Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (5 page)

When I first graduated college in 1970, I worked as a substitute teacher for the Detroit public school system. It was after the race riots, and there were strong feelings of black power emanating from the students. I was naive, freshly moved to Detroit. Everything was new and I was open. I remember being called to substitute for an English class in an all-black high school. “Great,” I thought. I had been an English major in college. I grabbed my frayed hardcover copy of
The
Norton Anthology of English Literature
and drove to my school assignment. The eleventh-graders entered the classroom at the sounding of the bell—“Hey, girl, what you doin’ here?” It was obvious that they weren’t going to dutifully sit in their seats, but I didn’t care. This was English class and I was in love with literature. “Now, wait a minute. I want to share these poems with you. I love them.” I read them my favorite, “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I had often read aloud in college to the dismay of my roommates. I read it to the Detroit English class with that same energy. They were totally silent after I read. Then a student grabbed a book of poems by Langston Hughes, shoved it at me, and said, “Read these.” For the whole fifty minutes we read aloud black poets that the students wanted to hear.

Writers, when they write, need to approach things for the first time each time. A teacher in Elkton called me to the side: “Look under the desks. There’s mud on the floor from their shoes. That’s a good sign. It means spring.” And I look in wonder for the first time.

How to generate writing ideas, things to write about? Whatever’s in front of you is a good beginning. Then move out into all streets. You can go anyplace. Tell me everything you know. Don’t worry if what you know you can’t prove or haven’t studied. I know the fields around Elkton because I say I do and because I want to walk out into them forever. Don’t worry that forever might be the one week you’re there as resident poet or salesman for a tractor company or a traveler on the way west. Own anything you want in your writing and then let it go.

Tap the Water Table

D
ON’T WORRY ABOUT
your talent or capability: that will grow as you practice. Katagiri Roshi said, “Capability is like a water table below the surface of earth.” No one owns it, but you can tap it. You tap it with your effort and it will come through you. So just practice writing, and when you learn to trust your voice, direct it. If you want to write a novel, write a novel. If it’s essays you want or short stories, write them. In the process of writing them, you will learn how. You can have the confidence that you will gradually acquire the technique and craft you need.

Instead people often begin writing from a poverty mentality. They are empty and they run to teachers and classes to learn about writing. We learn writing by doing it. That simple. We don’t learn by going outside ourselves to authorities we think know about it. I had a lovely fat friend once who decided he wanted to start exercising. He went to a bookstore to find a book so he could read about it! You don’t read about exercise to lose weight. You exercise to lose those pounds.

The terrible thing about public schools is they take young children who are natural poets and story writers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk “about” it.

The Red Wheelbarrow

“What did the poet mean by the ‘red wheelbarrow’? Did he mean a sunset? A chariot? And why was it ‘glazed with rain’?” So many questions. He meant nothing so much as a wheelbarrow, and it was red because it was red and it had just rained. So much depends on it because poems are small moments of enlightenment—at that moment the wheelbarrow just as it was woke Williams up and was everything.

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader’s job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels. Instead we should go closer and closer to the work. Learn to recall images and lines precisely as the writer said them. Don’t step away from their warmth and fire to talk “about” them. Stay close to them. That’s how you’ll learn to write. Stay with the original work. Stay with your original mind and write from it.

We Are Not the Poem

T
HE PROBLEM IS
we think we exist. We think our words are permanent and solid and stamp us forever. That’s not true. We write in the moment. Sometimes when I read poems at a reading to strangers, I realize they think those poems are me. They are not me, even if I speak in the “I” person. They were my thoughts and my hand and the space and the emotions at that time of writing. Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh. That is how writing is. Instead of freezing us, it frees us.

The ability to put something down—to tell how you feel about an old husband, an old shoe, or the memory of a cheese sandwich on a gray morning in Miami—that moment you can finally align how you feel inside with the words you write; at that moment you are free because you are not fighting those things inside. You have accepted them, become one with them. I have a poem entitled “No Hope”—it’s a long poem. I always think of it as joyous because in my ability to write of desperation and emptiness I felt alive again and unafraid. However, when I read it, people comment, “How sad.” I try to explain, but no one listens.

It is important to remember we are not the poem. People will react however they want; and if you write poetry, get used to no reaction at all. But that’s okay. The power is always in the act of writing. Come back to that again and again and again. Don’t get caught in the admiration for your poems. It’s fun. But then the public makes you read their favorites over and over until you get sick of those poems. Write good poems and let go of them. Publish them, read them, go on writing.

I remember Galway Kinnell when his wonderful
Book of Nightmares
first came out. It was a Thursday afternoon in Ann Arbor. I’d never heard of him, much less could I pronounce his name. He sang those poems; they were new and exciting for him and a great accomplishment. Six years later I heard him read again at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He’d read that book so much in those six years that he was sick of it. He ran through the poems, put down the book, and said, “Where’s the party?” There was nothing dangerous for him in them anymore. The air was no longer electric.

It is very painful to become frozen with your poems, to gain too much recognition for a certain set of poems. The real life is in writing, not in reading the same ones over and over again for years. We constantly need new insights, visions. We don’t exist in any solid form. There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever. Don’t identify too strongly with your work. Stay fluid behind those black-and-white words. They are not you. They were a great moment going through you. A moment you were awake enough to write down and capture.

Man Eats Car

T
HERE WAS AN
article in the newspaper several years ago—I did not read it, it was told to me—about a yogi in India who ate a car. Not all at once, but slowly over a year’s time. Now, I like a story like that. How much weight did he gain? How old was he? Did he have a full set of teeth? Even the carburetor, the steering wheel, the radio? What make was the car? Did he drink the oil?

I told this story to a group of third-graders in Owatonna, Minnesota. They were sitting on the blue carpet in front of me. The students looked confused and asked the most obvious question, “Why did he eat a car?,” and then they commented, “Ugh!” But there was one bristling, brown-eyed student, who will be my friend forever, who just looked at me and burst into tremendous laughter, and I began laughing too. It was fantastic! A man had eaten a car! Right from the beginning there is no logic in it. It is absurd.

In a sense, this is how we should write. Not asking “Why?,” not delicately picking among candies (or spark plugs), but voraciously, letting our minds eat up everything and spewing it out on paper with great energy. We shouldn’t think, “This is a good subject for writing.” “This we shouldn’t talk about.” Writing is everything, unconditional. There is no separation between writing, life, and the mind. If you think big enough to let people eat cars, you will be able to see that ants are elephants and men are women. You will be able to see the transparency of all forms so that all separations disappear.

This is what metaphor is. It is not saying that an ant is
like
an elephant. Perhaps; both are alive. No. Metaphor is saying the ant
is
an elephant. Now, logically speaking, I know there is a difference. If you put elephants and ants before me, I believe that every time I will correctly identify the elephant and the ant. So metaphor must come from a very different place than that of the logical, intelligent mind. It comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant.

But don’t worry about metaphors. Don’t think, “I have to write metaphors to sound literary.” First of all, don’t be literary. Metaphors cannot be forced. If all of you does not believe that the elephant and the ant are one at the moment you write it, it will sound false. If all of you does believe it, there are some who might consider you crazy; but it’s better to be crazy than false. But how do you make your mind believe it and write metaphor?

Don’t “make” your mind do anything. Simply step out of the way and record your thoughts as they roll through you. Writing practice softens the heart and mind, helps to keep us flexible so that rigid distinctions between apples and milk, tigers and celery, disappear. We can step through moons right into bears. You will take leaps naturally if you follow your thoughts, because the mind spontaneously takes great leaps. You know. Have you ever been able to just stay with one thought for very long? Another one arises.

Your mind is leaping, your writing will leap, but it won’t be artificial. It will reflect the nature of first thoughts, the way we see the world when we are free from prejudice and can see the underlying principles. We are all connected. Metaphor knows this and therefore is religious. There is no separation between ants and elephants. All boundaries disappear, as though we were looking through rain or squinting our eyes at city lights.

Writing Is Not a McDonald’s Hamburger

S
OMETIMES
I
HAVE
a student who is really good right from the beginning. I’m thinking of one in particular. The air was electric when he read, and he was often shaking. The writing process split him open; he was able to tell about being fourteen years old in a mental hospital, about walking the streets of Minneapolis tripping on LSD, about sitting next to the dead body of his brother in San Francisco. He said he had wanted to write for years. People told him he should be a writer, but anytime he sat down to write he couldn’t connect the words on paper with the event or his feelings.

That is because he had an idea of what he wanted to say before he came to paper. Of course, you can sit down and have something you want to say. But then you must let its expression be born in you and on the paper. Don’t hold too tight; allow it to come out how it needs to rather than trying to control it. Yes, those experiences, memories, feelings, are in us, but you can’t carry them out on paper whole the way a cook brings out a pizza from the oven.

Let go of everything when you write, and try at a simple beginning with simple words to express what you have inside. It won’t begin smoothly. Allow yourself to be awkward. You are stripping yourself. You are exposing your life, not how your ego would like to see you represented, but how you are as a human being. And it is because of this that I think writing is religious. It splits you open and softens your heart toward the homely world.

When I’m cranky now, miserable, dissatisfied, pessimistic, negative, generally rotten, I recognize it as a feeling. I know the feeling can change. I know it is energy that wants to find a place in the world and wants friends.

But yes, you can have topics you want to write about—“I want to write about my brother who died in San Francisco”—but come to it not with your mind and ideas, but with your whole body—your heart and gut and arms. Begin to write in the dumb, awkward way an animal cries out in pain, and there you will find your intelligence, your words, your voice.

People often say, “I was walking along [or driving, shopping, jogging] and I had this whole poem go through my mind, but when I sat down to write it, I couldn’t get it to come out right.” I never can either. Sitting to write is another activity. Let go of walking or jogging and the poem that was born then in your mind. This is another moment. Write another poem. Perhaps secretly hope something of what you thought a while ago might come out, but let it come out however it does. Don’t force it.

The same student mentioned above was so excited about writing that he immediately tried to form a book. I told him, “Take it slow. Just let yourself write for a while. Learn what that is about.” Writing is a whole lifetime and a lot of practice. I understood his urgency. We want to think we are doing something useful, going someplace, achieving something—“I am writing a book.”