*
This is not advice to writers
We are all writers
what about audience (and some crazy stuff about the primacy of the word over number)
Oh, for god’s sake, go ahead and start with the big idea
What I want from writing
*
1) This is not advice to writers. This is not advice to writers. God no. There is so much of that shit out there. Some writer on social media pulls out a quote or two, a paragraph from some longer piece by a writer, a “famous” writer he or she admires, and because it is a tried-and-true method he or she employed in their own writing, it is promoted as a kind of holy practice that promises to help notoriously unfamous hopeful writers become famous. Because becoming famous by writing must be the primary desired outcome of any writing one does. Right. Or else they are communists. Something like that. This is not that. This is me talking about writing. That. is. all. And why not? Why not talk about writing? I call myself a writer. I write. There’s some only partially understood balance the whole endeavor offers me. I, above all other outcome, above any other hope or desire, value that balance. My mind can be such a mélange of language, of pre-verbal grunts and hollers. I assume most if not all people, thinking people, feeling people, have a similar experience. My mind is always talking at me. Even in the woods or along the shore: Look at that light! My mind directs. It speaks to me… softly. Often quietly, folding into the burble of a little river I am fast approaching. Or when a scarlet tanager flickers through the spring green. The mind is delighted and sped into some parallel universe that is all amazement: how do these beings and phenomenon co-exist, these lovely and smart and hungry evolutionary designs, these miracles… how am I fortunate enough to be witness to them? To wildflowers, trillium, and adder’s tongue and mayapple. Or winter ice in waves from the last big blow and the way a fast river makes dozens of hanging spires from a roof of snow. My mind speaks to me even before it has the ability to form words until, by sheer persistence and insistence, all this erupted sensory input must form words… language. Language is related to birds, isn’t it? Language is born from the carcass of the zebra I saw just after dawn being dragged across the grass by a lioness. How else can I live here, in this world, how else can I traipse along, eyes open, and see… everything around me? The only possible understanding of all this image and light is to formulate words and connections through words. I am a writer so I must speak about writing. I must write about writing. It is all I have. It is not about giving instruction, about imposing order and confining that order in a system that works for me and insisting or implying that my way, my order, is the best or only way. Everyone has their own order. To communicate it to others is miraculous. It is how we connect, attach, invent a community, and go on. It is, in all ways, the core of writing. There are so many languages, aren’t there? There are so many ways to write, almost as many ways as there are writers. Almost as many ways as there are species across this once verdant spinning orb in the great suck of darkness and the solar winds, all this invisible but intrinsically in-utterable powerful yank and contraction, push and expansion, of the discovered and undiscovered universe. I see into the ink of the sky in the middle of an incredible fresh winter night and know I must be a part of it, however I am a part of it, and I must invent sounds and expression that locate me in its vastness. I am so small and so completely inexplicably folded into that vastness. It is my mother and my father. I must speak of this. I am a writer. I have no instructions, only observations. There is a great choir in all of this. If you are quiet. If you take the static of the shrinking world and the disappearing ice out of your ears and pull yourself away from the machine of what we are taught must be accomplished as it chips and erodes our abilities to perceive, to hear and to invent the words that keep us balanced in the continuing swell of the big boom, everything moving away from everything else, if you can look up into the ionic tonic of our womb, that great sparking, throbbing, novel of how we became and become, if you can (and you must… to live, to be alive) you will write about your own writing too. There are circles, holy gatherings, where these observations are shared. Rarer and rarer, they still find a place. This is one of those circles, and it is always becoming, always… all ways. Just in the hope, no matter how tiny or how seemingly insignificant. This is not advice on writing to writers. No. It is my story of my language. What is yours?
2) We are all writers. Because we are all born into language. Because we evolve as a family of beasts and evolve as an individual animal in that collective of beasts, because we find words to convey our wonder at our world, our fears and our realizations, our discoveries, and our desire to belong, we are all writers. From the moment of those first words. You know, the ones your parents celebrated, even the gestures and facial expressions, even the garbled experiments when you knew the meaning of the words being spoken around you but were unable or even unwilling to make the same sounds, preferring your own music from your own lungs, throat, and tongue: from that exact moment you were a writer. The entire collective human body is composed of one writer, one part of the anatomy of the race, communicating with one or all the others. This can barely be argued, regardless of how the powers that be, with their own wanton covetousness, would attempt to steal or steer the languages we all profess and love to use to know ourselves and each other, the writing we all are predisposed to send out into the collective, the interacting infused planetary systems of our thought and our experience. Regardless of how the robber barons of language work to shrink the reach of our pens and our typefaces, our inborn predilection to sing and chant on through the ceremony of the day, we always find our way out from under the grasp, the press of their boot. Did you know that hunter/gatherer societies spent about 40 hours a month hunting and gathering and building structures for living and providing for themselves and keeping themselves and their loved ones safe? Much of the rest of their time was spent telling stories of their lives, reformulating them into their sacred texts, repeating stories they were told as they grew into story tellers themselves. They too were all writers and they all knew they were writers. They wrote through dance and through sacred ritual, through art that was never separated from their gods and iconographic mythologies. Song and vision. They knew their story and preserved it, passed it on, dreamt and sung and recorded on cave walls and eventually on all the ways they made various kinds of paper, ink, and pens. Scribes then. Imbued with the most sacred of the tasks of a tribe or nation, tasked with recording the writings of all the people. Even numbers, records of harvests, records of wars and famine and the ways they met and shared resources and songs. Everyone had their own songs, their own stories, their own magic. Everyone was a writer. We are all writers. And we must talk about our writing and what we write about. Failing that, giving that away… to autocrats or machines or any force or person who wishes to steal the full range of what we wish to write for and about… failing that, we lose our humanity, our direction forward and our ability to see our way into a future that is sustainable and inhabitable, full of our potential but vulnerable. Not just by our kind, but inhabitable by all our relatives, all the beings who we must write about. Everything we cohabitate with in this place and absolutely need to know and write about for our own living. We must write about them to live, to dream. Because dreaming keeps us alive. We are all writers.
3) what about audience (and some crazy stuff about the necessary primacy of words over numbers) Those who sell writing, those whose primary occupation is to package and constrain/contain writing in a way that it can be marketed according to the principles and parameters, limits and boundaries that they have invented, are not interested in writing. No. Not really. They are interested in money. In capital. In a collection of numbers. Digits. And they believe the greater their collection of numbers the greater they must be. In that way they have as much, even more, power and compulsion to destroy writing as to promote it and get it into the hands and lives of people who would most benefit from it. Money has its own language, but, in the end, when we consider the genesis of language and of writing, when we consider the fact that we are all writers, money is unconcerned with the promotion and distribution of writing. It is primarily concerned with the promotion and hoarding of its own language. It is digital, and while those numbers have a prime importance in the story of our world and of our relationship to and survival with each other and our co-inhabitants in this tenuous and vulnerable planetary realm, the digital must always be held in service to the innumerable aspects of the planetary, to the written word and those who write it… which would be all of us. The proponents of the number work to make the word subservient to the number. It benefits them in nefarious, self-destructive, but seductive ways. There is a mythic quality in this dynamic. A cross-cultural fable. They work to contain the word in ways that render it wholly concerned with how they feel it must only be productive in terms of monetary, capitalized, value. In how much it contributes to their hoard. In order to accomplish this, to devalue the word and elevate the digital, the proponents of number have over time also designed and promoted an idea of the absolute attributes of audience, of who and how many are required to be in audience to any writing it deems will produce and enhance monetary, digital, value that feeds their hoard. They have, in effect, invented the idea of audience and invented the categories, themes and subjects that the audience will be provided with to reinforce their “audience-ness” and how the audience will measure value of what writing they are told they will pay to read. Of course, much, the majority of what is written that fits into their preferred categories involve the mythologizing of money, of the accrual of numbers and the lie that this is the best and only way to measure successful writing, despite the fact that all writers, all of us, are built to be successful writers… writing can only be taken away. We are all born to inhabit and use language, to tell stories. That they, those whose primary faith is in the primacy of numbers, regularly bestow great numerical value on writing that at its authentic heart eschews the primacy of the monetary only further extrapolates the mythic tale of how the destructive impulse of the seductive power of the primacy of numbers can coopt word and subdue, minimize its intent and power. In this way, writing that is primarily concerned with appealing to or developing an audience, is more digital, more about numbers than words. Does that make any sense? I think it is difficult to understand the depth of meaning in this construct. That the power and control that capitalized, digitally focused, number-oriented factions in the culture exercise over both the features of audience and what that audience consumes regarding the word is actually destructive to the word. It primarily if not consciously pushes to make the word and writing subservient to the number. The eventual unsustainability of the level of consumption represented by the adoration of the number, uncontained by writing and the word, affords those who place their faith primarily in digitally measured consumption, has the power to destroy the inherently democratic and self-balancing, self-sustaining nature of the word while it concurrently destroys the livability of the world due to its hierarchical nature being unconstrained by writing, the word. At any rate (and once out of the thick and thorny undergrowth of this proposal) it becomes evident that writing to/for audience as opposed to writing as a way to participate in the inherently democratic process of the expression writing affords each of us, writing that is our birthright, a way to build and reinforce democratic connection among the global collective, is an anathema to our true purpose and ability to sustain all the world’s populations as a collection of cultures on a vulnerable and spectacular planet. Write because you must. Because it makes you and what you know and see more than a number. Eschew the primacy of audience, of the hierarchy of numbers, the digital. Isn’t it interesting that so much of the most important writing that has come to the forefront in the past 50 years has come from the pens and notebooks of virtual unknowns? People, writers, in cultures overwhelmingly defined by a commitment to the digital and its narrow hierarchy and capitalization of experience, of writing and the word, even out of their relative isolation of being rendered silent and unimportant, have finally been exhumed and brought into the light to tell us the truth about what the digitalizers (those slave holders and extractors and plunderers) wrought? We know what we know about the full spectrum of the truth of our residency on this planet because of writers who were silenced by the hierarchy of the forced predominance of the digital, the worship of capital, the number. Write because you, like everyone else (however they do it) are a writer. Because your story is important, essential, to the survival of the collective planetary ‘we’. Audience is always secondary to storytelling and the truth of what you know.
4) why not self-publish? what about the writing industry wants us? what about the “culture” of writers. It’s come up again. Someone enmeshed in the industry of writing, and in this case, it was the industry of poetry (a bizarre concept in itself, if you ask me) has shamed a writer, a poet, for self-publishing, for even considering self-publishing. How does the entirely self-concerned, very small, world of the American poetry industry even have the gall to disapprove of self-publishing? What is that about? When the most anyone who writes and hopes to publish their poems can expect from their endeavors is to pay to enter a contest whose 1st prize is often enough financed by those who pay to enter it?? And then, what? Should one win that vaunted chapbook publication contest, in an overwhelming number of cases, a majority most likely, the grand prize of publication incudes the poet being given a box with a couple hundred copies of the book which the poet is expected to promote and sell or else they end up on a shelf in the closet. What a joke. All to support the livelihood of some little prominent academic magazine or small press that never or rarely moves beyond that model of self-sustenance. Then there’s the cost of the ever-burgeoning upper echelon MFA programs in creative writing. If you are accepted into one of them, after you put yourself in debt for the rest of your life, perhaps you’ll make the necessary contacts with a few well-knowns (are there well-knowns? I mean beyond the in-group academicians and those who have fawned adequately over their attentions?) to be promoted enough to win a chapbook contest or two… if you are lucky. I know. Am I being bitter? Perhaps I am being bitter. Maybe not bitter, but unimpressed and sarcastic, at least. My own satisfaction with my poetry and the worlds it has opened for me rarely if ever intersected with these elite self-aggrandizing and very pricy gambling casinos established to promote the potential of developing audience and contact with influence. The pyramid scheme of the poetry industry. But for what little money is made or paid out to poets for their efforts, I cannot seem to come to terms with the utter audacity of a “business” that insists that real writers, real poets, willingly cooperate with such a system that neither offers adequate, affordable support or any reach in terms of readership that is in reality any more, number wise, than if they publish and promote their own material in whatever way they see fit. Have you seen the cost of an MFA in creative writing these days? Just to sit at the feet of an allegedly famous poet who, in reality, has no more name recognition among the general public, beyond the cloister of the poetry “industry”, than anyone who has sunk time and heart and energy in creating their own community of poets, poetry readings and workshops. So, should one succumb to the siren song of the poetry writing denizens in one of the most prestigious MFA programs in the country, will it be worth it to pay off the debt for a few thousand years just to have that famous poet write a blurb for the 250 copies of your chapbooks? For god’s sake, do what you want with your poems. Good and great poems can come from anywhere. And they do. And remember, those who devalue your work or your voice simply because you choose to focus your energy on creating and participating in truly cooperative communities of other writers (according to your own values and gifts regardless of how weird anyone thinks you may be), those who refuse to read at the great democratic and juicy tradition of open readings you love or publish their stuff independently are no more likely to be lionized and accepted by the poetry digitizers, the poetry capitalizers, than you are. Just ask Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
5) Oh, for god’s sake, go ahead… start with the big idea. Why oh why do I continue to read the regular social media posts I see that feature advice on writing? Once more I am confronted by an allegedly famous poet who advises that poets should never start with a big idea. For God’s sake why the fuck not? Is this why so much of the published poetry these days seems so invested in being small? So quiet? So preoccupied with numbing minute and often incoherent details of lives of people who could afford to be in debt for the rest of their lives from paying for the honor of being in a hifalutin MFA program? And still, how may poems get published about being perpetually in debt from paying tons of loot to sit at the feet of someone who has a deserved or undeserved reputation of greatness… and are rude drunks or psychotics to boot. Oh, that’s mean. That’s really mean. I know. But having had my own brushes with psychosis I feel I am allowed. I am permitted. Start with a big idea if you wish. I give you permission. Tell ‘em the guy from Vance Refrigeration told you it was okay. Better yet, start where your poems tell you to start. Fuck what’s in style. And that’s all this insistence on starting with the little stuff is about. Some half-assed perception that there is even a current “style” of poetry. I can’t think of a poet worth his or her salt, past or present, who’d listen to such claptrap. Go ahead, list the poets who you know started with big ideas. Then compare their poems with ones written by those who are committed to never ever writing with a big idea in mind, no matter what the poem demands be written. Yikes.
