This Writing Life

On a springtimish Saturday afternoon in early June I took the 75 bus to the south end of the line in Milwaukie and wandered down to Wind Horse Coffee & Tea for an espresso and journal session. I took a seat at a sidewalk table, pleasant breeze, clouds banished from sky ten thousand fathoms of blue, the Willamette River tranquil two blocks to the west. People strolled by singly, in pairs, small groups. Some stepped into the Wind Horse. Across Main Street stand Milwaukie Masonic Lodge, Rice Thai Cookery, and Beer Store, a tap room with sandwich and burger offerings, which appeared to be hopping.

As often happens, the pen delivered only pedestrian fare without trace of lyricism or vision. That is how it goes with this writing life. My thoughts turn as I ponder what compulsion brings me back to it time and again, and from there to where it all started with this writing thing.

Books were the gateway. I was somewhere around the age of eight, third grade, when Mom brought home two new seventh-grade textbooks, one geography, the other U.S. history, from the school where she worked as secretary. The geography text was tedious. I never got far with it. The history though I tore through like an adventure tale. This would have been 1962 or thereabouts. The NASA space program and Russia’s Sputnik were in the air. I got into science fiction by way of juvenile space opera with Revolt on Alpha C ordered through the Scholastic Book Club at my little elementary school in rural South Carolina.

And I was off, reading like a fiend, history, biographies of historical figures, science fiction, books about science. A year or several later Mrs. Ballentine, the fifth-grade teacher at Dutch Fork Elementary, paid Mom and Granny a visit peddling World Book Encyclopedia. I sat in the yard with them there behind the house, the old smokehouse and washhouse to one side, the wisteria and farther back flowerbeds, a chicken house, a building that may have once been another chicken house now storing stuff and called just the building, fields and woods beyond.

Mrs. Ballentine made her pitch that my brother, sister, and I would need the encyclopedia as we pursued our education. The encyclopedia would have represented a bit of an investment. Mom and Granny made it because as family friend Patty Eleazer said to Trani and me when last we visited SC in 2007, “We’ve got to educate the children.” That was the spirit of the place where I grew up.

More than a few hours were passed in the years that followed looking up subjects that piqued my interest. At the end of each encyclopedia entry was a brief list of related topics, which would lead to other related topics and on elsewhere from there in a primitive, low-tech version of what is now known as surfing the web. I did well in school in part because I was often already familiar with topics in history and science when they came up in the classroom.

Don’t get me wrong. My reading was not all that hifalutin. There was precious little of literary merit or distinction in the science fiction and sports juvenalia I devoured. It is with a twinge of regret that I recall how I labored over books like A Tale of Two Cities, Silas Marner, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles in high school, even borrowing Bob Grigsby’s Cliff Notes for Tale of Two Cities, the only time I ever stooped so low. I came to books like that late, in college and after, and am still, as I near my seventy-first birthday, trying to catch up on what I missed. Once I hit on Camus and Dostoevsky thanks to Dr. Mulvaney and his introductory philosophy class freshman year, the reading habit cultivated early on through Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Tolkien, propelled me off again back into the Western canon and on up to contemporary figures like Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone. I picked up Tale of Two Cities again two decades after the Cliff Notes and read it with pleasure.

Bob Dylan was a gateway to poetry and the Beats who opened a door into a European avant-garde tradition that runs from Baudelaire up through Rimbaud and on to those zany Surrealists in Paris in the 1920s. From high school lit class the second wave of English Romantics, primarily Byron and Shelley, made a certain impression. I do not recall what I thought of Keats, who I have since come to near worship. Blake was intriguing, Coleridge not so much except for “Kubla Khan.” Wordsworth was pedestrian, deadly dull, representing along with Frost poetry that left me cold. In the decade of my forties I would change my mind about Wordsworth.

Acolytes of what Harold Bloom called the School of Resentment may notice the absence of women, people of color, and the like in the preceding paragraphs. Well. For the record and all, by way of example, in the haphazard fashion of youth I was reading Diane di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones), and Ted Joans, come to through their association with the Beats, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire by way of a reference by André Breton in some manifesto or other, and Chinese poet Han-shan through Gary Snyder’s translations in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems.

Reading those poets infected me with an urge to write. I have a vague recollection of writing poems filled with adolescent angst at the age of sixteen or seventeen. Fortunately none survive. Over the next few years all poetry scribbles were from time to time securely deleted in the fireplace. My pastime as pamphleteer and gadfly might be said to have its beginnings during that period with contributions to our “underground” newspaper Brass, a surreptiously mimeographed publication not to be confused with the official high school paper, which if memory serves was called The Stinger (the yellowjacket being the school mascot). Why it never occurred to me to try to write for the establishment publication is a mystery. Instead I hacked out screeds about the social and political unrest of that era for the ephemeral Brass. As far as I know none of these survive either, also for the best.

Some of my best moments in college were devoted to term papers. A few stand out. My first deep dive into the Beats came with a paper for a freshman sociology class. Quite a few evenings were passed in the periodicals reading room hunched over microfiche readers with back issues of Village Voice, Paris Review, Evergreen Review, and other more obscure publications whose names escape me. Dr. Matsen complimented a paper on Parmenides for an introductory class on the Presoscratic philosophers fall semester of sophomore year. Later Mr. Mandell liked my biographical sketch of Alexander Herzen for his course on European Intellectual History 1789–1914, and a paper on Martin Heidegger’s ideas about truth won an undergraduate essay award. I am now pretty certain I got Heidegger pretty much wrong, but heck, I was an undergrad. Of course I got him wrong. Although I dragged these papers and others around with me for years, somewhere along the way they too were lost. That I regret.

The first poetry publication came with a submission to the college literary magazine. The editor made a number of edits without running them by me, my introduction to the imperiousness of editors. The edits bugged me a little but not all that much since I never really thought anyone would ever want to publish anything I wrote anway. They may well have improved the poem.

Back in those days submissions were typewritten hard copies sent by mail and accompanied by the venerable SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) for the editor’s response. One submission from the early years prompted a handwritten rejection running to several pages explaining why some people should stick to reading poems instead of trying to write them. I was annoyed but not put off and kept hacking away. Another memorable note came if memory serves from Carol Bly, wife of Robert, who wrote that the poems had some interesting images but left the reader skating on the surface. Fair enough.

Russian poet Anna Akhmatova exclaimed, “Either someone’s a poet or not!” She went on to add, “Poetry is a catastrophe.” Akhmatova’s biographer, Roberta Reeder, summed up her theory of poetic creativity: “it is not a matter of will, of following simple rules set out by poets of the past, but a combination of craftsmanship and true inspiration that cannot be willed.” Arthur Rimbaud, at the age of sixteen, expressed a similar sensibility in his own fashion in a letter to his friend Paul Demeny:

I is some one else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it isn’t to blame. To me this is evident: I witness the birth of my thought: I look at it, I listen to it: I give a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths or comes bursting onto the stage.

Later in the letter he lays out what goes into becoming a poet:

The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it: it seems simple…so many egoists proclaim themselves authors…

One must, I say, be a visionary, make oneself a visionary.

The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself…He arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed, in the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them." (“By Way of a Preface,” Illuminations, tr. Varèse)

Now I find myself unexpectedly thrown back to Wordsworth and his well-known assertion in the preface to Lyrical Ballads that all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings “but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply.”

As to the actual act of composition, Coleridge told William Hazlitt “that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk” (Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions).

Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Akhmatova. Does anyone ever think of the three of them together? An obvious common thread was life in a time of revolution and upheaval. For Wordsworth it was the French Revolution. He took a long walking tour of revolutionary France in the summer of 1790 and returned in 1791 after taking his degree at Cambridge. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” (“French Revolution: as it appeared to Enthusiasts at its commencement”). In February 1871 Rimbaud ran away to Paris to join the insurgents of the Paris Commune, only to return home three weeks later just before the Commune was brutally put down (Arthur Rimbaud, Poetry Foundation). Akhmatova experienced 1917 and ran afoul of Stalin and the apparatchiks who determined literary fortunes in the era of socialist realism.

Different as Akhmatova, Rimbaud, and Wordsworth are, I find in each of them some kindred sensibility that informs my own poetic practice. The dynamic between craftsmanship and what cannot be willed, between spontaneous overflow and thinking long and deeply, between cultivation of the soul and visions beyond understanding, keeps cropping up. Not one without the other, or rather, if only one without the other, not poetry. Maybe this is an act of imagination on my part. These thoughts prompt me to recall a Zen teacher in Atlanta who passed along a saying of his own teacher: your enlightenment is yours, mine is mine. I can’t have yours. You can’t have mine. There may be about as many ways to go about poetry and writing as there are poets and writers.

Those who wait for the muse to grace them with her charms are apt to be left waiting a very long time. Some time ago I hit on the formula read a lot, think a lot, write a lot. Do things. Get out and about in the world. For me that entails afternoon wandering, boulevardiering, hiking when opportunity presents itself. Poetry is life as much as are books, film, an espresso and journal session at a favorite café, a happy hour rendezvous to talk about books and film. Crank up the volume yet again for Bob Dylan Blonde on Blonde. Political activism. Morning meditation. A poetry reading, an art exhibition. Going to the desk regularly with pen, paper, the computer is part of the deal, sine qua non. Yet Akhmatova is right. It is not a matter of will. Sometimes nothing comes of it. Often nothing comes of it. Write a lot because a lot of what you write will not be very good. That too is part of the deal.

