Category: Craft (Page 3 of 18)

The Essay Project: Simplicity and Clutter

June 14, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 2 Comments

Two things about my mother: she was a stickler for grammar at the diner table. She made much ado over the difference between well and good. Which was well and good but like putting our elbows on the table, it seemed pretty strict at the time. She also kept a spotless house. I know this because I often cleaned it for money to buy record albums. (I also diverted my lunch money for that purpose, too.) To give you an idea of how particular my mother was, one time we were visiting a relative and she complained that the toilet-paper-roll holder hadn’t been dusted. I remember thinking, “you mean we have to dust that, too?!”

At least I was allowed to create big messes in my own space, spread out my Little People villages with my friend Krissy. We had a friend whose mother made us pick up all the toys at the end of every day, which was very frustrating if you were trying to carry over salacious soap-opera storylines from one day to the next.

Grammar and housekeeping.

There’s a famous Henry David Thoreau quote that I keep on my refrigerator about simplicity. I bought the magnet years ago while on a Thanksgiving trip to Plymouth, Massachusetts, with my friend Coolia and her Dad. We visited Thoreau’s Walden-Pond cabin nearby and hilariously, it had a gift shop where, without any irony, they sold magnets about simplifying your life.

It goes without saying life is made no simpler by the clutter of magnets on a fridge. And although I’m no hoarder, I can tolerate a certain level of clutter in my life and in my writing. My life-clutter is part of what writer Neil Gaiman calls the compost heap of ideas. The clutter of my words is more about wanting to evoke the style of a kaleidoscope instead of the style of a Japanese garden. And I love Japanese gardens but I don’t think anyone would confuse me with one.

My style is me. And it’s cluttered all right. So when I reviewed three chapters I found stapled together in the essay stack, all from William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of it.

He says, “Clutter is the disease of American writing.” And although he’s right about “circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon,” there is a kind of good clutter.

I just took a Smithsonian class on Moby Dick, (which I still haven’t read), and our professor, Samuel Otter of UC-Berkley, lovingly described the whale clutter of that novel. Proust is famously cluttered and frilled. Faulkner, too, has purposefully confusing and circular paragraphs.

Zinsser isn’t really talking about those writers, though. He’s talking about floundering students and the corporate writers who “inflate” business letters, medical plans and instructions for assembling toys. Zinsser’s cure is to

“strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what…”

I think that is a very good exercise. It is. But it’s also a good to exercise adding big words back in. And sometimes you do want to make the reader unsure of who is doing what. And although he’s correct that clear writing reflects clear thinking, most of the time we’re not thinking clearly and writing is allowed to reflect that too.

If, like Zinsser says, your reader is someone with “the attention span of about twenty seconds,” then yes, clear writing is crucial. Clear logic between sentences, avoiding missing links, knowing what you want to say…all good things to know how to do.

But for many writers the act of writing itself is trying to figure out what they want to say. They surely don’t set out knowing what it is. Zinsser is a definitely correct to say good writing takes self-discipline and self-knowledge, because the tricky part is knowing when to be clear and when to allow clutter, when to simplify and when to complicate, when the long word serves you better than the short word. This takes trial and error, rewriting and understanding your readers, all of them, the short-attention-spanners and the Moby Dick readers.

A good teacher should allow students to write convoluted, over-complicated sentences until they figure out how to write elegantly long-winded sentences.

Zinsser says “fighting clutter is like fighting weeds” and he calls editing pruning, which is a nice way to think about it. It makes editing sound more fun and artisanal.

He says to fight all jargon and “fad words” like “at this point in time” or prepositional clutter like “facing up to something” instead of just “facing it.” The problem is language is constantly evolving and the new fad words of today becomes card-carrying members of the canon tomorrow. There’s no stopping it. I don’t even consider phrases like “at this point in time” faddish anymore because there’s a whole new slew of slang words I’m trying to figure out, like “giving Cher.” Zinsser says “the game is won or lost on hundreds of small details,” except that it isn’t. Readers continue to demonstrate they’re willing to make do. We slog through everything from convoluted health care plans to wordless IKEA instructions. Clarity would be nice but…you gotta put together a bookshelf tonight.

Zinsser hates euphemisms, for example calling a slum a depressed socioeconomic area because, he says, it “blunts the painful edge of truth.” But oftentimes jargon is trying to blunt the painful edge of truth, you know, for the people who live there.

It’s simply nicer to call a “dumb kid” an “underachiever” just like it’s nicer to call someone “misinformed” than “an asshole.” And this is where judgement comes in: you get to decide when you want to offend and when you want to be nice. There’s a place for everything. (Even hoarders will try to tell you this.)

He lists some of the obvious rules; but every experimental writer will try to break them (like any good mechanic):

Use active verbs. Avoid passive verbs.
Most adverbs are unnecessary and redundant. You don’t need to “clench tightly” because there is no other way to clench.
Most adjectives are unnecessary and redundant, too, like “effortlessly easy.” All cliffs are precipitous. He says not every oak needs to be gnarled, not every detective hard-bitten.
Don’t hedge with timidities (I do this all the time): I wasn’t “too happy” or that was “pretty expensive.” “The larger point here is one of authority” (passive sentence, Zinsser) “…every qualifier whittles away some fraction of trust…be bold.” (Really? We’re not all trying to be alpha writers here.)
The period: “most writers don’t reach it soon enough.” (Sigh.)
He is right about the overused exclamation point…it doesn’t work when making a joke; “humor is best achieved by understatement, and there’s nothing subtle about an exclamation point.”
He loves the dash (over the semicolon) although he calls it “a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English. But it has full membership and will get you out of many tight corners.”
One of his worst rules is to avoid Latin words if Anglo-Saxon words convey the same idea. (One type of word is not inherently better than another.)

Clear writing is easily understood but also can be completely boring. Turns out there’s always the rhythm of the sentence to think about. Some of these fillers help the momentum of a sentence just as much as a killer verb will.

And writers need room to practice being bad in all directions, with long and short sentences, and hopefully come up with a balancing act of both. But Zinsser is very discouraging here:

“And don’t tell me about Norman Mailer–he’s a genius. If you want to write long sentence, be a genius. Or at least make sure that the sentence is under control from beginning to end, in syntax and punctuation, so that the reader knows where he is at every step of the winding trail.”

Yeah, don’t do that. Or save that for the later drafts. Go ahead and be messy for a while. Carve a few ridiculous things. Stack up the words like pile of books. Unpack all your boxes.

And then do what I do and when you get a visitor, furiously clean the house like your happy-homemaker mother is coming over.

Essay Project: Words

June 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I can see looking at these next two essays, both chapters called “Words” from two different writing guides, that they are, (and we’re scraping the bottom of the stack here), not from the Sarah Lawrence essay class. I can tell this due to a teacher’s critical cursive scrawl at the bottom of one of them:

“Put all pages in a notebook This makes the unit look sloppy” (no punctuation which, ahem, makes her sentences look sloppy).

I had let these chapters exist free floating in my secondary education class assignment on “unit planning,” (it hurts my ears just to type out those two words), because I was envisioning photocopying them to waves of students over the forthcoming years. I was trying to avoid those photocopied, ghostly black ring-binder holes we all remember from the handouts of teachers who were much less sloppy than I was planning to be.

The whole enterprise was misguided though: the idea of me being a teacher and taking these education classes at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Earlier as a teen I envisioned someday having a big family; but I had never so much as babysat any kids before.

Well, once I did for my friend Charlotte in an emergency situation after a 10 minutes phone call that consisted mostly with me protesting to her that I’d never so much as babysat any kids before and her telling me her family had a very important event to attend and their usual babysitter had flaked out.

So I found myself entertaining three kids under nine and one baby. I had not a clue as to how to change the baby’s diaper and admitted as much to the three kids under nine. The oldest one, the eight year old, proudly announced she could do this and so she did. Later, I couldn’t convince them to go to bed; and so my friend and her family came home to find all the kids asleep on their parents’ bed. Charlotte seemed thankful nonetheless and at least we all survived, I figured.

So these handouts were from that time, one from a book called On Writing Well by William Zinsser. a book Howard Schwartz had us use in his intermediate poetry class at UMSL. The second book, The New Strategy of Style by Winston Weathers, was a book I loved from Mr. Moceri’s high-school composition class.

The “Words” chapter from On Writing Well, starts by chiding the “journalese” of periodicals like People Magazine with its “mixture of cheap words” and clichés.

“Never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive. The English language is rich in strong and supple words.” (Those shades sound sexy!) “Take the time to root around and find the ones you want.”

When Zinsser attacks lazy writing, he’s usually talking about lazy ideas versus words.

“If you find yourself writing that…a business has been enjoying a slump, stop and think how much they really enjoyed it…the race in writing is not to the swift but to the original.” (Except in journalism where you don’t have all the time…to be fair.) He recommends reading, (“cultivate the best writers”), and habitually using dictionaries, learning etymologies and their word branches, mastering the gradations between synonyms, (“what’s the difference between ‘cajole’ and ‘coax’?”), and heavily using Roget’s Thesaurus, although he seems to see the book as slightly ridiculous:

“Look up ‘villain’…and you’ll be awash in such rascality as only a lexicographer could conjure, obliquity, depravity, knavery, profligacy, frailty, flagrancy, infamy, immortality, corruption, wickedness, wrongdoing, backsliding and sin. You will find rogues and wretches, ruffians and riffraff, miscreants and malefactors, reprobates and rapscallions, hooligans and hoodlums, scamps and scapegraces, scoundrels and scalawags, jezebels and jades.”

That seems more fun than ridiculous to me. “Still,” he says, “there is no better friend to have around to nudge the memory than Roget…find the word that’s on the tip of your tongue, where it doesn’t do you any good….use it with gratitude.”

Also work on how you string words together, Zinsser says. Listen to how the word strings sound, not just how they read. Besides, he says, the inner ear always hears when you read. “Rhythm and alliteration are vital to every sentence.”

He references another canonical composition guide, E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, (which we read in college comp classes, too). He highlights White’s exercise of trying to rewrite Thomas Pain’s “These are the times that try men’s souls.” (“Times like these try men’s souls,” How trying is it to live in these times!” “These are trying times for men’s souls” and finally the funny, “Soulwise, these are trying times.”)

You must care about the “cadences and sonorities of the language,” he says. “Choose one word over another because [of its] certain emotional weight.”

If Zinsser is all about succinctness, (his chapter on words is only six pages long), Weathers’ chapter is comparable verbosity at eleven pages.

Weathers starts of talking about writing “with flexibility” depending upon your “rhetorical profiles” (I don’t know what that means). He encourages us to discover new words, review the ones we already know and even to create our own words or to revitalize old words by using them in new ways.

“Ponder the various connotations….few words have exact synonyms.” Keep “a large artillery” of short, simple words for clarity and longer, big words for “dictional, variation and emphasis,” large words that generate “more interest and excitement.”

Think about how a word contributes to the rhythm of a sentence, the “rise and fall of accents.” Also keep lists of “foreign words and phrases…literary expressions…quotations.”

He talks about using literary allusions, referencing texts we all know like the Bible, Shakespeare, fairy tales.

He talks about using tough, crude words for shock and surprise, playing around with words (using nouns as verbs, verbs as adjectives). He also recommends Roget’s thesaurus and that we “become sensitive to what are sometimes shadowy distinctions. Consider the connotative as well as the denotative value of words…emotional and associative meanings.”

He lists out types of words to avoid: idioms (give me a ring), vague words (business-speak words like basically, analysis, material, thing), tired, overworked words (he gives no examples), redundant and verbose words, however repetition for the sake of clarity and emphasis is okay.

He talks about pruning your sentences, which sounds more fun than editing them.

Drop spare words, reduce clauses and “prune inconsequential details.” He provides a list of cliches which includes a lot of good stuff I’d like to reuse for some reason. The list is like a poem unto itself:

acid test

at a loss for words

ax to grind

bitter end

blazing inferno

brilliant performance

bring order out of chaos

busy as a bee

depths of despair

dodge the issue

equal to the occasion

force of circumstance

hit the ceiling

it stands to reason

know the ropes

nipped in the bud

play into the hands of

quick as a flash

sad but true

sadder but wiser

shake like a leaf

think out loud

It’s okay to use cliches in fiction, he says, if the phrases are things your character would say.

Avoid “nauseating” pseudo-technical and pseudo-literary expressions,” he says, that are meant to “mainly impress readers,” word combos like “motivating factor” and “appreciable degree.”

And here is something many literary academic writers need to hear: “Remember, the more complex the thought, the more simply you must express it.” I feel many academic writers just like to show off their lit-jargon “artilleries.”

The Essay Project: Workshop Rules and Pastiche

April 11, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

When I lived with Julie at the Kelton house in LA, Julie started taking fiction writing classes out of the home of writer John Rechy. She took two or three of them as I recall and would always come home with funny stories about things he said. Back then, she passed along a few of his online essays to me and I just re-read them.

One is a very funny pastiche of famous writers if they had been tasked with rewriting the famous introduction “it was a dark and story night.” It’s very funny and well worth reading in its entirely.

The other essay was called “On Writing: The Terrible Three Rules” and the essay reconsiders the biggest cliches writing students are given: (1) show, don’t tell, (2) write about what you know and (3) always have a sympathetic character for the reader to relate to.

He calls the first point “major nonsense” and makes a very good case for exposition in some of our most famous works of literature. The rule “disallows setting” and without it would “obfuscate situation.” After all, we don’t call it story-showing, he says.

He then provides some tips on how to handle exposition so it doesn’t overwhelm a story.

I’m actually very glad he makes the point about “write what you know” because so many of us write into what we don’t know in a kind of effort to find something to know.

Who wants to discover what they already know? Granted, there are plenty of writers writing to show off to the rest of us what they already think they know, but I would argue those aren’t the best ones.

Writers write in many cases to get into the heads of characters they don’t understand and that’s where the humanity is half the time. This reminds me of seeing Werner Herzog speak before a screening of his movie Grizzly Man and admitting he hated the outdoors, absolutely hated nature. So his interviewer asked him why he picked a very flawed outdoorsman as his subject? And I’ll never forget what he said: to try to understand where someone so different from himself was coming from. That’s what he was interested in exploring.

Honestly, these are precarious times for this kind of project. We’re admonished all the time for not staying in our lane, especially our gender, sexual-orientation and racial lane. And we’re unintentionally self-segregating when we do this. And I don’t think this well-intentioned but short-sighted self-segregating will end well.

Anyway, I personally wouldn’t want to bother with fiction if I had to stick to writing characters who were mousy, straight, white, suburban females. But if we proceed to “write about what we don’t or barely know” we need to be open to (1) getting it wrong as writers and (2) extending more forgiveness as readers. Or else we will cease to have conversations and revert back to the eternal us v. them.

John Rechy lists all the writers who wrote about experiences they never had, experiences of war, crime, writing about other genders and a famous spinster who wrote one of our most indelible love stories.

And like...The Wizard of Oz. Fiction is “verisimilitude,” Rechy says, not reality.

For the last point Rechy lists all the unsympathetic characters we’ve loved to read, starting with Hamlet and Willy Loman, “Catharine and Heathcliff are horrors (and still manage—at times—to tear our hearts out),” Rechy says. They don’t have to be sympathetic, just fascinating.

Which is not to say any of this is easy, to create fascinating characters with artful exposition and verisimilitude. Which, I guess, is why Rechy was offering those fiction writing classes.

Short and sweet. I’m actually hanging on to these.

Music & Poems & Music Poems

March 31, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Some follow-up on this topic. While I was doing my long haul on Philip Levine, I came across some of his jazz poems in an essay called “Detroit Jazz In the Late Forties and Early Fifties,” the best of which was this one:

I Remember Clifford

Wakening in a small room,
the walls high and blue, one high window
through which the morning enters,
I turn to the table beside me
painted a thick white. There instead
of a clock is a tumbler of water,
clear and cold, that wasn’t there
last night. Someone quietly entered,
and now I see the white door
slightly ajar and around three sides
the light on fire. I remember once
twenty-seven years ago walking
the darkened streets
of my home town when up ahead
on Joy Road at the Blue Bird of Happiness
I heard over the rumble of my own head
for the first time the high clear trumpet
of Clifford Brown calling us all
to the dance he shared with us
such a short time. My heart quickened
and in my long coat, breathless
and stumbling, I ran
through the swirling snow
to the familiar sequined door
knowing it would open on something new.

I also came across this arresting line by James Harms in The Long Embrace, Contemporary Poets on the Poetry of Philip Levine. He’s talking about the great utility of expression in the Sonnet:

“Fourteen lines and a volta (along with meter and rhyme, etc.) might seem a confining set of logistics for exploring the intersection of the inner life and the lived moment, but aside from the three-minute pop song, what formal convention has proven more productive and flexible in addressing the lyric realities of our lives?”

The Essay Project: Bits About Value, Confession, Intimacy, the Poetry Buffet and the Unconscious

August 26, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’re getting down to the bottom of the Sarah Lawrence essay class stack. It's hard to estimate how many we have left, but a lot of it is probably unbloggable. Below is a short-stack of five single paged items that are not necessarily related but some are.

Value

The first is a Time Magazine Art section piece from February 1996 by Paul Gray called "Attention Name Droppers." At the time, a formerly obscure and newly attributed 16th century Michelangelo statue of Cupid had set philosophers of value into a tizzy. The same thing had also just happened with a newly found Shakespeare elegy.

“It is easy to see why people who make their living studying Michelangelo and Shakespeare should be agog at the possibility of more material to occupy their attention….[but] neither the Cupid or the elegy is intrinsically different now, in the full glare of worldwide publicity, than a few weeks ago, when both enjoyed obscurity.”

Exactly. And this is what make these valuations problematic…always. They're based on social ideas, not objective ones. We all think we're objective, but…

I’m always referencing this book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom because it exposes just this kind of illusion we have about what good judges we are of things like music, food and art. There’s a similar story in the book about a painting that had one value before being discovered as belonging to a famous artist and one afterwards. Or maybe it happened the other way around, that what was deemed a brilliant thing was suddenly discovered to be not so brilliant because it suddenly wasn't attached to a famous person anymore.

“Aesthetics,” Gray says, “for all the millions of words that have been written on the subject, remains an inexact science. We cannot say why a painting once supposed to be a Rembrandt loses face when its connection with the master is disproved, even though it looks just the same as it did when we admired it before.”

Perfectly said. Except that we can say: judgement is social, judgements are made based on social pressures, social aspirations, social likes and dislikes, even if they’re subconscious.

