Author: Big Bang Poetry (Page 3 of 3)

Fictions

October 26, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 4 Comments

A few weeks ago I was so proud of myself. I wrote my first short story. Well, that’s not entirely true. I wrote two short stories in college and they were both terrible. One was a humorous ghost story I wrote at Sarah Lawrence and the other was an undergrad story so terrible it had no plot or subject that I can recall.

But anyway, this was a significant milestone in that I’ve been struggling with my fictions since childhood when my friend Krissy and I embarked on our first novels at age 8. Unfortunately, we had no life experiences to cull from and so our epics petered out pretty quick.

In fact, my problem writing fiction goes back to that very young me, back to when I started doing what I call “calibrating towards reality,” in other words obsessively worrying that I am thinking from an unrealistic perspective.

It all started with a tween diagnosis of anorexia, most likely tripped off from a condition called body dysmorphia (although I wouldn’t know what that term was for another decade): an inability to correctly see with my own eyes what was in the mirror in front of me.

And this dutifully led to a distrustful questioning of anything I saw or experienced, basically. Great.

My “calibrations” developed like an over-correction and led to an irritating habit of always asking surrounding people these things: “did that really happen?” or “are you seeing what I’m seeing” and basically disregarding, whole hog, experiences I have alone.

Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans just did a podcast this week about ghosts and I was thinking about whether or not I’ve had any ghostly experiences. And then I remembered I don’t believe the experiences I’ve had because there wasn’t any corroboration. There’s a mental bucket in my head for those experiences: questionable.

This calibrating is also a problem in some social situations. Like someone will be spouting off their fictions and I’ll say, “But that’s not how it happened” or “but that doesn’t make sense because…” or “but what about this other evidence that contradicts everything you’re saying?”

And then I think, “Oh crap, this person is just coping with their fictions right now or this person is just talking in marketing mode.” Leave them to their realities.

But then I think, “Wait a minute, we all have the same reality. There’s no point in the universe where their reality ends and mine begins.”

See? I can’t stop. It’s like a buffering wheel. It’s always going in my brain: “Is that right? What you’re saying?”

This is why I find deep fakes so terrifying. And why I’m hyper-sensitive to gaslighting. Stop trying to fuck up a very fucked-up experience I’m already having over here.

Anyway, here is where these calibrations have a detrimental effect on my attempts to write fiction:

Recently I was in Kansas City and I met up with my grade school friend Jayne from St. Louis. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Jayne since we started Junior High and went into separate social groups. So we had a lot of catching up to do over dinner. And at the end of the night, out in the parking lot as we were saying goodbye, she said something like, “What about that piano teacher we had, huh!” We then told our spouses the gory story and I told Jayne I was trying to write a short story about it but was struggling.

I had just recently come across a photo of this piano teacher and had looked up a newspaper article about the murder she was involved in. Because the story involved a real family, I didn’t want anything I wrote ever getting back to harm the survivors. So I decided to fictionalize everything. Easy enough. I made changes to some of the sexes of the characters, pumped up the sex drama (as you do), added some disguising plot points and boom, I was off to the races.

Except that after a little while I suddenly stopped and said to myself, “But that’s not how it happened.”

“Am I for real right now with this?” I thought. Of course that’s not how it happened. That’s the whole point of changing everything from how it happened, so that it wouldn’t be how it happened!

And so I’ve given up on that story for a while.

Telling stories doesn’t seem to be a problem for me if they’re based on reality and I’m depicting an ostensible reality, even if my memory fails me or I need to embellish for the sake of humor or someone’s privacy or, as my great-grandfather would say, to make it better than it was. Those kind of detours feel acceptable because I know the difference in my head. The core reality is clear and stories aren’t obligated.

I’ve also written two books of narrative poems and I’ve been trying to figure out what the difference is there. Why was I able to do that? My Mars poems aren’t a fully realized narrative, but instead little narratives tossed in among personal lyric poems. I was still figuring out how to write narrative poems back then and could only carry a story for the length of a poem. That seemed do-able.

The next book of cowboy poems was actually a fully-drawn out, start-to-finish plotted story. It took forever but again, living in those stories was accomplished poem by poem. I always thought I could transfer that trick to short stories or a novel.

But it’s not the same. Like at all. Those genres demand you be more immersive in their fictions. And that is not a very comfortable place for me to be.

There’s a common prescription in fiction to base characters on people you know, à la Proust. As part of a fiction exercise in a fiction writing guide, I tried to make my novel characters an amalgamation of poets and people I knew. And the result was the same exact mess. My brain kept wanting to default to one real person or another. “But so-in-so wouldn’t do that.”

The new short story had the benefit of being the product of a funny dream. I was able to basically transcribe the dream, clean it up and embellish it where needed. It was subconsciously delivered almost intact and that make all the difference.

I’m thinking the problem comes with stories based on even a semblance of a true story but are not true stories, per se. And I’m leaning toward the idea that I’m to be a Donald Barthelme kind of fiction writer, veering heavily toward nonsense. Because I’m not haunted by the idea of discovering folderol, the uncanny or ghostly things.

I’m haunted by the specter of reality.

Happy Halloween!

Experimental Poetry

October 9, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’ve still some things to catch up on since I had to divert my attention to moving all my websites earlier this year. I kept on reading and now I have a big stack of books to review, so big that I had to divey them up into a traditional poetry stack and an experimental stack.

I’ll start with the experimental ones, because even that stack had sub-stacks: the ones I liked and the ones I didn’t. Sometimes I think I have a love-hate relationship with experimental poetry. If the experiment seems generous and comprehensible, I tend to really love it and it inspires me to try similar things: like strike-out experiments, experiments with bilingualism, footnote experiments, poems working side-by-side itself on the page.

However, if the experiments seem solipsistic or just an extension of the meaning-making experiments of parataxis or repeats of 100-year-old strategies modernism, I get annoyed.

Meaning-making is clugey, we get it. It’s hardly following Ezra Pound’s adage to “make it new.” Not that we have to keep up that death-march anyway.

But in any case, this all seems very subjective. Experiments I like fall flat with others.

Yield Architecture by Jake Syersak falls into the later category for me. The book itself is beautiful, which is why I picked it up at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books earlier this year. But I didn’t even finish it. And there are only a handful of poetry books I can say that about. I can usually stick it out (or skim it out).

This book is described as “an unyielding investigation of how linguistic and material structures intersect to shape one’s perception of reality” which sounds like part of L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. experiments again. There are four sections with names like “Skins, Skeins, History, Hysteria & Dust” that seems mostly juxtipositional sound experiments, like one called “Soldered Opposite of Weather Was Yourself” which contains this untitled snippet:

architecture
              dear architecture,

to begin, I’ve written two-words side-by-side on yellow-lined
              notebook paper:

violet: violence

as a way of testing the bruises a colloseum’s pillars bury into a
              hillside, how the grass gathers around it

(what anchors me in all this?—alarms of nausea, nausea the likes of
              which can only be described as: nausea describes

For example: I wonder, how calmly your waters hold a swan’s gristle

And there’s much more like this going on for 81 pages but we’re done.

Watch Me Trick Ghosts by Robert Krut was also beautifully printed and does follow a thin kind of sensical narrative but the poems still didn’t quite connect for me.

From “Pedagogy” first stanzas:

He wants to be a teacher, but what
to teach when the world is a tiger,

when even walking out to sneak a smoke
is met by a town where someone

behind a mailbox whips batteries
or unsuspecting afternoon walkers,

The poem “Ghost Does”

Sky ghost prepares lightning.
Electricity ghost is acid on steel.
Thunder ghost speaks to tree ghost.
Tree ghost is you.
Foundation ghost stretches, contracts.
Wind ghost inhales.
Blanket ghost is bandaging.
Slate ghost marks in chalk.
Bone ghost is an echo.
Moon ghost is moon.
Sun ghost is moon ghost.
I am moon ghost.
Branch ghost is arm as body.
Rain ghost is a footprint on cement.
Leaf ghost lifts eyeline.
Tree ghost is waiting.
Tree ghost awaits.
Tree ghost is you.
I am tree ghost.
Tree ghost is moon ghost.
We hide, appear.

More excerpts: https://www.hypertextmag.com/excerpt-robert-kruts-watch-me-trick-ghosts/

Some people still really enjoy these things of almost-meanings. I remember my friend Laura and I used to write these almost-sensical poems in the third grade when we were trying to feel our way into language and didn’t have any real meanings to work with yet. They weren’t quite poems, but wordiness we would put in clouds, like thought clouds but they were really like simulacrums of what we imagined sounding deep and thoughtful writings would be (without any actual deep thoughts because we were eight).

But, at the end of the day, I do support any kind of poet lab/pure experiments no matter whether I can find a practical use for their ideas or not. Everyone is on their own path.

Janet Kaplan’s Ecotones (given to me as a gift in NYC this year for my birthday), is about half-and-half successful for me. There are three sections called Plasma, Chronicles and Technopastoral. Plasma used collages with quotes to make very faint points. Her concern with the vocabulary and typography of technology inspired me to think more about technology poems, especially the connective tissue of communicating in code. I really liked the Chronicles section where there seemed to be more of a person writing there. Technopastoral contained various spatial experiments.

And I think this book helped to clarify for me what it is I’m looking for in experiments, not too much abstraction and intellectualism at the expense of finding a breathing, feeling person somewhere in there living a life. This kind of personhood has been so lacking in experimental poetries (especially but not exclusively the digital ones).

I did love the word pictures in You Would Say That by Robin Tomens, which I received for entering a contest last year. These are completely typographical experiments, literally using words as a visual medium, (which I would usually just classify as visual art), but Tomens does something extra to give a snippet here or there meaning, and so we felt a person was coming through. Some poems were commentary on the process of thinking but not so much that they didn’t strike me as still touching, maybe due to the way they were drawn into the typographical art.

Samples of the text from the pieces:

POETIC GLAMOUR IS NO LONGER WHAT COUNTS MOST
BUT THE INTRINSIC INTERST IN THE THOUGHT

~~~

A KNOWS HE IS NOT READING, AND HAS A
SENSE OF JUST THIS WHILE PRETENDING
TO READ

~~~

IF SOMEONE COULD SEE THE MENTAL PROCESS OF
EXPECTATION

~~~

HOLD THAT THOUGHT

Some images from the book:

James Thomas Stevens’ The Golden Book was a take on the intersection of grammar and love poems, an experiment I was doing myself last year. Stevens’ poems seemed to be so personal, however, as to be almost cryptic.

Based on David Lambuth’s The Golden Book on Writing, a writing guide from 1923, these poems shared titles like The Paragraph, The Sentence, Words, Punctuation.

The opening poem called “A Warning”

Isn’t every
encounter a cross
to bear,
a cultural one?

The small battles.
The volleys.
The flag raisings.

They poems are pretty far removed from their source material, which seems more like a jumping-off point than any attempt to address the rules of writing directly. One I really liked was called “Set Up Sign-Posts” which is an adage of writing any kind of persuasive thesis paper.

Point to your beloved.
Remind him of his progress.
At the end tell him that
you have arrived – and see
that he understand it.

Don’t have him turning over the sheets and
saying with a start: “Oh, that’s all there was to it.

From “Know Where You Are Going”

Know which He you are writing of:

He, the pianist carpenter, or
He, the poet violinist.

In like lions, out like lambs.

I also liked a poem called “Simple Words for Big Ideas” which it hard to even summarize but a poem that covers sex, language and colonization.

Personal story, I worked with Stevens when I was a faculty secretary at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) in Santa Fe back in 2013-14. There was tension there between the dean and both the art and writing faculty around who got access to the copier (and me), all which made some of the teachers a bit grouchy. Stevens was initially very grouchy about this and I remember some chastising he gave me for taking over the copier for one of the Dean’s projects. Stevens had an exceptionally messy office. I told him his office was itself a Language poem. But I really liked his poems and he became less grouchy (as did the other faculty) as the semester went on (and I learned to make copies after the faculty left for the day).

More excerpts from the book: https://courtgreen.net/issue-14/james-thomas-stevens

A few weeks ago I picked up the $30 Anne Carson book Float from the local library. It comes in a plastic box and has about 27 loose booklets and front matter pieces inside. They were all disorganized and in disarray.

It was very satisfying to my Skittles-organizing mind to sort all the front matter out. The little booklets could be read in any order although there was a Table of Contents. “Reading can be freefall” the title page claims.

I used the same reading strategy as when our book blub read The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson, which was to read the smallest booklets first, working up to the longest ones. It’s the low-hanging-fruit of reading strategies. The book was like the detritus of Anne Carson’s writing drawer, stuff too small to put anywhere else, culled together to Float in one package. It was only loosely cohesive and again connections depended upon the principle of parataxis, random connections of proximity.

There were ordered lists, long poems, poem sets, theatrical scripts and essays. The booklets kept slipping out of the plastic container all over the floor.

Understandably the book had less cohesion than other Anne Carson collections and I can’t say this was my favorite “book” of hers but it did inspire me to try a few things. I loved “Maintenance,” “Eras of Yves Klein” and “Merce Sonnet,” “Reticent Sonnet” and “Sonnet of the English-Made Cabinet with Drawers (In Prose)” from the booklet called “Possessive Used as Drink (Me), A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets.” A few of the essay pieces even inspired me to create an Essay poem and there will be a Cheras poem one day, no doubt.

My favorite experimental book this year was from Unincorporated Territory [guma] by Craig Santos Perez. I picked up this book at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), the museum extension of IAIA, along with the Stevens book.

This is a book about the status of Guam as part of and not part of the United States and how its citizens can feel diaspora even while living in their own place, beyond what even some post-colonized aboriginal groups might feel due to continued militarization. It’s colonization in real time and the book explores what it means to “be home” when the definition of your country is changing. Perez weaves in document-speak and impact statements into a kind of meaning collage. The poems are too difficult to type out so here are some images of my favorite pieces:

The first poem, from the legends of juan malo [a malologue]:

ginen ta(la)ya:

ginen fatal impact statements

And here’s a poem on spam: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57827/ginen-the-legends-of-juan-malo-a-malologue

The Labor Poets

September 15, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

After my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away, my grandfather came to live with us for a while in St. Louis. And when my grandfather found out I was writing poems, (I was in college at the time), he told me to read the labor poets.

I had no idea who these labor poets were. They certainly weren’t in the Norton Anthology I had from school.

My grandfather said I should look them up at the Public Library. He told me to go to the reference desk and say, “Show me the labor poets!”

I wasn’t about to do this for two reasons: for one I was too shy to demand anything from reference librarians, (ok, not entirely true if it was an old Cher magazine I wanted from an archive), but also I wasn’t reading any other poets at the time. I was just a newb writing to find my own voice.

I should take a moment here to elaborate about my grandfather. I usually talk about my grandparents on my father’s side because their history is very mythological and romantic. But my grandparents on my mother’s side are none the less interesting (or mythological for that matter).

Some would call my grandfather an anglophile.

Now I live with a Francophile. So I know what this is. Monsieur Big Bang’s high-school friends still lament about trying to have a conversation with him back in the 1980s. Listening to him was like, “France, France, France, Proust. France, France, France, Proust.”

Monsieur Big Bang himself will tell you he was very much like the Italian-obsessed kid in the movie Breaking Away, a working-class kid enamored with another romantic culture. And just like that kid in the movie who had his own reality-check during the bike-race scene when the Italians cruelly sabotaged his bike, Monsieur Big Bang spent a good deal of time in France finding out the French are assholes too, just like everybody else.

But I don’t feel anglophile is quite the right word for what my grandfather was. Somehow the word anglophile suggests a range in an obsession. And as I’ve mentioned in my other blog, my grandfather had only a small set of topics he would discuss at any time:

What English people ate or did not eat. This suspiciously coincided exactly with what my grandfather ate and did not eat, like tomatoes. He said an Englishman would never eat a tomato. (We’ll come back to that.)
The superiority of British shipping history. I spent many, many hours with this man and I only had to hear the words “Sir Frances” or “Sir Walter” and I would gently float off to my happy place, which in college was thinking all the time about boys.
America was a completely corrupt country and soon our hard-fought-for unions would be weakened and demolished. This was in the 1980s during Reaganomics. Looking back today, I can see he was right about this, but at the time it really rankled me and my mother to hear it.
The last thing was The Ludlow Massacre. I heard about this tragedy all the time. “Remember The Ludlow Massacre.” It was his Alamo. When I happened to come upon a highway sign for the massacre site in Southern Colorado about ten years ago, I turned off immediately to visit the place (every American should). I had heard about it so many times in my childhood, the actual location always seemed more fantastical to me than real. It was like coming upon the exit sign to Narnia.

These topics all come together for my grandfather in his family’s Colorado pioneer history. Although my grandfather spent only a total of two weeks in the country of England during his entire lifetime (see below), his adored parents were both from Cornwall, both from coal mining families who immigrated separately to America, and both his mother and father were heavily invested in the American labor movement as it was happening at turn-of-the-century coal sites in Colorado.

My grandfather could determine a stranger’s political party in five minutes. And he could be incredibly difficult if he didn’t like you (say you belonged to the wrong one). He could also exhaust people with his small list of discussion topics.

In fact, my grandfather talked about England so much that when my grandmother, (a Germanic woman from a big family farm in Iowa), was offered a two-week trip to England during the family’s roots tour of 1977, she declined. She opted instead to “take care of Dave and the kids in Missouri.”

She chose Missouri over England! (I can’t even.)

She said she felt like she had already been there.

After my mother, Aunt Merle and grandfather returned from that same trip, my mother told me, “Mary I saw tomatoes everywhere.” I was like how would we know? How would we even know?

My grandfather talked about England so much that I benefited in being the remaining person he took to dinner every Thursday night for years when everyone else in his life had dropped out. (Dropped out of the restaurant dinners, anyway. My mother still cooked him a big dinner every Sunday.) He insisted on eating at more expensive establishments after working until he was 80 as a machinist and a mechanic. He had a good social security check and had been frugal most of his life and he wanted to eat well. He usually wanted to visit the same fine establishments over and over, too, which also tired everyone out. I was the last man standing and his driver except for those times he wanted us to splurge with a cab.

I once took him to The St. Louis Bread Company, (a direct relative of Panera), so I could show him this fabulous new thing called a bread bowl. He was offended that I had to “truck our own food” to the table and refused to be impressed.

“But soup! In a bowl of bread!”

So we were back to the fancy Bristols and Spiros soon enough. I missed most of the Seinfeld, Mad About You and Cosby Show episodes during those Thursday-night years. It’s a gapping hole in my cultural literacy.

Anyway, all these years later I have discovered Cary Nelson who has recently created a critical space in the American poetry canon to rediscover these labor poets my grandfather was telling me about. Revolutionary Memory is a book about how these poets were lost from anthologies in the first place. Next Nelson edited two major anthologies which reinstated these lost poets, Anthology of Modern American Poetry and Anthology of Contemporary Poetry.

As I’m finding these labor poets in those anthologies, I’m deciding I really like them and I’ve been tracking down books of their collected works (if available; they’re still pretty obscure). These poets are all very funny and they don’t write about politics or labor issues all the time. But when they do, it’s poignant and crafted. Some of my favorite poets so far:

Kenneth Fairing, who also wrote a respectable crime noir book called The Big Clock
Thomas McGrath
Stanley Burnshaw

What you tend to want from your dead relatives is context. And back when my grandfather was alive I was too young and badly-read to even know what questions to ask him. Did he read these poets himself? Where did he come upon them? Did he ever subscribe to the socialist periodical New Masses or The Masses where many of these poets were published? (My mother tells me just now that he did take a Labor newspaper). Did these poets come up in conversation at union halls or in machine shops? I have my grandfather’s scrapbook of union and political clippings and there’s not a single poem in it as I can recall. Did he collect any of these poems somewhere else?

One final story. I was living in Yonkers and my grandfather would very kindly send me fresh canned tuna from Winchester Bay in Oregon in cases of 24. About every six months when I ran out, he would send me more. I’ve never tasted a better canned tuna than the fresh tuna from Winchester Bay, Oregon. My grandfather and I weren’t able to dine out together anymore because I was at Sarah Lawrence in New York by then and he had moved back to the coast of Oregon.

We still kept our standing date every Thursday night, if just on the phone. One time it took over two weeks for his box of tuna cans to arrive and he was really angry at the Post Office. During one of our Thursday night calls he said, “the Pony Express could have delivered it faster!” I took his point but truthfully, the Pony Express would have taken months and probably Indians would have been enjoying the cans of tuna instead of me. He then said very seriously, “You know in England they send all their mail through pneumatic tubes.”

I thought this was just about the silliest thing he had ever said. And in the years following I told this story of the tuna to many, many people as an example of the kinds of unbelievable things my grandfather would say about England.

Fast forward years later I’m in Paris with Monsieur Big Bang and we’re visiting some museum there, (the sewers? the catacombs? the city museum?), and they start talking about how Paris was once fitted with pneumatic tubes everywhere for quickly sending around mail throughout the city. I turned to M.B.B and said, “Oh shit. He was right about pneumatic tubes in England!”

Goodwill

September 11, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Goodwill. I’m not talking about a thrift score here.

I’m talking about the person-to-person kind. You know, bonhomie.

I’ve been around tribes of writers for many, many years now and other artists for a time too. I’ve always dreamed of finding my tribe, my school, my group of likeminded thinkers…and mostly for the social aspect if I’m being honest about the fantasy. When I read stories about professors holding court at restaurants or drinking establishments surrounded by their students talking shop, talking about quality writers and writing, I always think mmm….that sounds so nice.

I do have friends that I collaborate with and friends who are writers, but I’ve never found that sympatico group of people who are working on the same things I’m working on. And as for the work itself, some writers enjoy the process (I know I do) and some writers find it difficult and painful. But aside from any enjoyment you might get just by doing it (brainstorming, assembling, editing, polishing), I contend writing isn’t really about the written result per se. It’s about communicating to other people, which is more social than solitary.

And the harder the thing is to communicate, the more words become a problem. Words and sentences don’t always convey. They manipulate everyone all the time. Words say things you don’t intend. They stick your foot in it.

But you keep going, because what else is there but speaking and writing?

Once you’re dead, the written words will be left behind like an empty vessel. Others might enjoy them but that’s none of your concern anymore. The writing may live or not live. You most definitely will not live.

So if you were the last man on earth, would you bother? Once the people you’re communicating with are gone, would you bother? No, I don’t think it’s the writing itself, deep down, that fulfills what we desire.

As Al Pacino says in Author! Author!, “We’re people, Gloria! We’re people!” People who need people.

One of my biggest pet peeves lately is the envy writers and artists feel toward one another, especially friend-to-friend envy.

This is exhibited in many ways: friends consistently not reading or attending to their friends artworks, friends not providing words of encouragement when milestones are reached (like publications or good reviews), friends being inexplicably suddenly attentive when bad milestones are hit (failures, bad reviews). “Sorry to hear about your bad review. You must feel terrible.” It’s easy to say a real friend wouldn’t do that, but sometimes otherwise-very-good friends do things like this.

And full disclosure I used to be one of those people. Not the schadenfreude kind, but I did find it hard to drum up genuine enthusiasm for a friend or acquaintance’s success. And I think it’s a naturally competitive emotional response to be envious.

I think it serves you not a whit, but it’s a natural, normal response.

When I started this blog, I made a conscious effort to approach other people’s poetry pieces with an open and impartial mind. My friend Christopher was a good mentor in this. No matter how he may have historically and dramatically disliked something, (recently he declared to me on the phone, “no woman can pull of bangs!”), he will approach a new thing with an open mind, lacking any of his prior prejudices. He will say things like “I usually don’t like this but you have to give so-and-so credit. That was amazing. They really did that well.” It’s always a generous, fair-minded response.

It was in that spirit that I tried to dump my own prejudices and walk forward in literature without the baggage of envy. And this was initially a challenge when reading the work of someone I knew. In the back of my chest there was that pang of envy every time. Why didn’t I do this? I could do this. My friend is moving forward and I’m falling behind. The crazy thing is I didn’t usually care about falling behind. I’ve been behind from the get-go; I’m usually the dumbest person in the room and I’m comfortable with this.

But envy is a feeling your ego creates, something deep-seated. And your ego has its own agenda.

The thing is there is a trick to escaping this. I actually learned it from a therapist I had many years ago, the same one I quit over the Linda Ronstadt song. Although she gave me the terrible advise to consider ‘no good’ any boy who was disinterested in me (which was certainly not healthy or logical), she also gave me a piece of very good advice that changed my then-young life.

I was a senior in high school at the time and she told me to keep a daily list of everything good that happened to me and another list of everything bad that happened. She insisted that over time the bad list would become shorter and the good list would become longer, like magic.

And it worked. (In reality, it was a trick of attention and where you put it.)

Turns out, in the the case of envy, the fake-it-til-you-make-it method does, in fact, work. First you drum up some half-baked enthusiasm for your successful friend and it’s like endorphins kick in or something. It feels good to be happy for someone. Before you know it, you’re feeling real genuine enthusiasm for them and their projects. Magic!

You’ll soon notice envy fading away completely and you’re a much happier creative person in the world.

This is different than toxic positivity. Negative emotions are normal. And there’s plenty time to still feel shitty about strangers and their successes. Just don’t let yourself feel envy over your friends.

But then sometimes I wonder if maybe all friends aren’t created equal. Maybe good artist friends aren’t good generic friends. Cézanne was frustrated with Zola and Zola was frustrated with Cézanne. Maybe the friend who would bail you out of jail isn’t the same kind of friend who will happily deconstruct your latest opus.

I have to say, my best readers have been complete strangers. Hell, I think my only readers have been complete strangers, aside from my mother. (Thanks Mom!)

But the thing is some of those stranger readers have gone on to become very good friends. And we talk about more than writing or Cher. We talk about our struggles in life as well.

So I don’t know the answer to this yet but I think the world has become so hyper-competitive and self-serving and hyper-sensitive as to our own standing, we’ve lost too much goodwill. And trust me, goodwill feels so much more pleasant than envy.

🤗

And So the Summer Departs

September 1, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

To-do List Courtesy of Reddit

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here…well since our Essay Project came to a close in July. When I finish a big project I always feel suddenly a little untethered.

Alarmingly, this year has gone by faster than any year before (it would seem). Cruel summer and turned into cruel fall. Soon it will be Christmas and New Year’s Eve. The Halloween stores are already open and just a moment ago it was spring and I was finishing up migrating websites. The whole year was on the horizon and my day job was really feeling great. (They gave us ice cream!)

The year of 2023 has brought me….well, things. For one, the day job has turned into the gaslit labors of Sisyphus. And the somewhat dreadful news about Artificial Intelligence has taken a lot of wind from the sails of my proliferating digital poems.

I spent a few minutes yesterday with no small bit of ennui considering if I’ve actually accomplished anything this year.

But I have.

I’ve finished two multi-year online blogging projects on Cher Scholar and we’ve wrapped up the Essay Project here. I did create a few new browser-based poems and the The Electrical Dictionary of Melancholy Absolutes hit 100 definitions quite unbelievably this week.

And the in-progress stuff continues to march along. Although it’s been a slow slog, I’ve been working on a big course-like survey about the poems of American history. I stared about two years ago and I’m just now seeing the finish line. Monsieur Big Bang’s new Intro to Anthro podcast has me thinking about what format that survey course will take. Should it be a podcast or an online class? Should I use an educational platform for a fee or just host it myself for free (like a podcast)? I still don’t know. Podcasts have higher visibility but that format leaves out the possibility of fun PowerPoints and videos of petroglyph from my neighborhood. In any case, that’s a decision probably a year or two away.

The Katharine Hepburn poem is underway and slowing forming into itself. I’ve also started a new browser-based poem about my paternal grandfather based on some work my brother Randy finished a few years ago researching the history of our grandparents in Jicarilla, San Carlos, Hopi, Tohono Oʼodham, at the Indian School at Stewart, Nevada, and their final years in Roy, New Mexico.

I also need to dust off the Braille machine I purchased a few years ago and figure out how to write poems on that thing.

I have a little stack of experimental poetry books to review going back to last fall of 2022.

There are some fun trips ahead, too. Our group formerly known as the Sarah Lawrence writing group, now known as the Difficult Book Club, held a reunion dinner recently in New York City. It was so much fun, we’ve made plans to meet again in Winslow early next year.

And I have poems forthcoming in a spring 2024 anthology of Albuquerque poets coming out from University of New Mexico Press.

It’s a lot of work. I’ve made a big change in my day job hours that will go into effect at the first of the new year and hopefully that will give me more time finish all of this stuff. There’s that novel too.

So I guess that’s good, right? I feel like I’ve hit a plateau somehow. Oy. These are times for baby steps.

Anyway, in other news my friend Christopher gave me this book for my birthday, a coloring book created by Jane Heyes, peppered with Shakespearean, Romantic and 20th Century British poetry (except for one Walt Whitman poem floating in there, “A Glimpse“).

Maybe I should spend a few months just coloring around poems like I’m William Blake

The Essay Project: Last Call

July 19, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We find ourselves at the last essay project essay. The rest of the stack is pretty much just dregs, articles I don’t really want to read again let alone discuss.

Somewhat unrelated, I spent about four hours last week working on a Big Bang essay about a Lunch & Learn on Artificial Intelligence I attended. I was writing about AI as it intersects with anorexia, intuition and calibrating toward reality.

But I soon decided not to post it because it felt too revealing. Something significant also happened at work that week to made posting the piece ill-advised. But I was triggered very personally by the discussion about AI in ways I didn’t expect.

I do want to make a final comment about Suzanne Gardiner’s Sarah Lawrence College essay class and my need to constantly calibrate toward reality.

I was pretty quiet in this class, mostly because it huge, like 35-40 people if I remember correctly. Everyone wanted to take it. We all sat in concentric circles around a big table upstairs in Slonim House. I was also a first-year in the Graduate Writing Program and there were many second-years students in the class more than willing to pontificate. There were so many smart people in that class.

I involved myself in only two debates (as I recall), first to make a glib joke about T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” poem, (“a poem with more footnotes than lines has a big problem with flow!”), and second to argue with Suzanne Gardinier about the nature of reality. Gardinier was then kind of known as an activist poet and her poems were, of course, concerned in reality.

As I was even then obsessively calibrating toward reality, (which the anorexia AI piece was ultimately about), we got into an impassioned discussion about a chair being a chair. So clearly was it a solid chair we would sit on it, she said. We can all agree on the reality of a chair. And I said something about how a chair is not in fact a solid but an appearance of a solid, in fact an unsolid of moving atoms (or whatever silliness I said). The point was a chair was an idea of solid, a human compromise in believing a reality that didn’t really exist but that was useful to our need to sit somewhere. And then I think we agreed to disagree or we saw each other’s point of view or something friendly at the end. What a great class that was.

Writing is just as much about how we negotiate our reality. And this brings us to our last piece, a compilation of short chapters from Natalie Goldberg from her very spiritual writing guide, Writing Down the Bones, which seems like a very moving and warm place to finish.

(Somehow, I managed to end my essay project the same week I completed documentation of the variety shows of Sonny & Cher. Which is weird.)

But anyway…I’ve taken many one-day workshops over the years and in at least two of them, sections of Goldberg’s very popular book were distributed, probably because Goldberg combines writing with a kind of religious practice. She quotes gurus of Buddhism and talks about Zen meditation and going deep into writing,

“This book is about writing…it is also about using writing…as a way to help you penetrate your life.”

We start with her Introduction which has lots of good tidbits:

“In college I was in love with literature. I mean wild about it. I typed poems by Gerald Manley Hopkins over and over again so I could memorize them…it never occurred to me to write, though I secretly wanted to marry a poet.

