Thoughts on writing

·  David Mamet states that human beings do not "communicate our wishes to each other, but we communicate to achieve our wishes from each other. We do not speak the desire but speak that which is most likely to bring about the desire."

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

·  Italo Calvino: "Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls--and somehow stands for--everything that remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness."

·  Howard Hawks, on what makes a great movie: “Three great scenes. No bad scenes.”

·  F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Start with a person in mind and you can create a character, but start with a character (stereotype) in mind and you create nothing.”

· Raymond Chandler:  “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

·  Kurt Vonnegut:
Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Thoughts on music

Most of American music was made by people who never had any idea it would be listened to beyond the moment, and much of it will live forever. Somewhere around 1970 that changed. Every pop band thought they were making music for posterity, and most of it isn't.

Why it keeps getting harder

Thomas Mann once defined a writer as "a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." And a corollary -- the better you get at writing, the harder it becomes. It pretty much has to. Your standards get higher -- you demand more of yourself. And as a writer, you're in competition with everyone else who's writing and everyone who's ever written. In a sense, that's a fairly steady level of competition, but in a more significant sense, it's not, because you recognize more of your competition's salient points as you get more experience.
And in an even more significant sense, it gets wildly difficult, because your main competition is always yourself, and as you get better, it means your principal competition gets stiffer.

Revision in a workshop setting

there's no guarantee that any suggestion I make will actually make the poem better. Sometimes a suggestion can be perfectly good, and it'll end up making the poem worse. There's a movie called Rio Bravo, made by director Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne, and co-starring Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, who were both better known as popular singers than dramatic actors -- this was Ricky Nelson's only dramatic role. Hawks liked the story, and he made almost the exact same story into another movie, called El Dorado, also starring John Wayne, this time with Robert Mitchum and James Caan in the two supporting roles. Mitchum and Caan were both extremely gifted actors (Caan still is--he's still around). But for some inexplicable reason, Rio Bravo is the better movie. But you learn by trying different things, even if they don't always make the poem better.

Played with Bird...one more time

We forgot another one from our list of living musicians who played with Charlie Parker -- George Shearing, who died today.

Shearing came to New York for the first time in 1946. On meeting Charlie Parker, he asked to play something with the great alto saxophonist. Parker suggested “All the Things You Are,” though in the difficult key of B. Shearing was ready for the test. “I really love those awkward keys,” he said later.

From an obituary in the Louisville Courier-Journal

Interview with Marvin Bell

Great interview on poetry with my old friend Marvin Bell.

Changing things around

Often, when I'm trying to find something in a poem that's not quite there yet, I'll experiment with tense or person. Interestingly, this is something I worked out on my own, but once when I mentioned it to my mentor, Donald Finkel (I stayed in touch with him for his whole life, so this would be after we'd been talking and corresponding for 30 years or so), he told me he did the same thing. He told me a poem he'd written about an experience a friend had told him about. The friend had been struck by lightning while standing at a window, and knocked clear across the room. Don said he knew that there was a poem there, and he kept trying to write it, and it kept not working. He tried it in present tense and past tense. He tried in first person and third person. I don't think he tried gender-switching -- making his first person narrator or third person character a woman -- although that's something I'll do from time to time. Finally, he said, he got the poem to work by using two strategies, both of which he didn't believe in and would never use in a poem...but they were right for this one. He put in the second person and the future tense ("You will...")

Here's one I experimented with in that way. I had wanted to write a poem about the days when they still talked about jazz, and I had planned to make that the subject of the poem -- impersonal third person voice, a nostalgic/philosophical musing about a bygone era. It actually came out of listening to a Bill Cosby monologue. But it kept coming out hopelessly hokey and sentimental, which is probably OK for Bill Cosby, but not for me. Then I got the hot asphalt, crushed stone, sand and gravel from a sign on the side of a road which I was driving on when I got lost, and the poem started coming together, but gradually. I started with the present tense, I'm sure about that -- putting myself on that byway, seeing that sign. But that didn't work, so I started to try to get closer to the crushed stone by putting someone to work in the paving company. I'd put myself at some distance from a company like this in the past ("The Gravel Business"), but this had to be different.

I had, not long before, written one poem about a woman, daughter of a jazz musician, leaving her husband and trying to find herself. So suppose I put it in the third person, made it about her, had her move upstate to Kingston -- I pictured her living somewhere down around Abeel Street -- gave her a job with the paving company, and worked around to the jazz line that way?


HOT ASPHALT, CRUSHED STONE

By spring, she was living in upstate
New York, working for a paving company:
hot asphalt, crushed stone, sand and gravel.
The view from her window was great heaps
of stone, scooped, conveyed to barges,
an inlet of water, a distant high bridge, mountains.
Below her flat, old white men drank and talked
about guns and rights. She could hear,
late into night, the tunk! of darts, like
the patter of of raindrops slowed way, way down
by a drummer intent on mastering their rhythms.
She thought about her father, Ellis Perkins,
in the days when they still talked about jazz --
Louis Armstrong and Jabbo Smith at the Rockland Palace
and the next day it was all over Harlem
how Satch had smoked him with F over high C.
How Cootie left the Duke.
How one day everyone opened the windows, and played
Illinois Jacquet’s solo on “Flying Home”
to the streets and stoops: blat... blat... blaat... blaat... blaat...

Music blogs

I've always been remiss about keeping up my links list, but I'm making a stab at it today by adding a list of some of the music blogs and websites that I love, inspired by discovering a new one, JazzWax, which describes itself as "Marc Myers blogs daily on jazz legends and legendary jazz recordings."

I found it through a random web surf that led me to this interview with Jackie Cain, best known for her Jackie and Roy duets.


So...this entry, and this list, starting with my two favorite music blogs.

Bebop Wino Done Gone is devoted to finding and offering for download some great and forgotten rhythm and blues wax, and this one goes straight to my heart, which beats to the rhythm and blues of the 40s and 50s.

And The Old Weird America, which may just be the best blog in all of the Internet. This guy is blogging his way through the entire Harry Smith anthology, with explorations taking off from each entry, including links and downloads. He's currently at #50, “John The Baptist” by Rev. Moses Mason.

Walrus vs. Eggman

Working with my Creative Writing 1 class on a couple of things -- what Richard Hugo calls "writing off the subject" and I call "writing away from the subject," and learning how to talk about literature. One of my frequent first assignments is to write a poem that doesn't mean anything, and I often follow that up by assigning peer critiques, in which they have to find meaning in each other's meaningless poems.

Being able to do peer critiques of each other's work doesn't come naturally -- the language of criticism has to be learned, as does the confidence that ond can find something to say. So I spent today splitting the class up into small discussion groups, and asking each group to come up with an interpretation of this:



Now, John Lennon wrote "I Am the Walrus" in response to a letter he'd gotten from an old teacher, telling John that he was having his students analyze Beatles songs. John's response was essentially "Oh yeah? Analyze this!" He wrote "I Am the Walrus" quite deliberately to have no meaning, and therefore to be analysis-proof. But that's never stopped anyone from analyzing it, and I got some really nice results.

A couple of groups noticed that Lennon puts himself together with everyone else (he's the eggman, but so is everyone else) and apart at the same time (he's the only walrus). One group suggested that the eggmen referred to the larval state of human spiritual development -- none of us have advanced past being eggmen -- except, or course, the walrus.

Another group focused on "sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun to shine" -- the sun is enlightenment, and perhaps they're waiting on an enightenment that never comes. Or maybe it does -- the waiting itself is the enlightenment -- you get a tan from sitting in the English rain.

Another group pointed out the sterility of official answers -- the expert textperts, the answers of organized religion like Hare Krishna -- and maybe Catholicism, if the penguins are nuns -- and suggested Lennon was saying the real spiritual answers come from babies -- goo goo goo joob.

One group said -- and this was really stretching, but I wanted them to stretch, to think outside the box -- that if you take on O out of "joob" it becomes "job" -- jobs are nonsense, like the guys in the corporation T shirts.

So I was pleased -- I got what I was hoping for -- imaginative, inventive thinking.

The Bat Test

Bats in your poem, now a more or less complete essay on my website.

Meaningless

My first assignment for Creative Writing 1 -- write a poem that's 3 stanzas long, 5 lines per stanza, 8-12 syllables per line, each stanza featuring assonance and governed by a different vowel sound.

And it can't mean anything.

The idea -- start thinking about process, rather than message.

The first problem -- students confused assonance with rhyme, or mostly thought that they had to use rhyme. My fault for not making that clear. So I'm having them do it again.

Second problem -- how do you write a poem that doesn't mean anything? Of course, you can't. So all too many of them ignored that part of the assignment. But it's possible to try to write a poem that doesn't mean anything.

Then what do we do with a poem that doesn't mean anything? We make it mean something. That's what we do. Our minds are meaning-generating, connection-making machines.

Stanley Fish has an interesting essay on this, although that's not really his point.

Anyway, for my next class, I'm going to bring in a famous example of a poem that was deliberately written not to mean anything, and split up my class into groups, and have them come up with meanings for it.

Happy Birthday Bobby "Blue" Bland

From my pal Ken Kogan on Facebook, a reminder that it's the birthday of this blues great, and Ken posted a link to Mr. B doing this number:




Bobby Blue doing a Merle Haggard song and making it sound great. And isn't that the greatness of this wonderful art form that's our cultural heritage, our pride and joy? As Huck Finn says, the flavors are all swapped around. How about the Everly Brothers doing Ray Charles?



Or Sam Moore and Conway Twitty doing a duet:

Notes on persona and revision

When I write a poem, no matter how personal it is, when I get it down on paper (or computer screen) and start to revise it, I depersonalize it. The poem may say "I" on the page, but I think "he." I'm aware that the person in that poem is a character I've created, a fictional character--a persona. So when I'm critiquing a poem, I'll always refer to "the speaker," or "the character," or "he" or "she" -- never "you." It's not you any more, no matter how much it may be based on you. It's a character you've created. And as you revise, your responsibility is not to keep that character true to you, but to make that character true to his/her own self.

The Cold Hard Facts of Life

This is one of my favorite album covers ever. I couldn't find a jpg of the back cover, but it's the same scene, this time shot from behind Porter, showing the cheating couple from his POV.

Fucking your sister

Since I haven't taught a section of creative writing in a while, and perhaps I've lost some of my edge, I decided not to start out the semester with the fucking-your-sister exercise (well, I don't actually call it that when I give it), although former student Ian Brent tells me on Facebook that it was one he really liked – “I appreciated it as a great way to knock us off our horses right out of the gate, so to speak. It was a great way to look at our writing habits and thought processes without a whole lot of time for us to think about it.”

I'm sure I've blogged about this before, but since I haven't blogged about anything in a long time, I'll start off with this again, since it's on my mind. Here it is:

Write a letter to someone -- you choose who, real or imaginary -- but it's someone you, for purposes of the exercise, you haven't talked to in a few years. You're filling this person in on what's been happening to you, and what's been happening to you is not so good. You have a twin sibling -- probably, though not necessarily, of the opposite sex, and your twin committed suicide a year ago by jumping off a cliff.

It was a terrible tragedy, but you know you need to put it behind you and move on with it. But your mother can't move on -- she keeps taking you back to the cliff, and asking why it had to happen. And the worst part of that is, you know something that might possibly explain it, but you can't tell her: just a couple of days before the suicide, your twin came into your room and had sex with you.

You were maybe half awake -- it was like a dream, but you know it really happened. But you're not sure of anything more than that. You're not even quite sure whether you were forced or willing.

That, I tell them, is your assignment. You can turn it in and leave when you finish it, and we'll talk about it next time.

This only works as an in-class assignment given verbally – written out, as it is here, the information is too concrete. I don't repeat any of it. And I do it on the first day of class, when they don't know me at all, or what to expect of me. Heh heh.

What we talk about next time is not what they've written, but the experience or writing it. How did they feel about the assignment -- what, if anything, was difficult about it, what -- if anything -- was fun or interesting or challenging about it?

I get a range of answers, but generally they're something like this. Difficult -- the subject matter; deciding what tone to take; imagining it happening – and just the organization. Fun – the challenge to the imagination, the chance to write something taboo.

Anyway, what it all adds up to, and this is the reason I give the exercise, outside of a natural tendency toward sadism, is that basically, this is what poets do. We deal with emotionally dangerous or unexplored areas, we imagine ourselves in situations that challenge us – and there's a thrill in doing it.

Establishing a space

A family challenge we've just started -- answering a writing challenge. This one from my brother Jon:

Establish a room or space. It can be anything from a closet to a large public space. Locate it temporally and geographically. Introduce a character into the space. Have the character alter the space in some way, and then leave.

And here's mine:

Steven Hawking says that before the big bang, the speck that may have been ready to explode and become the universe was there, but you couldn't have seen it, because there was no light yet, and even if you had some sort of night vision goggles that would pick up no light at all, and even if you had been able to see something that small, you couldn't have seen it, at least not its outer contours, because space didn't exist yet, So inside the speck there's this seething cauldron of everything, and maybe nothing is differentiated yet, so there can't be any sexual urges, because if nothing is differentiated, who are you going to have a sexual urge for? But if there's a consciousness inside that speck, call it God, because it has no physical shape yet, just consciousness, then that consciousness must become aware of its separateness from everything else, even if there is no everything else, and the consciousness gives itself a name, and its name is Me. So God, which is Me, begins to create Myself in My own image, which is as yet a formless image. But as I conceive Myself as separate, My conception grows to encompass want, and as I begin to realize that want has to have an Other, I feel the first helplessness, the first hopelessness, hopelessness preceding hope, as I acclimatize Myself to the formlessness around Me, and the lack of otherness to the otherness which is everything outside of My consciousness. Out of hopelessness comes another formless awareness, which is longing, and the longing  begins to localize itself in one part of something which can't have parts, since it has no form, but this one part begins to swell, and harden, and the quantum space which has no provision for any hard object begins to glow, then bulge.

And this is how I created the universe.

Nick & Jake

You'll want to listen to the current episode (#9) of Nick and Jake, if only for the introduction of "Rue de Nostalgie," a haunting melody by Dave Grusin that becomes Nick's Paris theme.And you'll want to follow the unfolding relationship between Nick and Ronnie, as each of them begin to explore new cities and new lives. And what is the CIA planning now?

http://www.nickandjake.com

Back in action

I'm going to start maintaining my blog again -- I'd pretty much let it go when I started doing my Examiner page, but I think I'd just as soon have my thoughts on writing, or whatever else, be my own instead of Examiner's. So I'm reopening the old newsstand.

Poetry in Albany

Here's me reading as an open miker at the Third Thursday Poetry Night at Albany's Social Justice Center. The star of the evening was Victoria Rivas, and Dan Wilcox describes her work well:

sad, funny, even angry at times & raise broad issues about poverty & the role of teachers in the education system. She touched on ignorance & lack of manners, teen pregnancy, & the innate creative sense children have in spite of the conditions they are raised in.

New York Music

All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77 by Tony Fletcher



The whole range of New York music, lovingly rendered. How could I have been so shortsighted, back in the 50s, not to go to the Palladium to hear the likes of Machito and Tito Puente?

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