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Nowadays when I prowl the aisles of
shelves in the public library looking for a book to read, it’s so difficult to
find the right one. Sideways I read names of authors I don’t know, thinking
about taking a chance on a book I’ve never heard of, and then I remember that German
novel about the fresco restorers in Prague where I never got the sense of humor,
and I hesitate.
I even hesitate at the titles I’ve already read, not eager to repeat
any experiences, reluctant to admit I wouldn’t remember the books anyway, like Middlemarch, which I was forced to read
in Venice at age 20.
George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
The only store I could find there with English books only
had a few, but I ended up traveling so far into that world George Eliot created
that I barely left my room in the pensione,
foraying out occasionally into that city of mirrors and skies at sundown to
watch the clouds gather at the apex of the heavens like soapsuds draining in a
reverse bathtub, understanding why Tiepolo and Canaletto and Turner could not
get enough of that city.
J.M.W. Turner, The Grand Canal, Venice
Then I think that I should read
something completely different from my usual picks: a history of Venice in the
late eighteenth century, the assembly of the human genome, a biography of the
person who invented the smartphone. But I have to confess that facts without
beauty or imagination bore me.
No, I can’t decide what book to
take out anymore, because every story seems to be about disappointment, so I
magnetize toward the volumes by authors whom I’ve heard read in person or have
met, knowing their personalities well enough to be sure they won’t betray my
hope that the book will offer some bits of topaz, some involuntary chuckles,
some ecstasy or indignation to lift me above my cubicle and monitor. But the authors I know,
I’ve counted on them too often, and even their
books become a disappointment, since their minor works and juvenilia are never
up to their masterpieces, the books where I follow the characters in their bustles
and redingotes and shakos, reassured that letters can paint as well as
nineteenth century artists carrying beechwood boxes full of little tubes of mortared
pigments blended with linseed oil and white spirits.
What book, what book? Or maybe I
just have to bear down and think of something to write about, something as
mundane and ridiculous as what reading matter to choose in the library.
One way to convey your theme to
readers is not to lead up to it, as in The Big Moment, but to surprise the
reader. At least, not to lead up to the message in an obvious way, but in a
subliminal way. The surprise sneaks in and then leaps out in the final lines or
sentences of a poem or story or essay.
A writer can spend most of a
poem or essay or story describing one thing, and that thing can be only
distantly or obliquely related to the theme. Then at the very end, BOOM! The
writer suddenly says what he or she wants to communicate, but in such a way
that it doesn’t feel predictable or heavy-handed.
One famous example of this is
Rainer Maria Rilke’s great poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” I’ve translated and
written about this poem in another blog, but the ending is worth mentioning in this context. The poem seems to be a description of an ancient and
broken statue. Pretty boring, right? Except that Rilke makes that statue emanate
light and sensuality by comparing it to a glowing lamp and to a wild animal’s
pelt, among other things. He also uses a tightly constructed sonnet to call
attention to the structure of the poem, rather than giving away where the sonnet is heading. Then in the
poem’s last five words (in the German original), he clobbers the reader with a
message so didactic, so strong, that it is unforgettable. He gets away with
this sententiousness by catching the reader unawares, only leading up to the
end in the reader’s unconscious, never showing that the poem is veering in that
direction.
Another great example of this
strategy is one of my favorite poems, Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods.” You
might want to read the poem first, so I don’t spoil the ending. Emily Dickinson
once said, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."
Emily Dickinson
Mary Oliver's "In Blackwater Woods" never fails to blow the top of my head off.
But “In Blackwater Woods”actually starts
out as though it’s only going to be just a nature poem about the beauty of fall
foliage:
Look,
the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
Autumn leaves in New England—how trite can you get? Except that Oliver
starts with the imperative, “Look,” giving us a clue right from the start that
something is going on in this poem that requires our rapt attention. And
surprisingly, the trees not only have bodies of light, they are redolent of cinnamon and “fulfillment.” Already the poem is subtly conveying that something is undulating
beneath the surface of this landscape:
and
every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Notice the peculiar
repetition and setting apart of the word “is,” strangely unliterary,
prefiguring the diction of the poem’s last two lines. But why are the ponds
nameless? I don’t really know, but I’m guessing it’s because they are so
sublime in their own right that they are beyond any name that humans place on a
signpost or a map.
Then Mary Oliver really kicks it into gear: “Every year/everything/I have ever learned…leads
back to this”. So now we know we are in the realm of revelation, and what we
are about to learn transcends the everyday.
