Letters to Someone Else # 3

Old Joy,

I hope you don't mind if I wander a bit. It's a form that suits me.

1. Finding a form that suits one's lifestyle seems, to me, absolutely essential if I hope to make art these days. I learned this from people like W.C. Williams and Wallace Stevens and Ted Kooser, all poets who held down pretty serious jobs (doctor, insurance salesman, insurance salesman). Williams used to talk about ending a shift around 10:00 and then pulling a typewriter out of his desk and writing down poems that had been on and off his mind all day long. It's no wonder he wrote such clipped, short, odd poems--and, since he came along at the right time and happened to influence some other, younger poets, he also changed the face of poetry. I contend that his crazy schedule led to his style of writing (quick, hurried, unconsidered, rough-hewn). Contentions like this have always made it possible for me to be productive, no matter how busy I seem to be. I find a form that suits me, even if that means just jotting down a line as soon as I wake up in the morning.

2. I offer # 1 as a piece of advice, too. Having too much time can be destructive to art, especially if you push too hard against it. But if you release yourself into the drift of your days, maybe you'll do some good work yet. Just remember... free thinking (and freeing one's thinking) can be just as artful as anything written or spoken or painted or sung. Also, you might not write about your current experience until you are older... which is perfectly fine, too.

3. For more on # 2, study the life of Marcel Duchamp. His art was cool, but his writing/thinking were much more important. Also, all that was said about him... Really, you can't go wrong.

4. Currently listening exclusively to a song called "Wolves" by a band/man named Phosphorescent. In a day or two, it will be something different, but this song's got its hooks in me.

5. Yes still writing and making films. Even when I don't mean to, these things happen. What I want out of these activities is simple: to be always an amateur. The root of that word is wrapped up with the notion of love, loving, being a lover of a certain activity. And, embracing that term allows me to introduce mistakes, misshapes, laughter, and awkward moments into my work. Masters are not allowed to reveal blemishes; maintaining the status of an amateur allows one to make art that feels like life.

6. Funny, I just typed over what I first wrote, "the status of an amateur allows one to make life that feels like art."

7. My best friend wrote a great poem called "Dolce Far Niete" and I wrote a poem that incorporated that poem... and now you're picking up the thread.

8. Hanging out with my son a few weekends ago... he has a vocabulary of about 28 words at the moment. We were at my parents house because we have a dire need to escape Manhattan from time to time. Anyway, I was in bed with my son and the windows were open and the birds were singing. He's not used to hearing birds. He usually hears cars and sirens. He looked at me and pointed to the sound and said, "Bird." That was the best poem I've heard in the past few years.

9. If you're going to Y.U. next year, look up a former student of mine. His name is Eliot Bitner. He'll be a sophomore. He's a pretty special person. Just show up at his door and demand that he make you a cup of tea. When he pours the tea for you, sit down and say, "I need Paul Auster's fax number, and someone told me you could get it for me."

10. Solitude is hard; I wish you luck. I work it into my life two or three times a year, and it's always the best and worst time. Sometimes the eyes fill up with tears and you have to ask yourself, am I the happiest or the saddest I've ever been? When you don't know the answer, you are perfectly alone.

11. I think.

Take care,

S.

Tension Envelopes # 22 (unmailed, until tonight)

4/18/07

So this will be the last Tension Envelope before you leave Exeter. And, interestingly, as I knew I would, I feel a certain lastness now that you’re leaving. I estimated that I would have about 9 months worth of letters in me. I think I found about 8 months.

Figuring out where to end a series that has tried to prevent closure (in my own thinking, in my own language) is, of course, equivalent to trying to coax coffee from a cup without putting your lips on it. You can shake the table and bend your knees in prayer, but nothing, nothing will facilitate.

Let me explain that last sentence—it is emblematic of my life right now and probably explains the lack of letters these past few weeks. While writing it, I completely lost my focus. I knew words were happening, and I knew I was spelling them correctly. I can type, as they say, with my eyes closed. But, actually, this is the culmination of the tension project, a technique I’ve been looking to master. How can I write with only half or part of my mind? This, of course, mirrors the way I am sometimes forced to live my life these days, more and more these days, in only fragments, fractures, of concentration.