Confession

There’s a three paragraph excerpt of Muriel Rukeyser from her 1949 book The Life of Poetry about confession and revelation: “Confession to divinity, to the essential life of what one loves and hopes, on a level other than the human, is full of revelation. The detachment, here from conscious to unconscious emotion values, has the power to change one’s life.”

“But there is another confession, which is the confession to oneself made available to all…the type of this is the poem in which the poet, intellectually giving form to emotional and imaginative experience, with the music and history of a lifetime behind the work, offers a total response. And the witness receives the work, and offers a total response in a most human communication.”

Very similar to her earlier statements from the Digital Poetry post I made back in June. I’m just beginning to understand Rukeyser. Baby steps. Powerful stuff.

Reading as Intimacy

The next piece is from Donald Revell’s book The Art of Attention where he talks about poetry being a form of attention, “itself the consequence of attention. And, too, I believe that poems are presences.”

He quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to say, “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing…the creative act is continuous, before, during, and after the poem. An attentive poet delights in this continuity…I am speaking of intimacy, which is an occasion of attention. It is the intimacy of poetry that makes our art such a beautiful recourse from the disgrace and manipulations of public speech, of empty rhetoric. A poem that begins to see and then continues seeing is not deceived, nor is it deceptive.”

He then quotes this from Walt Whitman:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Revell says, “the poem of attention is not merely a work in progress; it is a work of progress in the most natural sense.”

Something for Everybody…or Not

The next is a grumpy little column from W.S. DiPiero called “One Paragraph on our Poetry.” It’s a long paragraph of which I’ve only excerpted about half, starting where he says,

“what’s wrong with it is that it’s worried about being right. Heart-throb platitudes, huggy acecdotalism, outraged stridencies over injustice in countries to which the poet migrates in search of worthy subjects, scrupulous self-censorship….agonies endured (or sworn to) entirely for the ‘appropriate dramatic fulness’ of a poem….valiant eloquence in defense of poetry…Does it matter? Poetry which exists in all of its words but which does not need only words for its existence…”

and then he takes on the new formalists.

Not much to say about this except that maybe it’s just best to just skip the dishes in the buffet you don’t like, instead of railing at all the eaters. Pea soup isn’t for everyone.

The Unconscious

The last piece is a collection of two blurbs about the unconscious. The first is “Writing and the Unconscious: The Imagistic Leap” from The Portable Jung that relates analytical psychology to poetry:

“the writer’s conviction that he is creating in absolute freedom is an illusion” and that artists are swimming with an 'unseen current' and guided by it and that it is a psyche 'which leads a life of its own' and that only a writer who 'acquiesces from the start' can begin to function.

The other little piece is from Robert Bly’s book Leaping Poetry.

“a great work of art often has as its center a long floating leap from the conscious to the unconscious” and possibly many leaps. He also says that “powerful feeling makes the mind associate faster…increases the adrenalin flow, just as chanting awakens many emotions.”

A Book About Trauma: Writing as Therapy, Writing as Witnessing

August 22, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

A few weeks back when we were reviewing some revision essays, a few teachers remarked on the issue of poetry as therapy for those poets who weren’t keen to do the work of revision, as if this was the cut-off between professionals and therapy-seekers. The topic came up again as I was finishing Richard’s Gray’s history on American poetry. Gray's second-to-last section was entirely about the act of writing poetry after trauma, specifically the collective trauma of the 9/11 attacks and the kind of group therapy that occurred when hundreds of poems found themselves tacked up all over New York City and every living poet of note took a turn at trying to speak about the 9/11 tragedy in verse.

These poems holistically challenge the ideas that “politics kills poetry” (Tim Scannell) or that therapy has no place in poetry.

Gray says the 9/11 poems are a mark of witness, a mark of despair or rage from a single voice in an effort to join a collective experience of sense making. Gray talks about the tropes of these poems: falling, ‘the’ moment of a disaster, the moment just before, the helplessness of words, the unsayable, transfiguration of the ordinary, nostalgia for innocence, and a community’s sharded fall into the depths of psychic harm. These poems also call in question the lines between private and public spaces and explore tools we have as humans to map the loss, the very particular coordinates of loss, and also trauma’s heavy burdens of impotence and exhaustion.

Gray explores a large group of 9/11 poems in an attempt to determine which ones are shallow and cliched and which ones are meaningful in order to understand how we can find meaning from trauma and strategies for writing about it.

To me, the 9/11 poems seem to operate like other trauma poems of our time (school shootings, for example) or like trauma poems from our past (most war poems).

Surviving Home by Katerina Canyon is a book about a set of personal traumas, which in many ways makes it a hard book to review. It is first and foremost an exercise in listening more than reviewing. The scenarios are pretty harsh and their ramifications are felt everywhere throughout the book. Which, as a second point, makes it hard to know which poems are “succeeding,” especially when reviewing the book from a very different life experience.

I feel you have to read a book of trauma in two ways at once: listening in the Brene Brown sense, a kind of human-to-human sense, and also reading with an ear to craft and execution. But even that is not easy.

Reading from a craft perspective, I want to say Canyon's simple poems were more impactful than the more complicated poems, and yet the complexities in those poems were an important representation of any confusing and entangled experience.

The first poem, “Involuntary Endurance,” is a good introduction to what you’re going to get. In fact, the hardest poems seem front-loaded in the book: “I Wish I Could Tell You This Has a Happy Ending,” “I Felt My Brother’s Wrists,” and “My Pain Is Sculpted into Art for You to Consume.”

Her titles are particularly good.

She explores deep wounds, like in “Thoracic Biology” where she says, “most times when I sleep, I dream of/my hands, clutched tight around something/I cannot see, and I cannot let go.”

Her poems are mostly conversational and she works with sensory feelers into the terrain of her Los Angeles past like in the poem “My Life Map” or poems about her mother: “Small Bear to Great Bear” and “An Afterthought of a Netflix Show” (with an uncanny appearance by Carol Burnett).

But there are also some experimental pieces, like “The Tyger, Interrupted” with literal interruptions into the William Blake poem, “The Tyger.”

There are some faint light beams of hope here too, some short reprieves for both Canyon and her readers: “Aunt May” which references Z.Z. Hill’s song “Down Home Blues" and “The New Hope” where “I kick the crust between my soles,/This is where I will find a picket fence/Painted white like dandelions.”

Which brings us to another point about experimental poetry and poets who express disdain for the political act of witness or explorations of trauma: the choice to go fully experimental or dismissive is an opportunity provided a privileged writer. Poetry of witness and therapy are less valuable to people who don’t need it. You don’t value the picket fence when you don’t need to; you can have it or not have it. I can have it or not have it and so this poem challenges me to understand what the symbol means to Canyon. What symbolizes a fantastical cliche to me takes on an out-of-reach realism for someone who has no easy path to the symbol and cannot take it for granted. So poetry like this challenges the very idea of cliches themselves. Symbols are cultural and relative.

Which leads us right into her poem “Authority Questions” with the lines “would it have been different/if I were white, and if I had blue eyes/and I lived on a ranch with 500 head of cattle? Would the doctor have still called me a liar?”

It gets worse from there.

The traumas here are racism, physical abuse, (being locked in the closet “All Day Long” with her autistic brother), drug trauma, (“Trifling with Heroin” which opens with “She learned to cut lines at eight”), “The Consideration of the Black Bear” where she says about her father, “I was raised to be/the perfect fault–/to take the blame/to allow you to be King.”

Even a poem called “Blessings” seem mostly ominous. There are quite a few meditations on god and godlessness, a school shooting poem, (“A Petition for Unrecognized Children”), a few Trump poems, poems about Sojourner Truth and Harvey Weinstein.

And this probably speaks to my GenX love for kind of new structures but my favorite poem in the collection was the “I Left Out ‘Bells and Whistles’ Written with a Little Help for Websters Dictionary,” a dictionary poem about (ominous) words and phrases born the same year Canyon was born, (which I'm guessing from the tool below was 1968). This makes me think we should all consider the words born with us and what vibrations, legacies and ramifications their ideas had on the world (similar to all the ramifications of our beliefs and actions); and isn't exploring ourselves and our words, and exploring ourselves in words the whole point of writing poems really.

Use this tool to help you search for your own birth words: https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler/

Digital Literature: The Medium

August 12, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

What is a Digital Poem

I want to start this digital catch-up by saying I’ve been thinking a lot about what separates digital poetry from digital art which happens to be using words as material. I think this is the main point of contention for paper poets around pieces labeled digital poetry, especially when few if any of the aims of poetry-as-meaning are involved. Many digital artists use words as material and since there’s no narrative element to the thing, they want to put it in the digital poetry bucket (as if poetry is just that nebulous thing that is not narrative or sensical, which is a pretty small view of what poetry is).

So I’ve been trying to come up with some parameters in my own head just to understand it myself. And here’s what I’ve come up with:

If the piece uses words (language) that are un-readable, or not even meant to be read in the traditional sense (to come to a meaning as a phrase or sentence would): this is digital art,
If the piece uses words and their meaning is the primary driver of the piece, meaning the piece is meant to be read in a traditional sense: this is digital literature, digital poetry or digital story,
If the piece can be read in a traditional sense but that’s not entirely the point of the piece or a secondary benefit of it (maybe there is a balance of meaning from both visuals and from words): this is a digital hybrid of art and literature.

The New Media Reader

We’re almost done with the conceptual essays about computers and it looks like we’ll be going into actual essays about art and hopefully examples of interesting things. These two are by Marshall McLuhan and you know we’d have to pass through McLuhan because he’s the one who famously said, “the medium is the message” which has digital art all over it.

The introduction to two of his essays talks about what the “medium is the message” means, that the delivery medium of any content influences our understanding of it in profound ways we do not often realize. (You can see this clearly with social media arguments on the internet; the internet medium had transformed the way we argue and the ways we tolerate ((or don’t)) opinions that differ from our own).

But McLuhan’s statement was made for television not the internet and his examples go back to the first printing press and how mass-produced books changed the way people thought about…well everything. The introduction also quotes Neil Postman (who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death) who said, “the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”

Oh boy.

The first essay is “The Galaxy Reconfigured or the Plight of the Mass Man in an Individualist Society” (1962) where McLuhan talks about “sense rations” and changing patters of human perception, using William Blake’s “Jerusalem” and how our imaginations acclimate to new technologies, how they change how we think, how technology actually facilitated changes from gothic to renaissance to realism in literature. The printing press (or the idea of a popular press) brought to us the idea of a mass consciousness, a group vision, the lack of one single vision, and that all endeavors became “a mosaic of the postures of collective consciousness” and then we started to question, ‘what is truth?’ and then the sheer volume of voices gave us “mental anguish.”

The task of the individual artist became to “tap into the collective consciousness” even if the forms were individualistic and private. He says this occurs both with music and writing technologies. We “behold the new thing” and are “compelled to become it.”

And then he goes into capitalism and market economics and self-regulation of markets and feudal societies confronted with technology. But then he comes back around to how technology can isolate the senses and hypnotize society. How we become what we behold as we are swept away by the novelty. He says, “the most deeply immersed are the least aware.”

We are often lured by the idea of an improved future. And in some cases the new technology does provide improved future (think of the washing machine, for example). Another example is the printing press which brought us the novel itself and the sustained tone of a long story which produced in readers a “feeling of living in the world.” Not too shabby.

The invention of the novel lead us to study the new reader which led to Edgar Allan Poe writing "The Philosophy of Composition" and inventing the detective story (all good there), then symbolist poetry, the reader as co-author, and the nineteenth century mass surrender of unique selfhood, the assembly line, the unconscious, the non-logical.

So that happened.

His second and famous essay is “The Medium is the Message” (1964)

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividng all things, as a means of control, personal and social consequences of any medium technology is an extension of ourselves.” He says machines usually fragment and decentralize.

Interestingly, he talks a lot about the invention of the electric light, pure information without a message. And he uses this to launch into talking about how the content of the medium is just another medium when you pull back the layers. Writing is really a medium for speech, which is just a medium for our thoughts, which is then a medium for our nonverbal impulses.

Technology changes the scale, pace, and pattern of human affairs. The railroad accelerated time and enlarged the scale of previous human functions. New kinds of cities came to be, new kinds of work and leisure that evolved to be independent of location. Then the plane came and dissolved the railway city.

There are independent consequences in the use of any technology. Again his example of the electric light: what it’s used for is irrelevant; it dramatically changed our lives and our behavior. "Content tends to blind us to the character of the medium." Content is a distraction.

He quotes something my father used to always quote as well because he worked for IBM for many years, probably the original 'thinking outside the box' idea: "IBM is not in the business of making machines, but in information processing."