Her
reference to “the black river of loss” suggests Lethe, the river in Greek
mythology that the dead must cross to the Underworld, the river that erases all
memory. But instead of the other side being the kingdom of the dead, in
Oliver’s personal myth the other bank of the river is “salvation.” Salvation is
a familiar idea in Christian culture, but Oliver’s idea of salvation is
one with a meaning “none of us will ever know.” These are powerful and absolute
statements by Oliver, but they are so unexpected, and so different from the usual
homilies about being saved, that they arrest us. We realize this is not going
to be any kind of sermon we’ve ever heard.
Then
Mary Oliver delivers the final pronouncement, again addressing the reader
directly, as she did in the poem’s first word: “To live in this world//you must
be able/to do three things...” Why is she speaking so directly to us, and what
are those three things she’s talking about? We immediately want to know. It
turns out they are actually very down-to-earth, and so desperately and
beautifully and simply expressed:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it…
Then the final
imperative, with its oddly repetitious phrasing:
and,
when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Those lines are a
kind of “letting go” on the poet’s part as well. She is no longer adorning her
poem in literary devices and sparkling originality. Mary Oliver just lays it on
the line. And she does, she does.
Other recent posts about writing topics:
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2,Part 3
One method of delivering a
message in a work of literature that I find satisfying and effective as a
reader is when the writer gives me just barely enough information to figure out
the puzzle on my own. That puzzle solving creates the “Aha!” moment. And the
closer it comes to the ending, the better it works for me. If I don’t get it
till the very last word, so much the better.
For the writer, it’s a bit like
writing a murder mystery. In a mystery, you want to plant little clues for the
reader, but unobtrusively, so you don’t tip your cards. You want the readers to
enjoy the guessing game, to want to solve the mystery, but you don’t want the
readers to guess who the murderer is before you reveal it. Once the secret is
out, you want the readers to think, “Of course! That’s so obvious.” But it
shouldn’t be so obvious that the readers know on page 10 what you reveal to
them on page 210.
But in a way, creating an “Aha!”
moment for the reader is like writing a mystery where you rip out the last
chapter. The reader becomes the detective and solves the crime. There shouldn’t
be a moment like the one in the classic mystery where Inspector Burley-Hyde confronts the murderer in an English country house where he has gathered all
the suspects in the well-appointed parlor with its lace doilies and concealed
revolver. For the kind of “Aha!” moment I’m thinking of, all the suspects
should be under one roof, but the reader should be the one to finger the
murderer.
That may sound fairly abstract,
so I'll give an example of a short poem by Tess Gallagher that creates an “Aha!” moment for the
reader.
Tess Gallagher
Here’s a link to Gallagher’s powerful poem, “Each Bird Walking.”Please read this marvelous poem
before taking in the rest of this blog, so I don’t spoil the surprise of the
poem for you. Gallagher’s poem is a mystery
from the start, with its oddly convoluted phrasing:
Not while, but long after he had
told me
This phrasing becomes more poetic and feels more necessary, though,
each time you read the poem.
The poem starts with a lengthy
and almost utilitarian description of a man washing the body of his frail and
elderly mother, shortly before her death. The description is fascinating, and
so wonderfully paced that it imitates the patience and care of the man who is
washing:
…the
rag
dripping a little onto the sheet
as he
turned from the bedside to the
nightstand
and back…
Notice how the enjambments mimic or enact the actions of the
man going back and forth from the mother’s body to the washbasin with the damp
cloth.
But why this meticulous
description that takes up most of the poem? That question itself becomes the
mystery. We get a clue in the stanza that begins “as though he were a mother,”
where the man who must be unnamed is transformed into a kind of mother by the act of
washing his own elderly mother, an act that is loving without being sexual. We get closer to the heart of
the mystery in the next stanza:
And because he told me her death
was
important to his being with her,
I could love him another way.
But even in helping to clear up the mystery, Tess Gallagher
is creating more mystery with the phrase, “I could love him another way.”
What does that refer to? It’s like a murder mystery where a second victim hits
the ground before our detective can even begin to figure out the first crime.
And then Gallagher adds that haunting and incredibly simple phrase from the
mother:
“That’s good,” she said,
“that’s
enough.”
It seems
as though the labyrinthine mystery of this poem could continue a long time before
arriving at an explanation, but the whole story careens to an end in
the last ten lines. We find out the speaker of the poem was the lover of the
man who washed his mother. We find out that he ended their affair “so as not to
hurt/the one closer to you”, i.e., his wife or partner. And finally, we find
out that the speaker asked for a parting memory that would allow her to
remember the man with love despite his hurting her, and that’s when he told the
story about washing his mother. Gallagher concludes by echoing the quote from
the mother that she had given us just ten lines earlier, but now in such a
different context—or is it so different?
It’s a
breathtaking ending. It breaks my heart every time I read it. The culmination works
so well because Tess Gallagher takes us right up to the edge of the cliff,
shows us where to look, but never says, “See, that’s the Grand Canyon.” In this
case, the Grand Canyon is—what? I’m not entirely sure.
Maybe
the title gives us another clue. Birds fly beautifully, but they only walk very awkwardly, the poet has
explained in an essay about this poem. So when we attempt to love without sex,
in a spiritual way, we are like birds wobbling on the ground, moving forward,
but clumsily, and yet that is part of the hard work of being human. But if
Gallagher had come out and flatly said all that at the finale of her poem, it
would have been a terrible ending.
Yes,
“Each Bird Walking” has a message, it has deep emotion, it has a beginning and a
middle and an end (though definitely not in that order!), but the final “Aha!”
is in the reader’s thoughts after taking in the poem, the way a chord lingers
in the air at the end of a solo piano concert.
In my last blog I tried to make
a case that The Big Moment, a passage where the author delivers a statement of
belief directly to the reader with no finesse, is not a useful strategy for a
writer. So, is it outmoded even to try to communicate a message or theme or
emotion in a work of literature? Maybe such a corny idea has been made obsolete
by postmodernism. Aren’t most people who read literature well-educated liberals
or social democrats who already think and feel the same way about most things?
There are certainly a lot of
authors who write as if they believe that a message or emotion is not important
to a work of literature, or that the message should be understood by the reader
even before approaching the writer’s work. I’m thinking of authors where there
are so many fragments or so little context in their work that very little of coherence
is expressed to the reader. Instead, the writing becomes shards of references
that the reader is either in on, or not. Mostly this type of work is read by
other writers or artists, often ones the author knows personally.
I have to agree with the poet
Pablo Neruda about this sort of writing. In his Memoirs, he describes an encounter with T.S. Eliot. I’m assuming
this is a fantasy of Neruda’s, since it’s a strange moment where Neruda says he
locks himself in the bathroom to avoid listening to Eliot reading his poems.
(Eliot’s poetry is generally written for a smaller and more elite audience than
Neruda’s.) Actually, Neruda only refers obliquely to Eliot’s work in this
passage.
Neruda concludes: “…if this
continues, poets will publish only for other poets…Each will pull out his
little book and put it in the other’s pocket…Poetry has lost its ties with the
reader…”
The work of the poets and
fiction writers who put chapbooks in one another’s pockets and never try to
reach a larger audience is work that doesn’t have a message, or doesn’t try to
convey emotion. It’s work organized as a collage of splinters, without any
attempt to change or move the reader. The writer assumes that the reader is
already in accord with his or her ideas or thoughts, and makes no attempt to
persuade or move. The author might allude to those shared beliefs or feelings
as a sort of common currency or in-joke with the reader, but there is no
attempt to deliver a message or emotion.
This is the situation that much
of poetry finds itself in today, at least in North America, and in other
regions of the globe as well. Nor is fiction exempt from this sort of writing.
And it’s this situation that Neruda worked his whole life to transcend, by
including a message in his wonderful lyrics, like a delicious dessert that includes
both ice cream and fresh fruit, so it’s both sweet to the tongue and nutritious
to eat.
In the next blog, I’ll talk
about some strategies for conveying messages that are not dogmatic or opaque.
Most writers want to say
something that's going to have a strong and lasting impact. To deliver a
message to your readers, it’s tempting to go for The Big Moment. The Big Moment
is a point when the author reveals The Truth. Suddenly the plot and characters
and metaphors and images fall away, and the author bares the real meaning of
the work, and maybe even what the writer feels is the real meaning of life.
Is this sort of direct message a
good idea for a writer? What are the consequences of reaching for The Big
Moment?
Here’s an example of a Big
Moment. In Ayn Rand’s novel, The
Fountainhead, the architect Howard Roark, loosely based on Frank
Lloyd Wright, has to stand trial for dynamiting the façade of a building he
himself designed. Roark destroys the front of his own building because his
design was altered, and the new version violates both his vision and the
agreement he had with the developer about artistic control.
When Roark goes on trial, he
elects to defend himself, and speaks to the jury for eight solid pages. Yes,
eight uninterrupted pages! At least it only takes 710 pages to get to his
harangue. Here’s a sample of what he says:
“The man who attempts to live
for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of
those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption.… This
country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any
precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness.
His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive.”
In this endless lecture to the jury,
Howard Roark is only a megaphone for Ayn Rand. He's not a character with a
personality, only a vehicle for an idea, and not a very well-thought out or
humane idea. It’s a Big Moment.
Poets are not immune from The
Big Moment, either. The temptation to wave the moral like a huge flag is just too great at
times. At the opposite end of the political spectrum from Ayn Rand is the
French poet Louis Aragon, one of the founding members of the surrealist group
and an avowed communist.
Louis Aragon, photographed by Man Ray
Aragon published the poem “The Red Front” in 1931 in
Moscow, a poem that speaks of the time when the supporters of communism will
triumph under the banner of the proletariat (referred to as "it" at this point in the poem):
It’s just waiting for the day the hour
the minute the second
when that lethal gunshot hits home
and the bullet’s aim is so true that all the social fascist doctors
leaning over the corpse of its victim
try in vain to run their eager fingers under that lace shirt
to listen with their stethoscopes to its heart already rotting
no they won’t find the usual cure
and they fall into the hands of rioters who line them up against the wall
“Social fascist” is a term that doctrinaire
Marxists use to designate progressives and liberals. Not a lot of subtlety in
that Big Moment! Aragon lays bare his political agenda for everyone to see. Communism
galumphs to victory, capitalism and its apologists eat the dust. At least he extends
the metaphor of the rotting corpse of capitalism! Though it’s quite a cliché.
I’ve picked extreme political
philosophies to illustrate my point that The Big Moment rarely works. I could
have picked statements I agree with, though. The Big Moment is usually a flawed
artistic strategy no matter what the message. The reality is that few generalized
moral judgments directed as a speech to the reader still surprise, provoke, or inspire us any more. They simply produce
a yawn in the reader. Not only that, the reader is likely to recoil from the
overbearing tone of a Big Moment. The Big Moment generally creates the exact
opposite effect from what the author desired, which is to persuade the reader.
In my next blog, I’ll talk about why whether it’s still important, desirable, or possible to make a persuasive point or to deliver a message in a work of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction
I'm continuing to participate in the Internet chain letter, The Next Big Thing, where writers discuss their works in progress. This post is a guest blog by the writer Richard Chiappone. Richard is a colleague in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He's the author of Water of an Undetermined Depth, a
collection of short fiction published by Stackpole Books (2003).
Opening Days, a newer collection of short fiction and essays on outdoor
sports was published in 2010.
Richard Chiappone
Here's Richard's blog:
What is your working title of your book (or story)?
Mister
Almost and The Enemy of Fun, a novel.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
When I was a kid in the fifties, there was a terrible
apartment fire in our town, Niagara Falls, New York. Some very poor African
American people died in the fire, and the landlord of the apartments, the
father of a neighborhood friend, was charged with building code violations in
relation to those deaths. I never forgot how embarrassed and mortified my
friend was.I’ve always tried to imagine
what it would be like to be the kid whose father was in prison for a major
felony like that. An apartment fire in a fictional poor black neighborhood is
the central event in the novel.
What genre does your book fall under?
It’s a character-driven novel about a working class family.
I guess booksellers will call it “upmarket” or “literary” fiction.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
There are several young boys in the story, and I don’t know
the names of actors in that age bracket. But, for the key adult roles, I
picture Claire Danes as the mother and titular Enemy of Fun. And I like Joseph
Gordon-Levitt for the father.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
When a fatal fire results in the jailing of a boy’s father,
the boy and his mother must set aside their contentious power struggles and
work together to salvage as much of the family as they can.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It’s currently in the hands of Sam Hyate, at The Rights
Factory.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I wrote the major events as a short story in 1992. At some
point over the years of revision, I realized the story was too big for the
short form. The first complete draft of the novel version was finished in 2009.
So, I guess the answer is, seventeen years.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Well, it’s set in 1960, and racial issues are a big part of
it, and justice and the legal system are part of it too; so, that subject
matter hopefully makes it a little less presumptuous to associate it with the
venerable To Kill a Mockingbird. And
it’s a coming of age story about a young man growing up on a big river (The
Niagara) so, I’d love to be even more presumptuous and say The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But, of course, beyond those
facile similarities, it’s nothing like either one. If I could find any
justification at all, I’d include The Bible, and all of Shakespeare’s plays as
comps too.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
My childhood friend whose father went to jail; my mother,
who always wanted to move up socially; my father, who wanted only to live a
quiet, peaceful life; my brothers and sisters and all the kids in the
neighborhood who were, and still are, my tribe, my clan, my family; growing up
in the industrial, ravaged, and polluted natural world along the Niagara River—which
I believed to be a paradise; but, most of all, having come of age myself in the
tumultuous, unforgettable 1960s.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
Mister
Almost and the Enemy of Fun is about family, race, religion,
friendship, first sexual attractions, fear of death, crime and punishment,
frogs and snakes, and the magical way that childhood is illuminated by a young
person’s imagination.
Ladies
and gentlemen, we interrupt this blog to bring you an installment of: The
Next Big Thing. This week I’m taking part in an Internet chain letter for
writers by that name. The idea is for a writer to answer a series of questions
about a current project in the works, and then tag other writers to respond
to the same questions about their own work.
What is your working title of your book (or story)?
I’m
working on a book of poems called Talking
with the Radio.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
I
live in California and I spend a crazy amount of time driving in my car. I
always listen to the radio to calm me down while I drive—I didn’t learn to
drive till I was 39 years old, and I can use some calming.
I
mostly listen to the jazz station in the San Francisco Bay Area, KCSM 91.1,
also available streaming at KCSM.org. Whenever I hear a song I really like, I
start talking to the radio, imagining that artist’s voice in a monologue. Or I
just react to the music, making up words that go along with it. I know, I
should be paying attention to the road! But that’s how I’ve written a lot of
the poems in this book.
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry.
But some of the poems are intended as song lyrics.
Which actors would you choose to play your
characters in a movie rendition?
There
are some dramatic monologues and dialogues in the book that would work well for
actors to recite. I’d choose Beyoncé or Queen Latifah to sing some of
the lyrics in the book, and B.B. King to sing the blues song “Washing the
Soap.” I wrote a dialogue between the singer Dinah Washington and her mother—I’d pick Alfre Woodard to play the mother. I’m not sure who would play
Dinah. OK, I’d settle for Beyoncé again.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Talking with the Radio
features poems and song lyrics about popular music and jazz.
Will your book be self-published or represented by
an agency?
Do any
agents represent poetry? If they do, they must be one sonnet short of a
sequence.
How long did it take you to write the first draft
of your manuscript?
I’ve
been writing this book very slowly, since a poem about a singer or a song
doesn’t come to mind every day, or even every month. I’ve written several poems
a year for this book over a five-year period.
What other books would you compare this to within
your genre?
Many, many poets have written about popular music and
jazz in their work. Their work inspired me. My book is dedicated to those poets, from
Jack Kerouac to Ntozake Shange to Cornelius Eady.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I
just love jazz and popular music. I grew up listening to my mom’s Ella
Fitzgerald vinyl LP records as she puffed on her cigarette holder, sipping
Johnny Walker Red Label. I had a little transistor radio as a kid that I snuck
into my bed at night and listened to Top 40 hits to put me to sleep.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s
interest?
The
book includes a series of ghazals. The ghazal is a popular song form in South
Asia. It’s also one of the oldest poetic forms still used. It comes from Arabic,
and it was perfected during the Golden Age of Persian poetry in 12th
century Iran, during the period of Rumi and Hafez. I like to sing my ghazals as
blues songs. Obviously, that’s not how ghazals are sung in Asia. But the blues
was originally a fusion of African and European vocal styles. Many of the
Africans who were brought to the U.S. first as slaves were Muslims who knew how
to chant Arabic prayers. Quite possibly the blues was influenced by Arabic song
and poetic forms as well, forms such as the ghazal.
I’m
tagging three wonderful writers whose work I admire greatly, to post blogs next
week in The Next Big Thing: Richard Chiappone, one of the funniest human beings
I’ve ever met; Beverly Burch, who is triply talented as a published fiction
writer, poet, and author on psychology; and Andromeda Romano-Lax, a terrific historical novelist. Thanks to the amazing Sammy Greenspan of Kattywompus Press for tagging me.