But it is also tied to a strategy aimed at readers. Readers have to make sense of words. I’d say that, in our current context of reading, given the history of reading, the writing almost doesn’t matter. I mean, currently I am making sense. But if I wasn’t “making sense,” then you would be making sense. Why? Because as a reader who wants to read this letter, that’s just what you do. If we imagine that, at this late stage of reading, only the interested will find their way to the texts we create, then I’m truly not sure it matters. Perhaps personality is the most important text we can cultivate.

Last week, some students were sitting at a table in the lunchroom and I joined them with my dessert, an orange. As I peeled the orange, one of the students told me I would probably just leave the peels on the table. She was joking about my habits. I thought, “that’s actually a funny idea, considering that teachers are always yelling at students to clean up after themselves.” So I left the orange peels.

Later, the peels appeared on my desk along with a note from an angry (?) student. Its gist was my hypocrisy.

I wrote my accuser a long email about beauty. My particular point was the invention of beauty. How we all play a role in that. Not my fault, I wrote, that she looked at the pile of orange peels and saw garbage instead of opportunity. A few quick squeezes and she would be at the heart of a performance, students gathered around while tiny, pulpy explosions lept and splattered like tiny volcanoes.

At the approximately same moment, I later discovered, my accuser was circulating an email about violinist Joshua Bell.

Her email was about beauty. How we sometimes miss it due to the persistence of our seeing, our mis-seeing, our habits.

My email ended with a petition for the recognition of my genius. Her email ended with a petition for the recognition of any genius that, prior to her email, had gone unrecognized.

She had big plans, but I reveled in my small victory. For a short time, I was a genius, but not on purpose. Time and context had conspired to make me seem so, when I was really only joking. This seems to me the best way.

The Collected Poems of October 3rd

Went from
the tiredest I've been
having pushed past the point of
brokenness
to the short films of Charles Burnett
to the short stories of Breece D'J Pancake
to Bill Fay
and all the while
an imaginery year
in Exeter
seems more real to me.

In the short films
they fail to move
a washing machine
and the movie ends,
or a horse dies,
and this takes me
to Breece
who is like
Hemingway
with a Vallejo twitch.

But the real champion
is Mr. Fay,
the real loser
all the ideas I've lost
or just smiled about
as they waved at me
like my son
who
heading for a bike or a playground
forgets where I begin
which is
how it should be
except for Pancake's death,
the self-in-need's
finger
twitching on a borrowed or bought
shotgun.

Grandfather William

"Despite Emerson's rousing call to stick fast to his own work, James went on much as he always had, scattering his energy and attention this way and that. The scattershot variety of his undertaking was his own real work. He was a pluralist to the bone. It is the monist -- self confessed or not -- who can organize a life around one central project, saying no to all offers and openings that may distract from the singular objective. F. Scott Fitzgerald said life is, after all, more successfully looked at from a single window. It is a truth -- if it is a truth -- for which James might have had some sympathy but no lasting patience."

They Used Time

more elegantly
than I have known it

strolling, only
slower,
the Jewish

families
walking,
barely,
together
at the exact pace
where toddlers
and the very old
synch

to throw bread
laced with sins
into the Hudson or
any river really

inspired
and sick
with my own
mutilations of it,
time,
I fell into
cinema,
the movies,
bought
popcorn
and watched
the story of a tightrope
walker
Man on Wire
and, yes,
wept, I wept

for fullness, finally, again. I have been wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Same Interview

"In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. "

From an Interview, 1993

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of ‘generalisation’ of suffering . . . We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realise that TV and popular film and most kinds of ‘low’ art – which just means art whose primary aim is to make money – is lucrative precisely because it recognises that audiences prefer 100 per cent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 per cent pleasure and 51 per cent pain. Whereas ‘serious’ art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 per cent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is ‘dumb’, I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard."