Is It Important to Visit the Places That Great Writers Have Frequented?

I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s book Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her start as an artist in New York City in the late 1960s and early 70s. It’s a fantastic memoir, I highly recommend it for its mesmerizing story of how Patti Smith went from being a homeless, teenage arts wannabe to a highly accomplished songwriter, performer, and author.

Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith

One thing that stands out to me about Patti Smith’s recollections of her early days as an artist is how important it was for her to stand in the places other artists had stood:

“My friend Janet Hamill had been hired at Scribner’s Bookstore, and she found a way of giving me a helping hand by sharing her good fortune. She spoke to her superiors, and they offered me a position. It seemed like a dream job, working in the retail store of the prestigious publisher, home to writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and their editor, the great Maxwell Perkins. Where the Rothschilds bought their books, where paintings by Maxfield Parrish hung in the stairwell.”

I share Patti Smith’s love of locales that artists, and writers in particular, have lived in or visited. I’ve made a pilgrimage to Walt Whitman’s house in Camden,New Jersey, where you can still view his signature floppy, gray felt hat. I’ve hiked to Dove Cottage in the Lake District of the United Kingdom to see where Wordsworth and Coleridge had their literary commune. I’ve walked across the bridge in Trieste, Italy, that James Joyce crossed each day on his way to work.

The author with the statue of James Joyce in Trieste, Italy

I’m as much of a literary groupie as anyone. There is something thrilling for me about visiting these places and seeing objects that my writer heroes touched. In the presence of those places I become like a true believer who hopes to experience the healing power of a saint’s metatarsal bone displayed in a gold monstrance. Maybe I’m subconsciously hoping that gazing up at the plaque on the house where Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning lived in Florence will somehow help me to harness the power of their art to energize my own. If only it was that simple!

Part of me remains deeply suspicious of artistic hero worship. After all, almost no one knew who James Joyce was when he crossed the Ponte Rosso in Trieste every day in 1905. He wouldn’t publish his first book of fiction, Dubliners, till nine years later. That bridge became famous because James Joyce did the unbelievably hard and inspired work of writing the great stories that make up Dubliners. The way to make your reputation as a writer is not to imitate James Joyce or to drink a Hugo aperitif near his statue in Trieste, as lovely as that is.

Yes, living la vie bohème and being near artists and their haunts may seem glamorous. But art is like sports: watching other people do it is not the same as taking part. There’s no substitute for the hard work of the artist.


Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Why It's So Difficult to Write about Dreams

Many great works of literature have been inspired by dreams, or dream-like visions. Two of my favorites are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” and Gabriela Mistral’s “The Flower of Air,” (“La Flor de aire”) just to name a couple. There are great poems and works of prose that recount dreams, but in general, for me, most pieces of creative writing based closely on actual dreams fail to recreate the magic that the vision had for the writer. Why?

Self-portrait collage by André Breton

I’ll give you an example. A couple of nights ago I went to sleep with the thought on my mind that I wanted to write something about dreams. I had a long and often interrupted dream that I kept returning to, a dream that concerned writing. There was a phrase that I and the other characters in the dream kept repeating: “Kicking the wall so hard, the paint falls.” I remember someone, maybe me, actually kicking a door in the dream, and chips of red paint breaking off of it. This phrase and action were supposed to summarize in a nutshell all the great teachings of an important literary figure, someone who was my mentor in the dream.

Well, I don’t think you’ll be surprised that when I woke up, that phrase turned out not to be as profound or as earth shattering as it seemed in my dream. In fact, it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. It has something to do with anger—the kicking—and anger as a force for change, or at least for damaging the status quo.

The difficulty in conveying the depth and urgency of a dream to a reader is that the dream seems to supply its own highly charged message and saturated color. When the dreamer recounts the action and tries to depict that aura for a reader, it rarely has quite the same profundity or significance. It’s like having a conversation where one person has the light behind them, and sees the other person in all dimensions and in full color, while the other person is looking into the light, and sees only a vague outline of the person they are talking to. The dreamer sees the dream clearly, with all its perspective and vibrancy, while the reader only sees a silhouette and is irritated at having to try to make out all the obscure details.

There are times when dreams can be the basis of good literature, but this sometimes works best when the writer is aware that dreams are notoriously unreliable in their claims of depth. I’m thinking, for instance, of the surrealist André Breton’s prose poems entitled “Five Dreams” from his book Earthlight, which I co-translated with Bill Zavatsky. Even though Breton was one of the first writers to offer a blow-by-blow description of his dreams as literature, he seemed to know intuitively that dreams were by nature best recounted with a grain of salt. Here’s an excerpt from the fourth of his “Five Dreams”:

“A part of my morning had been spent conjugating a new tense of the verb to be—because a new tense of the verb to be had just been invented. In the course of the afternoon I had written an article that, as far as I can remember, I found shallow but fairly brilliant. A little later I went back to work on a novel I was writing. This last enterprise had led me to do some research in my library. This soon led to the discovery of a work in octavo, composed of several volumes, that I didn’t know I owned. I opened one of them at random. The book claimed to be a philosophical treatise, but in one section, instead of Logic or Ethics, the heading read: Enigmatic. The text completely escapes me, I have only the memory of illustrations invariably rep­resenting an eccle­siastical or mythological character in the middle of an immense waxed room that looked like the Apollo Gallery [in the Versailles Palace].”

Breton is recounting a dream that almost has the quality of a revelation: he discovers a new tense of the verb to be and a mysterious lost treatise on philosophy. But he still is not willing to make any claim of profundity for his revelations—he finds his own article “shallow but fairly brilliant.” And the new volume of philosophy is called, fittingly, Enigmatic, and offers not universal pronouncements but only strange illustrations. The truths we come upon in dreams may be lightning bolts, Breton seems to be saying, but appreciate the irony and humor in the reality that the more they claim to be extremely profound, the more they give us mostly puzzles.
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Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 5

In Buddhism there is a term “right livelihood,” which refers to making a living in a way that is in harmony with your spiritual principles. As a writer, you also need a “right livelihood,” one that is in harmony with the demands of being a writer. Or, you can marry someone rich with a cute English accent, not a bad alternative. That works, provided you remain in touch with something you are passionate about.

Barring that, pick a career and a lifestyle that allows you time for your writing. Writing is a time-consuming activity. Even if you’re writing haiku—especially if you’re writing haiku—you need mental time to process your writing. I think of our creative thought processes as working like laundromat dryers, where you watch the clothes going round and round, in endless combinations.

You need your thoughts to circulate like that, for the shirts to get tangled up in the sheets and the pants in the shirts, in order for the right creative combination to occur. Make time to go walking or jogging or skiing or swimming, where all you do is think and compose in your head. Allow new thoughts and word combinations to mix in with your brain waves.

The English Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to compose their poems while hiking. 

                                                           William Wordsworth

                                                        Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Wordsworth and Coleridge did this first on England’s southern coast, and later in the Lake District. They took so many walks along the coast that faced France, and their writings were so radical, that the English government suspected they were plotting to find a landing site for the troops of the French Revolution to invade England. So the government assigned a spy to follow Wordsworth and Coleridge on their hikes, just in case. All the spy got to witness was a few sonnets in the making, but I wonder what that spy was thinking when he followed the poets on their romps through the rainy countryside of England. “Kubla Khan—hmm. That must be some kind of code.” “What do the daffodils stand for: maybe Robespierre?”

One thing you can do to sustain your career as a writer is to choose a type of work that allows you time to think about writing, and to write. That doesn’t mean you need a job where you can sit and type sestinas all day at your computer, though few of us would complain about being paid for writing poetry. But there are some careers that feed your writing, and others that starve it. A career that feeds your writing is not necessarily teaching writing or literature. Wallace Stevens was a lawyer on the payroll of an insurance company, which in those days, was a relatively low-pressure job, I imagine. Gary Snyder worked as a watchman on a fire tower for the Park Service and wrote many terrific poems while he did that. Th poet May Swenson had jobs as a stenographer and secretary for decades while she wrote most of her best poems. For years the poet Li-Young Lee worked as a clerk in a book warehouse, but the job allowed him the privacy and mental space he needed to develop as a writer. I’m not suggesting you get a dead-end job—you should have a career that fulfills you professionally.

But some careers do make it almost impossible to write. I doubt you can be in charge of a major business or nonprofit organization or a major part of a business or organization, where you have to supervise many employees, and still write actively. I don’t think you can be in a corporate law firm where there’s pressure to make partner. It’s the mental time as well as the actual writing time that suffers in that sort of job. I’ve never known a writer who had a job like that. For one thing, they’d never hire us, and rightly so. But I’d be happy to be proved wrong about this, if someone knows a counter-example.

If you don’t know if a job will allow you the mental and physical time to write, try it out. You’ll find out soon enough.

Use your time wisely, as our seventh grade teachers used to tell us. People who get hooked on watching multiple old TV series all the time may have fun with that hobby, but they rarely finish writing books.

Another important method for saving time for your literary work is to think through an idea before you start writing it, the way a chess master looks many moves ahead before pushing even a pawn one space forward. Play out the possible combinations, to see if you have any place to go with that idea. If you see that the moves you plan will lead to an insurmountable problem, try a different idea later. That will save you time.

Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer