DLMA

Is done. They have to grade the bastard, but it would seem that I’ve completed the requirements of a MA in Creative Writing. And all I really want to do is sleep.

I think there is a certain moment when you do have to look into the face of your own activity and discern exactly what you’re doing and who you are . . . –Leonard Cohen

We will credit this particular reckoning to completion requirements for the MA. Do not expect coherence, you will be disappointed.

Looking into the face of my own activity and identifying exactly what it is that I doing is a bit of a challenge: I have no idea why I write or where the urge to put some small truth on paper comes from. The pursuit of an MA in Creative Writing is certainly not explainable by probability of future riches in the post-MA phase. The words I scribble will not cure AIDS, they won’t feed any hungry children – not even my own – they won’t heal the sick or raise the dead. I am no one’s messiah.

Any self examination raises questions that I do not have the answer to. If I say I write because I seek some small truth, then I must ask what kind of truth there is to tell. Is it my truth or someone else’s truth or something universal.

So, then, I do not write for truth. Do I write from a historian’s perspective: this is how it was, once, and is no more? That may be close. But what an inaccurate historian I am, with no primary texts to research, no time line and not even a name for the voices that demand a poem.

Poetry as a form of schizophrenia, then. Or not.  Maybe it is a new age activity where the ghosts of lives past bubble to the surface and burst on the page: do not blame me, mister.  I’m just the medium.

How I have progressed as part of the MA process is bound up in why I started in the first place, and why I started it is the question of why I write and an honest examination of why I write is simply the cliff that launches one into the abyss. (My philosophical development aborted at the Existentialists.)

What an agonizing question. Why do you write. The answer is as nebulous and irrational as anything you could come up with to answer someone who asked who you are. Not your name, not where you were born or what acts of prostitution you agree to perform in order to pay your bills, but who are you. Not who your parents were or what family traits you drag behind you like a failed helium balloon. Who are you? Why do you write?

To say that I must write is clearly untrue. If I were to never put pen to paper again, I would not shrivel up and die.  There is no imperative about it. To say that I like to write is also untrue. I am in a foul mood for hours after I sit myself down with a story. Who enjoys sifting over the thousands of available words in order to find the one that says exactly what you mean, particularly when what you mean is so subject to shifting from your grasp.

It is entirely possible that there is no higher meaning to the act than a simple matter of habit. Or worse, a function of arrogance; that the phrase you thought of, the rhythm of the words in your head is so unique, so worth while that it must be etched out in paper. What makes you so special, little girl?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.

A desire for fame, then? To partake in primitive acts of entertainment, long overshadowed by Hollywood and their pretty people. An anachronism: a troubadour in the age of Tivo. Am I no different than those who live by Renaissance Festivals, where test-tube babies battle it out on the jousting field and bellow for their wenches?

One of my favorite blogs ever is www.gapingvoid.com. One of his cartoons declares that the market for something to believe is infinite. Another thing he says is that it is the story that sells, not the product.

Here is a new thought for the day: people have been putting their discretionary funds into stories forever. You walk into a posh home furnishing store. You drop $8,000 on a new sofa, loveseat, diningroom table and dinnerware. The commodities themselves do not cost $8,000.  What costs $8,000 is the energy someone has put into building a story about the life you could lead perched casually on that sofa, eating off of those plates, sitting at that table. If it were simply plates, you could get those at Walmart for under $20 a box. But in the story you want to tell about yourself there is no room for Walmart plates and aluminum cutlery.

A rash statement: this is how it is with everything. Publishers and agents want a story too. You can send the best of the best writing ever to 100 agents and you might get two responses. But build a story around yourself and you are a wunderkind. Rags to riches is a perennial favorite.  Underestimated, marginalized kid makes good with brilliant literary tome. Who wants the story of a white girl who grew up lower middle class and has aspirations to greatness? My street, my school, my country is filled with them. We aspirants are not special, we are a dime a dozen. If I’m writing for the accolades, for the publication, then I’m in deep shit. 

But if I were content with my little scraps of paper there for my own pleasure, why bother with $16,000 worth of a MA program? In Creative Writing, no less. 

***

Try this on for size: I am a writer and a poet because I have an insatiable appetite for story and I find others insufficient to truly satisfy my needs.

***

Concept: poetry is fiction. The essence of a novel in a handful of lines, cutting away all but the heart of the thing. Do I believe that?

 

what if?

So let me think through this whole humanities thing…

Humanities would be the perfect place to hammer out my theory that the way we use the language changes the course of history: that atrocities can’t happen until we use words to distance ourselves from the victims. An excellent place to sort out the concept of “other” and its implications. A blending of history and literature and creativity…

But all of that would require yet more school, which I could only afford were I to win the lottery and get us out of debt. And the chances of that happening are a zillion to one.

Which leaves me back where I started. What I’m doing professionally has yet to cut it. There is much standing between myself and what I want to do professionally. And navigating from here to there reeks of the impossible.

Bastard.

oliver (as in mary)

I mistrust certainty.

Mary Oliver has written a book called “A Handbook of Poetry.” I am currently having trouble with refining my line breaks. My tutor points out places where I’ve broken lines against sense and thinks I should be more capable than what I present to her. I’ve pulled out all of my books on writing and on poetry writing–half a dozen, at least–in hopes of finding some sort of explanation for line breaks that makes sense.

I know, I know. I am supposed to be well-versed in the iamb and the trochee, but there are times I fear I am deaf to the wonders of iambs and trochees. I don’t hear them, unless I count them out and I couldn’t tell you off hand which is which. What I hear, what I want to recreate is the sound of a voice saying these words out loud. And because poetry is an auditory experience for me (rhythm should be key if what I’m saying is true, but whatever talent I have in that respect is all inate and not intentional at all), the stanza breaks and line breaks on the page don’t resonate.

Okay, so what I’m confessing to must be that I’m not a poet after all. Either that or I need to get my shit together and be more intentional.

Meanwhile, back to Mary Oliver. I bought this book when I was in college for a poetry course and we were required to scribble all over the books. Our teacher would give us a reading assignment, and we had to turn our books in with stuff scribbled in the margins.

All over this book are my nitpicks with Ms. Oliver’s absolute certainty that what she says is poetic gospel. I mistrust certainty.

Leonard Cohen

I have opinions on poetry, not all of which are humble.  For instance: poems on the subject of self are dangerous.  Too many fall into the trap of sounding like an over-serious high school student reading lines to an indifferent cafeteria. 

Nevertheless, one of my favorite poets ever is Leonard Cohen.  He writes about himself a lot. He says of himself “I never discuss my mistresses or my tailors” but his poems identify the objects of his desires by name.  Go figure. 

I am approximately half way through with my MA in Creative Writing.  Come this time next year, I imagine I’ll be all the way through with the coursework and eagerly awaiting graduation, which should happen on or around the 12th of December.  I think I would be more excited about this if I thought that my employment situation was likely to revolve around the MA.  Mostly, I suppose it will end up being a vanity degree, which is depressing so I don’t think about it.

Anyway, next summer, I will find myself writing a self-reflective piece on my progress from last year to this.  I am currently dispairing ever learning how to break my lines and stanzas to my tutor’s liking and am sure that I will be failing miserably shortly.  Other times, I am determined to graduate with a distinction.  In preparation for this self-reflective piece, I’ve started (as of today) digging up quotes from Leonard Cohen to see what he has to say about the craft.

And doing a little thinking of my own about poetry writing and why I think it is important.  Or if I think it is important.  I envison some sort of a synthesis between photography, history, poetry and storytelling.  My references might be www.gapingvoid.com, a book called Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes (which I suddenly fear I have no idea where it is among the bookshelves), Leonard Cohen and…  I don’t know.

I guess that is a start?

A quote from an old Leonard Cohen interview, 1967:  “I wrote ‘Beautiful Losers’ on Hydra, when I’d throught of myself as a loser, finacially, morally, as a lover and a man.  I was wiped out; I didn’t like my life.  I vowed I would just fill the pages with black or kill myself.  After the book was over, I fasted for ten days and flipped out completely.  It was my wildest trip.  I hallucinated for a week.  They took me to a hospital in Hydra.  One afternoon, the whole sky was black with storks.  They alighted on all the churches and left in the moring . . . and I was better.  Then I decided to go to Nashville and become a song writer.”

Surely the muse is there, just waiting to be turned into an essay on writing?