Standing at the Intersection of Art and Grace

            Someone was mean to me once, and it threw me ten years off course.

            It is sobering to look around in my mid-forties and realize that I’ve squandered some important creative years, all because I took to heart some freakishly harsh criticism from a person I loved, a person who should have done better by me.

            The “who” doesn’t matter. What happened is this: I was in the middle of a creative project that thrilled me, and I talked about it to one of the people I cared most about. This person sat me down and told me all of the things that were wrong with me. I felt I was better than everybody else. I lorded my accomplishments over others. I flaunted my education. I refused to speak normally, and instead used big words and complicated constructions to say basic things.

            This were personal criticisms, not poetic ones, but they rose from my attempt to express that moment of artistic glee—I had a project that was changing my creative life and making me feel like I had real potential as a poet.

            By the end of that conversation, I had put my pen in a drawer, figuratively speaking, and it stayed there for a decade.

            The other day, a friend mentioned that she was worried about sharing her work with her loved ones. Other friends piped in with advice. The work is important, they said; the loved ones need to hear it and support it, or they are not worth loving at all.

            Sharing work with special people is tricky. I’m always hearing artists talk about the fear that accompanies a family member reading their poetry or seeing their visual art in a gallery. And it may not be worth the trouble. When loved ones are also artists, it’s easier; they know how to honor the humanity within the work yet separate the product from the creator. Loved ones who aren’t artists may look for themselves in work; they may psychoanalyze the creator or see something unhealthy about the way we work through things on page or canvas.

            It seems like the best move may be to go ahead and keep work and loved ones separate, unless family, friends, or lovers seek it out on their own, or otherwise show readiness for confronting the artist through the work. I certainly experienced no profit from excitedly talking about my life-changing project with someone who didn’t know or care what it meant to me.

Art, including literary art, can be regarded sort of like, say, gardening is. It’s lovely to hear that someone has planted dahlias in the side yard; we can hear about the bold blossoms, maybe glance at them and appreciate their beauty and the fact that someone has cultivated it. We don’t need to investigate the roots and stalk. We don’t need to count the petals. Seeing the happiness of the gardener is sufficient. That person—and maybe any person who increases, rather than decreases, the beauty in the world—should be congratulated, cheered on.

            It is tempting to be angry with the person behind this moment that never stops being horrible. (I go back to the conversation from time to time, and it hurts just as much after all this time as it did at the moment it was happening.) The fact that this person made the wrong call doesn’t even factor in. An MFA in creative writing is not the kind of education one flaunts. A non-tenure-track job, lowest rank in the institution, is not an accomplishment to be lorded. Being awkward and stilted in conversation is not a source of pride. The poetry, though? That’s a very reasonable source of delight. A professor I had once told me that there are two kinds of poetry: good poetry and great poetry. The act of making art is, in itself, ennobling, whatever the product.

            I think the rightful focus of anger is obvious. It’s me. Most people are nice and supportive—even strangers hold doors and spare a smile. We run into stinkers from time to time, though, and from time to time, we are the stinkers. The only unforgivable act in this scenario is not reporting for duty—not answering the call of those poems that tried to find their way into being during that empty decade. Who knows what words might have visited me, had I been in position and ready to accept them?

            The unkindness of others shouldn’t change me, and I won’t let it change me again. Whatever the actions of people around me, I choose, forever after, to be a loving person and a gracious host.

Learning By Connecting

            I have always been fascinated by learning, and for most of my life, I have devoted time and energy to it, both inside and outside of formal classes. I am a student right now, actually, in a TESOL certificate program at Missouri State University, and that has me hitting the books and writing papers and taking tests for the first time in years. However, I am also trying to learn more about a number of subjects on my own. Geography is one. I enjoy reading about countries of the world; in my spare time I like to see how quickly I can fill the names of countries into a blank map. I’m getting pretty good—fast, and clear on the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia, Guyana and French Guiana, Malawi and Mozambique.

            I teach writing and speaking to international students, and right now (in fact, at this moment, as I write along with them on the overhead projector) they are writing an essay about their unique learning styles. It is a good question to ask—What kind of learner are you? For my students, the answers run the gamut, from the styles American students are well versed in—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—to their more personal preferences, like studying with others or listening to music while they work. (If my students end up being the ones who come up to you at the start of the first session of your lit class to announce that they are kinesthetic learners and may require appropriate accommodations, I apologize, and wish you well with the challenge of applying tactile elements to your lesson plans on Jane Austen’s Emma or William Wordsworth’s The Prelude.)

            My students’ assignment has me thinking about my own learning style, which is as idiosyncratic as anyone’s. For me, learning starts with seeing, whether that is with words on a page or pictures on a website. As I read, I get snagged on interesting words, and then sound takes over. Encountering a musical name like “Tannu Tuva” sends me Googling—what does Tuva look like? What do the people there do?

            Turns out that this formerly independent state is now part of the Russian Federation, and Tannu Tuva is no more. The area is properly called the Tyva Republic. It is a lush, green place, not unlike Montana in appearance. One thing that some people there do, as it turns out, is throat-singing—a method of song-making that allows them to produce multiple notes in the back of the throat. Tuva, as it turns out, was an interesting place, well worth learning more about.

            My brief exploration into Tannu Tuva is indicative of my own learning style—independent, natural, sporadic, curious, disorganized. I love factoids and I love people, and there is nothing more fascinating than learning how people in other places get through their days.

            It’s something that fascinates me about my students, too. What is life like in Gujarat, in western India? What is it like in a smaller, history-rich city in China? In Riyadh? I wonder—and I ask. My learning style means that they tell me a detail about their country and I Google away, trying to imagine where they’re from, what they’re about, what they do and love and play and sing and eat.

            I know that they’re a lot of fun to spend time with. They’re good-natured, and they go along with my sometimes-bizarre lesson plans. They are happy to write and speak and share their truths, and they have gotten over their fear of making a mistake, abandoning it in favor of their desire to communicate something essential.

            I guess my own learning style, if I’m to conclude our assignment, is to position myself in the vicinity of fascinating people and bug them until I begin to know some things they know. It is to reveal aspects of my own life so that they will, out of a sense of decorum or pity, reciprocate with details from theirs. It is, in short, to forge connections where I can.

           

            

Chi and the Writer

            Keeping a clean house doesn’t come very naturally to me. Maintaining a constant state of clutter, though? I’ve made an art form out of that. I’m not even sure where the stacks and piles come from. One day the place is tidy; the next day, chaos.

            The denizens of my house spent this past weekend cleaning. I find that the eight-year-old is just the right age to run things here and there—toy to his room, dish to the kitchen, stray sock to the hamper. (This may be why I had one of those, come to think of it. It takes a long time for a kid to become useful!)

            A clean house makes me feel relaxed. It also prepares me to take on the next project. There is no pile of mail to go through, no trash or recycling to take to the bin. May as well write a poem, I figure, rather than, oh, watching TV and feeling guilty about neither cleaning nor writing a poem. Clutter puts everything on hold; we all move through the house in slow motion.

            I went through a period a few years back when I read everything I could about feng shui, the traditional Chinese system that directs placement of items within a space in a way that facilitates the flow of energy, or chi. A real commitment to feng shui requires a much tidier setup than I have on my very best day, so I gave it up as a bad deal—but the logic of the system sticks. Our own sluggishness inside a messy house makes sense within the terms of feng shui. Clutter stops flow, stops energy, and the negative energy builds in the places where it becomes stymied. A tidy house with a careful arrangement the items within helps all of us to ride a silver stream of chi.

            In terms of writing, the neatness feels like a boon—but the effect is so temporary for someone like me, someone who leaves literal paper trails, someone whose first move upon arriving home is to step out of her shoes in mid-stride, drop her pants on the floor, then work her bra through her sleeve and slingshot it to any corner.

            There is a question inherent in all of this. Is it a good writing strategy to tidy up before setting in to work? As much as I like the (now deteriorating) cleanliness, I did blow a weekend pulling it off—and that was a weekend I could have spent writing. What’s more, a clean and tidy house has a short half-life if I’m the one living in it. A weekend of effort is effectively neutralized by Wednesday.

            Like so many problems, money could solve this one. A regular hired housekeeper could take care of the cleaning, and that would allow my family just to tidy up—an easier job, but not a small one, by any stretch.

            And along those lines, full-time childcare would also free up some writing time. And so could an errand person. A personal shopper. A chef. An accountant. It would be lovely, too, not to have to go to work. Imagine! A person could wake up when she wanted, work when (and on what) she wanted, have fun when she wanted, and end each day relaxed. May as well add a massage specialist to the mix, while we’re at it.

            But in the world I inhabit, there are courses to plan and to teach, papers to grade, kids to nurture and to play with, meals to prepare, love to make, stuff to buy and repair and maintain.

            And there’s a mess, gathering even now, in my brain and in my house. From a writerly perspective, I actually believe it can be good for energy to stall and to tangle in the brain, despite the benefits of flow. I suppose letting a thought come and letting it go is a healthier way to live—but whatever would we write about? The poet’s mind needs clutter. I just wish I could work the tangles out on my own time, within the order of a perfect home.

A Life Devoted to Poultry—Ahem, POETRY

When covering farm news, it’s good to have some jeans and a pair of boots in the trunk of your car, because you never know what you might end up walking in.

I learned this from my agricultural beat predecessor, a woman raised in rural Ohio, and someone who knew the ins and outs of a working farm. While my own upbringing was also rural, my family lived in the woods and did not farm, aside from a rather mean goat and a copperhead-filled chicken house we maintained for a few years when I was growing up.

On the farm beat, one day you might cover a tragedy in a silo or a gravity wagon—both of which can pull a person’s body under the grain and smother him or her as rescuers make a futile attempt to fight the pull. On a brighter note, you might cover a new crop—my colleague knew of a secret field of peppermint, the location a closely kept secret because of the value of the harvest in an area mostly dedicated to corn, wheat, and soy.

The constant friction between family farms and large-scale egg or pork production facilities is another part of the farm reporter’s beat, and there is also the highlight of the year—the county fair and the winning entries in livestock, small animal, and even baking categories.

            My time as a reporter spanned the decade of the 1990s in the small town—practically a village—of Kenton, Ohio. I was also a poet, which at the time didn’t amount to much more than writing words in a notebook and trying to shuffle them around until they lined up as they should.

            Being a poet also involved reading. Every trip to the state capital, Columbus, I would buy journals, anthologies, whatever I could get my hands on that had poetry inside.

            My favorite book was by a poet named William Matthews, who was quite a famous poet, although that fact means very little in the broader, non-poetry world. Matthews wrote a book called Flood that really spoke to me as it chronicled what floodwaters did to a landscape. These flood poems felt relevant to what I was doing at the time as I covered the stories that seemed to alter the landscape of my community. I wrote about farm news, of course, but I also covered county government, heartbreaking court cases, and features about extraordinary people—because even in rural America, brutal monsters and awe-inspiring heroes walk among us.

            Matthews’ poetry moved me so much that I decided to track him down and write him a letter. Poets don’t get a lot of fan letters, although these days the big ones are probably drowning in unsolicited e-mails and Facebook friend requests.

            I don’t remember exactly what I wrote. It would not have been unlike me to use the word “love.” I know I told him what I did day in and day out, and also what I wanted to do—make poetry of my own. I closed by thanking him for inspiring me.

            Some weeks later, I checked my mail and found an unexpected postcard, its message handwritten in small, tidy black print. Yes—it was from Matthews.

            He had filled the blank side of the picture postcard with kind and gracious words. Although I’ve moved a few times since then and lost the postcard in the shuffle, I remember one sentence distinctly:

A reporter is to a small town what a poet is to the language.

The words may as well have been strung up before me in neon. Even now, they are seared on the back of my eyes.

            While Matthews praised the part of me that was stuck as a small-town reporter, I also saw in his analogy a glimpse of myself as a poet. Already, I knew that my feature stories had the power to move people like poetry could. Matthews’ postcard made me realize that what I had viewed as a deviation from my path as a poet was actually another step along it.

I have no doubt that in that line of text, Matthews was referencing the Modern poet William Carlos Williams, who famously said, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” I was well acquainted with the intersection of difficulty and news. I had once covered the murder trial of a young man, small in stature, who had been beaten to death at a quarry. They pulled his body from the water and matched a boot print on his child-sized chest to the foot of one of his killers.

            I knew another kind of difficulty, too—the challenges posed by spreadsheets. Obfuscation surrounding a polluted landfill. The science in agricultural reporting. Journalism was nothing if not practice in sorting out complex things, in making sense of the world.

            Matthews’ little aphorism suggested something new to me—that I had in me the potential to offer readers a different kind of news in my poems. Maybe I was too busy being a watchdog of local government, and not busy enough being a watchdog of the spirit.

           

            Over the next few months, I applied to the two nearest creative writing graduate programs and was waitlisted by one (Ohio State University) and admitted into the other (Bowling Green State University). I began working evenings at a chicken restaurant to make some extra money, since I would be leaving a full-time job to pursue my new course of action.

            I also continued to report the news, but with a renewed sense of its possibilities. On one assignment, I remember approaching a large group of sandhill cranes (a “sedge” of cranes—that’s the collective term, the precise word for such a gathering). I snapped pictures and edged closer and closer, until some signal passed silently among the birds and they took flight together, right over my head, so close I could have reached up and touched a trailing leg.

            I also remember my very first feature story for the newspaper, about a woman who, though dying of cancer, set up what she called a love garden, where anyone could come and gather enough to eat. Evenings, she would sit up in bed, sunlight through the window turning everything golden, and she would look at her neat rows of beans and lettuce, and sow compassion until her very last day.

            Sometimes when the sports desk was short-handed, I would pitch in there and help out as best I could. On a few occasions, my job was to photograph a college basketball game, and this entailed sitting behind the net and pointing my camera at lanky athletes as they leaped toward the basket with the ball, just above me—sort of like those cranes taking flight.

            And some days, I would just photograph a farmer in his or her field to track the progress of the corn. “Knee-high by the Fourth of July” is the old saying; in practice, though, July corn can be eight to ten feet tall.

            My nights at the restaurant, I wore a different hat, or, more specifically, an apron. My usual role was to seat people and bring their drinks, and to bus their tables when they left. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, all-you-can-eat chicken nights, I had another responsibility: the chicken pass.

            My job these nights was to take a platter of broasted chicken throughout the dining room and distribute extra pieces. It was disconcerting at first as a young woman to be summoned to a table by a barked-out command, “Breast!” or “Thigh!” I got used to it, though. That didn’t mean it grew any less strange, or that I wouldn’t eventually write about it.

            One night a person I know came in—an affable fellow, someone I’d once interviewed for a story. He wasn’t particularly a friend—you don’t always make a lot of friends as a reporter, although in a small town, most people know your name.

            “I hear you’re heading off to college to study poultry,” the man said politely as he picked out a wing and a thigh.

            It struck me that this was farm country. Food, something so basic to human existence, was foremost in everyone’s mind in this place. From daily fluctuations in the price of a bushel of soy to the land application of waste from a massive chicken farm, this was the news. It was also, I had had come to understand, the poetry.

            I let the misunderstanding pass. “Yes, sir, I am,” I replied.

            “You’ll do fine,” he assured me.

            His words had the ring of a blessing, so I tucked them away exactly like an extravagant tip to spend later on something nice, just for me.