consciousness, to find the meaning we need to:
We just have to be reminded of it.
So/ Erie Lackawanna
--CQ
At any point in time, we are at a confluence of sorts. That is to say, at every moment in our lives, we are taking in and processing multiple stimuli, which sounds awfully clinical, but there is a great deal of humanity at work as well. We hear the rush of the train in the distance. We feel the wind kick up dirt around our ankles on the platform. We watch a child, wide-eyed, watching the world around her then out of wonder and fear reach up for her mother's hand. We feel the softness of our clothes against our skin, but are barely, if at all, conscious of them until something's out of place. We see the numbers and hands on the clock face and it gives us a sense of order. We catch ourselves, and wonder why we're watching/thinking what we are.
The human part is what we do with it all--what we make of it. What does it all mean, man? On some level, we process no differently than a cat on the windowsill, watching the birds outside, feeling hungry. But the cat isn't going to make conjectures about the emotional state of said birds. He isn't going to wonder why he's in that particular window, watching those particular birds.
In our reading life, too, are we always at a nexus. What we've read before informs what we're reading now, and if we're reading multiple books at the same time, it's no wonder those things come to strangely (and then again, not-so-strangely) inform one another. And of course, this thinking extends well beyond the reading life to the entire artistic life, then even further to life as a whole.
I worry, in times like these, that I only make sense to myself. It's a matter of finding the right words. I feel like we all know these things, somewhere in our bones, but it's a matter of being reminded of them. Maybe that's what artists, in fact, are--The Great Reminders.
When I was an undergrad, in a poetry class we talked about Dave Etter's "A House by the Tracks." I can find neither train nor track of this poem online, so here's a snippet from me own personal hard-copy archives (Thanks, DC):
Snow falls, stops, starts again.
Santa Fe Wabash Seaboard
The freight train earth cracks in two.
Nickel Plate Nickel Plate
There are curses on the courthouse wind.
B&O L&N
South of town a farmer has been shot
by a hunter with a Jim Beam face.
Illinois Central Illinois Central
(piggyback piggyback)
. . .
I could make some very human conjectures as to why this poem has always stayed with me, but for our purposes here, suffice to say it first implanted the idea Ruefle mentions of developing consciousness coinciding with the perfect ripeness for a particular book/poem/sentence/photo/painting/moment. Etter uses passing trains to punctuate the speaker's lines, and the result is exactly what it had to be for the poem to be successful (which, as Richard Hugo would point out, is complete nonsense but also true).
The point, to which I'm always long on getting, is: sometimes, we find the Right Train at the Right Time.
Let's get back to those photos on the way to and in Vorkuta, Russia. The piece as whole, the photographer says, has a great deal to do with bearing witness to a painful past (my interpretation of his 100 words). Here, I'll enter, saying Yes, we all must bear witness to an often painful past, and that past informs our present and likely our future. The present moment is the intersection of that past with everything currently happening around us and in us, and the interplay of those things cannot help but affect what will come next.
And now, we're going to bring in The Dude. Because what isn't The Dude relevant to?
I've been reading The Dude and the Zen Master, and it has proved to be the Right Train for me at this particular moment in time, with all its connections, implications, and extensions. A good deal of what I've read so far has been about the vehicles we use to move through life (how fucking appropriate, right?). I want to share with you some passages from pages 37-39:
Jeff: So even if you're dealing with a topic that's not joyful, that's painful or sad, or whatever, if you approach it out of a joyful, generous, loving place, then everything comes out in a freer way.
And not too much later, Bernie comes in:
No matter how hard we try, situations come up that we'll want to separate from and leave behind us.
But if you are going somewhere else, let me say this much: At least change the boat and the oars. Say I get to the other side, what do I do? Well, I got here thanks to this beautiful boat with this set of oars, so I'll just hold on to them and carry them wherever I go. Isn't that weird? Now I've got the burden of carrying around whatever got me here.
Holy fuck. Mind = Blown.
But I knew this. I've learned it before. And I'm always having to relearn it.
Be reminded of it.
The toppled train car on the way to Vorkuta, surrounded by the bones of the people who built the tracks.
My own not-so-beautiful, rickety boat full of holes I'm always scrambling to patch with what feels like limited resources, surrounded by miles and miles of open water.
Why would we choose to carry these things with us? Because it's so damn hard to let go. We like to hold on to what got us here, safe and familiar, and we could go through our lives without ever having to learn how to use a new vehicle.
Then, we break down. And we end up staying in one place.
So do we abandon the things that got us here? Maybe in some cases, for our survival, we have to. We can't carry the falling-to-pieces boat over the mountains by ourselves, stopping every few feet to pick up the scraps and place them back in the hull. I'll fix it, we tell ourselves. You'll see. One day, I'll be able to fix it.
Maybe what we really need to do when the boat is falling apart is let it go, let it rest beside the water we just crossed and find another way of moving through the next part of our journey, where we may need a train or car or bike. Or maybe, just our own two feet. And a friend to talk with, with whom to kill the time. Maybe once it's off our backs, we can stop seeing only the splinters and holes. We can see it for essentially all it is--what got us to where we are now. It needn't be more than that.
I don't know if all of this would have meant what it means to me if certain things weren't swirling in my atmosphere. Then again, maybe we're always at the perfect ripeness, the right state of consciousness, to find the meaning we need to:
 |
| on the cover of The Dude and the Zen Master |
We just have to be reminded of it.
So/ Erie Lackawanna
--CQ
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