And McLuhan insists light is a communication medium and it's no coincidence they called light companies “light and power." Electric light eliminates time and space just like the radio, the telegraph, the phone, the TV (and now the internet).

He criticizes technology apologists for being disingenuous when they say technology is the scapegoat for the sins of the world. It's like saying “apple pie is neither good or bad. It is the way that it is used" (and "guns don't kill people…")

There are consequences of innovation. These apologists speak "in the true narcissistic style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form."

But it's more complicated (as it always is) than good or bad. The printing press gave us trashy novesl and nationalism, but he says, it has also gave us the Bible (and Choose Your Own Adventure books). Movies brought a world of illusions and dreams, point of view, then cubism happened, the idea of perspective, the interplay of planes, contradictions, instant sensory awareness of the whole…

Like all cultural things, it's not always easy to unravel: “Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.”

That's a lot of omelet to chew right there.

The Essay Project: Five Takes on Revision

August 10, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 1 Comment

We're getting down to the bottom of the essay stack–lots of little pieces down here. I found four in a row on the topic of revision. Three of them begin with basically the same idea:

Richard Tillinghast says, "The willingness, the ardent desire even, to revise separates the poet from the person who sees poetry as therapy or self-expression."
Kim Addonizio says, "If you don't think your work needs revision, here's a tip: Don't try to be a poet. You will never–I mean never–be any good…Revision separates the professionals from the amateurs and wannabies."
Mystery writer: "Revision is what separates the poet from those who see poetry as therapy."

I'm always surprised when I talk to writers who hate the editing part of the process for some reason or another. Editing has always been one of my favorite parts. You've regurgitated the raw material into a formless shape and the shaping part is effort for sure but that’s where the magic starts to happen.

It's also where the sweat happens and without the idea of work, writing would be too fluffy to me. Besides, if I wasn’t wanting to do the work, I'd rather stretch out on the couch and read the fruits of someone else's hard labor, which is a lot less work.

I feel writers tend to fetishize first thoughts. But thinking is bigger than first thoughts, awesomely less simplistic that first thoughts. A first thought is a seed. And if you’re satisfied with seeds over flowers…

Editing is long process that happens over a lifetime. Editing is also relationship-building, not just with your first readers, but with yourself, all your other self(s).

The first of these five notes on revision is of unknown origin. I think an old friend of mine went to a workshop one day and gave me a copy of their notes but I'm not sure. It's a one-sheet thing about how revision is a "re-visioning" or a "re-imagining."

Get some distance from the poem, a "half-forgetting" distance that disconnects you from "the initial impulses" so you can see what "the poem is revealing." Then ask these questions:

What can you remove to still keep the poem's "thrust/energy/drama"?
Does the poem have enough images, ideas, metaphors, sounds, silences…often what is left out of a poem is the most immediate and powerful."
Are line lengths and line breaks doing their work to "push the poem's rhythm?"
"Have you been too concerned with what the poem is saying (some kind of wisdom-epiphany), as opposed to how it is doing?…letting local brilliances and discovered surprises…nudge it toward some unexpected inevitability?"
Have you let yourself get lost in the poem, "to grope about in the unknown, using only your peripheral vision."
Is your tone consistent?
Is there a balance of "philosophical and psychological" with enough "emotional intensity?"
Have you learned or received something from this poem you didn't have when you started writing?

The second sheet is also a mystery essay but along the margins is written Best Words, Best Order which is the title of Stephen Dobyns' popular writing guide. This sheet asks a few other interesting questions:

Does the poem destroy chronological time?
Does the poem create in the reader a desire to know? "You release a particular Logos energy…a transference…much like a pitcher releases a fast ball toward home plate that the hitter is compelled to smack with his bat over the fence. One of your core tasks as a writer is to make the reader want to swing…strong art awakens the spirit of the other."

The next essay is "Household Economy, Ruthlessness, Romance and the Art of Hospitality: Notes on Revision" by Richard Tillinghast from the book The Practice of Poetry. It begins with a quote from Dorothy Wordsworth in 1800, "Intensely hot, I made pies in the morning. William went into the wood and altered his poems."

Along with his comment about poetry-as-therapy, he states, "the impulse to improve is also a sign of humility" which he admits is "naturally rare, particularly among young writers, for whom the value of doing something remarkable is vastly increased when they can say it only took them fifteen minutes."

Snap.

He talks about Elizabeth Bishop's worksheets and Robert Lowell's drafts and how there were "few sparks of genius, few notes of originality or distinctive voice" in them and how different their initial thoughts were from what the final poems ended up to be. A perfect poem could have started as "a series of dispirited and formless reflections."

Tillinghast advises to "apprehend the poem's field of energy…Get a sense of the poem as something not defined by or limited to the words you have written down…a good poem, even in a potential form, has a shape, a life that floats above the words: 'the light around the body,' as Robert Bly put it."

He says, "savvy writing is a way of staying flexible." Metaphors he uses to describe the process: (1) getting off the freeway and going through an unknown neighborhood, (2) entertaining like a good host.

He also says revising is a "revision" but one that doesn't "knock the bloom off your original excitement." Give it just enough distance to "allow the poem to suggest new moves."

"Revising," he says, "is not so much a task as it is a romance." But he doesn't go on to define what that means. He just lays that out there.

The next mini-essay is "Waiting and Silence" by Susan Snively also from the same book, The Practice of Poetry. She starts like this:

"Franz Kafka is said to have kept a sign above his desk that read WAIT. Kafka's sign could serve as both the first and the last word on the subject of revision. But it is not a command to be passive. On the contrary, waiting is an active state of mind in which important work may take place–perhaps the most important work in the life of a poem. The most exhilarating, and therefore treacherous, moment in a poem's composition comes when the first draft is done."

She talks about the discipline of "leaving the poem alone" and how "no rules exist for how long the poet must stop fiddling with the thing." She suggests, like many do, reading the poem out loud to find "awkward enjambments, unwitting repetition and accidental howlers. Casting a cold eye on mingy little words (and, it, but, which, that) shows how to clear the underbrush from the living roots. Keeping both eye and ear alert for dead phrases and cliches."

She admits it could take months and years to finish a poem and recommends David Kalstone's Becoming a Poet. She ends with the following questions:

"What am I not allowing myself to say? Should it be said? Why do I want this poem to end? Is it a false resolution?"

In any case, she says, a poem can be "rescued by silence and waiting."

I've saved my favorite for last, Kim Adonnizio's "do-overs and revisions" from her book Ordinary Genius.

Addonnizio is such a great teacher (a very popular teacher) because she operates on both the mechanical and mysterious levels, where many poems believe you have to choose between the two ways of thinking. (Why should we have to choose?) She's also very cool and so when she says something, (I've seen this at writing festivals), the students lean in.

"A lot of people get hung up on revision," she says. "How can you be objective about your work, so you can figure out what it needs? How do you know what to let go of and what to keep?…How do you keep from losing interest in the process that felt so great at first, but now feels like you're hacking through vines with a butter knife for a machete? Welcome to the jungle."

"It's not so much a process of editing as of making unexpected discoveries."

Editing helps you build your decision-making skills, how to take what you need from books, from the "contradictory suggestions" of your readers. You can revise toward mystery; you can revise toward clarity. Here are some guidelines she's come up with:

Leave it alone for a while.
"Find the heat" – that part that makes the poem run, "the pulse"
Review your diction, word choices, tone. Are they right?
Check your sensory details and imagery. "You may think you are being quite specific when you're not” and “Sometimes you'll have plenty of detail, but it's pointless."
Review your rhythm, rhyme, sounds, syntax. "You can't look at rhythms without looking at your line breaks." She says, "Get your ear down to the poem and listen."
Review the poem's tension and surprise, the oppositional elements: "If your poem is too pretty, it needs edge. If it's graphically violent; it may need some tenderness."
Is the poem intellectual vs. intuitive: all head or all heart? "You want balance."

Things she suggests trying:

Change the tone/mood, go from funny to serious or vice versa. Make an earnest poem ironic.
Change the syntax/sentence lengths. She even talks about how to diagram your sentences like a good mechanic!
Get rid of extra adjectives/adverbs, put some back in.
Copy another poet's style in a rewrite and see how that goes.
If the poem opens with an image or statement, try it the other way.
Intensify the operating metaphor of the poem.
Reduce a long poem to less than ten lines.
Extend a short poem to two pages.
Take a narrative and focus on one moment.
Tell the true story behind a metaphorical poem.

Work through a few of these exercises even if you don't feel like it, she says. The point is to jumpstart your mental processes.

You'll find your dead ends, she says. She talks about the editing "comb-over" that is "taking thin areas and adding in more texture, more detail, more energy of language."

The part you can't teach, she says, is the mental leap, the epiphany that sometimes comes from playing around (editing). Her final advice is to "learn strategies, be stubborn, and wait–pray–for the leap."

The Essay Project: Different Takes on the Prose Poem

July 21, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So there was this kind of event that happened at Sarah Lawrence when I was there where fellow poetry students would put out flyers for little gatherings outside of classes and workshops, like impromptu discussions. I went to two of them, (that I remember anyway). One was on making a living as a technical or business writer organized by the poet Ann Cefola. I never did persue a professional writing career, (as soon as I discovered I had quite limited amounts of creative energy reserves), but Ann I became friends at that event and have remained supportive colleagues ever since that day. The other gathering was organized by a poet named Karl. I still have his flyer: "The Common Table: The Prose Poem." A bit pretentious sounding but I was always curious about prose poems and how they diverged from fiction shorts or shock fiction. At this event we were to determine the borderlines were actually very fuzzy.

The flyer quotes Charles Baudelaire, (considered the first prose poet and the one who coined the term), and his preface from Petites Poemes en Prose about the "miracle of a poetic prose…supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses."

Oh la la. The flyer then goes on to talk about this "confounding form" that is not an "unstructured monster" but "subtle" and how "you know a prose poem when you find one."

Or write one. I have written many pieces over the years I consider somewhere inbetween prose poems or fiction shorts. I've also been known to perform prose-poem opportunism, like for this poem "Orgasmic Orange" which is truly a three stanza lyric poem but here is masquarading as a prose poem.

And then I have many, many poems that intially came out as prose but they don't seem rightly prose and so were changed into verses (sometimes going back and forth a few times to figure out what they really were). "Fortune" is a recent example of a poem that initially came out like a longish prose poem and then was shaped back into tighter verses. And I think "tight" or "loose" here are my personal keywords when determining which direction to go in.

But nobody seems to agree on what the rules or the tools are or how to define the prose poem.

There's an excerpt in this packet from Introduction to the Prose Poem: An International Anthology edited by Michael Benedikt who agrees we are "in the midst of" an exploration on what prose poetry is," a genre "self-consciously written in prose" and forgoing the device of the line break. He says a key word for him is "intense," and says the form has a structure with its "own independent internal logic…metaphor and analogy" using "a music more internal" and "subtle" where the "line is not present to underline musical effects."

He notes that some of "the major poets in verse" worked with prose poems toward the end of their careers "when their command of poetry and their sense of its possibilities were presumably at their most practiced and acute:" Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme and Valery.

The packet then includes a deep dive into Michael Benedikt's poem "The Meat Epitaph" and how he drafted versions. He was very organized and kept each draft coded in file folders! My notes on this section quote Princeton Encyclopedia's definition of the prose poem as a form of contractions that undermine the action, how over time, poetic devices have become less effective and what does a line by itself mean; often it contradicts the sentence it is in ," [which is what I've always liked about it].

Anyway, Benedikt talks about the contradiction he was working with in his poem: how an "impious human" can write "morally concerned…poetry without betraying either the impiousness of the Self or the seriousness of the subject."

Benedikt talks about aspects of his process and whether prose poetry is "freely associative" and how structure finds its way into free verse and what poetic divices are still in play in the prose poem but that prose poems often read with a kind of "flat" style and borrow qualities from the surrealists.

My marginalia from the conversation has extra definitions:

Self-consciously a poem in prose using poetic devices: sound, meter, repetition" [but short fiction can also do this]
"5 elements: (1) logic of the unconscious; (2) every day speech; (3) relativity, the idea that reality is questionable [more an idea of modernism really]; (4) wit and humor, black humor; (5) politically and socially skeptical, questioning of fixed ideas [again, modernism really]

We also talked about how pieces like "A Potato" by Robert Bly have a kind of fable-like quality, that these pieces are not always linear, not always "about something" or to "further some idea."

One question remains for me based on one note toward the end of the conversation: "form of prose poem is rectangle (box); pack only essentials."

Is this true? Or is there room for more superfluous storytelling in prose pieces than verse? Because usually when I convert something back into verse, a lot has to go and I shave out quite a bit. So are prose poems more economical than verse poems? In some ways they might need fewer words than a long-form poem but have more breathing room than a short lyric poem has or a haiku obviously.

Packet poems:

"Bloating and Its Remedies" by Jim Heynen
"Cows in Trouble" by Steve Martin (one of my favorite shorts/prose poems)
"The Meat Epitaph" by Michael Benedikt
"The Five Fingers of the Hand" by Aloysius Bertrand
"The Old Woman's Despair" by Charles Baudelaire
"The Sirens" by Franz Kafka
"The Victory Burlesk" by Margaret Atwood
"A Potato" by Robert Bly (another one of my favorites that I typed out here)
"The Wheelbarrow" by Russell Edison
"The Broken" by W. S. Merwin
"Vespers" by W. H. Auden
"Clocks" by Julio Cortazar
"Pretty" by Jayne Anne Phillips
"Laura's by Gunter Eich

At the meeting, Karl also provided a bulleted list of poets who have tried the form, a list which is too long to recreate here but here are some highlights not already mentioned above:

Charles Mallarme
Arthur Rimbaud
Juan Ramon Jimenez
William Carlos Williams
Jorge Luis Borges
Tomas Transtromer
Charles Simic
Pablo Neruda

I would add to this list:

Gertrude Stein (why does she always get left out of these things?)

The Essay Project: Childhood Trauma in Art

July 12, 2022 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

The next essay is a bit of a departure from the other SLC class essays, It’s the preface and two chapters from The Untouched Key, Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness by Alice Miller (translated from German).

In the book, psychologist Miller explores the way childhood events affect paitners and writers and how she can see childhood influence in pieces of art. She considers these clues to works “lost keys.”

The first chapter is on Pablo Picasso, particularly his “late works in Basel” painted when “he was 90 years old.”

She talks about how he “disregarded all convention as well as his own technical ability and attained what he had wished or all his life: the spontaneity and freedom of a child, which his perfectionism robbed him of in childhood…I seemed to be sensing a man’s last strenuous efforts to express the most hidden secrets of his life with every means at his disposal before it’s too late, before death takes the brush from his hand.”

Miller says, “a great deal has been written about the sexual themes…attributed to his declining libido” but she feels the sorrow exhibited in his late work reaches back to childhood trauma and not “an aging man’s regrets at his waning sexual vitality.”

She sensed this, she says, from “the themes," “the force of the brush movements,” “the vehement way he sometimes applied the color and conjured up new feelings that had to be given form,” his “haste to produce the unsayable, to say it with colors.”

But then again, these things could indicate almost anything.

But Miller continues, “since the efficiency of defense mechanisms decreases in old age, since repression works with less ingenuity, it was possible, I thought, that traces of childhood trauma not evident before might become visible in his late works.”

And the trauma Miller explores was based on his intense “reluctance to go to school” which was presumed to have been caused by a 1884 earthquake in Málaga when he was three years old. His parents had to flee with the family and the stress of the escape possibly caused his mother to go into premature labor days later before the family could safely return home. She sees implicit support in a poem Picasso wrote in 1936 about a cacophony of screaming (children, women, birds, flowers, beams and stones, bricks, chairs, curtains…paper, etc.) Miller sees a visual depiction of the earthquake (as seen by a child) in Guernica (1937) with its “horror, terror, and helplessness…total destruction…he even painted himself over to the right as the bewildered child in the cellar.”

Miller says Picasso “always abandoned a style once he had developed it…but the theme of the distorted human body haunted him all his life.” She says “little children often express their traumas in a painting….it took forty years before he was able to paint like a child, that is, to let his unconscious speak.”

She admits most biographers gloss over Picasso’s childhood in total, and this earthquake’s significance in particular.

I’ve been exploring childhood myself (in some subconscious ways, too) so this was an interesting topic for me. But like all things, I half believe it and half don’t. She’s probably right in general but she simply doesn’t have enough evidence in Picasso’s case to make a definitive, convincing case; so she just rehashes the same arguments multiple times and across many pages as if rewording the few pieces of evidence will prove a theory to be true.

Very sketchy biographical information does not equate to threads drawn out from years of therapy. As a psychologist and psychoanalyst, Miller would know this.

In the other chapter included in the set, Miller talks about an exhibit of Chaïm Soutine. She draws parallels between the childhood's of Soutine and Hitler and how one man became an artist and the other a despot.

She talks about Soutine’s paintings filled with “strange, twisted, tormented figures…houses, streets, and squares…that looked as though they might start to quiver at any moment…I asked myself whether the extremely threatening situation of the Nazi Holocaust had motivated, or even compelled, Soutine to paint the work as shaking and falling apart.”

She talks about how Soutine and Hitler were both punished severely with “brute force” for wanting to become artists, Soutine because his family were Orthodox Jews and Hitler because his family was totalitarian. In Soutine’s case, he had an advocate in his mother which helped “him develop a sense of justice.” Hitler had no advocates.

Miller then goes on to talk about the childhood of Paul Celan and “the witnesses who rescued him” from his yard-locked life where “the world lies on the other side of the chestnut trees” and Dostoyevsky whose father “treated his serfs with such cruelty that in 1839 they murdered him” and Stalin and his childhood of extreme poverty not dissimilar to Charlie Chaplin's but whose “experience of being loved can be sensed in all the Chaplin films. In spite of hunger, misery, and calamity, there is always room for feelings, for tears, for tenderness, for life.”

Miller says, “the truth won’t allow itself to be silenced completely, even with the help of poetry, philosophy, or mystical experiences. It insists on being heard, like every child whose voice has not been completely destroyed.”

It’s possible these conclusions are too simple in the face of an annoyingly tangled and complex lives. But that doesn’t mean her ideas might not be on to some clues regarding these artworks or that we can’t use this to explore our own ideas and executions, to explore our own childhoods.

Over a year ago, my mother sent me a box of things she had collected from my childhood. Confronting that box was a bit shocking and eye-opening for me. It opened a door to my childhood that is still bearing fruit. And it also has me thinking about the ways in which childhood and young adult events are still shaping my behavior and reflections today.