Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis
Most days, writers write. Occasionally, though, being a
writer means stepping back to look closely at what we have made. And sometimes
it means assessing our habits of mind as revealed through those many drafts.
I have a few bad patterns as a writer. Chief among them is
my go-to poetry rhetoric. On the first draft, many of my poems are shaped
similarly, and the argument moves according to a predictable pattern. I lay out
terms—Say such-and-such happened—and then
build until I get nearly to the end, where I turn. It’s a painful moment, to
suddenly realize that you’ve written the same poem over and over for a couple
of decades.
That problem has proven to be fixable, though, and the
process of repairing it has been artistically gratifying. I figured out right
away that I could shift the location of the claims or the warrants or the
supports to good effect. Seeing a poem as a rhetorical occasion is helpful in
itself. I’ve found that it’s possible to move the aspects of the argument like
furniture within the poem, and that doing so—reframing, reordering an
argument—is very gratifying, intellectually speaking.
A less enjoyable poetry problem to fix is my tendency to
offer a detail of setting (usually of time, but often of place) in the very
first line of a poem. Look at this sampling from a couple of my manuscripts:
Today, I sat in a pew …
At the Laundromat …
I woke this way—bent …
On the way to Provincetown …
Some days everything seems
scattered …
After a hard day, only this …
Lately I’ve been forgetting …
Someone inside me is upside down …
Somewhere near Des Moines you work
it out …
The minute she threw her wedding
ring over the stern …
Today my son opened his arms wide
…
It’s the night when the veil is
thinnest …
In church today a woman …
At the coffee shop today …
Today at the butterfly house …
Last night my son drew a picture …
The day the eclipse came …
One afternoon, driving …
You wore sweatpants to work on
Monday …
Last night the cold feed of
Aristotle …
This problem is more vexing for me. It certainly reveals a
lot about my processes, doesn’t it? I’m a busy mom who teaches and edits, and I
don’t have the luxury of retreating to my hidey-hole for days at a time to
ponder big ideas. Sometimes I can convince myself that small ideas are my
turf—but then I have to remind myself of the bigness of my world, and the
importance of creating and nurturing life, of useful toil, and of helping
people to become better writers. And the mom in me knows that small moments in the
lives of small people are actually a very big deal, so I chronicle them best I
can.
But this is a digression. Clearly, I’ve caught myself with
my pants down, artistically speaking. My process is plain as day for anyone to
observe; I begin by sitting down and asking myself, “Hmm, what should I write
about?” and the inevitable answer is, “Why, I’ll write about that
funny/perplexing/scary/important thing that happened yesterday.”
And then the poem begins. “Yesterday, ….”
And then the poem begins. “Yesterday, ….”
This seems like an easier problem to solve than that
rhetoric conundrum, but it’s really not. When I don’t allow myself to set the
scene for the poem, I’m left without footing. I literally have nowhere—and no
space in time—to occupy. Oh, it’s fine to recognize that you’re using a crutch,
but it gets a bit trickier when you kick that crutch away. A poem can topple
right over.
I’m not writing this, however, to propose a solution to my
problem. It’s something I work with every day, and like every writer, I find a
way in. There are a lot of paths into a poem, and finding different access
points has certainly helped my work.
I do recommend this process, though—a clear-eyed look at our
writerly habits, whether good (but overused) or bad. In a sense, most artifacts
on the page that can be thought of as “habits” are something of a problem. When
we make it but we don’t “Make it new,” the ghost of Ezra Pound sheds an
autocratic bundle of tears.
It’s painful, but necessary, to assess and correct where our
art is concerned.
I think it's so important for writers to evaluate/think about their process. In my MFA program I found it discouraging that my instructors dismissed discussion of process, writing habits, ect. Though we all have repetitious tenancies, many of these writerly habits build into something that contributes wonderfully, and uniquely to what--for a lack of a better term--I'll call style.
ReplyDeleteThat's absolutely true, and it's an idea I'm tossing around for a future post! (You should write about habits as indicator of style! That's nicely put.)
DeleteWonderful, thought-provoking post. It's growth to be able to finally understand your own process and accept it, but even more so to take that leap of being able to detach from order & starting point we recognize ourselves falling into, almost without thinking. T0 consciously try something new and stay with it,and have it eventually become something you're proud of, doesn't happen nearly as often as I'd like it to in my life, but it's so sweet when it does.
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ReplyDelete