Ren Powell's Blog, page 8

Not Adding Fodder

I am still brainstorming a project that may or may not pan out. There’s a concern though regarding the commissioned work: that the adaptation will inadvertently put a group of people already too often villainised in a bad light. And last night before falling asleep, I was having a difficult time conceiving of a way to avoid it.

I do worry about these things. Not because I am worried about being politically correct, or “woke”, but because I care. There are some fears so close to my heart they can stop me in my tracks. The thing is to stop just for a moment, and then find a “good” way forward. Good by my own standards.

I finished the Bryson book last night. His friend got lost in the woods and they each spent a night alone. The next day they called quits for that particular stretch of wilderness. Calling it quits is always a possible valid choice, too.

It is odd to read this light book so long after it was written. The climate concerns of 1998 seem quaint. But don’t misunderstand me, maybe the fact that they seem quaint is a major contributing factor to the problems we have now taking it all in: the dead seriousness of it all.

And the complexity of it. I am subscribed to a podcast that focuses on positive news regarding climate change. The hosts talk about the ambivalence people have discussing the gains for fear of complacency or even denial. On the other hand, silence is lying by omission and might feed into a kind of collected learned helplessness. We hold our breath and wait for the worse because a drop in the bucket is a drop that doesn’t seem particularly useful.

Bryson talks about the damage acid rain had done to the woods in the 90s. But there have been significant decreases in acid rain since his book was published.

“Doug Burns, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Troy, New York, who directs the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, says the rain falling in the Northeast today is about half as acidic as it was in the early 1980s. Consequently, surface waters have become less acidic and fragile ecosystems are beginning to recover.” – Smithsonian Magazine.

I remember the thick smears of yellow guts over the windshield driving from L.A. to Vegas. We’d always stop in Barstow and someone would squeegee it off the glass. I can still hear the sharp, rising pitch. A prolonged squeak. I can still feel the faint disgust.

But last time I made that trip was different. Far less disgusting. A lot less life.

This little thing about the world has changed. People have called it an insect apocalypse. As though that their world is not our own.

Diversity is something we need. Honesty. Respect. And fearlessness. Life can be some ugly shit. And the climate intolerable.

There went the timer.

A Closet Play

I have been listening to radio theater the past few days. It’s a medium that I haven’t much experience with. I wrote a short radio play in verse years ago about a women and her father who had Alzheimer’s. Waltzing in Present Tense. It won a competition as was supposed to be produced as a CD (that is how long ago!), but nothing ever came of it. In that sense, the play never existed. This weird little closet play that is rather like a desk-drawer novel.

In my mind, the difference between theater and literature is the collaborative aspect of the former. Of course, literature needs to be read. But that is a private matter. Even if you discuss it afterward, the experience is a private matter between the writer and the reader. But the impetus of theater is the attempt at a communal experience in real time. The in-the-moment aspect long preceded the fragmented virtual reality we have now. For me, it really is connected to the breath. Even reading aloud in my bed at night won’t open my, challenge my to accept other perspectives in the present tense.

The more intimate the physical relationship between actor and audience member, among the audience members, the more powerful the transformative effect.

Remember when transformative was a buzzword?

Theater, in the moment, is a kind of aspirational universe. Even when it explores our darker sides. It is a lie to say that we don’t desire to indulge our less-than-best selves. Catharsis is a kind of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solution. It creates an inclusive community – even when the larger community does not. It forces a strange fellowship.

Like football games and parades, other forms of theater, it threatens one’s autonomy with the mob mentality. And giving into it (this safe space) can be an exercise in real joy.

When I teach (Western) theater history, I teach the perspective that the Dionysian festival was a brilliant effort to control the passions of the masses by letting them have their cake, and eat it to. A “time-out”. Like Vegas. Very like Vegas, maybe.

But radio theater? I am thinking about this. About this in-between medium of the private imagination and the shared imagination.

Still thinking about this…

There went the timer.

A Sacred Trust?

I am casually continuing to read Arne Naess and still sorting through what he really means, and what I really believe.

“Ecosophies are not platforms for a political movement or policies, but are personal philosophies of life in a worldview.”

He goes on to say that this international movement of deep ecology does not constitute a religion. But I am (mis)understanding his belief system as something aligned with religions – the kind that do create a hierarchy with humans at the top of what has be created:

“The protection of the Earth’s vitality, diversity, and beauty is a sacred trust.”

Back to Bryson, with his layman understanding of geophysics, whose depictions of the earth point to a kind of vitality that is beyond our comprehension, and certainly beyond our protection. The continents will “drift” long after we are gone. Vital and diverse.

I am not at all implying a disregard for climate concerns, for the human-driven tumble toward the end of the world as we know. I am just wondering how honest we are when we talk about the deep ecology perspective on the extinction of certain insects and birds and, well, all of it. Is it honestly out of a belief that we are no more significant than the lady bug, or is it that we want to tip-toe around all of it as though it were an expensive present that we are obligated to respect and attend to.

And… what does beauty have to do with it? Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. It is an active way of viewing the world and dividing it into a hierarchy.

I would love reading suggestions regarding the exploration of ugliness. A kind of objective poetics, perhaps. If art is for art’s sake is it truly not in service to our pleasure?

There went the timer.

Poetry and an Upstart Crow

I still find myself turning to non-fiction for poetry. Bill Bryson explaining how the Appalachian mountains were formed and keep forming seems somehow more to the heart of poetry than a lot of what I’m finding in the anthologies I take to bed.

I keep wondering if this has something do with the fact that my education, like that of many others, was so colored by deep reading that even Billy Collins had to bitch about it. This frustration of mine is on me.

I’m struggling to unlearn now everything I know about poetry. And I’m still trying to figure out how much a writer can demand of the reader in terms of their curiosity, their efforts to read between the lines, and to hear the subtext in every expressed thought. I mean, I don’t think that poetry should never tell the truth. (Especially when you dress it up in “borrowed feathers” like established poetic diction.)

By all means tell anything you want – except the truth.

I nearly wrote something this morning about what was “behind the greasepaint”. When I was an undergraduate we had old tubes of greasepaint at the bottom of the make-up boxes. Nasty stuff. They were already decades old and none of us touched it except with our fingers, out of curiosity. Any kind of metaphor that doesn’t take the immediate, experiential world into account risks being little more than a self-conscious anachronism. (Oh, but I do remember the… smell.)

All these pretty words – and “shocking”, vulgar words, too – do they give us useful metaphors that takes us deeper into the parallels that exist in our experience, or are they sentimental allusions to help us confirm what we already wanted to see in the moment? I think that my early poetry education was so deeply influenced by the Modernists that literary references themselves masqueraded as art in my mind.

I think we can show the truth, by way of making lies transparent. I am thinking of a fun exercise for myself to play with this idea. Here is the challenge of quick, morning pages: the ideas come like excited puppies, but then like Ruth Stone’s dragons, they’ll slip away between the commute and the lunch break. They’ll move on to someone else.

I want to clear a wall here in my little library and put up a huge board. I’ll pin the edge of these ideas, like insect wings, in neat, taxonomic rows. And the sound of their fluttering (what a soft word for the that kind of struggle) will fill the room. And remind me why I am here.

No. There has to be another way that doesn’t involve capturing the poems. That doesn’t involve torturing the world into shape.

I’ve written before about my Snow White fantasy of talking with the gentle animals of the forest. I think a lot of us have that little dream. But once, on Nara, I held out the rice cakes for the deer on the island, and they rushed at me with their soft snouts and smooth teeth. And for a moment I thought: so this is the way my world will come to an end. Suffocating, deer lice filling my lungs.

The world really isn’t how we think it up.

I think what I want to do as a poet is to make and then fracture poetry somehow, create the cracks where the truth can get out.

Probably because I think that’s what poets have always done. Zoom in. Zoom out.

Look here.

Tomorrow,
I may think
differently.

To Sit with a Single Line

GLOUCESTER: Alack, alack, Edmund, I like not this unnatural dealing. When I desired their leave that I might pity him, they took from me the use of mine own house, charged me on pain of perpetual displeasure neither to speak of him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him.

EDMUND: Most savage and unnatural.

King Lear

It is Edmund, whose conception was the result of natural attraction rather that of socially constructed union, who describes Lear’s daughters’ ambitious cruelty as unnatural.

The dramatic irony is thick as fresh sap.

Edmund is both natural and savage and understands the inherent connection in all things. His bloody rebellion is against the unnatural constraints he is obliged to accept as the will of gods.

Does he mean the women’s behavior is savage and unnatural toward their father, or is it savage and unnatural because it encroaches on Gloucester’s own territory and volition?

If we repeat a dogma often enough, we internalise it. But we do so still knowing it isn’t true. It is just accepted. Begrudgingly, and under various forms of threat.

Children have to be taught not to “dash the brains out” of other living things. They have to be taught to put restraints their own drives. Conflict is easy and natural. It’s the way around it that requires some kind of constructed route. What can the nature of any construction be?

I’m going to take Leonard to the dark park. There is always a possibility that things will go wrong when he tests out new relationships or challenges old ones. That’s why it is safer to have him off the leash.

There is an anthology of Furies waiting for me this evening. (For Books’ Sake publishers).

The Archive of Self-Absorption

“To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.” ― Dogen

So.

That didn’t happen.

The Nature Poem

I think that I have always had a bit of an aversion to the nature poems that hold up the prettiness of nature like an anecdote to all that hurts. They feel like lies.

Imagine lying on the grass, looking up at a blue sky. How can you not put yourself in that space without also feeling the sharp edges of the blades of grass under your soft and exposed upper arm? Or feel the dread tickling of a piss-ant crawling over your ankle? The mystery movement – a tiny rustling – just under and behind your ear?

How can you breathe in the oh-so-pleasant smell of pine sap and not acknowledge the slaughter on some level? I don’t mean in a sins-of-our-fathers way.

What is, is. In the nature documentaries the p.o.v. is everything. The lion or the wildebeest. Funny how we will attribute cruel volition – volition – to the lion when we see through the eyes of the ungulate. But when the story is told from the lion and her cubs’ point of view, the grazing wildebeest is as senseless and lifeless as cartoon prey of a cartoon protagonist. The dead eyes of the schooling masses.

Goldbarth’s nature poem doesn’t mention a single tree. But it is all about looking closely at the wholeness of… us.

I was listening to a podcast that mentioned early cave art: the hand-prints that are silhouetted with paint “before spray paint existed”, they said. They expert imagined the volition of the individual artist who wanted so badly to leave “his” mark in the world. Invention to suit a desire.

But you know what I thought? I thought about laughing spontaneously with a mouth-full of half-chewed blueberries. I would love to think that that is how the spray-paint discovery was made.

This hand? Yes, I was here, but just in passing. Like a ghost temporarily blocking the way of the truth. Like a toddler demanding attention before her attention is snatched by a buzzing fly on the rim of her sippy-cup. Like an exchange of conversation in the now, unconcerned with who may be listening.

The view is always more interesting when peeking through a small aperture. It doesn’t make it more true.

In the late fall, the oyster mushrooms look like lilies from a distance.

Where to begin again?

The unread and read-but-unsavored books on my shelves overwhelm me with choices. Matthea Harvey, I read for the line-breaks. Marianne Moore for the imagery. Robert Hass, to follow the evolution of a single poem through publications.

I haven’t counted, but I fear books about poetry may outnumber books of poetry, if one is looking strictly at a genre distinction.

I am still trying to remember who it was I loaned George Brant’s Grounded to. I remember being disappointed it was written by a man. So was Nuts. I don’t think I ever actually owned a copy of that play.

Last year, for several months, I actually read for joy. Then I tried to twist it into something useful. That will kill anything that needs to breathe. My relationship with poetry has been one of continual deaths and resurrections. There is no good reason for that now.

I walked Leonard this evening and took a photo of a small tree stump. The bark is pulling from the wood, and there is a thin, nearly texture-less layer of moss covering the wound. I wrote Afterlife on the Instagram note. (No hashtag. I am trying to wean myself from all of that.)

Scanning the bookshelves for an entry point, I see Albert Goldbarth’s 2015 collection Selfish. Seems like a good place to begin. With the teacher who simultaneously drew me in and pushed me away from poetry. The poet who had a way with poetry, and a way with unwritten words. Looking back I suppose I could find new perspectives from which to view that semester. Maybe knowing that is enough not to have to.

This evening I heard the phrase fluid perception in connection with memory.

Auden said, “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” I have so many mixed feelings. Mixed perspectives.

I flip through the book to see if I had even gotten to it whenever I bought it. No.

But my eye lands on a word in a poem: Afterlife.

“[…] I’ve witnessed that come-hither prestidigitorial trick / ten thousand times. An afterlife – is there an afterlife […]”

The title of the poem is “The Disappearance of the Nature Poem into the Nature Poem”. So, yes. This seems a good place to begin.

Libraries are magical places – places for divination. Even when they are in your own home, assembled over decades out of duty and obligation – out of aspirations that are still only aspirations.

The timer has chimed three times to say it’s time to move on. I will pour a glass of wine and take Selfish downstairs. Leonard will stretch out with his back pressed against my hip and leg, and he’ll dream.

I’ve always admired Goldbarth’s poetry.

I’ll try to find the nature poem in the nature poem. But first I have to look up prestidigitorial.

What it Means to Try

These introspection pages began with a virtual Camino during the lock-down. My formal participation in the group didn’t end well. The host didn’t believe that alternative perspectives were admissible in discussions. I disagreed with her declaration that no one could disagree with her. I was blocked, which was an easily foreseen consequence. And a reminder that all prophets are fragile – regardless of gender or denomination – because they are human. And even when it’s undertaken unintentionally, without conscious ambition, it’s a rickety climb upward, prodded on by people holding the ladder, proclaiming their trust in you.

I learned a lot. But maybe not enough.

It is one thing to have a healthy skepticism of the map. It is another to toss it out entirely. One winds up walking in circles.

Using one’s own memory of experience as a guide to find something novel is absurd. It’s, in affect, an exercise in solipsism masquerading as therapeutic “work”. At least, this has been a thought adding to the pulp that is sealing me off from the world, like regurgitating the plug that seals the entrance to a potter-wasp’s nest. But in this metaphor I am both the egg and the caterpillar. And yeah, no, believe me, this inside-out stuff looks nothing like an ouroboros.

I am going to archive these blog entries and start again.

There is a terrible catch-22 in all of this ambition: wanting to write means wanting to be read, seen. Self monitoring, self-flagellating, self-loathing, self-aggrandizing. But no one wants all that to be seen. This is what I need today, is not the same as This is who I am.

When I was a teen I kept a diary full of poems. I would write, knowing my mother would sneak in and read them when she got the chance. I would write. I would leave it there one day, two days, then rip out the pages. Gambling with fate. But really only adding to the cloud of uncertainty. What did she really know? What did she really care about?

This morning I listened to a New Yorker article about a writer whose entire life was fiction. I think he traded one fear for another. But at least now I understand better the allure of writing novels. And understanding that maybe that that is a truly braver endeavor. How often is authenticity used as a cloak to repel criticism? But look at all the stories sticky with patronizing reviews.

One fear for another.

I started a Medium project. I shut it down. I started a Substack project. I shut it down. What begins as something avocational and creative. An attempt at something Catherine Price calls “true fun” (marked by the presence of playfulness, flow, and community), always seems to soak up thoughts around “entrepreneurship” and the zeitgeist of virtual influence and status. I feel like a farmer whose every crop becomes infested.

The community element of writing is a puzzle for most of us, I think.

Yesterday I watched the final episode of The Last of Us, wondering how it would end, needing to see the end, but consciously considering how the end was just a choice made by a writer (or writers), not a real thing. But I wanted the story so badly. I wanted to know the true ending. I believe this desire/belief is a form of and a recognition of community. We need the truth from one another. We need a truth from one another.

I got an email yesterday for a workshop conference held by a respected publication. Of course the question of whether MFA programs or any kind of writing program belongs in the university system has always been up for discussion. But this time, this kind of workshopping struck me as something deadly. Let us teach you how to write the kind of work we want to publish. This isn’t about assuming there will be readers listening. It is about organizations securing their branding (which began long before branding was jargon for the masses.) This seems like a closed loop. A single story. A petrified truth.

Rebecca Solnit has offered 10 tips for writers. One of them is about finding your vocation. Hardly shocking: this iteration of “find your why”. But here is my woo woo rising again – the words come when we need to read them.

I would be lying – and convincing no one – if I said that I didn’t write to be seen. That every one of my poems wasn’t me waving as drowning. But it is also true that wanting to be seen is the first step towards belonging. Which is still an ego-centered (not necessarily egocentric) motive, but sounds better.

When I read, I’m moved by poems that open me to the world that is not me. Show me you and weave your story into the world somehow so I know it to be true. Show me mermaids where we never dreamed there were mermaids. Show me all the monsters.

I don’t think any of us begin with an urge to create something for dissection. But everything that comes together falls apart as we try to make sense of it. And it is in the fragmenting that we find the whole.

If I have a vocation as a writer, I wonder if it is a branch of the same passion that I have as a reader: a passion to uncover everything. Everything belongs and deserves attention.

“Honey or condensed milk with your bread?” he was so excited that he said, “Both,” and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, “but don’t bother about the bread, please.”

― A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

At some point we choose to see the expression unchecked desires as either comically charming or terrifying, depending on the safety of our current position in the pecking order.

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”

― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Maybe I just want to say that while something may be undesirable, unpalatable, ugly – it is not unnatural. We can’t handle the natural world – to make a pop culture allusion. It terrifies us, as it should.

Maybe the truth is always in our blind spot. A shadow on the periphery. Best told at a slant, as she said.

Perhaps.

I think I remember someone telling how to drive in the proper lane, by eyeing the corner of the car’s hood with the solid white line instead of looking straight ahead to try to center the car on the road. He said something about not trusting perspectives.

It was terrifying.

Hell. I have no idea what I am trying to say.

Focusing on the Poetry

A timed, unedited, nearly-daily meditation practice
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