Janet Holmes BOISE, ID Janet continues to study painting, and blogs at humanophone.com when time permits. Friday: 01.19.07 | Permalink | Comments (19)

I am coming off a very quiet time, unusual for me. Classes begin tomorrow (we’re remembering Martin Luther King today), but for the past week I’ve been able to go to my office and work on the course I’ll teach on the “Objectivists” or work on Ahsahta Press business more or less undisturbed by the phone or by people dropping in with questions. At home, my husband and even my dog were out of town (together, thankfully). I am rarely so isolated with my own thoughts and behaviors as I’ve been this past week. Yet for all the time I spent on the deserted campus, I didn’t write any poetry there.

A friend, a successful novelist, tells me he knows of no writers who have done the work important to them, their poetry or fiction writing, in an English department office. (“I think they’re toxic places,” he said. He shuddered.) I can’t think of any either, though I know many people who seem to be able to write in any environment. Back in the eighties, Natalie Goldberg advised poets to write in cafés, in spiral notebooks with cartoon characters on the covers so as not to take themselves too seriously—or at least that’s what I remember from my reading of Writing Down the Bones back in the day. God knows, there are plenty of folks at just about any Starbucks anywhere with open laptops or pen and paper doing something. Most of them look as if they’ve blocked out the world, and I know the feeling of intense focus or concentration that accompanies such a look. I probably look like that when I’m writing, too—but in a café I’m hard pressed not to people-watch, eavesdrop on the non-absorbed, or visit with friends. Those activities may feed my writing at a later time or cause me to make a note on a napkin of something interesting or a turn of phrase, but actually working on a poem seems impossible in such an environment. Maybe I could blog there, but otherwise I don’t think I’d get anything done. My filters aren’t strong enough.

[An aside: I’m suspicious of talismanic writing aids like that cartoon-covered notebook. Hemingway, they say, required yellow pads, sharp pencils, and that famous stand-up desk to draft his novels. You don’t hear about many poets in that boat, requiring specific objects. The romance attached to the rolltop desk, fountain pen, Aeron chair, leather-bound book, seems empty and silly to me. I could write (and have) on the backs of receipts, paper bags, and the white spaces in newspaper advertisements, as long as I have a place to do it. And I have no trouble composing work on the computer.]

I write at home in one of four places: at my desk, in a book-cluttered soi-disant “office” in my house, on a laptop; in a favorite chair with pen and pad; at the dining-room table on a laptop; and propped up in bed with either laptop or pen. Each situation requires solitude, so I move to where the solitude is. Another friend, a painter, used to have a studio in his home, but he found it impossible not to be distracted by the movements of his partner elsewhere in the house, and to make things worse his dog insisted on following him back and forth when he, as is his habit, paced. So he rented space for a studio elsewhere. It’s an ideal solution for some writers, too; John Cheever, for instance, dressed himself as a businessman going to work, walked to his rented office, and wrote his stories and novels. I seem to recall that at one point, his office was in his basement, but his routine didn’t change; he dressed professionally, walked to the back of the house and down the stairs.

For many of us, writing environments make all the difference. I know of several writers whose situations allowed them to rent what one of them called his “fiction factory.” I don’t come from that side of the tracks (what were my parents thinking?), nor do most of my friends. We have to hunt.

When I was trying to work on my most recent book, I found my home office filled with Ahsahta Press business and grading, and having let these non-poetry specters take over my space, I had to find some way to banish them so I could work on my poems. I was just learning to balance the dual duties of running the press and teaching, while trying to maintain my family life. Where to work on my book? The office on campus was out (too busy), as was renting myself a place (too expensive). I didn’t like using the library at school because of the likelihood of running into friends or students who’d want to talk. A friend lit on an ideal solution: the law library in the Idaho Supreme Court building. Let me sing its praises: there are carrels with outlets and even a row of deposition rooms that are never completely in use, small white rooms with a desk-shelf along one wall, outlets for a laptop, and a door that closes. All citizens have access. There are no books that look remotely tempting. None of my students or colleagues frequents the place. It is quiet. [Cue “The Big Rock-Candy Mountain.” Cue choir of angels.] It was not only possible to work there, but I felt my mind eager to get to work every time I approached the row of rooms at the building’s far end.

Two friends of mine (each of considerably more means than I) have designed themselves writing spaces. Each was at the top of a house with big windows, nice views. Both had bookcases. Both had music systems. I don’t expect ever to have such a luxury, but if I were asked to design something for myself, a special place that facilitated my writing, I think that short of a room-size version of the Bose noise-canceling headphones I tried not long ago at an airport kiosk, it would be something like one of those deposition rooms. Businesslike chair. A wall-wide desk to spread things out on. Any great views, shelves packed with poetry books, or access to music would distract me from writing, not help me. I would be in procrastination heaven. The little white deposition room in the law library was not architecturally inspiring, but for a year it gave me a place to do what I desperately needed to do during a time when I had too much going on in my life. Having a place where I didn’t have to block out distractions made a huge difference.

This semester Al & I will have two visiting poets (married to each other) living with us, Ahsahta will be running its sixth annual contest, AWP will occur in Atlanta, and I’ll go on a book tour with Kate Greenstreet (whose book, case sensitive, was published by Ahsahta), all things I anticipate excitedly. I’ve got that “Objectivists” grad seminar. I have a manuscript to mail around. Maximizing my number of quiet places will be important, and I suspect I’ll be back at the Supreme Court building within, oh, a month.

I’m happy to respond to comments or questions—later this week I’ll be writing about my own process, directing Ahsahta Press, painting . . . and whatever comes up. But if this can be a conversation, so much the better.

Back in grad school (the early eighties, not to put too fine a point on it), the advice to “write every day” meant, in my mind, to sit down at a desk and work on a poem, preferably a new one, every day. I had my own computer back then, since my job as a technical editor made them familiar and desirable objects, and I used it to compose. (It was one of those 520K “Power Macs” that looked like a breadbox on end, with a minuscule screen in black & white. It came with a program called “Speakeasy” that spoke aloud whatever you typed into it. I typed my dog’s name, Wally: it came out rhyming with Sally.)

Truth is, I just am not good with dailiness. I’ve never been a diarist; I even find it difficult to remember, every day, to take my vitamins. I do a lot better thinking about writing poetry as a constant process, which includes note-making, reading, thinking, and writing all jumbled up into one. Part of this had to do with a change my work took about 12 years ago, when my ideas for poems seemed larger than what (I conceived of as) a “single poem” could accommodate. (My definition of “poem” changed as a result: I’d consider the entire book of F2F, for example, a poem.) I began looking at the tiny pocket diaries my father kept from 1919–1921, in an attempt to write about him; he had passed away in 1985. Part of my process in writing the poem sequence “The Green Tuxedo” included transcribing his tiny handwriting into a computer file so it could be searched, and researching locutions, events, and places mentioned in the work.

In the meantime, the rhythms of the diary’s language (which was not quite like spoken language, or my father’s speech) got into my mind. I began to collage parts of the diary into the sequence. I was aware that other poets were using collage as a technique, but this was my first need for it; this writing also made me much more aware of poets’ incorporation of different levels of speech into a single poem. I hadn’t yet read Zukofsky’s “A,” but “A-1” would have been a great example of this, as would C.D. Wright’s remarkable Deepstep Come Shining. This awareness made me both much more eager to incorporate different levels of speech into my work and more bold about incorporating collaged words from a subject’s own voice. (This goes back to the “eavesdropping” from yesterday’s post. The collage allows the reader to eavesdrop.)

At about the same time, Stephanie Strickland and I began to collaborate on a Web-based hypertext presentation of her poem “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot.” This was a long-distance project, with me in St. Paul, MN, and Stephanie in New York, conducted almost entirely over e-mail. (The results are at http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/.) I was the mechanic on the project: she provided the poem & images, and I did the HTML coding. The theory was to make the site as technologically “lowest common denominator” as possible so it wouldn’t be impossible to access as operating systems, HTML, and browsers updated—lucky for me because my coding skills were nascent.

Stephanie had created a poem that didn’t require the computer (Heather McHugh chose it in text form as winner of the Boston Review’s second annual poetry contest (http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/strickland.html)), but which immensely gained from its use. It also dealt significantly with issues of computer-human interaction—Sand is, after all, silicon. I can’t describe what it is like to draw together all the many connections a poem makes intratextually, and add to them imagery with its own multiple connections, except by saying that the reading experience was larger than I was used to. I found myself wanting to create a project with such scope.

One of the advantages of Stephanie’s poem is that the stanzas are quite short, which enabled me to make a lexia, or media page, small enough for very primitive browsers to load but with large enough type to allow easy reading. When I began to write my own hypertext piece, I used index cards: the first time since that 512K Mac that I’d intentionally begun writing seriously by hand. I wanted to keep my lexia short, with the idea that each segment would display and then segue, much like a film, and the cards worked as physical limitations (kind of like Ammons’s adding-machine tape). Because I was dealing with internet messaging as a topic, I would replicate the look of internet messages for those segments. I began to dream big: because the character of Echo was important, perhaps I could incorporate sound as well! Maybe video instead of words! In short, while writing the poem, my intentions for it soon outstripped my capabilities to code it.