6) What I want from writing. One thing that is pretty constantly on my mind is the purpose and meaning of my writing. In my life and in the world. I put a lot of effort and soul (yes, that’s it, soul) into my writing. I like thinking about it, I’ve decided, even when it’s intrusive and challenging and a little dark. And as much as, like anyone in the culture, I flirt with and can hardly fail to wonder about the whole idea of acclaim and renown, I have enough of a grasp on reality to understand how unlikely it has ever been for me, or for any writer, regardless of the quality of the work. I do think much of this is dictated by things beyond my reach, beyond my class, and largely according to a more and more perverse idea of value being in sync with fame and wealth. We all know this focus on an almost completely monetized measure of worth and renown is a myth and probably even a fatal fallacy of the number-based, capitalized, culture… but still, it has been ingrained in us from birth and can hardly be altogether silenced. One wonders how many fine artists have been utterly ruined simply by the fact that they could not see past the evaluative nature of the culture of numbers given primacy over word? How many have quit… maybe because they had no deep abiding energy left after a day at their accountants’ or IT desk? It happens. How many people do you know who loved their art making, loved their writing, but stopped when the demands on their time and their soul became too overwhelming and dispiriting? Given more time and support how many of them may have continued to contribute to the absolutely essential nature of adding to the collective voice, the collective word? One hopes against hope that there are enough of these people left who keep up the work of recording their existence via art, via the word, via writing, in spite of their everyday quest to keep a roof over their heads, or food on the table, or keeping themselves and their families safe from the next incursion of some oil obsessed super power masked as religious extremists or freedom loving hoarders. Because, in the end, they, the unknowns, will ultimately be the trove of the real stories of our time on this rapidly dissembling orb. We were born in a miracle of random occurrences of astounding and unlikely beauty. Living beauty. Interactive beauty, Sometimes through some incredible series of events we are even kept safe enough to create a memoir of our time here… what happened, who we knew, who we loved and who loved us, why some and maybe all of this, everything around us that sustained and fed us, went wrong… in spite of our belief in processes and discoveries altogether and inestimably greater than the sum total of all we see and know. Only through our collective recollection can we even see and recognize who we are and where we live and how we got here (and where we are going). I admit, the whole idea of reaching some pinnacle of renown from my own recollections, my own recordings, has been an irritant in the overall scheme of how I most wish to experience the world and my time on it… because: isn’t it amazing? There are things I’ve seen… even in my little neighborhood, in my backyard… that are irretrievably unbelievable in their unlikely, gorgeous, miraculous arrival as I, through some unexplainable majesty of the loops and overlaps of what we call time, am moved through them. Write. Just because you are, we all are, writers and each of our stories are integral to the story of how and why our residency… rare, unlikely, tiny and huge and blue blue blue… is worth recording. What do I want from writing? Beyond leaving a record I want to reach out into the ether, into the ever-expanding, ever spinning, ever exploding and regathering phenomena that I am surely a part of, I want to know myself and see myself within and beyond a collective of selves. Without these words I think I become just another dissembling occurrence, lost to myself and lost to whatever erasures and evolutions are always on the horizons. I can make importance out of a complete and total lack of it. That is, if one can be ultimately important and completely unimportant at the same time. And isn’t that in itself something to wonder… and write…about?
(all but 2 of the photographs included in this issue of Compendium: The Kitchen Sink were taken recently at Whitefish Point on Lake Superior)