Process Notes: on Ideas

I have a student who is very smart and studies the way the brain works and has asked me very pointed questions about process. Because we’re online, I’ve been writing her quite lengthy emails about how MY brain works when I sit down to write a poem. It’s been very interesting to write it down for someone else. Usually this kind of discussion happens in office hours, so normally for me this talk of process is spoken, which means it disappears after the student gets up and leaves.

This past week, she asked me about the role of “ideas”, which is a curious word, I think. Many students talk about having ideas when they sit down to write. Generally they say, they have trouble writing until they have “an idea” what they want to say. It is a way to begin, certainly, but over the years I’ve seen how having an idea before you write can limit the kind of exploration you might engage in. Almost always, an “idea” means “a thing I already think is true” —like “love is a painless joining of two people that makes all other problems meaningless” or “if I just work hard enough, all my anxiety about the past will disappear” or “my mother is a monster”. Then they go on to write a poem that proves that’s true in some way.

But what’s lost most often is exploration. How, if a poem is just about proving an idea is “true”, does anything new or surprising happen in poetry (or in one’s own imagination)?

The more I teach, the more I’ve become interested in the terms idea, meaning, and sense, and how they differ and overlap in poems and the process of making art. Anyway, that’s a long introduction to this email I sent my student and which I post as a way to help me thinking some of these things out.

Dear R,

So, when you say you think about “the ideas”, what does that mean for you? When you say you have a mental image, do you mean an image comes to you or you’re struck by an image as you walk by it? Because either way is a certainly normal way to begin writing.

But then you say you “build an idea around that”, and I’m curious about what that means.

If you see, let’s say, a pigeon on your window sill, and you write

I see a pigeon on my window sill

what kind of idea do you build off of that? I’m asking because the word “idea” feels too clinical to me, although you might not be using that way. If you mean you want the pigeon to immediately stand for something else–be a metaphor for something else

I see a pigeon on my window sill

and I think about my own lonely soul

That is a way to proceed. Is that what you mean by an idea–that you start to build a meaning around it? You take a thing outside yourself and immediately use it to say something about you or to stand for a idea about yourself that you have.

Because the thing I’d suggest trying when you find that image like the pigeon is you explore it as a literal thing first

I see a pigeon on my window sill,

gray and fat with a touch of black

on its wingtips, its beak a fierce yellow,

his eyes watching the street.

Do you see what I mean? Now, once you get that image to be full, to feel like a thing that you’re actually seeing, you can go in and notice that there are also some nice sounds from fat and black–the short a sound. Maybe you like that sound, so you keep it in the back of your mind, and maybe even make a list of other short a sounding words in the margin.

But in all of this, I’m not really creating a meaning yet. The pigeon is just a bird I’m watching, something literal I’m paying attention to. I haven’t tried to impose a meaning on it–that it’s like my soul or anything like that. I want to just watch it as a literal thing and maybe stop every so often and notice if a group of sounds are happening around it. I notice the long ee sounds of beak and fierce and street as well in the second example. I don’t know what I’ll do with that but I just notice.

Now, I “might” have an idea that I’m also thinking about–let’s say your idea about how emotion and conflict can have a genetic/generational aspect, how trauma can be passed down.

And there might appear as I’m writing about the pigeon some opening or moment when I think about what this pigeon knows about the world at birth and what he or she might have to learn, and maybe even what it might know that looks like instinct or handed-down knowledge. Maybe I’ll suddenly wonder how to tell what’s genetically encoded knowledge and what is something that is present in the external world that has never gone away and so every generation has to experience and deal with it. Now I have a question rather than an idea. But I don’t try to answer that immediately either.

I’ll never know that in a pigeon, unless there is research that deals with it, so I might ask a question about its instincts, its view of the world, the origins of its skittishness, of the long history of pigeon-nervousness, and then go back to just describing it to attend to it again as a literal creature with its own mind.

And then do that back and forth.  Maybe I’ll wonder even why I’m wondering about a pigeon’s history and think about my own and why I’m asking that question about inherited emotions.  Maybe that might lead me to think about my own family and what we’ve inherited and how when something difficult to process happens, we tend to go off alone, like this pigeon has.

Do you see what I mean?  It’s a kind of wandering around, trying to stay close to the original image but allowing yourself to ramble a little in the draft of the poem, just to feel out a number of things. The writing can get “fluffy”, in fact, but in the original draft it doesn’t really matter.  You put down everything and edit later.   It can in fact be later, when you find some fluff, some silliness, you can ask yourself:  why did I write this fluffy stuff?  Often fluff appears when you don’t’ know what to say–in the uncomfortable moment of having nothing, our minds often turn to cliches and silliness.  So finding silliness or cliches can in fact help you know where you need to dig in more–you might be distracting yourself from a very uncomfortable fact that you don’t want to say out loud. That happens all the time.  

This is another long email but I think what I’m saying in a practical sense is this: in the beginning stage, when you’re composing, you put everything down. Don’t edit yourself too much, just kind of follow your brain and what language comes to you even if it’s silly. Don’t get too attached to anything, especially some idea that the poem has to say something about an idea. In the second stage, that’s when you read things over and begin to separate out what’s interesting to you and what’s not. What’s a surprising thing that came up in the draft? That’s the stage when the poem can begin to come together. In third stage, which is often a multi-stage, you really begin to notice the sound, the shape of the lines, the line breaks, and all the smaller things.

If you already know what you want to do–say, you see a pigeon and you think How can I use this pigeon to get across an idea I have–you’re already at a disadvantage as a writer because you’re only using your subject to make a point you already know is true. And then you are not discovering anything. Does that make sense?  

Writing Prompts

Because I’ve neglected my blog here, I thought I’d copy some of the things I’m doing with my Senior Seminar class this Spring.

What everyone asked for was a way to write more, so we are doing in a month-long grind, writing at least a draft of a poem every day for the month.

Here are my instructions:

I’m going to set up a set of prompts to give you a way of beginning the grind. You can use them or not. You can strike out on your own one day and another day use the prompts. It’s totally up to you.  The point is to get you to write daily and generate more work. Try not to judge it too quickly. Write day after day and then at the end of the month you can look over and try to see what’s there.

Okay, so the easiest way for me to do a monthly grind is to simple write

A

B

C

D

E

F

and so on down a piece of paper and use those letters as prompts. What’s a title that starts with an A?  Here are seven:

Aubade, which is the name of a traditional love poem written at the break of day, usually regretting that the day has come and the lovers must part. See Philip Larkin’s poem Aubade for a much more cynical version of the genre, in which a lonely man meets the break of day.

Against…, this is a kind of poem in which you can take a side against something. Against Forgetting. Against Love Poems. Against the Idea that Wealth Brings Happiness.  The trick to poems like this is not to fall into a rant but to make a kind of argument that makes your point but also fulfills the characteristics of good poetry–beautiful language, complicated thinking and feeling, and surprising patterns of sound or image.

An Apology. A kind of poem that makes an apology for something you did. William Carlos Williams’ famous one This is Just to Say is an example of an apology that is really a non-apology to his wife for eating the plums in their refrigerator.

Anaphora. Anaphora is a name for the repetition of a phrase or clause over and over again, usually at the beginning of the lines. So a poet might write:   Because you are so lovely, I bought you an alligator for your lawn./ Because you are so lovely, I bought a swan and set it free./ Because you are so lovely and beginning to think I’m crazy, I bought you a butter croissant and left it on your front porch. / Because you are so lovely, I didn’t call you all day. /     and so on and on.  You can just start, as I did here, with something stupid and force yourself to write at least twenty lines and see if something weird and interesting doesn’t show up. It might not be autobiographical or even make sense.

Ode to an Apple (or an Avocado or to an Aardvark or to any thing that begins with A). The gret example is Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes, which you can find in several places.  My favorite is the Selected Odes that Margaret Sayers Peden translated. There are great ones to a Lemon and a Tomato.  The idea is to transform something so common no one even sees it anymore into something astoundingly beautiful.

Advice.  Write a poem of advice to someone who needs it, which could include yourself or a public figure who has screwed something up. Try to remember that everyone secretly hates people who give advice, so anything you say may have to be angled interestingly to distract a reader from the fact that you’re reminding them of their own inadequacy.

After _____ (fill in the name of a writer who has given you some inspiration or who you’ve stolen a line from to start the poem). Steal a line from Sylvia Plath that suggested a memory of your own. Here’s a line from Celan I liked: ” Whichever word you speak/ you thank–/corruption.” How would write the line of a poem that follows that?

So there’s a group of prompts for next week!  Just start and try to get to at least 14 lines. You might not manage it, but give yourself some goal. You get one and only one haiku this month!  But think about what you might want to try–prose poems, sonnets, a villanelle, etc. The point is to begin. Good luck!

For Tony

I just heard that an old friend of mine died. We knew he was dying, had a bad cancer, was at his last days, last house, last bed, last words. His last sunlight came and withdrew from his last window. He sank into whatever we all are at last. He would’ve said my using the word last over and over was too clever a gimmick, that in revision I ought to face up to my grief better, be less clever, let the real poetry emerge from that. Last night I was even looking at his books again, thinking I should read him again, especially the prose he wrote about the poetry he loved, but I put it away as a macabre sentimentality that I was engaging in instead of really engaging in poetry itself, reading as opposed to feeling the loss of a friend I knew I didn’t really know very well but we were colleagues and happy to see each other when our paths crossed in later. He was quick and lean, a kind of whippet or maybe one of those retrievers who have to be fitted with tracking collars because they always seem ready to leave you, their senses attached to a far subtler world than yours will ever catch. Or ready to catch fire, maybe I mean, thin-furred and wired to lightning. Always ready to produce a jackknife to open whatever junk mail the world has sent. He made packets of poems for his students I used to sneak copies of. Around him the air smoked almost, even his hair seemed like steam. He could talk to you at the same time he could listen to some thrum in the universe, maybe I mean. Or maybe I mean he treated you as if you were a possible answer to a question. Anyway, I was glad to hug him the way I’m grateful to hear a cello being played by a person who loves life but also knows it’s not easy for anyone. Not one of us was going to get anything right finally, but why not try to embrace even the lonely percussionist, thin triangle and mallet in hand, waiting for his cue to make things shimmer? All these things happening to us constantly, rising and falling away, turning us around so we only get to see or hear or smell or taste the barest smudge of camaraderie, which itself is more than enough to praise, keep ourselves attending to like a fire we want to keep alive forever against the darkness the body eventually enters. Like a friend, we hope, who is happy to see us. Who wants to know everything that’s happened since we last

Hypertension: the personal and the political again

Here’s how I’m answering the “How are you doing?” question these days:

Well, Trump is still president.

*

I’ve been officially diagnosed with hypertension. I’m at the early stage apparently but the blood pressure has been climbing steadily since summer 2015. New guidelines have made my level–over 130/90–the beginning of treatment. I’m “elevated”. Treatment to my doctor of course means drugs. He is, I found out from one of the residents, one of country’s experts on hypertension, one of the mysterious characters who helps write the rules of treatment. So there is good reason to believe him.

Still, I’m having trouble believing I can’t lower my blood pressure without drugs. Drugs might be the only way, I understand, but I want to at least try to avoid them. It took me a month to get over the fact that I probably had to change something in my diet or activity level, but then I started going back to the gym, limiting salt and sugar, limiting processed carbohydrates, embracing water, green vegetables, reducing red meat. I’ve lost about five pounds, which is a beginning. My goal is to lose 10 more, to weigh 185 again.

Once the weather is better, the dog and I can walk more and more regularly. Much of this winter has been short bursts of activity and then getting back to the couch as quickly as possible.

I am almost certainly going to have to cut down portions and maybe even get rid of bread and butter, pasta and all dairy to see if that will help get me down toward my goal weight. I’m not however a fundamentalist or a martyr, so I will have to try a number of things, I expect.

I keep thinking: if only Trump  weren’t President; if only the Republican agenda to ruin America for anyone not making $250K a year  would disappear; if only the rich felt they had enough money; if only the American people could throw off the shackles of their poor educations, impoverished imaginations, their fear and panic and habit of projecting their own worst traits onto others and vote out the Republicans; if only I’d win a prize or have a book accepted or could find time for a residency or just win the lottery….

In the meantime, though, I think I actually need to deal with the present as it is and as it has been apparently since 2015, before Trump. The temperature of the country has been rising for a while now, just as my bad eating habits have continued. Do I want to be one of those men who won’t take advice or ask for help because they’re sure it’s a problem with a simple way out?

I have finally bought myself a blood pressure cuff and begun the work of self-monitoring. I have already found out that my blood pressure spikes between 5 to 10 points between home and the doctor’s office. Today when I went in to have blood drawn fora blood glucose test and a prostate screening test (a precaution at my age), my pressure was at 140/95, as high as I think it’s ever been. The nurse who took my blood suggested a 24 hour monitor, so they can rule out White Coat Syndrome, in which just going to the doctor’s office can raise some people’s bp significantly.

But come on. Isn’t it time to change? Slowly the pull away from the fast, the easy, the processed whites of salt, sugar, milk, breads, and pasta. Slowly replacing of coffee with water and morning tea. As the crimes of the president pile up, as the attacks of the Republicans on the working class and middle class become clear to us, as the foolishness of voting them into positions of power becomes clearer and clearer, America itself may finally come to grips with its bad choices and aim for less self-destructive alternatives–ones that embrace sustainability, community, and large-scale environmental health rather than short-term greed, quick policy patches, self-protective defensiveness. I want to believe the nation can do it. I want to be here long enough to see if it can, to do my part.

Fake/Fuck: some notes on intensity (Nancy/Heidi)

I keep correcting student sentences that use “so” when they really “very” or “extremely,” as in My relationship with my mother is so complicated. It’s a habit I’ve noticed they fall into without thinking, which means they’ve probably grown up with it. Does “very” mean anything to them anymore, or is the monosyllabic so just faster than the disyllabic very or the trisyllabic extremely? It’s a marker, I know, of a certain kind of intensity. Maybe the long o sound, which can be elongated when said out loud in ways that the long and short e sounds in very and extremely can’t be—my love life is soooooooo complicated—makes it feel more expressive, more intense.

I have been known to say Fuck as I’m in-class talking to students as a way to emphasize a point. It usually shocks them into laughter which can shift the deadly atmosphere a long class can take on. But you can only do that trick so many times in a term before they see that it’s a fake intensifier and that I am potentially just another adult trying to seem cool. Another fake fuck.

At the moment, I’m not sure what is fake or what is real. Politicians certainly can’t be trusted to tell us anything about anything; their inability to answer a question is now a given. People’s frustration with that is I think at least one of the reasons why the current president got voted in. He seemed the only person who defied the ordinary ways of doing things. He name-called, he heckled, he out-and-out lied and boasted and said things that many of us trained not to lie or hurt other people’s feelings would never say. It seemed refreshing, I imagine, to many, many people who, like me, flip the channel when yet another politician avoids a pointed interview question. America was tired of Teflon non-entities.

Many many Americans seemed to prefer someone who at least said something, even if it’s ridiculous or stupid or racist or homophobic or sexist. Because it seems real to have opinions, and if anyone has had a difficult father or family, it’s real to hear someone say he hates whole groups of people, to be categorically misinformed, to make broad sweeping statements. Maybe now that we’ve had a taste of this President, the country might vote for people who speak in measured tones again. I do think that Hillary Clinton’s tone, which was always measured and careful, was heard as too academic and evasive, as if she was one of those teachers most people remember from middle school who already knew the answer to the questions she’d ask. You had to read her mind, which seemed inscrutable. She never had what Obama or Bill Clinton had as a speaker: another register, the ability to project herself as one of the people. She didn’t act like she wasn’t smart, which is a sin in many, many places in America. The 30-40% of Americans who will always vote for an idiot who confirms their own prejudices/beliefs aside, that inability to shift may have cost her the election, as it cost Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry before her, all people who wouldn’t say the word Fuck to save their lives, although they must have thought it many, many times after the election. I hope none of them thought, Well, that soooooo discouraging.

I say Fuck daily these days. I wake up thinking What the Fuck is that asshole doing now? What is that smug Fuck McConnell or that smiling Fake Fuck Ryan going to fuck up next? I rage listening to NPR interviews racist fucks like they have anything to say. I conversely cheer when someone like Jake Tapper tells the always smiling Nazi Stephen Miller that he’s wasting Tapper’s and the audience’s time. I go into work and try my best to impersonate a functioning adult. Once in a while, though, I feel the need to remind students I’m not dead or a pre-programmed hologram. I care about the state of the world and our ability to create beauty out of pain, a deep and powerful ability human beings have always done, under terrible conditions. I want them to know I have hope and anger, and that these are things they can have too. At home, exhausted by my performances, I hang out with my dog who can’t fuck or fake much of anything.

Fuck, I hope the voters who hold the shifting middle ground have had it up to their soon-to-be-uninsured necks with the Fake Fucks the Republicans have become. I hope there are enough people who will fucking show up to vote, despite whatever fears they have, however inconvenient it might be that day. I hope the Democrats will learn to avoid a language that keeps saying things are “soooo complicated,” which makes them seem spiritless and uninterested in the details of human experience, fake. I want my students not to have to face so many fake and fucked up people in their futures; they are so many of them filled with despair and dread.

Energy (where it comes from) (Michelle)

From Rest: I wake early, usually having slept at least six hours. Which means, since I seem now to always wake around 3 or 3:30, I try to be in bed by 9. When I wake, it’s dark and although I’m initially still sleepy, I go downstairs and write at least 250 to 500 words between 3 and 5. The dog usually slumps some part of himself against me and sighing goes back to sleep. I love the feeling of being up and quietly writing for these hours. At around 5, I’m tired again so I usually curl up for a quick nap until six when my husband wakes up to a Game or Thrones ringtone.

From Food and information: when M comes downstairs, he always asks if I’d mind if he puts the news on. I always say no. We usually watch cbs to get a quick update of big stories. He’s turned on the electric kettle in the kitchen and puts in some bread in the toaster. If the current president hasn’t completely fucked up the country, I get up, the dog getting up with me, and we join M in the kitchen. One of us pours kibble and replenishes his water dish. I arrange something for myself to eat: cottage cheese or yogurt, fruit, and toast. Either English breakfast tea or just water. Sometimes a couple slices of ham or turkey. Then we all go back to the living room to watch the news, adjusting ourselves to the truth of the world, practicing our social voices on one another—what are you doing today? What’s on the agenda today?

From Debt and fear: I work because I need to. I’m lucky in that I love what I do: teaching writing and helping to administer a really good writing program at a large research university. But if given the choice, I would not go to work all the time. I’d take a year off now and then and just write or learn more about painting or another language or travel more. But I’m in debt to a bank for my little house, and to Honda for my little car, and I have to pay for the utilities that make my warm shower function so wonderfully, and I don’t grow my own food or make my own clothes so I have to have money. If I stopped going to work, I know that the bubble I live in would collapse in on me very quickly and without much mercy. So I get dressed, I plan my lessons on the bus in, and I am as kind a person as I can manage to be at the office. After thirty years of practice, I can stay almost completely in character for up to six hours, typing up reports, uploading letters of recommendations, going to meetings, showing up on time and prepared to the classes I teach. My students keep me honest; my colleagues keep me entertained and inspired. Well, most of them do. Some in both categories also drive me nuts. My work keeps me in touch with history, great literature, smart and funny and weird people of all kinds, and this generates an energy that usually so overwhelms the fear and debt animating me that I forget about it for long periods of time.

From Fear of dying before I’m 80: Three days a week, I also go to the gym for thirty minutes to keep excess weight off and give the body something to do than slump in chairs. I prefer the elliptical to the treadmill. I prefer weights to the machines. I have a belief that exerting myself in this way will allow me to live until I’m 80, a number I’ve associated with having lived a full life.

From Love, happiness, hunger: I consider the end of the day to be five pm, after which I want to be left alone to walk the dog, talk to my husband, and watch tv while eating something. Although as a percentage of my time, these three things seem to get the least amount of time, these things and my writing, which is to say my inner life, are the point of all my energy use during the day. Talking with my husband, walking the dog by the river, hanging out with friends at the dog run, eating and reading and writing at the cafe, these are things I do because I really want to do them. If I had all the money in the world, as we used to say in my family—which really meant enough to live on without having to work—these are the things I would want to do more of.

From habit: I’ve even learned to like the moment I think to myself, darkness in every window and the tv only a kind of chatter, Okay, time for bed again, time to remember the debts I owe for having this life.

(

Again, Beginning

Where to begin: first memory or present moment? Autobiography is a trickier thing than many believe. It’s not a straight line or royal road to enlightenment. When did your life begin? Is it what you remember or what you desire or where you came from or what you saw one day in 1985, in a bus station in Binghamton, NY? Where did you start?

I think back to Thich Nhat Hahn’s piece, Interbeing, in Peace Is Every Step:

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.” (See the longer version here.) Without the cloud, he reminds, there is no rain; without rain there are no trees. Without sunlight no trees. Without the logger. Without the logger’s mother. And so on into infinities. Nothing is without its contribution. “As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.”

The work of origin is tricky, in other words. Whose contribution do you want to trace? Which came first, we ask, the chicken or the egg? Does it matter if both are grade A? (Here’s the chart to determine the grade. In it, I finally found the difference between squab and pigeon was immaturity and tenderness in one and maturity and toughness in the other.)

We use the letter A to start off the alphabet. Why? There are theories but no one seems to know. The letter A started life, as many of us did, upside-down from how we know it now, as a picture: the head of an ox or cow. Maybe since cattle indicated wealth, were such an important source of labor, food, and material, it felt right to let it lead the system of representing and accounting that writing arose out of.

Other theories suggest the first alphabet was the skeletal remains of a long poem that once existed. All we have left is an acrostic structure which poets keep trying to reconstruct or rewrite. And it might of course be simply a random collection. We’ll never be sure, which is probably why we devised a song to remember it, to cement in place its (dis)order.

This is not my first alphabetic assay. I go back to the structure because I never end up with the same words. Writing ABCDEF down the page still gives me a little first grade thrill, of having arrived at the door of mystery. Now comes the work of finding a way to open things up, to see the clouds and the trees in this sheet of paper.

This time I actively solicited words from my Facebook friends, and I thank them for giving me a set of strange and challenging prompts. My goal is to explore a word a day for the month, looking for a way into it or into myself maybe. What’s the difference? The aim’s to be surprised.

The Televisions

In my locker room there’s now a mounted television, and it’s always on. Sports, of course, as if all men… Where there had been just peace some mornings before the day began with its various responsibilities. As if the silence of the old room were a 20th century oppression, filled with the sounds of zipping and unbuttoning. Now that the evidence against us is clear and everywhere. Haven’t we made war in every instance of war? Haven’t we silenced the women who wanted to speak? Aren’t we keeping cruelty in power? And the children who had other ideas than ours—? There used to be comfortable silences: in the bathroom with the paper, in the shower with a song, out for a walk with dog. Now, even when I’m filling up the car at the gas station, there’s a television in the center of the pump that turns on automatically in case the sound of my consciousness as I step out of my black vehicle whispers something about the plastic-coated ocean, the radioactive fish, the whales dying in waves. Black men killed and no one found to blame. The television in the phone. The television in the watch. The tiny televisions within the television! Those young men who cannot sit still without a monster truck shaking the air around them to pieces. Whom can they hear saying no, or help? After all they’d been promised by their fathers who came home after a long day for the television, the sound turned up full to drown out everything that might have required more. Televisions on every floor. Televisions in every room. Televisions growing thinner and thinner. Better stereo. Better definition. As the nation fattens on dull self-affirmations.  Always on in case a self grows wild in a crack of silence and speaks out of turn, a blossom of hope, a lull in want, a welling of what? Patience for the world of need, of love? A drinking in of have? 

The House Next Door: a diary

March 27/

Damages so far: 

The top right corner of the housefront has lost its plaster/cement. It was patched quite a while ago, and had been looking a little weak lately, but when the contractors banged the chain link fence into one day, it clearly gave way. Its pieces fell into the trench they dug. I’m going to have to tell them I expect them to fix it. My in-laws have told me to call my insurance company first, in case they want to go after them. 
The other thing we’ve noticed is that the inside stairs, which were just fixed a few years ago, have pulled out somewhat (between an 1/4 inch to a 1/2 from the wall), making them more dangerous, more likely to break. You can see the dark places where they’ve moved away from their normal slots in the structure. 

Other lesser strains: Nerves, tempers. Michael started to fall asleep last night but then had a dream in which a gigantic crack opened up in the bedroom wall near his head. He was up after that and never quite fell back to sleep. 

Yesterday, we went downstairs to inspect the walks. He’d only been down there a few times, so when he started pointing out cracks in the plaster, I had to say, “no, that was there.” Most of that wall is plaster and stone and worse is covered by a pegboard over the big worktable done there. There was nothing more that I could see. 

My relationship to cracks is that I don’t like them, in houses most deeply, but also in arguments, in friendships, in my own personality. I’m not forgiving of any threat of loss. What I can’t prevent, I’m given to abandoning. I’m not given to optimistic scenarios of mending fences or burying hatchets. Of course one could say that I’ve crafted a teaching and administrative career out of fixing problems, of anticipating difficulties. If there were none, I wouldn’t have my job. 

I am enchanted every time someone on Facebook posts an example of the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which a broken bowl is repaired with a lacquer dusted with gold, that brokenness can result in a more beautiful object. I believe that “there is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” But those are aesthetic ideas I can’t actually live inside, how ever much I might admire them. I want my house to be safe and secure. The only light I want coming in should be from the windows. 

Poetry is a kind of kintsugi, isn’t it? Maybe all art is. A simultaneous recognition of a break with the normal world we auto-pilot through and of our ability to transform discomfort, grief, rage, into something bearable, even interesting. Am I appreciating this old house now, as it exists under pressure, or do I just want to sell it off and run away? Mostly the latter. But where in this rapidly gentrifying city would I now be able to settle? 

The House Next Door: a diary

1/ March 13

Is today the day? The “developer” of the lot next door has parked two backhoes in it. They sit like two scorpions, bucket arms curled up, near the back of the lot, and the no parking signs are up along our half of the already crowded street. Nobody is going to get to park comfortably for a while, and it will be even worse on weekends.

Breathe, I say to my chest and mind. It will be all right eventually. Breathe in anxiety and breathe out peace. If anything happens, I can sue. Although the house is old, the basement is old, and I am afraid, no other equally old house or equally frightened neighbor has fallen apart because of the new construction in one of the empty lots. Some nice houses have been built, and some horrors, it’s true, but about taste, there’s not a whole lot to do. The plans make this one coming seem decent. 

Breathe, I have to keep saying, as if I am my own respirator. I notice tightness of muscles everywhere. It can be hard to tell it from excitement sometimes but this own has much powerlessness in it. I will have to accept most of what comes the way I’ve had to accept changes already: the loss of the pear tree and the spruce that grew in that lot and sheltered birds. I will be penned in on one side now as I never have been. The noise will be obnoxious for at least a year. 

I write to ameliorate my fear of change, which I have never loved. Even though I have lived through enormous changes which have been wonderful I still fear it. Does anyone love the threshold over which one has to pass if one is to act, to speak? Why is it that there is always an apocalypse at the ready in my mind and not the peaceable kingdom? This is test says the spiritual pilgrim I’ve installed in my head. (This is “only” a test, says the internal joker-voice, echoing the old tv “emergency broadcast system” we used to hear periodically.) 

There was also supposed to be a snowstorm today, that same voice reminds. What fell so far? I look out onto our little street. Nothing.
2/ March 14

Shall I mention the cool precision of the man who runs the backhoe when I come home for lunch, the way he guides the bucket expertly in the alleyway between the two houses behind ours? He’s digging out a new waterline, I think. And despite the apparent clunkiness of the backhoe, he’s maneuvering it with such delicacy it surprises me. I think of metal and mechanical things as unsubtle tools of men, but as I watch quietly from the car before getting out with the dog and my bags, I can see the care the man inside the machine is exercising. The neck of the backhoe extends slowly and carefully between the houses where he has to dig like the neck of a goose nibbling grass. 

What I expect, as I said, as I have to remind myself day after day, is always the worst of humans. I expect men who work with their hands or in some physical way to be rough, uncaring, nonverbal, insensitive to the emotional lives of others. Yesterday when I left the house with the dog, the contractors were just getting out of their oversized white truck. The guy from the passenger side was exactly what I expected: large and scowling. He looked at us without a word, though I smiled. When we walked around the front of the truck to get to my car, we encountered the driver of the truck, who was exactly the opposite. He said Good Morning loudly, and I smiled and said it back. I said I wasn’t sure anything was happening today because we’d expected snow and he laughed and said Yeah, we were surprised too. We both laughed. I got the dog inside the car and turned to the driver to ask about the work going on, so I had, I told him, some sense of what to expect. He told me in a voice that was neither irritated by having been asked or nervous about where I might be going with my question. He seemed genuinely human.

The result? I wasn’t panicked the whole day about what was going on. 

Which is not to say that later in the day when I came home and saw one of the men running the backhoe so expertly, I felt happy to lose the lot to these strangers who didn’t know our little cluster of folks or feel the need to care about our emotional lives. But I did think: I can survive this.

That the dog wasn’t nervous about the sound of the work next door helped too. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I’d feared. 

Then my house shuddered.
3/ March 16

But nothing happened. Nothing that I could see anyway. I looked out the front door and though the backhoe was close to the house, there was nothing I could see wrong or dented or marked. 

It does occur to me that since the house is attached to the earth around it, I might be misjudging the sound of the house being hit and the sound of the earth around us moving. One I can sue over. The other I’m not so sure about.

I’ve begun looking over the walls on that side for new cracks. I put my palms on the big wall going upstairs the way I’d put my hand on the flank of a big horse: to steady myself against its presence. 
At the same time, of course, the nation is actually shuddering. The Republican congress, with the new Narcissist-in-Chief is at work rearranging the American government, are today about to strip away the Arts, defund scientific research, and aid to the poor here and abroad. 

Breathe, I say to my chest and mind. Breathe in anxiety and breathe out peace. If anything happens, I can sue. Although the house is old, the basement is old, and I am afraid, no other equally old house or equally frightened neighbor has fallen apart because of the new construction in one of the empty lots.

I say it again and again to my apocalyptic mind, and the nation is not likely to completely collapse either. I honestly don’t know what will happen, though, to the nation I hoped would be better than this by now. Some days I do feel as if a house has fallen on me.  I have never won an NEA fellowship, but many of the literary journals I’ve published in seem to depend on that body for funding in large and small ways. Not that the Republicans care or think about the literary infrastructure. They can’t even seem to think about public infrastructure. Their transparency, their utter devotion to their corporate sponsors is abundantly apparent. They don’t care if the government falls; they have accounts elsewhere, expect windfalls from lobbying jobs. They will never be touched by hardship or emotional crisis. 

They have replaced the weather in their inhumanity. I’m insured against the house falling over or a hurricane.