Still, some of my students recall my carrying about my little index-card-sized binder with the poem building inside it. Eventually, as collaborations with programmers fizzled (I didn’t have money to pay a programmer, basically), I began to structure the poem as a book instead. Thinking of F2F as a book instead of hypertext brought changes to the work, though in some poems a triple-dot break remains as a vestige of those lexia plans, those index cards.

The poems I wrote in 2002¬–2003 felt burdened by my own growing depression and anger at the run-up to war, and I turned to favorite poets for solace. In Dickinson I found a poet also dealing with a devastating war, and in the first poem she is thought to have written in 1862, just a year into the conflict, are the lines

If it had no pencil
Would it try mine—

I took these as an invitation. I loved what Tom Phillips did with A Human Document, and even more what Ronald Johnson did with Paradise Lost—the latter, I think, more because I could discern connectedness between the created poem and its palimpsest. Erasure had seemed almost a parlor game to me in the past; it seemed too easy to have meaning. (Uncool to want meaning, I guess. No news to me that I’m uncool!) But what I discovered was a deep sense of collaboration in the process. I had to negotiate Dickinson’s language, history, and her deep, idiosyncratic spiritual life, and found it immensely well suited to our own situation in what now seem to be the early years of a long, horrifying war. Now, instead of a pack of index cards or a laptop, I was working by writing in a book, circling, erasing, revising, creating something I titled “The ms of my kin.” The voice is neither Dickinson’s nor my own: it is a third thing I use to unloose my anger.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that my process is either fluid or inconsistent, depending upon your point of view. It is not a process I recommend to others or think superior to anyone else’s; it is simply the only way I can work. Each project dictates its process. Although I am miserable in the between-phases, I now know that it’s very likely because I’m working out a way of working. As a teacher, I never tell my students they have to write every day at the same time, to make a forced habit of it. Instead, I can open up a channel for discussing their writing processes, in which writing every day on a schedule is one way of creating.

Yesterday was the first day of classes, and I met for the first time with Ahsahta’s new editorial board, the graduate students who will help select the finalists for the 2007 Sawtooth Prize. Our class is called “Small Press Production.”

I’d met the week before with Dennis, the undergraduate intern who will be opening, logging, and filing the entries as they come in over the next two months; we created the skeleton of the database and I explained the procedures. It’s Dennis’s job to remove the identifying parts of the manuscript (the title page with the author’s name and address, the acknowledgments, and the bio if there is one) and file them along with the SASE. He assigns a number to each manuscript and files them in numerical order in file boxes. These are what I brought to the first class session: anonymous manuscripts that have been gathering over the past two weeks.

I have great respect for the contest process. My first book was winner of the Anhinga Press contest in 1993, with Joy Harjo judging. At the time I was working in a corporate job in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was fairly well removed from a poetry community. What I remember most vividly about going to Tallahassee to read in the FSU spring festival the following year was dropping by the post office with the Anhinga Press board member who’d been asked to pick up the mail on the final day of their competition. She returned to the car wheeling five postal bins filled with manuscripts—somewhere around 200, I’d guess. As I helped her load them into the back of her Jeep Cherokee, I knew in my heart that if I’d seen this the year before, I’d have been far too intimidated to enter their contest in the first place. This was one day’s submission! And they all looked alike; how could mine have distinguished itself from the others? How could any?

As the students in my class will quickly find out, the resemblance among manuscripts ends when the envelope is opened. (They will also learn that nearly half the manuscripts in any competition arrive during the last week of the submission period.) Each student took a numbered envelope, and I asked them to give me their first impressions of the manuscripts they held.

“These poems have footnotes,” one said, flipping through his.

Another: “I hate this title.”

Another: “These poems are in very small type.”

Another: “This one is printed landscape.”

It’s inevitable; a manuscript will make a first impression before it’s even read. And, try as they may to be objective evaluators, all readers are human and will react to presentation.

The students in this class are going to learn a lot about presentation, simply by virtue of reading hundreds of entries to the contest. They’ll learn that there is no one right way to present a manuscript, but that there are lots of mistakes they can learn to avoid. I can predict that none of them, after this class, will ever use a script font for an entire manuscript of poems—not because I or anyone else is going to tell them not to, but because they are bound to run across a submission set in a decorative font its author believes enhances the poems, and will discover the barrier that provides for someone trying to read and evaluate the work on its merits. They will form opinions about epigraphs, notes, and titles that will affect their own use of these elements. They will quickly see what’s in fashion: is ekphrastic poetry all the rage this season, or will it be formal verse sequences? Poems about childhood, or about politics? They’ll form opinions about these as well, which will color their decisions in the reading process as well as their own writing. And this is perfectly natural.

I once heard Donald Justice deliver a lecture (later, I believe, printed as an essay) on the manuscripts he read while serving as a member of an NEA panel determining who would receive the literature grants in poetry. He had set everything up in statistics: 34% of poets preferred “gray” to “grey,” for example. (I’m making the percentages up.) I remember vividly his saying that Georgia O’Keeffe was the most popular human subject for poems that year (after people’s grandparents), but that only a small percentage of poets could spell her name correctly. (I can assure you that two e’s and two f’s is the correct spelling; I made a point to look it up afterwards and haven’t forgotten.) He said cancer was the “most popular cause of death.” Justice’s lecture was meant to be funny, and many in the audience of students duly laughed; I found the performance condescending, an eminence grise ridiculing the unfortunate masses. We in the know, he seemed to be saying, know that spelling “gray” with an “e” is an affectation! Those people are dopes! He was lecturing to students; we all knew poems from our workshops that fit the descriptions he was mocking. The laughter was nervous.

He was, of course, just giving us his subjective evaluation of the flaws in the NEA manuscript sample, not the Word of God. And I guess the lesson I took away was You can’t please everybody. There aren’t objective judges of poetry out there; there are only carbon-based life forms filled with aesthetic beliefs, political opinions, spiritual lives, dysfunctional relationships, happy memories, and amorphous needs who can’t help bringing all that to the process. In the best of circumstances they’ll make great efforts to be as objective as possible. I urge my students to try to put their preferences behind them when they’re reading, and I do the same.

If I had any advice for contest entrants, it’s this. As poets submitting manuscripts, your best bet is to present the work as plainly as you can so its individual power—its language, its structure, its idiosyncratic subject matter, its beauty or transgressiveness—can distinguish it. Beyond that, there aren’t any rules.

Despite this being a busy semester, I’ve signed up once again for a painting course in the Art Department. That means two three-hour time commitments each week. Six hours a week is a huge amount of time to give to something away from actual writing (though not enough to give to painting if you’re a painter; I know I’m just a beginner), and yet it’s beginning to feel necessary . . . to my poetry. It’s not that I’m writing poems about painting. But being involved with painting (looking at more works, reading more criticism, and actually learning some basics about the art) is helping me think in ways new to me about what I mean to do as a poet.

I knew I liked my painting professor when he assigned Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions to the first undergraduate class I took. It was one of my favorite films, and I felt about it (unreasonably) as if it were a secret that only a select few shared and loved. In the film, Lars von Trier sets tasks for his mentor, Jørgen Leth, who is going through a difficult artistic phase—tasks that seem absurd or impossible to do. Throughout the film, Leth complains that Lars von Trier must be mad to give him such assignments, but he diligently does what he can’t help but do: he fulfills the tasks by making beautiful, short films. He doesn’t just do what’s asked of him. He makes art.

Writers restrain themselves like this constantly. I think that must be part of the reason formal poetry seems so attractive to some people: the requirement to overcome the strictures of meter or rhyme pushes them to create something they wouldn’t ordinarily have attempted. Oulipo constrains work similarly, as do the “requirements” of any other formal structure we attempt. I mentioned those index cards and Ammons’s adding-machine tape earlier in the week; both are conveniently packaged ways of dealing with a line-length restriction.

In the art class, the professor was using the film to discuss, for example, the difference between painting from life and painting from memory: if our restraint was to create a model’s pose simply from memory, could we do it? (I’m oversimplifying, of course. This was only one of the discussion points.) But since I am primarily a writer, a poet, it has helped me to think of my constraint as being painting itself. I don’t just want to “imitate life”; I want to create art. My skills are almost getting there; up until now, I think my lack of them got in the way of my aspirations when I got behind an easel.

But lack of skills hasn’t kept me from looking at art. I’ve been fortunate to travel in the past few years and have seen some shows (not always painting shows) that were transformative to me: the Max Beckmann retrospective at the Centre Pompidou (which included three short films that I don’t believe traveled to New York—by far the best curated show I’ve been to); a Manet-Velazquez show at the Musee D’Orsay; Anish Kapoor’s “Marsyas” and the Seagram paintings of Mark Rothko at the Tate Modern; the Picasso studies from “Las Meninas,” and his work all over Spain; the “black paintings” of Goya at the Prado; the Rubens paintings and drawings in Italy. I’m interested in the difference between painting and “drawing with paint,” and I’m quite interested in the different ways painters put their medium to use. (If you live in New York and haven’t seen Jasper Johns’s work in current “Picasso and American Art” show at the Whitney, it’s definitely worth going to. See Kiki Smith’s retrospective while you’re at it!) I think my “looking” at painting has changed, much as my reading changed when I began to write. It’s not about searching for meaning, but about finding meaning in many more places than I expected.

I can’t claim an actual cause and effect on my work from the practice of painting. I haven’t been writing about paintings, certainly; I don’t know, at this point, that such a thing would be interesting to me. And I don’t paint writers (though I saw an R.B. Kitaj painting of Robert Duncan & Robert Creeley in the Thyssen Museum in Madrid that really should be reproduced more often—it’s splendid). For now this is an exploratory practice, and I like to think I’m creating neural paths through painting that are beginning to light up when I write as well.

Here’s my least favorite component of the publishing process: blurbs.

AGAINST BLURBS: Poetry books are rarely sold in bookstores, so virtually nobody actually picks up a book, reads the blurbs, thinks, “Hmm! My favorite writer is enthusiastic about this book! I think I’ll purchase it with my hard-earned money!” and carries it off to the register.

ON THE OTHER HAND: Poetry buyers for bookstores want to see them in the catalog. Distributors like them. People shopping on line like them. [Lazy] reviewers like knowing how to categorize a book before they even read it by seeing who’s blurbed it.

AGAINST BLURBS: Nobody really likes writing them. Most published poets will tell me, “I never write blurbs, because if I wrote them for one person, I’d have to write them for everybody.”

ON THE OTHER HAND: Those published poets have plenty of blurbs on their own books. Poets, especially when publishing their first book, need an “introduction” to the market, and published poets could easily support the community by providing it. Is it a lack of generosity, a belief that although they have benefited from community support, they needn’t continue the tradition? Is it sloth? Is it not having the spine to tell a writer one doesn’t like that you can’t fully support the work in the book? Yes, yes, yes. Sorry, yes. If you’re teaching poetry and one of your students publishes a book, who else is going to read it and endorse it?

AGAINST BLURBS: Because they hate writing them, some writers use canned language. “Best writer of her generation,” etc. “Luminous.” Or, my favorite new cliché, “Important.” “The only important book of poetry this [year, decade, century].” Baloney. Say something.

ON THE OTHER HAND: Enthusiasm from a poet who cares about language makes the search for a blurb worthwhile.

BLURB PEEVE #1: A writer promises to write a blurb, and turns in something so generic it might apply to anything. In the past year, I’ve received two or three blurbs from well-known poets that fail to mention the author of the poems, the book’s title, or any detail about the poems in the book. “Sometimes one comes across a book that’s so luminous, so important, that one sighs to read the future books this promising young author will create.” (Oh, yeah? Was this one of them?) Can’t use it.

BLURB PEEVE #2: A writer writes a blurb that is much more about the writer of the blurb than about the author of the book. “I, a well-known poet, have many opinions, and this book has managed to garner my momentary attention.” (This often works in conjunction with Blurb Peeve #1.) Worse: “I, not yet well known (but on my way, by God), am elevating my stature by passing faint praise upon this poor, lesser writer who may someday improve.”

“BLURB WHORES”: I’ve heard this term applied to poets who often write blurbs for books. Frankly, I don’t think there’s a poet in the universe who goes about looking for books to blurb—doing a good job of it is simply too difficult, it’s unremunerative (not usually a goal of whoring), and though the publisher & author are grateful, the job is otherwise thankless. When I see someone’s name endorsing a book of poetry, I know that poet is extending herself or himself to help another writer to an audience. This is a rare thing, my friends.

THE COMPLAINT THAT THE BLURBIST IS A FRIEND OR TEACHER OF THE POET: The situation is such that virtually nobody will write a blurb for someone they have no previous connection with. They prefer to champion people they’ve seen develop. When Ahsahta published David Mutschlecner’s Esse in 2002, I was at a loss to find someone to write an endorsement; Esse was David’s first book published in the U.S., and he hadn’t been studying poetry writing anywhere. I sent it to Cole Swensen because of its themes, thinking she might respond to it, and she generously read it and wrote a wonderful endorsement. With Ed Allen’s 67 Mixed Messages, I sent the book to Sam Gwynn, whose comic formal poems seemed in synch with Ed’s sonnet sequence. I greatly appreciated his enthusiasm and generosity.

That’s where I’d like to end this week: with a call for more enthusiasm and generosity.