After I graduated college and discovered that no one was going to hire me to read novels and swoon over poetry, three friends and I started a co-op restaurant and cooked and served natural food lunches in the basement of the Newman Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This was the early seventies and one year before the opening of the restaurant I had tasted my first avocado. The restaurant was called Naked Lunch, after the novel by William Burroughs—“a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

See? Right there Goldberg masterfully talks about writing while talking about life as well.

She talks about “learning to trust my own mind” and how she happened upon Erica Jong’s poetry, Fruits and Vegetables, which illustrated for her how to write about her own subjects.

“A friend once told me ‘Trust in love and it will take you where you want to go.’ I want to add, ‘Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go’.”

Learning, she says, “is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life…to say deep down what you need to say.”

Beginner’s Mind

“Each time is a journey with no maps.” She doesn’t spend much time talking about how to attain beginners mind before each poem. Instead, she recommends some practical matters: a fast-moving pen to keep up with your thoughts, a cheap notebook so you won’t feel afraid to write crappy drafts.

“This is your equipment, like hammer and nails. Feel fortunate—for very little money you are in business!”

She even likes spiral notebooks with “Garfield, the Muppets, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars” covers. She uses them as pneumonic devices to remember which notes and and drafts are in which notebooks. She also says, “I can’t take myself too seriously when I open up a Peanuts notebook.”

She talks about how many writers work off scraps of paper. My father wrote his lists of to-dos on discarded 1960s-era computer cards. Goldberg talks about William Carlos Williams using prescription pads.

She talks about how physical writing is and how it matters what process you use, composing on typewriters or writing by hand. Computers weren’t around, apparently, but she does mention a Macintosh computer and writing into a tape recorder. She says she uses different tools for different projects.

First Thoughts

Goldberg talks about freewriting in timed exercises to explore first thoughts, and she includes the usual tips: keep your hand moving; don’t cross stuff out; ignore spelling, punctuation and grammar; lose control; don’t get logical; “go for the jugular;” if your writing gets “scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.”

The point is to burn through your energy, she says, “unobstructed” by your “internal censor.” Get to the feels, the “oddities of your mind.” This is all about exploration. The ego “tries to be in control, tries to prove the world is permanent and solid, enduring and logical.”

She then goes back to Zen meditation, how sitting is a discipline. “You must be a great warrior when you contact first thoughts and write from them…you may feel great emotions and energy that will sweep you away.” She talks about how her beginning students often break down and cry. You must not be thrown off, she says. “This is the discipline…inspiration means ‘breathing in,’ breathing in God. You actually become larger than yourself.”

Writing as Practice

Writing is like running, she says. You practice whether you want to or not or you will atrophy. “One poem or story doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s the process of writing and life that matters.” She quotes Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist master to say, “We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.”

Composting

Goldberg is the writer who originated this idea of mental composting, the process that happens with all those inspired notes we take and never use, all our experience just “sifting through our consciousness.” She reminds us that Hemmingway wrote about Michigan in Paris (and then about Paris from somewhere else.)

“From our decomposition of the thrown-out egg shells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories.”

When you take stabs at something but it doesn’t quite work, this means the compost isn’t ready. It isn’t entirely about your free will.

She quotes Katagiri Roshi to say, “Your little will can’t do anything. It takes Great Determination. Great Determination doesn’t mean just you making an effort. It means the whole universe is behind you and with you—the birds, trees, sky, moon, and ten directions.”

Goldberg adds, “Suddenly, after much composting, you are in alignment with the stars or the moment or the dining-room chandelier above your head, and your body opens and speaks.”

Wow.

“We aren’t running everything,” she says.

No, ma’am.

Artistic Stability

Goldberg talks a lot about her life in New Mexico, teaching and practicing, about a friend out near Taos building Earth Ships with old tires and how she allowed this friend to see her bad writing and how moving the experience was.

“We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.”

Original Detail

Goldberg talks about how original detail in your pieces leads to groundedness. You don’t have to be rigid with it. “The imagination is capable of detail transplants, but using the details you actually know and have seen will give your writing believability and truthfulness. It creates a good solid foundation from which you can build.”

But you have to relax, she says. “Don’t be self-conscious.”

The Power of Detail

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical….recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter…Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the real truth of who we are…we must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.”

I mean!

(But then how do we decide which real things really exist? Ok, there I go.)

This is a fine place to leave it.

The Essay Project: The Lead and The Ending

July 5, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

When I was an undergrad at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (or UMSL), I took a class in magazine feature writing because that seemed like a feasible career (instead of teaching). You could just pick a random topic, research it and write about it. Kind of like what Monsieur Big Bang does now on his new anthropology podcast. In my romantic mythical imaginings one could make their own hours and never get bored.

Problem was I was too shy to actually go out there and interview strangers. And at the time I had a huge phone phobia. This was before I became a Kelly Girl and they sent me out on all these nightmare receptionist temp jobs ((all those phone calls!!)); but then I had a total Schitt’s Creek driving test moment and realized “nobody cares.”

But that epiphany came much later. Back at UMSL I stewed in anxiety for a few weeks and then ended up just interviewing my own grandmother about her life on Indian reservations, which was a complete cop-out but the result completely enthralled the teacher and I ended up getting an A. Plus I then had three cassette tapes of my grandmother doing her great storytelling thing (and my funny Aunt Edna for a bit, too). Having run out of interesting family members, I then had to turn to my dog Helga’s veterinarian, interviewing him about ways to rescue your pets during house fires, floods and tornados. I’ve never had a cat so learning about scooping one out of their hiding places with a fishing net was very informative.

Anyway, in this feature writing class we also read William Zinsser’s guide On Writing Well, particularly the chapters on “The Lead” and “The Ending.” Back at Parkway North High School, we had already learned about the juicy non-sequitur lead paragraph. I used it when I wrote my first high school comp paper on the untold logistical and political food-delivery problems behind the efforts of Band Aid and U.S.A. for Africa. In that paper I somehow miraculously managed a lead involving Sonny & Cher. Don’t ask me how. But I got some margin-scribbled praise for that feat of lead-footwork

So I was informed about the magic of the lead, which according to Zinsser is “the most important sentence in any article…[because] if it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it is equally dead.”

But you can’t be deader than dead, sentence #2.

And although these chapters are about features and prose writing, this is similarly true for poems, maybe even more so because readers tend to skim and skip around a set of poems more than they do for prose and abandon rates for poems are arguably higher.

Zinsser does acknowledge that in literary pieces, you can delay your point a bit longer than in mainstream feature writing. I abuse this allowance all the time. But Zinsser warns, “I urge you not to count on the reader to stick around. He is a fidgety fellow who wants to know–very soon–what’s in it for him.”

Sheesh. Aint it the truth though.

Zinsser has some ideas to help us with the lead. He literally says to “Cajole him with:”

freshness
novelty
parody
humor
surprise
an unusual idea, an interesting fact
a question

“Anything will do as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve….but never patronizing him…”

Sounds uncomfortably like flirting to me. Or the perils of Scheherazade.

“Next the lead must do some real work,” Zinsser says. Like a date, I guess. Get to your proposition statement, Zinsser says, “but don’t dwell…coax the reader a little more…continue to build…adding solid detail.”

Don’t be a tease. Nobody likes a tease. Even the reader. Don’t frustrate the reader by not going anywhere. Ok, there are some readers who enjoy going nowhere sort of experimentally, but finding those readers can be tricky and most likely other less-accommodating readers will find you first.

Zinsser has some good advice here about your first whole paragraph: “Take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph–it is the crucial springboard to the next paragraph.” First and last sentences. Very important. Give them “an extra twist of humor or surprise,” a little snap and pizazz. Or find funny quotations for those spots.

Zinsser also believes in substance over style. He says “salvation often lies not in the writer’s style but in some odd fact that he was able to unearth.” This is true for feature writers 100% more than for poets. Poets can be all style and little substance. But some substance is good. Have a little bit of a point. Unless your point is pointlessness. But hasn’t that been done to death already?

He advises us to “always collect more material than you will eventually use.” Good advice for all writers.

“An even more important moral is to look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people.” He says to read your telephone bill fillers, read the back of menus and catalogues and through junk mail. He says this, and it’s invaluably true, “you can tell the temper of a society by what patio accessories it wants. Our daily landscape is thick with absurd messages and portents.”

(I see from my marginalia in the late 1980s I had to look up the meaning of the word ‘portent.’)

Zinsser excerpts his favorite leads from Joan Didion (“7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,” her essay on Howard Hughes from Slouching Toward Bethlehem), Garry Wills (from his book Nixon Agonistes) and actor Richard Burton’s essay on rugby.

So quickly, what does Zinsser have to say about an ending? He says few writers know how to stop well, but that “you should give as much thought to choosing your last sentence as you did to your first. Well, almost as much.”

“A good last sentence–or paragraph–is a joy in itself. It has its own virtues which give the reader a lift and which linger when the article is over.” This is even more important to the poem, which often demands to resonate, more than prose. “The perfect ending should take the reader slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right to him.”

He elaborates:

“It is like a curtain line in a theatrical comedy. We are in the middle of a scene (we think) when suddenly one of the actors says something funny, or outrageous, or epigrammatic, and the lights go out. We are momentarily startled to find the scene is over, and then delighted by the aptness of how it ended. what delights us, subconsciously, is the playwright’s perfect control.”

“For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point that you want to make, look for the nearest exit.”

I find this maybe is too pat. Knowing went to end is something that takes practice. It’s a feeling. It’s understanding the flow you’re in, the current that’s taking you along. When to leave is an art, not a science. It’s refined calibration and a fine-tune. The way to get good at it is to keep working at it (and to keep reading delightfully crafty endings).

When in doubt, Zinsser always comes back to that funny quotation, to end with “some remark which has a sense of finality” or “adds an unexpected last detail.”

So when you don’t know how to end it, let someone else do it. (I’m here to tell you this article is breaking up with you.) This scheme not only provides a get-away vehicle but emotional distance. Sometimes what you don’t say at the end is just as important as what you do say. (Joan Didion was a master of this.) Likewise, Monsieur Big Bang’s favorite song (and he quotes it all the time) is by singer-songwriter Mike Stenson who elaborates about the end of flirting itself when he tells the story of inviting a girl to see The Rolling Stones. She never called him back. He surmises maybe she didn’t get the message but he never followed up. Instead, he wrote a song where he says, “I got your message when I never got your call.”

~~~

So, does that quote work as an ending? Yeah, I don’t think it does. Because Mike Stinson-fan Monsieur Big Bang did actually end up calling me twice in the beginning and I honestly didn’t get the first message. So the moral of the story here is that sometimes you can end a thing too soon.

Meditations on Milestones

June 26, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 1 Comment

Three stories:

One: a project that took so long, everything changed

I was very excited Sunday when I suddenly hit a major milestone with my Katharine Hepburn epic. I finished sorting through all my notes. Woohoo!

Okay, this may not seem like a big deal, but I took my first note while sitting on the floor of my living room in my Yonkers apartment 25 years ago.

It was a basement apartment steps away from a beautiful aqueduct trail running up the Hudson River near Odell and Warburton. I used to walk my dog there twice a day. The apartment was always freezing (and flooding) and everyone else was on rent strike…except me because nobody bothered to tell the new tenants about it.

I would gladly have joined the strike just to be able to phone my grandfather in Oregon to tell him I was finally on strike for something, at least something other than that time he talked me into going on strike in their Port Orford living room the day I was disgruntled about having to eat fish again for dinner. He even helped me make a picket sign and sent me pacing around the room with it.

Of course, he would have asked about the picket lines and I would have said, “There’s no line, Grandpa. I’m just not paying my rent! Kickin’ ass for the working class!”

Anyway, aside from reading the occasional new Katharine Hepburn biography, it wasn’t until this year that I made a concerted effort to compile all the notes from all the books, magazines and journals. And it kind of feels like 25 years, (on and off, but mostly off), digging into a basement and now I can start pouring the foundation and raising the walls.

But here’s the thing, a lot has changed for women in 25 years. And I am finding that assumptions I made about Katharine Hepburn back then, assumptions I was pretty sure most other women shared as well, they aren’t so certain anymore.

For example, Katharine Hepburn herself, both her parents and her Aunt Edith together worked for and symbolized sexual, economic and reproductive freedom for women. You don’t have to search very far on social media to find men (and women) fighting against those very ideals Hepburn stood for and defended. Conservatives are attacking reproductive freedom on many fronts, not just abortion. Contraception, control over one’s virginity or sexuality, and the entirety of women’s roles in the workplace are now contested spaces. I saw a tweet yesterday attacking a woman’s decision not to procreate at all, even through abstinence.

So I can no longer tell the story I was going to tell in the same way I was going to tell it, with the assumptions I was going to make about how women are allowed to be. The direct quotes I had been cataloging from Hepburn and her allies, quotes which still sound empowered and fearless aren’t going to land the same way for everyone. Even the assumption that an empowered woman is a positive thing is now up for debate again. I can’t even assume Katharine Hepburn can be understood as a great American hero in today’s political climate.

Two: hypertext heroics

I also finished a new browser piece, a more complicated piece using those iframes we once implemented back in the late 1990s with all those boxes and ugly scroll bars everywhere.

And usually, when I try to return to these older HTML design elements, I introduce a whole host of problems for myself and have to find work-arounds and make compromises. For example, in this piece I had wanted to use the new search technology Text Fragments. You’ve seen this in action if you’ve ever searched for something and were directed to a webpage with the exact search text highlighted. My grand vision was to show highlighted text from one frame link to another frame’s text. But Text Fragments won’t work at all with iframes so I had to scrap that architectural pipe dream.

I was telling a relative in Kansas City recently about writing browser poems and how I was going about them. And she said, “So you’re trying to make them hard to read?” And I said, “Yes.”

Because it’s hard to read on browsers. It’s frustrating on many levels. That’s what makes a book so pleasant…to this day. And pages and poems don’t get lost in a book. They don’t suddenly stop working. On the other hand, books are relatively passive. Links make you do something. Even something as microscopic as clicking a mouse button. Browsers and books, they each have their capabilities and failures.

Three, the notebook

A few weeks ago I started to use a handmade notebook I’ve been saving for a special purpose. I purchased it about 10 years ago but whenever I need a new notebook, I always go for the dollar-store ones first.

I finally decided on a use for this best notebook collecting favorite poem titles from poems I find on Twitter. And since I am reminded of the day I purchased the notebook each time I use it, I’ve been thinking about the people I met that day and looking up their names on Wikipedia. This weekend I discovered two of them have died. (Sigh.)

Nonetheless, this is an amusing story about meeting somewhat-famous people and how it doesn’t always go so well.

When we first moved to New Mexico in 2010 we lived in Santa Fe. I was working for ICANN in Los Angeles but working from home in Santa Fe. So I wasn’t meeting any new friends. This is partly because Santa Fe has become a wealthy and cliquish city. But also, I just wasn’t getting out. I met my friend Maryanne on a bus tour to see Greer Garson’s historic John Gaw Meem house on the Pecos River. For years, she was the only friend I had in Santa Fe.

I was even attempting to glom on to Monsieur Big Bang’s friends from Highlands University and the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. Well, I only did this once but I befriended one of his anthropology professors, a woman from Israel living in New Mexico to study Navajo culture. She was a cancer survivor and involved in a Santa Fe charity whereby seriously rich people were raising money to help poor, rural New Mexico cancer patients afford the stupidly expensive Santa Fe motels when they came in town for treatments.

So I would invite the Professor to dinner and she would invite me to these charity art shows and events in Santa Fe, One day the two of us traveled to the small New-Mexican town of Galisteo for the town’s home studio art tour. Because it’s always fun to go house to house and see everybody’s studio set up, especially in rural towns with especially high concentrations of artists.

Galisteo is interesting in itself. All I ever knew about it was that Burl Ives lived there. If you drive through the town, it appears to be just another shady ancient and rundown New Mexican village. But shockingly those dilapidated-looking adobes are actually multi-million-dollar retirement homes. I remember the Professor telling me the CEO of Victoria’s Secret lived in one of them! How did those people even find out about Galisteo? And is it fair for a bunch of rich people to buy up a quaint little New Mexican village?

Anyway, so we went from swanky shack to swanky shack looking at everyone’s art spreads and we finished up at a house on a hill, my Professor’s friend from the cancer charity, a French woman named Evelyn Franceschi. She was a strikingly beautiful woman who had an attic full of delightfully charming French-looking things she had made by hand: books, dolls, pictures. She even made her own French chocolates. (I bought some.) She was also quirky and charming and I bought the aforementioned notebook from her and loved it so much I hated to use it for ten years.

While we were there, another friend rode up on a motorcycle. We all stood in the dark, adobe living room chatting. Evelyne found out from the Professor that Monsieur Big Bang was working on an anthropology degree and Evelyne told me we should come back sometime to see petroglyphs on a mesa bordering their property (we never did). When the Professor told Evelyne I was a writer, she told me her husband was a writer, too, and had just written a book of local Galisteo history. I was very interested in reading about Galisteo that she told me I should ask her husband about it when he came back. As if on cue, her husband arrived minutes later. I went up to him and said, “Evelyne tells me you’re a writer. What sort of things do you write?”

I was expecting him to show me his stack of book copies on Galisteo history. But with a stone face he said, “I write plays.”

And I said, “Oh.”

I remember the sound of disappointment in my voice and I could even feel my face crumple up a bit at this unfortunate news. I mean plays are nice but how often do you meet a Galisteo historian?

And so that was the conversation killer. He looked at me with the face of someone who is annoyed that you do not know who he is, but not annoyed enough for him to tell you. We each went our separate ways and I never did learn the history of Galisteo.

The Professor and I took our leave and as we were walking to her car, her motorcycle friend comes up behind us. As she’s putting on her helmet she says to me, “You know who that was, don’t you?”

And I hate it when people say that because they know very well you don’t know who that was. But anyway I said, “No. Who?”

“He wrote The Elephant Man.”

“Oh…wow,” I said. “That is impressive.”

She told us he moved to Galisteo in order to not be found. His name was Bernard Pomerance and he died in 2017 of cancer. Evelynn died in 2015, about two years after we all met in her house in Galisteo. All things considered, I’m very happy to have this souvenir of my social awkwardness, this lovely notebook handmade by the charming Evelyn Franceschi, wife of the playwright who wrote The Elephant Man and possibly other bits of Galisteo history.

The Essay Project: Silences

June 21, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In 1978 the writer Tillie Olsen published a book called Silences, “a landmark survey of disenfranchised literary voices and the forces that seek to silence them.” In 2003, the book was re-released.

This essay was photocopied from that book and appears to be its introduction.

Olsen wrote often about the political and social reasons why women have been prevented from writing. In our Sarah Lawrence College essay class back in the mid-1990s we usually passed around purely craft essays. But occasionally someone would pass around a political essay, which is kind of interesting since our professor, Susanne Gardinier, was a political poet. I’m actually surprised we didn’t cover more political pieces, just to, like, kiss-up to the teacher.

In the first part of this essay Olsen talks about creative silences in general, why artists may choose to go quiet.

“Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all….what are creation’s needs for full functioning?”

She talks about natural silences, those which represent a “necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation.”

But Olsen really wants to talk about unnatural silences, like for example Thomas Hardy ceasing to write novels and taking a religious vow that required he refrain from writing poetry. Or Arthur Rimbaud abandoning “the unendurable literary world.” Herman Melville’s needing to earn a living.

Akin to those silences are what Olsen calls “hidden silences: work aborted, deferred, denied,” censorship silences, self-censorship, “the knife of the perfectionist,” problems of focus or will-power, silences created by self abuse. Ernest Hemmingway is her example for this type. She borrows his own quote from “The Snows of Kilmanjaro”:

“He had destroyed his talent himself—by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.”

She then talks about silences caused by long foreground periods. Walt Whitman is a good example here and writers who didn’t even start up until their forties, fifties, sixties (Laura Ingalls Wilder). Some writers had so many life demands, they needed “the sudden lifting of responsibility” or the “immobilization of a long illness” to carve out the time to write.

Rainer Maria Rilke was so possessive of his time, his need for “a great isolation,” that he refused to help support his wife and daughter at all, let alone feed the dog. (He didn’t even attend his daughter’s wedding). I’ve heard Mary Oliver suggest as much in an essay, that’s all is fair in love and war and writing. Emily Dickinson, in her own way, withdrew from the world.

I’m just gonna say I can’t live like that. I mean, I can hermit up as much as the next monk and I feel no great rush to publish, but I can’t refuse time to people. And honestly, I don’t feel I have to. Maybe this is because I was an administrative assistant for over ten years. I learned how to multi-task. Maybe because I’m obsessed with the idea of lost time I’ve learned how to hoard it.

