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.

In Search of Namaste

People have a lot of negative things to say about the creative writing workshop culture, the worst of which is that all of the writers who go through an MFA or doctoral creative writing program end up writing the same poem or story.

They don’t.

There is also the stereotype of the sniping, competitive workshop, where everyone is engaged in fierce one-upmanship.

I haven’t seen it.

But I do have a complaint about workshop culture. I never really liked all of the nonstop workshopping.

Here’s the thing: by the second workshop session, you can almost predict the responses from each member of a cohort whom you will work with for two or three years. Reader A doesn’t think you pushed the poem far enough. Reader B wants you to experiment with form. Reader C thinks you should be more open-ended. And it’s quite possible that you will receive variations on these responses from this particular cast of characters for every poem you turn in, forever.

Luckily, everyone is quick to point out that they really like your X, but. The “Xbut” comment dominates the workshop, really—there is a smattering of faint praise for a surface feature, and then an explanation of how a reader wants to see more of whatever it is she wants to see more of.

When I teach a workshop, I advise against the Xbut comment. In fact, I advise against “like” statements at all. I’ve never understood why anyone thinks that a personal preference is relevant to a conversation of craft. It’s a first step to gaining a sense of what is working and what is not, of course, but at the graduate level, the conversation needs to go further—and it even needs to start in a further-along place.

“Like” is an unhelpful word, and it’s generally an unexamined one. A negative criticism (and one probably based on personal aesthetic preference) is coming, and the Xbut comment softens it. It’s a kind of workshop foreplay, but as foreplay goes, it’s insufficient. To push the comparison, the Xbut statement is the clumsy boob-squeeze to the coitus of the discussion.

In a workshop, the conversation seldom turns to the most basic element of a piece of writing, and that is what idea is being communicated. We might explore the rhetorical structure of a poem (and this, though welcome and useful, happens seldom), but we generally fail to acknowledge what a poet is trying to say—which is too bad, since most poems rise from some urgency within the poet.

Unfortunately, the workshop can infect the rest of a writer’s life, if we let it. Poems are judged to be good or not by readers, publishable or not by editors, but I find that poems are very seldom heard.

In my daily life, I tend to greet people with a friendly “Hey.” Were I a speaker of Zulu, I would have a completely different greeting: “Sawubona,” which means “I see you” or “I recognize the humanity in you.” The Sanskrit-derived word “Namaste” also means “I see you,” or, more specifically, “My spirit recognizes your spirit.”

Doesn’t the typical workshop offer a sort of good-natured “Hey”? And in writing a poem, aren’t we instead looking for a “Sawubona” or a “Namaste”? This may sound a little bit old fashioned, but I write poems in part to express something I’m feeling. That’s always the starting point. I’m aiming for art, but it’s rooted deep in my spirit, and more than anything else, I have something I’m trying to say—something I’d like for you to hear. I don’t even care particularly if you like the little artifact of the poem. We all like different things. As accomplished as his poems are, I never cared much for Ezra Pound. I have tried, though, to hear him out.

One way I’ve recovered from the oddity of the workshop is to share little poems on social media from time to time. What is most gratifying to me is when someone who isn’t a regular reader of poetry connects with my work. Here’s a poem I wrote in church on Sunday and posted after the service:

Mary of Bethany

In church today a woman

rubbed the bald spot of the man

she loved, and did it all the way

through the message, the offering

and meditation. I know.

I opened my eyes to check.

And isn’t that God, touching us

where we’re most exposed,

loving even our emptiness,

all those places soft with down.

I don’t necessarily consider this little poem to be high art, but I was trying to communicate something I felt, and it turned out that a lot of my acquaintances, poets or otherwise, churchy types or not, connected with those ten lines. We all have a few fuzzy places; we want that caress.

            What’s more, we want to be heard, seen—recognized. Good or bad, like or not, most poems are a human being’s best attempt to tell you something urgent. We’re listening for the namaste.