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And So the Summer Departs

September 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

To-do List Courtesy of Reddit

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here…well since our Essay Project came to a close in July. When I finish a big project I always feel suddenly a little untethered.

Alarmingly, this year has gone by faster than any year before (it would seem). Cruel summer and turned into cruel fall. Soon it will be Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The Halloween stores are already open and just a moment ago it was spring and I was finishing up migrating websites. The whole year was on the horizon and my day job was really feeling great. (They gave us ice cream!)

The year of 2023 has brought me….well, things. For one, the day job has turned into the gaslit labors of Sisyphus. And the somewhat dreadful news about Artificial Intelligence has taken a lot of wind from the sails of my proliferating digital poems.

I spent a few minutes yesterday with no small bit of ennui considering if I’ve actually accomplished anything this year.

But I have.

I’ve finished two multi-year online blogging projects on Cher Scholar and we’ve wrapped up the Essay Project here. I did create a few new browser-based poems and the The Electrical Dictionary of Melancholy Absolutes hit 100 definitions quite unbelievably this week.

And the in-progress stuff continues to march along. Although it’s been a slow slog, I’ve been working on a big course-like survey about the poems of American history. I stared about two years ago and I’m just now seeing the finish line. Monsieur Big Bang’s new Intro to Anthro podcast has me thinking about what format that survey course will take. Should it be a podcast or an online class? Should I use an educational platform for a fee or just host it myself for free (like a podcast)? I still don’t know. Podcasts have higher visibility but that format leaves out the possibility of fun PowerPoints and videos of petroglyph from my neighborhood. In any case, that’s a decision probably a year or two away.

The Katharine Hepburn poem is underway and slowing forming into itself. I’ve also started a new browser-based poem about my paternal grandfather based on some work my brother Randy finished a few years ago researching the history of our grandparents in Jicarilla, San Carlos, Hopi, Tohono Oʼodham, at the Indian School at Stewart, Nevada, and their final years in Roy, New Mexico.

I also need to dust off the Braille machine I purchased a few years ago and figure out how to write poems on that thing.

I have a little stack of experimental poetry books to review going back to last fall of 2022.

There are some fun trips ahead, too. Our group formerly known as the Sarah Lawrence writing group, now known as the Difficult Book Club, held a reunion dinner recently in New York City. It was so much fun, we’ve made plans to meet again in Winslow early next year.

And I have poems forthcoming in a spring 2024 anthology of Albuquerque poets coming out from University of New Mexico Press.

It’s a lot of work. I’ve made a big change in my day job hours that will go into effect at the first of the new year and hopefully that will give me more time finish all of this stuff. There’s that novel too.

So I guess that’s good, right? I feel like I’ve hit a plateau somehow. Oy. These are times for baby steps.

Anyway, in other news my friend Christopher gave me this book for my birthday, a coloring book created by Jane Heyes, peppered with Shakespearean, Romantic and 20th Century British poetry (except for one Walt Whitman poem floating in there, “A Glimpse“).

Maybe I should spend a few months just coloring around poems like I’m William Blake

The Essay Project: Last Call

July 19, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We find ourselves at the last essay project essay. The rest of the stack is pretty much just dregs, articles I don’t really want to read again let alone discuss.

Somewhat unrelated, I spent about four hours last week working on a Big Bang essay about a Lunch & Learn on Artificial Intelligence I attended. I was writing about AI as it intersects with anorexia, intuition and calibrating toward reality.

But I soon decided not to post it because it felt too revealing. Something significant also happened at work that week to made posting the piece ill-advised. But I was triggered very personally by the discussion about AI in ways I didn’t expect.

I do want to make a final comment about Suzanne Gardiner’s Sarah Lawrence College essay class and my need to constantly calibrate toward reality.

I was pretty quiet in this class, mostly because it huge, like 35-40 people if I remember correctly. Everyone wanted to take it. We all sat in concentric circles around a big table upstairs in Slonim House. I was also a first-year in the Graduate Writing Program and there were many second-years students in the class more than willing to pontificate. There were so many smart people in that class.

I involved myself in only two debates (as I recall), first to make a glib joke about T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” poem, (“a poem with more footnotes than lines has a big problem with flow!”), and second to argue with Suzanne Gardinier about the nature of reality. Gardinier was then kind of known as an activist poet and her poems were, of course, concerned in reality.

As I was even then obsessively calibrating toward reality, (which the anorexia AI piece was ultimately about), we got into an impassioned discussion about a chair being a chair. So clearly was it a solid chair we would sit on it, she said. We can all agree on the reality of a chair. And I said something about how a chair is not in fact a solid but an appearance of a solid, in fact an unsolid of moving atoms (or whatever silliness I said). The point was a chair was an idea of solid, a human compromise in believing a reality that didn’t really exist but that was useful to our need to sit somewhere. And then I think we agreed to disagree or we saw each other’s point of view or something friendly at the end. What a great class that was.

Writing is just as much about how we negotiate our reality. And this brings us to our last piece, a compilation of short chapters from Natalie Goldberg from her very spiritual writing guide, Writing Down the Bones, which seems like a very moving and warm place to finish.

(Somehow, I managed to end my essay project the same week I completed documentation of the variety shows of Sonny & Cher. Which is weird.)

But anyway…I’ve taken many one-day workshops over the years and in at least two of them, sections of Goldberg’s very popular book were distributed, probably because Goldberg combines writing with a kind of religious practice. She quotes gurus of Buddhism and talks about Zen meditation and going deep into writing,

“This book is about writing…it is also about using writing…as a way to help you penetrate your life.”

We start with her Introduction which has lots of good tidbits:

“In college I was in love with literature. I mean wild about it. I typed poems by Gerald Manley Hopkins over and over again so I could memorize them…it never occurred to me to write, though I secretly wanted to marry a poet.

After I graduated college and discovered that no one was going to hire me to read novels and swoon over poetry, three friends and I started a co-op restaurant and cooked and served natural food lunches in the basement of the Newman Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This was the early seventies and one year before the opening of the restaurant I had tasted my first avocado. The restaurant was called Naked Lunch, after the novel by William Burroughs—“a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

See? Right there Goldberg masterfully talks about writing while talking about life as well.

She talks about “learning to trust my own mind” and how she happened upon Erica Jong’s poetry, Fruits and Vegetables, which illustrated for her how to write about her own subjects.

“A friend once told me ‘Trust in love and it will take you where you want to go.’ I want to add, ‘Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go’.”

Learning, she says, “is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life…to say deep down what you need to say.”

Beginner’s Mind

“Each time is a journey with no maps.” She doesn’t spend much time talking about how to attain beginners mind before each poem. Instead, she recommends some practical matters: a fast-moving pen to keep up with your thoughts, a cheap notebook so you won’t feel afraid to write crappy drafts.

“This is your equipment, like hammer and nails. Feel fortunate—for very little money you are in business!”

She even likes spiral notebooks with “Garfield, the Muppets, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars” covers. She uses them as pneumonic devices to remember which notes and and drafts are in which notebooks. She also says, “I can’t take myself too seriously when I open up a Peanuts notebook.”

She talks about how many writers work off scraps of paper. My father wrote his lists of to-dos on discarded 1960s-era computer cards. Goldberg talks about William Carlos Williams using prescription pads.

She talks about how physical writing is and how it matters what process you use, composing on typewriters or writing by hand. Computers weren’t around, apparently, but she does mention a Macintosh computer and writing into a tape recorder. She says she uses different tools for different projects.

First Thoughts

Goldberg talks about freewriting in timed exercises to explore first thoughts, and she includes the usual tips: keep your hand moving; don’t cross stuff out; ignore spelling, punctuation and grammar; lose control; don’t get logical; “go for the jugular;” if your writing gets “scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.”

The point is to burn through your energy, she says, “unobstructed” by your “internal censor.” Get to the feels, the “oddities of your mind.” This is all about exploration. The ego “tries to be in control, tries to prove the world is permanent and solid, enduring and logical.”

She then goes back to Zen meditation, how sitting is a discipline. “You must be a great warrior when you contact first thoughts and write from them…you may feel great emotions and energy that will sweep you away.” She talks about how her beginning students often break down and cry. You must not be thrown off, she says. “This is the discipline…inspiration means ‘breathing in,’ breathing in God. You actually become larger than yourself.”

Writing as Practice

Writing is like running, she says. You practice whether you want to or not or you will atrophy. “One poem or story doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s the process of writing and life that matters.” She quotes Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist master to say, “We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.”

Composting

Goldberg is the writer who originated this idea of mental composting, the process that happens with all those inspired notes we take and never use, all our experience just “sifting through our consciousness.” She reminds us that Hemmingway wrote about Michigan in Paris (and then about Paris from somewhere else.)

“From our decomposition of the thrown-out egg shells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories.”

When you take stabs at something but it doesn’t quite work, this means the compost isn’t ready. It isn’t entirely about your free will.

She quotes Katagiri Roshi to say, “Your little will can’t do anything. It takes Great Determination. Great Determination doesn’t mean just you making an effort. It means the whole universe is behind you and with you—the birds, trees, sky, moon, and ten directions.”

Goldberg adds, “Suddenly, after much composting, you are in alignment with the stars or the moment or the dining-room chandelier above your head, and your body opens and speaks.”

Wow.

“We aren’t running everything,” she says.

No, ma’am.

Artistic Stability

Goldberg talks a lot about her life in New Mexico, teaching and practicing, about a friend out near Taos building Earth Ships with old tires and how she allowed this friend to see her bad writing and how moving the experience was.

“We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.”

Original Detail

Goldberg talks about how original detail in your pieces leads to groundedness. You don’t have to be rigid with it. “The imagination is capable of detail transplants, but using the details you actually know and have seen will give your writing believability and truthfulness. It creates a good solid foundation from which you can build.”

But you have to relax, she says. “Don’t be self-conscious.”

The Power of Detail

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical….recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter…Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the real truth of who we are…we must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.”

I mean!

(But then how do we decide which real things really exist? Ok, there I go.)

This is a fine place to leave it.

The Essay Project: The Lead and The Ending

July 5, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

When I was an undergrad at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (or UMSL), I took a class in magazine feature writing because that seemed like a feasible career (instead of teaching). You could just pick a random topic, research it and write about it. Kind of like what Monsieur Big Bang does now on his new anthropology podcast. In my romantic mythical imaginings one could make their own hours and never get bored.

Problem was I was too shy to actually go out there and interview strangers. And at the time I had a huge phone phobia. This was before I became a Kelly Girl and they sent me out on all these nightmare receptionist temp jobs ((all those phone calls!!)); but then I had a total Schitt’s Creek driving test moment and realized “nobody cares.”

But that epiphany came much later. Back at UMSL I stewed in anxiety for a few weeks and then ended up just interviewing my own grandmother about her life on Indian reservations, which was a complete cop-out but the result completely enthralled the teacher and I ended up getting an A. Plus I then had three cassette tapes of my grandmother doing her great storytelling thing (and my funny Aunt Edna for a bit, too). Having run out of interesting family members, I then had to turn to my dog Helga’s veterinarian, interviewing him about ways to rescue your pets during house fires, floods and tornados. I’ve never had a cat so learning about scooping one out of their hiding places with a fishing net was very informative.

Anyway, in this feature writing class we also read William Zinsser’s guide On Writing Well, particularly the chapters on “The Lead” and “The Ending.” Back at Parkway North High School, we had already learned about the juicy non-sequitur lead paragraph. I used it when I wrote my first high school comp paper on the untold logistical and political food-delivery problems behind the efforts of Band Aid and U.S.A. for Africa. In that paper I somehow miraculously managed a lead involving Sonny & Cher. Don’t ask me how. But I got some margin-scribbled praise for that feat of lead-footwork

So I was informed about the magic of the lead, which according to Zinsser is “the most important sentence in any article…[because] if it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it is equally dead.”

But you can’t be deader than dead, sentence #2.

And although these chapters are about features and prose writing, this is similarly true for poems, maybe even more so because readers tend to skim and skip around a set of poems more than they do for prose and abandon rates for poems are arguably higher.

Zinsser does acknowledge that in literary pieces, you can delay your point a bit longer than in mainstream feature writing. I abuse this allowance all the time. But Zinsser warns, “I urge you not to count on the reader to stick around. He is a fidgety fellow who wants to know–very soon–what’s in it for him.”

Sheesh. Aint it the truth though.

Zinsser has some ideas to help us with the lead. He literally says to “Cajole him with:”

freshness
novelty
parody
humor
surprise
an unusual idea, an interesting fact
a question

“Anything will do as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve….but never patronizing him…”

Sounds uncomfortably like flirting to me. Or the perils of Scheherazade.

“Next the lead must do some real work,” Zinsser says. Like a date, I guess. Get to your proposition statement, Zinsser says, “but don’t dwell…coax the reader a little more…continue to build…adding solid detail.”

Don’t be a tease. Nobody likes a tease. Even the reader. Don’t frustrate the reader by not going anywhere. Ok, there are some readers who enjoy going nowhere sort of experimentally, but finding those readers can be tricky and most likely other less-accommodating readers will find you first.

Zinsser has some good advice here about your first whole paragraph: “Take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph–it is the crucial springboard to the next paragraph.” First and last sentences. Very important. Give them “an extra twist of humor or surprise,” a little snap and pizazz. Or find funny quotations for those spots.

Zinsser also believes in substance over style. He says “salvation often lies not in the writer’s style but in some odd fact that he was able to unearth.” This is true for feature writers 100% more than for poets. Poets can be all style and little substance. But some substance is good. Have a little bit of a point. Unless your point is pointlessness. But hasn’t that been done to death already?

He advises us to “always collect more material than you will eventually use.” Good advice for all writers.

“An even more important moral is to look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people.” He says to read your telephone bill fillers, read the back of menus and catalogues and through junk mail. He says this, and it’s invaluably true, “you can tell the temper of a society by what patio accessories it wants. Our daily landscape is thick with absurd messages and portents.”

(I see from my marginalia in the late 1980s I had to look up the meaning of the word ‘portent.’)

Zinsser excerpts his favorite leads from Joan Didion (“7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,” her essay on Howard Hughes from Slouching Toward Bethlehem), Garry Wills (from his book Nixon Agonistes) and actor Richard Burton’s essay on rugby.

So quickly, what does Zinsser have to say about an ending? He says few writers know how to stop well, but that “you should give as much thought to choosing your last sentence as you did to your first. Well, almost as much.”

“A good last sentence–or paragraph–is a joy in itself. It has its own virtues which give the reader a lift and which linger when the article is over.” This is even more important to the poem, which often demands to resonate, more than prose. “The perfect ending should take the reader slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right to him.”

He elaborates:

“It is like a curtain line in a theatrical comedy. We are in the middle of a scene (we think) when suddenly one of the actors says something funny, or outrageous, or epigrammatic, and the lights go out. We are momentarily startled to find the scene is over, and then delighted by the aptness of how it ended. what delights us, subconsciously, is the playwright’s perfect control.”

“For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point that you want to make, look for the nearest exit.”

I find this maybe is too pat. Knowing went to end is something that takes practice. It’s a feeling. It’s understanding the flow you’re in, the current that’s taking you along. When to leave is an art, not a science. It’s refined calibration and a fine-tune. The way to get good at it is to keep working at it (and to keep reading delightfully crafty endings).

When in doubt, Zinsser always comes back to that funny quotation, to end with “some remark which has a sense of finality” or “adds an unexpected last detail.”

So when you don’t know how to end it, let someone else do it. (I’m here to tell you this article is breaking up with you.) This scheme not only provides a get-away vehicle but emotional distance. Sometimes what you don’t say at the end is just as important as what you do say. (Joan Didion was a master of this.) Likewise, Monsieur Big Bang’s favorite song (and he quotes it all the time) is by singer-songwriter Mike Stenson who elaborates about the end of flirting itself when he tells the story of inviting a girl to see The Rolling Stones. She never called him back. He surmises maybe she didn’t get the message but he never followed up. Instead, he wrote a song where he says, “I got your message when I never got your call.”

~~~

So, does that quote work as an ending? Yeah, I don’t think it does. Because Mike Stinson-fan Monsieur Big Bang did actually end up calling me twice in the beginning and I honestly didn’t get the first message. So the moral of the story here is that sometimes you can end a thing too soon.

Meditations on Milestones

June 26, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 1 Comment

Three stories:

One: a project that took so long, everything changed

I was very excited Sunday when I suddenly hit a major milestone with my Katharine Hepburn epic. I finished sorting through all my notes. Woohoo!

Okay, this may not seem like a big deal, but I took my first note while sitting on the floor of my living room in my Yonkers apartment 25 years ago.

It was a basement apartment steps away from a beautiful aqueduct trail running up the Hudson River near Odell and Warburton. I used to walk my dog there twice a day. The apartment was always freezing (and flooding) and everyone else was on rent strike…except me because nobody bothered to tell the new tenants about it.

I would gladly have joined the strike just to be able to phone my grandfather in Oregon to tell him I was finally on strike for something, at least something other than that time he talked me into going on strike in their Port Orford living room the day I was disgruntled about having to eat fish again for dinner. He even helped me make a picket sign and sent me pacing around the room with it.

Of course, he would have asked about the picket lines and I would have said, “There’s no line, Grandpa. I’m just not paying my rent! Kickin’ ass for the working class!”

Anyway, aside from reading the occasional new Katharine Hepburn biography, it wasn’t until this year that I made a concerted effort to compile all the notes from all the books, magazines and journals. And it kind of feels like 25 years, (on and off, but mostly off), digging into a basement and now I can start pouring the foundation and raising the walls.

But here’s the thing, a lot has changed for women in 25 years. And I am finding that assumptions I made about Katharine Hepburn back then, assumptions I was pretty sure most other women shared as well, they aren’t so certain anymore.

For example, Katharine Hepburn herself, both her parents and her Aunt Edith together worked for and symbolized sexual, economic and reproductive freedom for women. You don’t have to search very far on social media to find men (and women) fighting against those very ideals Hepburn stood for and defended. Conservatives are attacking reproductive freedom on many fronts, not just abortion. Contraception, control over one’s virginity or sexuality, and the entirety of women’s roles in the workplace are now contested spaces. I saw a tweet yesterday attacking a woman’s decision not to procreate at all, even through abstinence.

So I can no longer tell the story I was going to tell in the same way I was going to tell it, with the assumptions I was going to make about how women are allowed to be. The direct quotes I had been cataloging from Hepburn and her allies, quotes which still sound empowered and fearless aren’t going to land the same way for everyone. Even the assumption that an empowered woman is a positive thing is now up for debate again. I can’t even assume Katharine Hepburn can be understood as a great American hero in today’s political climate.

Two: hypertext heroics

I also finished a new browser piece, a more complicated piece using those iframes we once implemented back in the late 1990s with all those boxes and ugly scroll bars everywhere.

And usually, when I try to return to these older HTML design elements, I introduce a whole host of problems for myself and have to find work-arounds and make compromises. For example, in this piece I had wanted to use the new search technology Text Fragments. You’ve seen this in action if you’ve ever searched for something and were directed to a webpage with the exact search text highlighted. My grand vision was to show highlighted text from one frame link to another frame’s text. But Text Fragments won’t work at all with iframes so I had to scrap that architectural pipe dream.

I was telling a relative in Kansas City recently about writing browser poems and how I was going about them. And she said, “So you’re trying to make them hard to read?” And I said, “Yes.”

Because it’s hard to read on browsers. It’s frustrating on many levels. That’s what makes a book so pleasant…to this day. And pages and poems don’t get lost in a book. They don’t suddenly stop working. On the other hand, books are relatively passive. Links make you do something. Even something as microscopic as clicking a mouse button. Browsers and books, they each have their capabilities and failures.

Three, the notebook

A few weeks ago I started to use a handmade notebook I’ve been saving for a special purpose. I purchased it about 10 years ago but whenever I need a new notebook, I always go for the dollar-store ones first.

I finally decided on a use for this best notebook collecting favorite poem titles from poems I find on Twitter. And since I am reminded of the day I purchased the notebook each time I use it, I’ve been thinking about the people I met that day and looking up their names on Wikipedia. This weekend I discovered two of them have died. (Sigh.)

Nonetheless, this is an amusing story about meeting somewhat-famous people and how it doesn’t always go so well.

When we first moved to New Mexico in 2010 we lived in Santa Fe. I was working for ICANN in Los Angeles but working from home in Santa Fe. So I wasn’t meeting any new friends. This is partly because Santa Fe has become a wealthy and cliquish city. But also, I just wasn’t getting out. I met my friend Maryanne on a bus tour to see Greer Garson’s historic John Gaw Meem house on the Pecos River. For years, she was the only friend I had in Santa Fe.

I was even attempting to glom on to Monsieur Big Bang’s friends from Highlands University and the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. Well, I only did this once but I befriended one of his anthropology professors, a woman from Israel living in New Mexico to study Navajo culture. She was a cancer survivor and involved in a Santa Fe charity whereby seriously rich people were raising money to help poor, rural New Mexico cancer patients afford the stupidly expensive Santa Fe motels when they came in town for treatments.

So I would invite the Professor to dinner and she would invite me to these charity art shows and events in Santa Fe, One day the two of us traveled to the small New-Mexican town of Galisteo for the town’s home studio art tour. Because it’s always fun to go house to house and see everybody’s studio set up, especially in rural towns with especially high concentrations of artists.

Galisteo is interesting in itself. All I ever knew about it was that Burl Ives lived there. If you drive through the town, it appears to be just another shady ancient and rundown New Mexican village. But shockingly those dilapidated-looking adobes are actually multi-million-dollar retirement homes. I remember the Professor telling me the CEO of Victoria’s Secret lived in one of them! How did those people even find out about Galisteo? And is it fair for a bunch of rich people to buy up a quaint little New Mexican village?

Anyway, so we went from swanky shack to swanky shack looking at everyone’s art spreads and we finished up at a house on a hill, my Professor’s friend from the cancer charity, a French woman named Evelyn Franceschi. She was a strikingly beautiful woman who had an attic full of delightfully charming French-looking things she had made by hand: books, dolls, pictures. She even made her own French chocolates. (I bought some.) She was also quirky and charming and I bought the aforementioned notebook from her and loved it so much I hated to use it for ten years.

While we were there, another friend rode up on a motorcycle. We all stood in the dark, adobe living room chatting. Evelyne found out from the Professor that Monsieur Big Bang was working on an anthropology degree and Evelyne told me we should come back sometime to see petroglyphs on a mesa bordering their property (we never did). When the Professor told Evelyne I was a writer, she told me her husband was a writer, too, and had just written a book of local Galisteo history. I was very interested in reading about Galisteo that she told me I should ask her husband about it when he came back. As if on cue, her husband arrived minutes later. I went up to him and said, “Evelyne tells me you’re a writer. What sort of things do you write?”

I was expecting him to show me his stack of book copies on Galisteo history. But with a stone face he said, “I write plays.”

And I said, “Oh.”

I remember the sound of disappointment in my voice and I could even feel my face crumple up a bit at this unfortunate news. I mean plays are nice but how often do you meet a Galisteo historian?

And so that was the conversation killer. He looked at me with the face of someone who is annoyed that you do not know who he is, but not annoyed enough for him to tell you. We each went our separate ways and I never did learn the history of Galisteo.

The Professor and I took our leave and as we were walking to her car, her motorcycle friend comes up behind us. As she’s putting on her helmet she says to me, “You know who that was, don’t you?”

And I hate it when people say that because they know very well you don’t know who that was. But anyway I said, “No. Who?”

“He wrote The Elephant Man.”

“Oh…wow,” I said. “That is impressive.”

She told us he moved to Galisteo in order to not be found. His name was Bernard Pomerance and he died in 2017 of cancer. Evelynn died in 2015, about two years after we all met in her house in Galisteo. All things considered, I’m very happy to have this souvenir of my social awkwardness, this lovely notebook handmade by the charming Evelyn Franceschi, wife of the playwright who wrote The Elephant Man and possibly other bits of Galisteo history.

The Essay Project: Silences

June 21, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In 1978 the writer Tillie Olsen published a book called Silences, “a landmark survey of disenfranchised literary voices and the forces that seek to silence them.” In 2003, the book was re-released.

This essay was photocopied from that book and appears to be its introduction.

Olsen wrote often about the political and social reasons why women have been prevented from writing. In our Sarah Lawrence College essay class back in the mid-1990s we usually passed around purely craft essays. But occasionally someone would pass around a political essay, which is kind of interesting since our professor, Susanne Gardinier, was a political poet. I’m actually surprised we didn’t cover more political pieces, just to, like, kiss-up to the teacher.

In the first part of this essay Olsen talks about creative silences in general, why artists may choose to go quiet.

“Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all….what are creation’s needs for full functioning?”

She talks about natural silences, those which represent a “necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation.”

But Olsen really wants to talk about unnatural silences, like for example Thomas Hardy ceasing to write novels and taking a religious vow that required he refrain from writing poetry. Or Arthur Rimbaud abandoning “the unendurable literary world.” Herman Melville’s needing to earn a living.

Akin to those silences are what Olsen calls “hidden silences: work aborted, deferred, denied,” censorship silences, self-censorship, “the knife of the perfectionist,” problems of focus or will-power, silences created by self abuse. Ernest Hemmingway is her example for this type. She borrows his own quote from “The Snows of Kilmanjaro”:

“He had destroyed his talent himself—by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.”

She then talks about silences caused by long foreground periods. Walt Whitman is a good example here and writers who didn’t even start up until their forties, fifties, sixties (Laura Ingalls Wilder). Some writers had so many life demands, they needed “the sudden lifting of responsibility” or the “immobilization of a long illness” to carve out the time to write.

Rainer Maria Rilke was so possessive of his time, his need for “a great isolation,” that he refused to help support his wife and daughter at all, let alone feed the dog. (He didn’t even attend his daughter’s wedding). I’ve heard Mary Oliver suggest as much in an essay, that’s all is fair in love and war and writing. Emily Dickinson, in her own way, withdrew from the world.

I’m just gonna say I can’t live like that. I mean, I can hermit up as much as the next monk and I feel no great rush to publish, but I can’t refuse time to people. And honestly, I don’t feel I have to. Maybe this is because I was an administrative assistant for over ten years. I learned how to multi-task. Maybe because I’m obsessed with the idea of lost time I’ve learned how to hoard it.

I’m actually multi-tasking the writing of this blog today as we speak.

I’m pretty good at “time management.” That said, I have failed to carve out the time to write the novel and the short stories. But I’ve always considered this more of a challenge of will power and work-life balance; but hey, that excuse could just as well be a rationalization.

I’m sure I could produce out more if I worked at it nine to five or even 9 to noon. But, like Joan Didion, I didn’t want to teach (or write screenplays or finagle inheritances). So then…life choices.

But I’m having the dog. Between the dog and the novel, the dogs gonna win that battle.

Olsen says, “Most writers must work regularly at something,” if not teaching than something out in the big world. But “substantial, creative word demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it.” And here she mentions Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, who produced quantity while holding down other jobs. She quotes from Franz Kafka’s diary to illustrate his struggles finding time to write.

From 1911, “I finish nothing.”

From 1917 “the strain of keeping down living forces.”

This is especially true, Olsen says, of women. Many women writers see decades between books, and not due to “lying fallow” in order to fertilize ideas. Olsen compiles a long list of the most successful women writers of the past century, (I’m assuming she means 1800s), who either had no children or had servants to help with the children. Then she lists accomplished 1900s women writers who also had “household help or other special circumstances.”

She then rightly poo-poos the belief some hold that women don’t need to create because they can “create babies.”

(For the love of..)

I need to stop now…and seethe.

The Museum of Didion

June 20, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I used to work with Natalie years ago at a company called Agribuys in Torrance, California. We’ve stayed friends and she came to visit last fall. While we were standing in the outdoor car of the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad train in Northern New Mexico, she said the Joan Didion exhibit, (“Joan Didion, What She Means“), had finally opened at the Hammer Museum in LA. What? I completely lost track of that. And I had only two months left to see it!

Which I did finally in January with Julie (Natalie lives in the San Francisco Bay area) and we went right after my plane landed (and after a quick breakfast at the old stalwart Dinah’s). That’s how excited I was to make it the first thing in an event-packed weekend. It was raining the whole weekend, which drove people to do things they normally didn’t, like see museum exhibits and the Didion crowd was so big they had to break us up into two tours, one to start at the beginning of the exhibit and one to start and the end (our group).

After the first ten minutes of our guide drawing out visitor insights from two Anne Truitt and Martin Puryear abstracts (with questions like what does this say to you? And you? And you?) and nary a mention of Didion herself or what Hilton Als might have been thinking when adding the abstracts here, Julie and I peeled off to make our own way through the show.

And to be honest we kind of flitted through the five or six rooms because by this time we were tired and exasperated with the rain and the excitement of me being back in LA after a few Covid years. We focused mainly on the personal items and pop culture subjects, which generally happens with Julie and I are together and thinking with the same brain. I knew I’d need the book to make sense of how the original art pieces selected by Hilton Als all fit together in the Joan Didion story.

The exhibit was the brainchild of writer Hilton Als. In his essay he said he tends to like writers who are mental frontiersmen, writers who equivocate sometimes and writers who aren’t afraid to have second thoughts. Me too and I think that’s why I also like Lester Bangs (although he works in a much messier, wild west way). To see somebody change their mind is a very impressive thing.

And this wasn’t simply an exhibit of Joan Didion’s life, or her ideas or all the writings. It was an exhibit of how her experiences can intersect with the images and sculptures of other artists, artists who are thinking about the same dilemas or covering eras she had also lived in and wrote about.

Als talks about her flat tone, her family myths of self-reliance and pragmatism, the whole mythology of her ancestry of California frontiersman. She tired to “carry that on” in the vein of “seeds got carried.” But she later found those ideals were “recklessly self-inventing.” So important in my connection to Joan Didion. How our family histories try (and sometimes fail) to propel us. Als talks about her emotional detachment, her family idea that the future was a space (the West), a territory, a freedom, and yet how frontiers are susceptible, Didion came to feel, to kinds of “crackpot theories.” This is a concrete example of Manifest Destiny as a crackpot theory.

Als talks about her efforts in turning over the wounds of losing her daughter and husband prematurely, how astute she was about loss but how her attempts were ultimately failures to “understand what could not be understood.” He talks about Didion’s idea of how writers “look for stories that describe the self to the self.” But also how Didion was different in that she could find herself in other peoples’ stories, people who were very different from her. I always found this impressive, too. As humans, we don’t tend to do that.

Didion didn’t believe all the things she had written “add[ed] up” and she distrusted narrative resolutions, conclusions, wrap-ups, morals or even structural outlines.

Als talks about the great Didion gaze, her way of noticing, (I think in a very removed but emotional way), how she used her whiteness and frailness to expose lies and “the fakery involved” in not just Hollywood, an underbelly of which she was intimately familiar with, but also the great showbiz of politics, which she spent that later part of her career exploring.

Her tentative feminism: “Woman still rarely allow themselves the right to look at and talk about anything, let alone themselves…nice ladies turn away. They do no look but are looked at.” Such an awesome observation right there.

The exhibit’s commemorative book includes sections that depict each separate room of the show (in chronological eras of her life), all the gathered art pieces interspersed with brief biographies and an indicative essay from that era.

The first room was called Holy Water (covering the years of 1934-56) and it dealt mainly with the holiness of our early places, in Didon’s case the Sacramento area where she grew up.

The art pieces for this era were primarily about water, fluidity and movement. They included Wayne Thiebaud’s arial oil panting of farmlands, an Alma Ruth Lavenson photo of the northern CA landscape with a juniper, Chiura Obata’s woodblock print of a river mountain landscape and a Marven Hassinger sculpture which was basically a long chain and rope meant to symbolize a river. There was a video excerpt from John Wayne scene in Stagecoach (because Didion loved John Wayne), family memorabilia, handmade maps of Sacramento, embroidery art and quotations about female creativity.

The next room, Goodbye To All That (1956-1963), depicted Didion’s time after leaving Sacramento for an opportunity to write fashion copy for Vogue Magazine in New York City, winning the same Prix de Paris award Sylvia Plath did years earlier (as fictionalized in The Bell Jar). Didion always claimed her writing style was “fashioned” here writing copy for Vogue and the occasional movie reviews, personal essays. It was during this time she met and married writer John Dunne (1964).

This room showed the upper-middle-class and society paintings of John Koch (depicting her own upbringing), Edward Hoppers’ “Office in a Small City,” the Todd Webb photo of Georgia O’Keeffe standing in her garage in front of her “Above the Clouds” painting, some Diane Arbus movie-themed photographs, the Vogue covers which had Didion pieces in them and her Prix de Paris Vogue announcement itself. One of the best juxtapositions was a Diane Arbus photograph of black transvestites next to a Richard Avedon photo of the Daughters of the Revolution. Both subjects had deadpan stares for the camera.

This section in the book ends with a good Didion essay from 1969 from Life Magazine, “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths.”

The next room, The White Album (1964-1988), covers probably her peak period, when she wrote her most memorable and groundbreaking essay collections, novels and essays, and when she also started writing screenplays with John Dunne (A Panic in Needle Park, A Star is Born) because she said she didn’t want to teach. She also became a parent in this decade. She famously said during this time,

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Didion was starting to think about how writer’s think.

The art pieces include a sketch of Didion by Don Bachardy, a video clip playing from the movie of her book, Play it As It Lays showing Tuesday Weld driving around LA freeways. There are documentary photos of the unrest at the time, personal photos with Sharon Tate by Jay Sebring, the abstract Anne Truitt acrylic and, Martin Puryear etching and charcoal that sent us running from the tour, Noah Purifoy’s sculpture about the Watts Riots, Ed Ruscha’s photos of Santa Monica Boulevard and his fold-out lithograph of every building on the Sunset Strip, Jack Pierson’s set up of a record player on a table, Didion and Dunne’s screenplay movie posters, Los Angeles neighborhood photos by Henry Wessel, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, Robert Bechtle’s reproduction painting of a yellow Pinto in a driveway and photos of the Blank Panthers and Hells Angels which Didion wrote about. There are also Vogue photos of the interior of Didion’s Malibu house.

Her 1975 essay “Planting a Tree is Not a Way of Life” ends the section and is an almost perfect essay on the self-deception of the writer. It was a commencement speech delivered for the University of California-Riverside. “We all struggle to see what’s going on…that’s the human condition.”

The final room was called Sentimental Journeys (1988-2021) and it included later-day Juergen Teller photos of Didion, Doninique Nabakov’s areal photo entitled “Jogger in the Park,“ Cuban artists Ana Mendieta’s areal photographs of blood in the surf, works of other Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Salvadorian artists Ronald Moran and Walterio Iraheta (interesting photographs of worn Salvadorian shoes).

The last essay was “The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic” about the creation of the Broadway stage production of The Year of Magical Thinking.

I actually get a lot out of these artist mash-up exhibits, making connections between different types of artists and thinkers, looking for conversations in art pieces. It reminds me of one of my favorite books produced for an exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It was called Shared Intelligence, American Painting and the Photograph and it showed how the early modernist photographers and painters were conversing with each other through their work.

It looks like the next stop in my Joan Didion obsession is going to be the New York Public Library once they finally acquire and process all of Didion and Dunne’s personal papers. Can’t wait.

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.

Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt

June 13, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So there is a podcast happening in the house, Monsieur Big Bang’s conversations about anthropology with John Lehr. As a result, copious packages of books have been delivered on every conceivable topic. I asked how many books were needed per podcast. I was told ten. (!)

For an upcoming show on contraceptives, the following book arrived, (and of course I plucked it out of the stack to peruse), Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt, The Erotic Secrets of the Forbidden Papyrus. And I didn’t grab it just for the racy drawings (but there it did not disappoint). There are poems in this thing, specifically in a chapter called “Love, Eroticism, and Sexuality in Literature.”

I was hoping the poems would be as risqué as the drawings.

They weren’t.

Apparently “the people of the Nile had a great love of writing” and they wrote on everything: rocks inscriptions, leather, plaster-coated wooden tablets (which were erasable like white boards), earthenware vessels. And apparently they loved to make sexual innuendos and saucy insults (aww, they’re just like us). They even swore and said obscene things. For example, a common insult to a man was someone with his “testicles far away.” (Things never change.) Another ancient insult to women (especially older ones) was to call them an “old tube.” (Oy my! That is offensive!)

Anyway, you’d think some of that might be found in the poetry included in the book?

Alas, no.

Here are some samples (and it’s handy to know these Ancient Egyptians called their beloveds brother and sister):

The One, the “sister” who has no equal,
More beautiful than all the rest,
To look on her is to see the star that rises
At the beginning of a good year.
She of the radiant perfection,
Of the resplendent complexion,
She who gazes from such lovely eyes.
Sweet are her likes when she speaks:
She never says a word too many.
She of the delicate long neck over breasts in full bloom.
Her hair is veritable lapis lazuli.
Her arms surpass any gold
And her fingers are like lotus buds.
She whose back is so lithesome, her waist is so narrow,
And whose beauty her hips still stress.
Her bearing turns the head of every man who sees her
Happy is the man who embraces her….

I mean, okay, maybe this was erotic at the time, to labor over the idea of a woman “who says not a word too many.” (Sigh.) Myself, I love the word veritable, but it’s not very sexy.

Now if you want to explore the misery of love, there’s plenty to offer here: “an illness has taken over me,” nothing can cure me, I can no longer “walk like everyone else,” “my reason is troubled,” “your love turns me upside down. I do not know how to let it go,” “I am the servant…the captive of the beloved…she gives me no water,” and the very dejected “I no longer put on my shawl, I no longer make up my eyes. I no longer even perfume myself.”

There’s also joy, elation, exultation. salvation in some of the poems. But not an actual lot of body parts.

We get close with lines like this, “It is my desire to come down and bathe in your presence…” but there are likely many encoded provocations, like one verse about a man who braves crocodiles in a river to get to his lover on the far bank: “The river could flood my body/…a crocodile lies in wait on the banks/ [but] going down into the water, I wish to cross over through the waves/by showing great courage in the canal.”

Yes, one must take courage in the canal for sure.

And here we go:

my seeds are like her teeth
my fruits are like her breasts…
I remain constant in all seasons:
when the “sister” acts with the “brother”!…
While they are intoxicated upon wines and liquors,
And liberally sprinkled with oil and balm….
Though I still stand upright, shedding my flowers,
Those of next year are (already) in me.
I am the first of my companions,
[but] I have been treated like the second!
In future, if they again begin to act this way
I will not keep my silence on their behalf!

At least we get some booze and lubrication in there. And the last poem in the chapter is allegedly full of metaphors and innuendos whose meaning the author surmises we may culturally miss (err…not really though):

You must present yourself at the house of your “sister”
alone, with no one else.
Go up to her door…
It is up to you to master her lock…
Like one unlocks a reception room.
How splendid is her pergola!
She is provided with song and dance,
wines and beers of ceremony are beneath her shadow,
while the colonnade is open to the breeze.
It is through the wind that the sky displays itself,
it will bring her aroma [that of the “sister”];
her perfume spreads, intoxicating those who breathe it.
It is up to you to agitate your “sister’s” senses,
and bring them to a pinnacle during the night!
Then she will say to you: “Take me in your arms?
Dawn will find us in the same position.”
It is the Golden One who has presently appointed her for you,
so that you may put the finishing touches upon your life.

Well, we may have different ideas about what a reception room is, and I’ve never heard them called pergolas and colonades before. But architectural metaphors why not?

The whole chapter ends with this sentence, “With this delightful and poetic evocation of the first night of love for the young couple, we will close the shutter on the literature of pharonic Egypt.”

Those funny phallic pharonics.

AI Aiyee!

June 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I’ve been telling people this week about what a dumpster fire my life is at the moment what with various things going awry, (job things, neighborhood things, sick friends, old dogs, and many, many more).

For example, I wanted long hair when I was young and my mother would not allow it, mostly based on her own aggravating childhood experiences of her mother brushing her long hair while she practiced piano but also because she said she knew me very well and I would never brush it. And if I didn’t brush it, spiders would nest in it. That’s what she said.

I thought, hmmm…not a deal breaker.

So what happens this morning? Ok, she was right. I don’t brush my hair very often, but seriously? I suppose you could say this is a dumpster fire of my own making but that’s not the point. The point is, that spider could have picked any other week to go for my long, unbrushed hair.

So anywho, I’ll be using a few dumpster fire pics to describe the new normal for poets and other writers in the shadow of Artificial Intelligence, another dumpster, another fire.

Everyone everywhere is talking about Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and the astounding (and creatively off-putting) gains it has made in the last few months with the release of ChatGPT.

When I was last in LA in April, my friends and I went to the Marina del Rey restaurant Dear Jane’s and our friendly waiter there, (who had just moved to LA from Atlanta), told us he was using ChatGPT to write a script for a sitcom about a restaurant where he was once employed. He said he just plugged in all the characters and some scenarios and bada-bing-bada-boom! The script was done.

Forget for a moment the cliché that every waiter in LA is writing a Hollywood script. We have more pressing problems.

I also have a friend from Sarah Lawrence who now works as an editor at a very prominent magazine in New York City. She told us the writers there are being told they have to use ChatGPT for first drafts (save us all time, you know). The writers there are very unhappy about it. Even the young digital natives are upset. Everyone can see the writing on the wall here.

For years, we’ve been letting AI learn from us everywhere from Grammerly to auto-correct to auto-suggest. And we’re so cheap and frugal. We’ll happily be lab rats as long as the App is free. As they once said in the documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” if you didn’t pay for the product, the product is you.

So here we are. Flood under the bridge.

I’ve been saying for years writers shouldn’t feel so threatened by AI since nobody wants to hear what machines have to say. We’re human beings wanting to connect with other human beings about the human being experience. I was even reminded of this while attending my niece’s graduation from Perdue in Indiana last month. We talked about AI there too. At dinner when someone suggested the commencement speeches might someday be written by AI, everyone noticeably cringed.

The table was full of engineers who had plenty to say about AI. First the engineers informed us it was really machine learning we’re talking about, not AI. (I still don’t know the difference.) My brother Andrew, his ex-wife Maureen and her best friend are all computer engineers and they had a mini-debate at the table about whether or not we could use tools to detect things created by AI.

That debate started because I lamented AI would probably affect all future literary submissions to magazines. Now this is one thing I hadn’t thought about before when I insisted people don’t want to hear poems, music and stories created by machines. We still don’t want to but what we want only matters if nobody ever lies.

And as we know, people love to lie.

So, for example, how will a literary magazine be able to tell, post ChatGPT, whether a submission has been written by a human being or a machine? We’re on the honor system now. And the problem is letting machines write your poems is easier than doing it yourself. And we all know people who care more about getting published than they do about authorship in the first place. Why wouldn’t they let a machine try to create something that would get their name in print and then just lie.

I didn’t think about the lies.

How do we even prove we’ve created something? I’m imagining a scenario like Melanie Griffith in the movie Working Girl where she’s explaining to Harrison Ford the long and winding way she came up with her business idea to prove her boss, the lying Sigourney Weaver, did not.

And what’s to stop a literary magazine from one day deciding to let a machine write the whole thing? It’s a lot easier than dealing with those pesky, needy writers. And who would even know? Who would even be able to tell? Do we even have the time to even try to figure it out?

My brother thinks we’ll soon have machine tools to be able to suss out tell-tale markers of creative AI content. My other brother Randy then said “But won’t AI then just get smarter to outsmart the tools?” To which Andrew replied that the tool will just get smarter then too.

Oy. Sounds like a lot of work.

And then having worked in the Internet business for a while myself, I can see how even AI might not be able to slog through the onslaught of information burying us these days, (AI could process it but could it find what’s meaningful for us?) or even more distressing, I can see how one bug in the program could cause a lot of damage. Happens every day. We’re not smart enough to make perfect AI. (Although some day AI could be conceivably smart enough.)

Some people are even worried AI could cause not only the loss of all our professions, but the demise of humanity itself! Some alarming scenarios are proposed in an article in this week’s The Week. I’ve been talking about some of these apocalyptic scenarios with my Dad (a former computer hardware mechanic and software programmer) for years. But he sides with the machines! “Good-bye to bad rubbish,” I think he said. No help or sympathy there.

I spoke to my cousin Mark about it last Saturday. He says what I hear most of my writer friends say, “I’m just glad I’m at the end of my career and/or life.” But if you believe at all in reincarnation, you’ll probably just get reborn decades down the line, right back into this flaming dumpster fire so that’s not a real hope of escape. Besides, I’ve got maybe 40 years left if my family genes hold up. I’m not planning on retiring from creating.

My cousin Mark also said he’s heard about people forming communities around the idea of only consuming creative material made before 2023. And honestly, if each of us just tried to consume the mountains of creative material at our disposal made before 2023, we’d never run out of music, poems, fiction, movies, or TV shows. We’ve surely got enough stuff.

But that’s still not very comforting.

Creators might have to live with creating on a much smaller scale, with just a small circle of readers. Because the joy of making art isn’t just in consuming it. Humans love to make it. Making it, in fact, might be the most pleasurable part. And at the very least, we know whether we made it or not.

It feels like a big dumpster fire in the making. Let’s just all stop brushing our hair in protest.

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.”

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