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

Has the Best Literature Already Been Written?

It’s very easy to fall into the mindset that there’s not much point in writing anymore, since the best writing has already been written. After all, who is going to write a lyric poem better than Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments...”? Who could out-do his Sonnet 55, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme...” so bold in its claim, so democratic in its implications.

The Bard Guy

But imagine if all the writers since Shakespeare had thrown away their quills or pens or clunky manual typewriters with stuck keys and said, “No way I’m going to measure up to the Bard Guy.” Think of the many thousands of works of literature we wouldn’t have, from Wordsworth’s sonnets to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to Neruda’s poems of surrealist angst in Residencia en tierra? Make your own list. Probably the majority of great literature was written after the Golden Age of Petrarch to Shakespeare was ancient history.

You might still say that the works of even those more recent classic writers I just listed are out of reach now, since our daily speech has declined in the age of texting and singers with dollar signs in their names to the point where we can’t reach the peaks of the literary sublime. Maybe. But what an interesting challenge that is, to try to create a moment of heightened language and emotion in a world where that is not the norm, where new literary classics are as rare as pulling an emerald from the dirt!

Rather than assume that literature has seen its best days, why not think of what literature has not been attempted yet?

Have we melded literature as fully as we can with the other arts and technologies? Heck, no. (Who said that?)

Have we taken literature authentically into the realms of intimacy that have been so private up till now?

Have we written about the new shapes that relationships and families are taking in our world?

Have we laid out the radical equality and justice and sustainability that will allow our world to survive this age of splits—of faiths, families, nations, and atoms?

Yes, there may be a trade-off. We may not be able to duplicate the lacy sounds of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, or the intricate dance of Dante’s terza rima. But we have the benefit of hundreds of years of history and change since Jacobean England and Trecento Italy, change that has given us, I hope, new insights. There are new musics, new asymmetries of elegance to reveal.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
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
How to Be an American Writer

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

The Curvature of Time

Several years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s brilliant book, A Brief History of Time, and marveled at his ability to make the Theory of Relativity exciting to troglodytes like me who never braved a science course after high school. Hawking discusses how Relativity shows that time is actually subjective, based on the observer’s relation to gravity. But he then asserts that time is an arrow, always moving in one direction: “Our subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time, is therefore determined within our brain by the thermodynamic arrow of time.”

I think writers operate with an entirely different notion of time. Our idea of time is based more on emotion. In Einstein’s vision of space, the shortest distance between Point A and Point B is not a straight line as it appears on a ruler, but a line tugged and stretched by the gravity of nearby bodies. So the time between Moment A and Moment B is, for the writer, not a simple stopwatch calculation. For the writer, the proximity of an event in time has more to do with its emotional and symbolic power for the person affected by it. The day of my mother’s death, for instance, though it occurred over forty years ago, is far closer to me and easier to recall than the work meetings I attended last week. My first day of kindergarten fifty-five years ago is more vivid to me than my commute this past Thursday.

For the writer, the nearness of the past has more to do with its emotional and symbolic mass than with its place in the linear parade of time. But this applies not only to the past, but to the future. Just as past events constantly erupt in our present consciousness, events from the future that have a traumatic or symbolic power seem to ripple into the present. This happens most often in our dreams, where we are most sensitive to the curvature of time, but it also sprouts up in our waking life. How many times has each of us dreamed some detail only to see it occur a few hours later the next day? Of course we all shrug off all such events as coincidence. But let’s not forget that for centuries scientists dismissed the slight miscalculations that Newtonian physics produced, before the Theory of Relativity revealed that this margin of error pushed open the door to understanding the nature of space.

For the writer, the curvature of time has always been of the utmost importance. Tragedy as a literary genre is obsessed with foretelling the hero’s future fall. Think of the Weird Sisters’ prediction that Macbeth will meet his doom when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane and at the hand of a man “not of woman born.” The mechanics of how this prophecy plays out are a huge part of what makes Macbeth’s fate interesting, not the fact that he died after a certain string of events. In Ford Maddox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier, the story is told out of sequence altogether, the jumbled way one person would actually recount it to another, in a burst dam of emotions. Wordsworth’s daffodils and Proust’s madeleine are those writers’ proofs of the formula that the nearness of the past is proportional to its emotional or symbolic mass.

So I have to quibble with the physicists’ idea that time is an arrow. As a writer, I see time as being just as oxbowed as space, with emotion and symbolic gravity as the equivalent of the physical force of gravity in stretching the elastic of temporal material.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
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

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer