Stop, Look, Listen and Write

Recently, I was asked to give a talk on writing poetry. What I learned from preparing for that talk was that I don’t follow many rules of writing poetry. Or maybe I do and just don’t realize it. One of my biggest influences on my writing style has been the late William Stafford, a Kansas born and raised poet. When I was a student in the Wichita State University MFA program, I consulted his book, Writing the Australian Crawl, quite often. It was helpful in freeing me to write the way I saw fit rather than the way others thought I should write.

A quote from Pico Iyer, an Indian essayist and novelist, is also helpful for poets. Iyer said: “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading. Writing should … be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent … and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”

Back to Stafford, who uses a line from William Blake’s “Jerusalem” to illustrate his philosophy of writing poetry.

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

Stafford says, “The stance to take, reading or writing, is neutral, ready, susceptible to now: such a stance is contrary to anything tense, or determined or ‘well-trained.’ Only the golden string knows where it is going, and the role for the writer or the reader is one of following, not imposing.”

Here is one of Stafford’s poems, one he wrote about an ordinary event, a car trip with this family. At the end of the poem, he uses lines that he, as a child, heard his mother say often.

The Trip

Our car was fierce enough;
no one could tell we were only ourselves;
so we drove, equals of the car,
and ate at a drive-in where Citizens were dining.
A waitress with eyes made up to be Eyes
brought food spiced by the neon light.

Watching, we saw the manager greet people—
hollow on the outside, some kind of solid veneer.
When we got back on the road we welcomed
it as a fierce thing welcomes the cold.
Some people you meet are so dull
that you always remember their names.*

*From Traveling Through the Dark, Harper and Row. Copyright 1962 by William Stafford.

Stafford’s poem comes from a childhood memory. Notice the words he capitalizes. Notice also his feeling about riding in the car. In a child’s eyes, these items would be significant in a way that they wouldn’t be to an adult. Through the eyes of a child, he perceives that the manager is a phony, something an adult might not notice. Stafford’s parents were the kind of people we like to think of as true Kansans—plain-spoken, not above themselves, honest. Stafford brings that sensibility to his poetry.

When I first started writing poems, I didn’t worry about form. I did what Stafford advised. I followed the “golden string.” I listened to the voices around me and in my memory. We all have a sense of rhythm that has been instilled us from the womb. We hear the rhythm of language around us. If we grew up in, say Kenya, we would hear another rhythm. Those who live in the south hear a different rhythm from those who live in the north or the Midwest. For example, when I first moved to Michigan, I felt like I was living in Holland because so many people up there spoke with that touch of Dutch in their voices. By contrast, many Michiganders thought I had a southern accent. The upshot of this is, whatever the rhythm of your home is, that’s the rhythm that you write in.

Many of my poems come from listening, watching, touching, or smelling—sensory impressions, in other words. I don’t worry about iambic pentameter or blank verse or all that other technical stuff I studied as an English major. In fact, I had to forget all that when I first started writing poetry.

One poem I wrote for a project developed by the current Kansas poet laureate Wyatt Townley is a cinquains with the theme of home:

Home

Raised in
the wood frame house
that once housed my father
around me the ghosts of laundry
roamed free

The poem comes from the memory of my mother hanging the wash in the kitchen on cold winter days. The poem was published in several newspapers around the state.

I find a great deal of inspiration from listening to my husband talk. One day, he started listing all the things he would do if I died before he did. I laughed at his list, but then I started writing and this is what I came up with.

After

He says, if you die before I do, I will cancel
the cable, get an antenna, rabbit ears.
I will move our money to a credit union
I will put a basket on my bike, ride
it to the grocery store, shop daily
for my food, European style.

She listens, thinks of the void her absence
will make, the hole in the world they inhabit,
clawing their way to get to this place.
She thinks of the shadow that would fall
on her if he would go before. Thinks,
but does not say, does not want to say
such a thing aloud into the lamp-lit room.
She turns her face to the dark outside
the window, to the quarter moon.

Published on Kansas Time & Place

Most of what is in this poem is what happened. My husband was frustrated that Cox cable costs so much, even though he loves watching KU basketball on a cable station. He has a bike, but I think it’s a pipe dream for him to ride it to get groceries. We did go through a great deal of angst to get the peaceful place we now inhabit. And I did look out the window and I saw the sliver of the moon. Some may think this is a depressing poem. I don’t. My husband isn’t anxious for me to die. He’s be in a world of hurt without me and he knows it. He’s just imagining an alternative life that I won’t let him have.

As for writing a poem, don’t make it harder than it is. Just stop, look, listen, and write.

Entrenched in the Writing Life

It seems that nowadays everyone I meet is either writing or wants to start writing. As a retired community college English instructor, I see that as a good thing. Given that so much communication has moved to the Internet, the fact that people are still driven to put words to paper in some form gives me hope for the future of the craft.

I have enjoyed writing all my life. It comes naturally to me. I understood from an early age the structure of the five-paragraph essay, with its introductory paragraph, the three paragraphs of the body that support the thesis statement in the introduction, and the conclusion that draws everything together. By the time I was in seventh grade, that form was second nature to me. As a college freshman, I tested out of English composition I and II, and I enrolled in sophomore literature classes. I had little clue what was going on those classes, but at least I made respectable grades, unlike the algebra class I tested high enough to get into. If anyone thinks those tests have any value at all, I am living proof that they don’t.

I long ago moved away from the five-paragraph essay structure to a more organic form, but it’s impossible to break old habits and I’m not really sure I want to. Writing has to be comprehendable. Otherwise, why bother? On the other hand, poetry doesn’t always have to be comprehended in a rational way, as I discovered when I started writing it thirty years ago.

After getting a BA and an MA and teaching journalism for several years, I decided I was in a position to enter the world of creative writing. I did so by enrolling in the MFA program at Wichita State University. In order to get into the program I had to submit a poem to the dean of the English department. I still have that poem, which I’ve rewritten several times, and which is still an embarrassment to me. For some reason, though, the dean liked what I sent him and I was in the program.

By this time, my kids were all off to college and I was old enough to be the mom to some of my younger classmates. My first few weeks in the program were daunting and difficult. Only a few of the students were my age or older. The younger students knew that I was a middle-aged high school teacher. In their eyes, I might as well have been a washerwoman. In fact, the second night of the first class I enrolled in, I stayed after class to tell the professor I was going to drop out of the program. I didn’t have the stomach to deal with the sneers and the put-downs that came my way. It didn’t help that we met at night in the professor’s apartment and some of the students were already pretty stewed by the time the class started.  The prof was the visiting professor that semester, which is why he had the apartment. This wasn’t the first time I’d attended class in a private home, but it was the first time I felt at a disadvantage doing so. Students sprawled on the floor must have felt they were still in Kirby’s, the pub across the street from the campus, where things got pretty raucous on occasion. I didn’t mind that things got raucous at Kirby’s. I joined in at times. I didn’t like that they got raucous in the class.

However, before I had a chance to say I was leaving, the professor, Robert Dana, said I should stay in the program because I knew a lot more than most of my classmates and I would eventually get the hang of writing poetry. I couldn’t have felt more elated if he had told me I’d won a million dollars. As it turned out, I become friends with my classmates and

The following year, I quit my teaching job and became a full time student. I had a teaching assistantship, for which I taught two sections of English composition. Since I’d never taken such a class, I was up a creek when it came to teaching it. The English department required all of us to take a course in teaching English composition, however, and it was one of the best courses I ever had.

Bruce Cutler, who held the Adele Davis Chair, was my thesis adviser. For reasons I will never understand, he seemed to really like my poetry. He was a gentle man whose class inspired to do some of my best writing. One of my regrets is that I forgot to thank him in the introduction to my thesis.

Both he and Robert Dana are now dead, a great loss to the world of poetry and peace. I say a word of thanks to them and to Anita Skeen, another of my professors, who is still alive and writing her wonderful poetry.

When I went across the stage with my MFA classmates, I knew something good was coming to an end. I never realized how bereft I would feel after most of them left Wichita, never to return. I keep in touch with a few of them still, but the closeness we had will never be regained. People move on, and that’s as it should be.

I got a job at a community college, which I loved. I still wrote, but sparingly. Now that I’ve finally retired from teaching, I have taken up writing again. I’ve had some publishing success and I’ve won a few awards. I belong to a small writing group comprising women who are around my age. They are my best critics because they challenge everything. I want to continue writing and I want to get at least one book published. My life has become focused on that now.

My only problem is that I’m easily distracted by the outside world. I marvel at writers who get up at 4 a.m. and write for two hours (William Stafford), or those who start writing at 8 a.m. and continue until 2 p.m. (almost anyone who lives with someone who will take care of the household duties). I also have developed a social life, and it’s difficult to resist a lunch or movie date with my friends. Somehow despite all these distractions, I manage to pump out several poems a week. Not all of them are worth sharing, but every so often one does surface that makes me extremely happy. I love the writing life.