Dylan later in life was at a loss to pin down just how he came to write those early songs. It is a mystery that was at the heart of Surrealism practiced by André Breton and his comrades in Paris in the 1920s. “It is true of Surrealist images as it is of opium images that man does not evoke them; rather they ‘come to him spontaneously, despotically. He cannot chase them away; for the will is powerless now and no longer controls the faculties’” (Breton, citing Pierre Reverdy, Manifesto of Surrealism).

There was a season when I conceived of myself as writing in the spirit of the Surrealists, delighting in the fortuitous juxtaposition of two terms to produce an image that did not “reveal the slightest degree of premeditation.” Breton offers examples from Reverdy’s work:

In the brook, there is a song that flows

Day unfolded like a white tablecloth

The world goes back into a sack

For Breton “the two terms of the image are the simultaneous products of the activity I call Surrealist, reason’s role being limited to taking note of, and appreciating, the luminous phenomenon.”

Along with Breton and Surrealist automatic writing I had in mind Jack Kerouac’s ideas about spontaneous prose and Allen Ginsberg’s pronouncements about “first thought, best thought” that had him tying himself in knots during interviews later in life when he was at pains to explain that first thought was not necessarily the first expression of that thought on the page and his revisions were not really revision after all (more on this in my essays Revisiting On the Road: The Original Scroll Route, July 30, 2021, and A Look Back at Allen Ginsberg (Part 2), January 7, 2023).

Legend has it that Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks fueled on Benzedrine. Editor Howard Cunnell disputed this in his introduction to On the Road: The Original Scroll ("Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road"). According to Cunnell, Kerouac told Neal Cassady that On the Road was written on coffee: "Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks." Cunnell says nothing about where Benzedrine came into the legend. Kerouac was certainly familiar with it and other drugs. At that time, 1940s and ‘50s, use of amphetamines as aids to creative activity, boosting focus and concentration while reducing the need for sleep, was fairly widespread in artistic, intellectual, and other circles. Jean-Paul Sartre, Graham Greene, W.H. Auden, and the crank Ayn Rand are among those who went in for better writing through chemistry (see Revisiting On the Road for details and citations). Nothing is got for nothing, as Emerson put it. The chemical life contributed to Auden's death of heart failure at the age of sixty-six. Sartre lived longer, two months shy of seventy-five, but was a mess mentally and physically for years before that. Their experiences were not atypical.

Coffee was part of my writing life as much as pen, paper, computer. In this Kerouac and I were in good company, notably Balzac, whose marathon stints were fueled by coffee brewed using a method he described as “terrible and cruel.”

Clothed in the white hood of a Dominican monk, and equipped with ink, quills and an endless supply of coffee, Balzac began his writing day at 2am, leaving his desk only to attend to his personalised Limoges cafetière, which kept his thick Turkish coffee warm throughout his long nights of writing. It took 15 cups or more to fuel these writing bouts. (Smith, A Cup of the Strong Stuff)

In a “metaphor-filled ode to coffee” Balzac described the spectacular effect of strong coffee on an empty stomach as ideas

marched like the battalions of a great army onto the battlefield…Memories charge in, flags flying; the light cavalry of comparisons advances at a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes in with its convoy and its charges; witticisms appear like snipers; characters rise up.

The prolific coffee fiend cranked out some ninety novels and novellas collectively known as La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) before his untimely demise due to heart failure in 1850 at the age of fifty-one. Somewhere along the way my own coffee consumption moderated more or less of its own accord in the course of things. I am more apt to sip from a glass of water as I write today.

Periodic forays into fiction should perhaps mentioned for the record. My files are littered with abandoned novels bearing titles like I Wanted to Feel Exalted, Next Time We Talk, The Winter Within, and Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine that came to nothing of note. The fiction like my marathon days is behind me.

The writing life is a mystery, unfathomable as ever, as I approach the age of seventy-one. I remain drawn to it as poet, pamphleteer, gadfly, as with running grateful that I can still do it and find satisfaction in the doing. Grateful too that almost in spite of myself I have somehow found a small audience of readers who find something in some of it and encourage me to keep at it. I wake and find myself a poet.

References and related reading

• Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, Viking, 1989

• Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, St. Martin’s Press, 1994

• Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871, in Illuminations, tr. Louise Varèse, New Directions, 1957

• Hazel Smith, A Cup of the Strong Stuff: Honoré de Balzac’s Coffee Habit, France Today, August 23, 2021

• William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R.L. Brett, A.R. Jones, Routledge, 1991

Keep the faith.

Stand with Ukraine.

Yr obdt svt