the word studio notebook

A Sentence in Search of a Home

It’s like the way a building changes when you realize it’s empty, that you can see right through it to the sky behind, like a castle abandoned, its walls holding up nothing, its floors open to the weather, its timbers and its tiles and its people all weathered away to nothing.

Re: All Those Fucks I Give

When the writing’s going well, I can hardly give a fuck. I can hardly muster one half of one damn for my troubles. Problems with cars and broken bones can go fly. I’ve got an electrical charge, I’m a machine powered by the current, and everything either makes sense or it can go fuck off and who cares, because the writing is going well. 

When the writing’s not going well, I give a lot of damns. Everything little thing seems larger than it really is and I give fucks about all the things. Instead of stringing words together, I manufacture damns and give them away freely to anyone who will take one. I might as well dress as a hot dog and give out coupons on the street, good for one free damn about anything at all, ‘cause they’re cheap, I’m making more of them all the time, and nobody cares. Because who takes or gives even a damn, even one good damn, about some feckless dude who hasn’t written shit today? Everything that sucks sucks worse because the writing’s not going well.

We can write or we can do other things, but sitting and hoping to write isn’t anything at all, so if we’re not writing let’s do other things, do them well, and not stockpile a bunch of useless fucks about it.

That Exists Today That Didn’t Yesterday

After a weekend of tripping over every word, getting tangled in sentences, and being setback by the paragraph due to my own frustration with my own writing and creative decisions, I am taking some time to work on other words my brain has been trying to sort out for 50 hours. I am going to take the progress I can make in lieu of the progress I demand. I’m putting those words down on paper (well, “paper”) so I can stop fretting about them, dwelling in them like a mouse in a boot, and then move on to what needs to be done.

This is like eating my dessert first, frankly. Yet if I don’t make the time for these words, they’ll never get written. And it’s not the waiting for a chance to write them that’s driving me crazy, I don’t think; it’s the heavy suspicion that I’ll never be done with work and so never get to write these words—these words for me—otherwise.

As I wrote to a friend the other day, the list of things I want to write is longer than my life expectancy. Thus, if I keep deferring the things I’m trying to write for me, for the sake of the writer I want to be, for the projects that might not otherwise get written, they’ll never get written and I’ll always be on some verge.

This is not a new revelation, of course. It’s an old one. I have it rather a lot.

This is me invoking my right to write, for myself, for a little bit. “Anything that exists today that didn’t yesterday is something,” I wrote on Twitter.

Then it’s back to work. 

Old Poems

Old poetry, in my life, comes in a few varieties. There’s, like, Gilgamesh and The Odyssey and Beowulf:

So blessed with abundance, brimming with joyance,
The warriors abided, till a certain one gan to
Dog them with deeds of direfullest malice,
A foe in the hall-building: this horrible stranger
Was Grendel entitled, the march-stepper famous
Who dwelt in the moor-fens, the marsh and the fastness;

—Beowulf [via Gutenberg]

Next variety: the poems that predate us and our styles but not our language—or not quite. I’m thinking of poets like John Keats and Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, whose iceboxes we sometimes understand but whose hyphenated “may-bes” are antiquated enough to give their work a patina, however handsome.

Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all—that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
May-be the things I perceive—the animals, plants, men, hills,
shining and flowing waters,
The skies of day and night—colors, densities, forms—May-be these
are, (as doubtless they are,) only apparitions, and the real
something has yet to be known;

—Walt Whitman, “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances”

These are the poems in mid-transformation—the poems that reflect not just the moment their shutters snapped but the eras in which the cameras were made. Fog’s swallowing up some of them, more every day it seems, but we can make them out like figures in the woods against that fog.

Final variety: the poems of your own past. Maybe you wrote them. Maybe someone else wrote them and you loved them with a teenaged passion and the certainty that no one else could understand your love. Whatever. Point is, there they are, just as you left them, and there you are, no longer the same.

I found a folder of my old high-school poems today. These aren’t the ones I remember being proud of—tentatively proud, just learning how to walk on stilts—there were the ones I was proud of once but have since forgotten existed. These were poems from the other semester, when I thought I was good and I was making everything grandiose and serious and winking all at once. These are the poems that I thought were cute back then, who sat behind me in English junior year, who I was friendly with but not friends with, exactly. What were their names? I don’t recall. I put them back in my filing cabinet not five hours ago and I already do not recall.

These are the poems that make you realize that the poems don’t transmute at all. They stay the same. We change. We change shape, we change our minds, we change our standards and our expectations. We change our language and treasure different things. The patina’s on us, just like it’s on them.

Somewhere around here is a folder of the poems I wrote that I remember fondly—a couple of them won awards—and I’m afraid that one day soon I’ll find it.