Sage Cohen's Blog, page 17
March 4, 2011
Thirst
We understand least
what we hold closest.
Cup contains, water resists.
Thirst: a lineage of cups
with no trust in the future.
What wakes you up in the night
mouth empty, sheets blank
might be the faucet's dumb neck
arched with a brassy assurance
that you have not yet learned to tap.
March 1, 2011
Making time for writing: part 1
The universal chorus of complaint from writers of all stripes seems to be: not enough time. The truth is, writers make time for writing. And everyone does it her own way. Your job is to find your way. Every Tuesday for the next, six weeks I'll be offering suggestions to help you investigate how your relationship with time is moving you forward or holding you back.
You have all day
The fiction writer Grace Paley was once asked in an interview, "Grace, you are a mother, a teacher, a writer, and an activist. How do you find the time to do it all?" To which Grace replied, "Well, I have all day."
Time is a level playing field
We all get the same twenty-four hours in a day. What you do with yours is up to you. You may believe that you have "no time," but the fact is, you have just as much time as anyone else. What varies for every writer is our unique mix of work and family responsibilities, financial commitments, sleep requirements, physical and emotional space for writing, and perhaps most importantly, our ability and willingness to prioritize writing in this mix.
Consciousness is the first step toward change
Because I don't know you, I can't tell you exactly how you can make time for writing; but I assure you that you can. I can also tell you that your relationship with time is far more subjective than you might imagine. The best way to get a handle on how much authority you actually have over our time is to start becoming aware of how you are spending it. (Chapter seven of The Productive Writer offers a friendly time-tracking method designed to give you a snapshot of your daily and weekly patterns.)
Pay attention to how you're investing your time today, and you'll develop a clear picture of the mix of mandatory and voluntary activities that shape your days. Once you become conscious that your relationship with time is not something that happens to you but a dynamic orchestrated by you through dozens of large and small choices you make every day, you can evaluate if you would like to choose to continue the pattern you are in, or to create a new one.
February 25, 2011
From Dysfunction to Duende
"What is to give light must endure burning" — Viktor Frankl
More often than not, when I tell people that I write poetry, they get a wistful, faraway look in their eyes. Exhaling deeply, they admit, "I used to write poetry once, too."
When I inquire as to why they no longer write poetry, the answer is so invariably the same that it's almost become a cliché: "I stopped writing because I got happy."
I admit that I came to poetry on my knees, for the same reason so many of us do: because I had no idea how else I might survive. And this can be a powerful way to get initiated into the craft and life of poetry. However, contrary to cultural stereotypes, dysfunction doesn't make a poet, and poetry does not exist merely as a life support system to keep the dysfunctional groping along the bottom of things. Poetry at its best is a portal we write ourselves through, from the ecstasies of grief to the ecstasies of joy: two sides of the same coin.
At a recent lecture with Elizabeth Gilbert, she observed that in the television show Heroes–where each character has a supernatural power–the writer has a heroin addiction, the origin of which is never explained. In contrast, Gilbert aptly pointed out, the cheerleader on this show does not require crystal meth to effectively shake her pom-poms. Why, she wondered, do we accept without question that the life of the artist demands this kind of self-destruction?
I think our artist/writer/poet mythology is born of a kind of romance with darkness that is sustained by the general public's avoidance of it. We look to our artists to live out the dark sides that many of us are not courageous enough to live ourselves. This is why as a culture, and as writers, it's easy to fall into the trap of misunderstanding the difference between duende and dysfunction: writing darkness, versus living it.
I'm not saying that there are no poets who live darkness. Certainly, they're out there; Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton and John Berryman are some of our most famous poets who never emerged from their own pain and ultimately ended their own lives. Many of us inhabit darkness and write our way out of it from time to time. But I think it does a disservice to poetry and to poets to romanticize or give credence to the idea that poetry is born and bred entirely of this dark place.
I remember as a young woman worrying about what I would write if I ever got happy. Eventually, I had an "aha" moment when I learned of duende in an essay by the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. In this piece, Lorca described duende as dark and potentially dangerous energy an artist is seeking to channel from within.
Wikipedia further illuminates this difficult-to-grasp concept: "Duende is a spirit of art, much the opposite of the Muse. Where the Muse brings golden inspiration, Duende brings blood. The Muse speaks of life, yet Duende sings of death. Duende is not inspiration, Duende is a struggle, a dark force, having very little to do with outer beauty, a struggle present in the artist's soul, the struggle of knowing that death is imminent. It is this knowledge of death that awaits and the despair that stems from it that produce Duende, and Duende will then color the artist's work with gut-wrenching authenticity, painful hues and tones that produce strong, vibrant art."
Duende happens when we call upon the wisdom of darkness–our own or that of the universal human experience–and use it to know ourselves more completely. When we tap into duende in our poetry, the poet becomes the conductive wire through which it moves, not the well in which darkness collects.
Paradoxically, much of my poetry is quite dark. People who know me well read it and have a difficult time reconciling their experience of my sunny disposition and my cloudy poems. For me, duende is the clarifying fire that burns through observation to spark the illumination of truth. Whether I'm happy or I'm sad, the mining of what is true can go deep into the darkness. When we emerge squinting into the light with the glorious gem of a word that fits just right, this is the ecstasy of poetry.
Excerpted from the February 2011 issue of the Writing the Life Poetic zine.
February 22, 2011
Top 10 Productivity Busters
No short-term goals. You can't hit a target that you can't see. Knowing your daily, weekly, monthly, and annual goals (both practical and aspirational) can help ensure that you keep moving in the right direction—and that you know when you've arrived.
Fear. Risk is the hinge on which productivity turns; if we are not in danger of failing, we are not likely growing. When we let fear prevent us from taking steps that could bring our writing goals and dreams closer, we clamp down on our possibilities and limit our opportunities to succeed.
Doing the wrong task at the wrong time. Understanding your own writing rhythms and honoring them is the key to finding and sustaining a flow that you can count on. For example, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that I have ants in my pants until about 4 p.m. The popular wisdom is that the early morning is "the time" for a writer. If I had limited myself to writing in this prescribed time that is not a fit with my biorhythm, surely I would have given up by now.
Shabby systems. If you can't find the latest draft of your essay, don't remember what you've pitched and to whom, can't keep track of the great ideas you're having, and have no system for archiving, measuring, repeating, and building on success, this is likely to limit your performance, satisfaction and results.
Lack of creativity and consciousness about time. If you're not aware of how you're spending time, what your time is worth, how you might source more writing hours from the life you're living right now, nor what you intend to accomplish in each chunk of writing time you do have, you are not getting the best value from this most precious resource.
Transition turbulence. Without solid systems and established rhythms for sitting down to the blank page, completing a writing session, or generally navigating the unbounded freedoms of being responsible for our own motivation and performance, we are likely to have bumpy transitions that can limit our productivity and discourage us from even attempting to get started.
Perfectionism. If you wait for your work to be perfect, it (and you) may never leave your desk. If you focus, instead, on professionalism—doing the very best that you can, committing to learn along the way, and understanding that mistakes and failures are the nurse logs that feed every success, you can steadily improve without that albatross of the impossible weighing you down.
Isolation. Writers need other people to learn with and from. We need a context in which to understand and appreciate the work that we are doing. We need role models whose accomplishments we can aspire to, colleagues we can conspire with, and business partners who can collaborate with us to bring our work forward. Without a social, professional, and community context, we are far more likely to get discouraged, lose our way, and miss out on opportunities for greater pleasure, prosperity, and productivity.
Neglecting to celebrate and be grateful. It's easy to focus on the negative in writing and in life; there is certainly plenty of opportunity to do so. But when we, instead, turn our attention to what's working and what we appreciate from moment to moment, something surprising happens—our sails turn into the wind. Let me be clear, I'm talking about the smallest of celebrations: for the blank sheet of paper drinking up the ink under your hand, the sun pointing a finger through the curtain to your desk, the editor who included a personal note in the form rejection letter.
February 18, 2011
Convenience Kills
I remember reading the news article about people dying from E. coli occurring in pre-washed, pre-cut, plastic-bagged spinach. At that time, I also read an interview Susie Bright conducted with a farmer who explained that spinach in and of itself is not dangerous. It is our passion for convenience—to open a bag of vegetables that someone has already cleaned and chopped for us—that requires a type of processing that makes our vegetables far more susceptible to disease.
I believed then, as I believe now, that E. coli poisoning born of a desire for consumer ease is a metaphor for the endless ways we pollute our imaginations and our lives with the speed and comfort of our high-performance machinery and culture. When it comes to creativity, in many cases, convenience kills.
A few years ago, I was photographed by the city of Portland, Oregon ––repeatedly––driving under the influence of poetry. Rather than appreciate the alternative interpretations my daydreaming mind might bring to the concept of "speed limit," Big Brother said, "Enough is enough." Driving 36-38 MPH in a 25 MPH zone four times in two years is grounds for a 30-day license suspension. I was grounded.
I am as goodie-two-shoes as they come. I didn't want to break the law; I didn't want to be punished. It is, of course, much more convenient to drive. But I have too much experience stumbling upon feast in the paradox of famine to get myself tangled up in upset about my temporary license suspension. Instead, I was eager to experience 30 days without a car. What would life be like below the radar? Who would I be without the privileged convenience and speed of driving I had enjoyed my entire adult life?
What I learned is that inconvenience trains tentative tendrils of receptivity to its lattice of laborious climb. In other words: the less convenient things are, the more awake you become. On a particularly aggravating summer day of needing to be somewhere I didn't want to go, the sky was gray, the air thick and sticky. It seemed appropriate to have to physically trudge uphill and as I set my mind and my pace to it, I stepped over a torn piece of paper on the sidewalk on 41st Avenue, probably ¼ mile or so north of my house. It looked like someone's homework.
After an hour's wait in an overflowing waiting room, I spent another hour walking home. This time, I found myself slowing down over the torn page resting peacefully on the sidewalk. It was yellow, 8 ½" x 11", wide-ruled in blue, torn from the top out of someone's notebook. I think it caught my attention because there was only a single sentence written at the top of an otherwise blank page. In blue pen, carefully printed in fat, bubble letters, it read: Can't take back the things that I did before.
I stood over this paper as if it were a baby bird that had fallen from a nest I could not find. I leapt back from it as if singed. I read it. I read it again. I looked in a wide sweep in all directions of the street: nothing. Into the heavens: no one. Who put this here? I stood over the paper for maybe another 20 seconds before some impulse came over me to grab it and fold it into my pocket stealthily, as if someone might try to tear it out of my hands.
Can't take back the things that I did before. I clutched this tattered totem of sidewalk truth in this moment of absolute, clarifying, unfathomable grace and continued walking slowly home. It lived on my bulletin board for more than a year, and in that time grew into a poem, an essay and a philosophy about learning how to listen to what the world around us is offering us. How might you keep yourself just uncomfortable and awake enough to notice the gifts that are literally falling at your feet?
February 16, 2011
Author Erika Dreifus contemplates how memory informs poetry and prose
Erika Dreifus is a force of incredible goodwill, generosity, intelligence and service in the literary landscape. I first encountered her through her role as editor/publisher of The Practicing Writer, a free (and popular) e-newsletter featuring advice, opportunities, and resources on the craft and business of writing for fictionists, poets, and writers of creative nonfiction. And then I had the good fortune to have her as a student in two of my Poetry for the People online classes. (She subsequently placed several of her poems in fine publications).
Quite familiar with the voice and nuance of Erika's poetry, I was delighted to experience a new (to me) dimension of her literary prowess as I gulped down her new short-story collection Quiet Americans in just two nights. The stories pierced me clean through with intimate, seismic stories that unified generations and continents, reminding me that every story told well by a narrator I trust becomes my own. (I highly encourage you to get your own copy of Quiet Americans.)
I invited Erika to join us today to consider how inspiration translates to the expression of prose and poetry in the literary life. I'll let Erika Dreifus take it from here, in her own words.
* * * * *
As the author of a recently released short-story collection (Quiet Americans), I have been appearing before audiences and reading brief excerpts from my book. One of the excerpts I'm most fond of presenting is a section from a story titled "Homecomings."
Like much of the book, this story draws inspiration from the experiences of my paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. In "Homecomings," a couple with a similar background—Nelly and Josef—return to Germany for the first time in September 1972. At one point in the story, the cousins who are hosting them drive them back to Nelly's home city: Mannheim.
In fact, Mannheim was my grandmother's home city, and my grandmother did return there for the first time in 1972. I was too young to be aware of the occasion at the time, but Grandma spoke about it in later years, and I often thought about what she said, and imagined how she must have felt. I thought about all of this even more in 1990, when my father and I traveled to Mannheim ourselves for the first time, and on two later trips.
Some of those commingled thoughts, observations, and imaginings appear in "Homecomings":
Mannheim's water tower still stood, surrounded by well-tended lawn. The florist shop she and her father had visited each week, so that he could buy a bouquet for her mother—still there, too. The office where her father had run his business, until the Reich outlawed that. Only the shoe store had changed; now it was a café. The shoe store, where she had found a job at the age of eighteen, because even with her Abitur she couldn't attend university. Not then. Not in 1933. But her father had said: "You're not just sitting around here, my dear girl. Waiting to emigrate. You shall do something useful."
Her cousin Daniel turned the Citröen off the city's main ring, onto Ifflenstrasse, and Nelly thought she'd stopped breathing. The building, where she and her parents had lived in an apartment that occupied the entire second floor, was the same! The same purplish stone. The same flowerboxes. The same big windows.
No. The windows. Those were not the same.
"Those men came in," her mother had said, once they could speak freely about that night back in November 1938. "They smashed the windows. The china. The paintings."
In "Homecomings," Nelly cannot bring herself to leave the safety of her cousin's car, even when the cousin offers to see if her apartment's current owners are home and might allow her inside. That, too, is based on "what really happened" when my grandmother returned to Mannheim.
I wrote my first draft of what became "Homecomings" in 2002. Many details I included in the story—the street name, the apartment, what happened during the Kristallnacht of November 1938, the idea that the native daughter cannot bring herself to reenter the building even decades later—reappeared in a poem I wrote about five years later.
Here is how "Mannheim" begins:
I did not cry the first time I went to Mannheim,
when my father and I studied the nameplates
listing the residents of the building on Ifflenstrasse
where his mother had been born, and grown up.
The building she left one April day in 1938, just in time,
and had never re-entered.
I did not cry even when the current second-floor residents
invited us to visit,
and I stood in the high-ceilinged rooms where my great-grandparents had
withstood the Kristallnacht.
In fact, in the photos my father snapped
to show my grandmother, back in Brooklyn,
I am smiling.
The most obvious difference between the poetry and prose is that the poetry more transparently reflects my perceptions and experience. To be sure, the prose, too, draws in part from my own observations: The photographs from my first trip to Mannheim include snapshots of "the florist shop she and her father had visited each week," "the office where her father had run his business," and "the building, where she and her parents had lived…." I am certain that having had the opportunity to see those places myself, and possessing the photographs to revisit, fixed those images in my mind and memory, and enhanced the fictional references.
The stories my grandmo
ther transmitted and the perceptions that I attached to them, then, manifest themselves— differently—in the two forms. This, to me, is part of the "path of possibility," the always-unpredictable and kaleidoscopic way in which, as writers, we may return to a single source of inspiration, again and again.
* * * * *
About Erika Dreifus
Erika Dreifus is the author of Quiet Americans, a short-story collection that is largely inspired by the histories and experiences of her paternal grandparents, German Jews who escaped Nazi persecution and immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. Erika earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, where she taught history, literature, and writing for several years. Currently, she lives in New York City, where she works for The City University of New York.
February 15, 2011
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #6
YES, THAT SUCCESS COUNTS
I often find myself arguing with students and friends who have a whole litany of reasons why their various successes "don't count." These folks always have a persuasive story about how they could have done better—published in a more reputable magazine or presented to a more prestigious crowd. Of course, there are always opportunities to do better. And in my experience, the most efficient way to approach those opportunities is by being grateful for what we are accomplishing right now. And understanding that we build slowly over time toward achieving our big goals with one tangible foothold at a time.
The truth is that no matter what your level of expertise and experience may be, chances are that there's someone out there that knows more than you and someone who knows less. And no matter where your writing life takes you, this will always be true.
So why not just relax, put that notch in your belt, a clip in your scrapbook file, a link in your blog or whatever you need to do to celebrate each and every opportunity and honor that comes your way? Don't berate the people admiring you (or berate yourself) if your current audience is not the Pulitzer Prize committee. We all have to start somewhere. I propose that you start by giving yourself permission to appreciate the success you have created, no matter how insignificant you might believe it to be. Right now. I know you can.
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #1
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #2
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #3
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #4
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #5
February 11, 2011
Dear Theo,
Don't let anyone tell you an apple
tastes the same in slices as it does
in bites. Or that you won't find
sharks and elephants and mommies
on Old MacDonald's farm. You know
the ladybug and her captor spider
have equal rights in the weave
of life, and that metaphor can be
chewed from toast. May you find
in pirate ships the reflection
of your treasure. May you learn
from my mistakes, though they
can't spare you. When the pain
gets too great, paper your heart
with bees' secrets. Look to
sweetness for shelter.
February 8, 2011
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #5
You're already doing it!
"I always wanted to be a creative writer but was never brave enough to really do it. The cost of failure seemed too great. So I pursued a number of other things—photography, art history, Asian studies. At some point in my mid-twenties, I quit my job in art history and found a writing job. One where I had to write a lot of articles, success stories, interviews—silly corporate things. But they gave me a lot of confidence that I could put sentences down on paper. Be persuasive. Provide information and direction. Frame things in a point of view. And I got comfortable doing that, and even a little confident. In looking back, this 'silly' writing job laid a great foundation for me as a more creative writer and more recently a poet."—Heidi Schulman Greenwald, award-winning poet
How much do you want to bet that you're already doing whatever you're telling yourself that you don't know how to do and could never do in a million years? Maybe you're terrified of reading in front of an audience, but you just led a conference call at work. Maybe you are too scared to approach a short story, but you regularly make up bedtime stories for your child. When we don't allow ourselves to attempt what we really want head-on, often we come at it sideways, or crawl in the doggie door. What small space are you shuffling around in that is echoing a larger playing field of your passion? Chances are good that the seed of your skill in this area has already been planted, and even watered, on the sly. Imagine what would happen if you simply brought it out into the light!
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #1
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #2
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #3
Transforming fear to courage: Tip #4
February 4, 2011
Dear Cupid,
It was more likely that you'd hit
an artery or splinter the neighbor's
picture window than find a way to divide
my pride at the perfect precipice where
possibility lifted above the crumbling
stories I had outlived. The day Jon left
his undershirt behind and I filled my breath
with his lingering absence, though my armor
was glistening with intent, I already belonged
to this scent. The animal of my body struck
by the good luck of your incision
which weakened me enough to believe.
There was no happily ever after, Cupid.
But you knew this when you chose
Jon for me: with each hit beyond
what we can tolerate, we are meant
to soften. Your strike survived.
It pierced all the way through
the shock of the wife and mother
I soon became back to that trail
of scent where our love began.
You broke me. And now I'm open.