I’m actually multi-tasking the writing of this blog today as we speak.

I’m pretty good at “time management.” That said, I have failed to carve out the time to write the novel and the short stories. But I’ve always considered this more of a challenge of will power and work-life balance; but hey, that excuse could just as well be a rationalization.

I’m sure I could produce out more if I worked at it nine to five or even 9 to noon. But, like Joan Didion, I didn’t want to teach (or write screenplays or finagle inheritances). So then…life choices.

But I’m having the dog. Between the dog and the novel, the dogs gonna win that battle.

Olsen says, “Most writers must work regularly at something,” if not teaching than something out in the big world. But “substantial, creative word demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it.” And here she mentions Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, who produced quantity while holding down other jobs. She quotes from Franz Kafka’s diary to illustrate his struggles finding time to write.

From 1911, “I finish nothing.”

From 1917 “the strain of keeping down living forces.”

This is especially true, Olsen says, of women. Many women writers see decades between books, and not due to “lying fallow” in order to fertilize ideas. Olsen compiles a long list of the most successful women writers of the past century, (I’m assuming she means 1800s), who either had no children or had servants to help with the children. Then she lists accomplished 1900s women writers who also had “household help or other special circumstances.”

She then rightly poo-poos the belief some hold that women don’t need to create because they can “create babies.”

(For the love of..)

I need to stop now…and seethe.

The Museum of Didion

June 20, 2023 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I used to work with Natalie years ago at a company called Agribuys in Torrance, California. We’ve stayed friends and she came to visit last fall. While we were standing in the outdoor car of the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad train in Northern New Mexico, she said the Joan Didion exhibit, (“Joan Didion, What She Means“), had finally opened at the Hammer Museum in LA. What? I completely lost track of that. And I had only two months left to see it!

Which I did finally in January with Julie (Natalie lives in the San Francisco Bay area) and we went right after my plane landed (and after a quick breakfast at the old stalwart Dinah’s). That’s how excited I was to make it the first thing in an event-packed weekend. It was raining the whole weekend, which drove people to do things they normally didn’t, like see museum exhibits and the Didion crowd was so big they had to break us up into two tours, one to start at the beginning of the exhibit and one to start and the end (our group).

After the first ten minutes of our guide drawing out visitor insights from two Anne Truitt and Martin Puryear abstracts (with questions like what does this say to you? And you? And you?) and nary a mention of Didion herself or what Hilton Als might have been thinking when adding the abstracts here, Julie and I peeled off to make our own way through the show.

And to be honest we kind of flitted through the five or six rooms because by this time we were tired and exasperated with the rain and the excitement of me being back in LA after a few Covid years. We focused mainly on the personal items and pop culture subjects, which generally happens with Julie and I are together and thinking with the same brain. I knew I’d need the book to make sense of how the original art pieces selected by Hilton Als all fit together in the Joan Didion story.

The exhibit was the brainchild of writer Hilton Als. In his essay he said he tends to like writers who are mental frontiersmen, writers who equivocate sometimes and writers who aren’t afraid to have second thoughts. Me too and I think that’s why I also like Lester Bangs (although he works in a much messier, wild west way). To see somebody change their mind is a very impressive thing.

And this wasn’t simply an exhibit of Joan Didion’s life, or her ideas or all the writings. It was an exhibit of how her experiences can intersect with the images and sculptures of other artists, artists who are thinking about the same dilemas or covering eras she had also lived in and wrote about.

Als talks about her flat tone, her family myths of self-reliance and pragmatism, the whole mythology of her ancestry of California frontiersman. She tired to “carry that on” in the vein of “seeds got carried.” But she later found those ideals were “recklessly self-inventing.” So important in my connection to Joan Didion. How our family histories try (and sometimes fail) to propel us. Als talks about her emotional detachment, her family idea that the future was a space (the West), a territory, a freedom, and yet how frontiers are susceptible, Didion came to feel, to kinds of “crackpot theories.” This is a concrete example of Manifest Destiny as a crackpot theory.

Als talks about her efforts in turning over the wounds of losing her daughter and husband prematurely, how astute she was about loss but how her attempts were ultimately failures to “understand what could not be understood.” He talks about Didion’s idea of how writers “look for stories that describe the self to the self.” But also how Didion was different in that she could find herself in other peoples’ stories, people who were very different from her. I always found this impressive, too. As humans, we don’t tend to do that.

Didion didn’t believe all the things she had written “add[ed] up” and she distrusted narrative resolutions, conclusions, wrap-ups, morals or even structural outlines.

Als talks about the great Didion gaze, her way of noticing, (I think in a very removed but emotional way), how she used her whiteness and frailness to expose lies and “the fakery involved” in not just Hollywood, an underbelly of which she was intimately familiar with, but also the great showbiz of politics, which she spent that later part of her career exploring.

Her tentative feminism: “Woman still rarely allow themselves the right to look at and talk about anything, let alone themselves…nice ladies turn away. They do no look but are looked at.” Such an awesome observation right there.

The exhibit’s commemorative book includes sections that depict each separate room of the show (in chronological eras of her life), all the gathered art pieces interspersed with brief biographies and an indicative essay from that era.

The first room was called Holy Water (covering the years of 1934-56) and it dealt mainly with the holiness of our early places, in Didon’s case the Sacramento area where she grew up.

The art pieces for this era were primarily about water, fluidity and movement. They included Wayne Thiebaud’s arial oil panting of farmlands, an Alma Ruth Lavenson photo of the northern CA landscape with a juniper, Chiura Obata’s woodblock print of a river mountain landscape and a Marven Hassinger sculpture which was basically a long chain and rope meant to symbolize a river. There was a video excerpt from John Wayne scene in Stagecoach (because Didion loved John Wayne), family memorabilia, handmade maps of Sacramento, embroidery art and quotations about female creativity.

The next room, Goodbye To All That (1956-1963), depicted Didion’s time after leaving Sacramento for an opportunity to write fashion copy for Vogue Magazine in New York City, winning the same Prix de Paris award Sylvia Plath did years earlier (as fictionalized in The Bell Jar). Didion always claimed her writing style was “fashioned” here writing copy for Vogue and the occasional movie reviews, personal essays. It was during this time she met and married writer John Dunne (1964).

This room showed the upper-middle-class and society paintings of John Koch (depicting her own upbringing), Edward Hoppers’ “Office in a Small City,” the Todd Webb photo of Georgia O’Keeffe standing in her garage in front of her “Above the Clouds” painting, some Diane Arbus movie-themed photographs, the Vogue covers which had Didion pieces in them and her Prix de Paris Vogue announcement itself. One of the best juxtapositions was a Diane Arbus photograph of black transvestites next to a Richard Avedon photo of the Daughters of the Revolution. Both subjects had deadpan stares for the camera.

This section in the book ends with a good Didion essay from 1969 from Life Magazine, “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths.”

The next room, The White Album (1964-1988), covers probably her peak period, when she wrote her most memorable and groundbreaking essay collections, novels and essays, and when she also started writing screenplays with John Dunne (A Panic in Needle Park, A Star is Born) because she said she didn’t want to teach. She also became a parent in this decade. She famously said during this time,

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Didion was starting to think about how writer’s think.

The art pieces include a sketch of Didion by Don Bachardy, a video clip playing from the movie of her book, Play it As It Lays showing Tuesday Weld driving around LA freeways. There are documentary photos of the unrest at the time, personal photos with Sharon Tate by Jay Sebring, the abstract Anne Truitt acrylic and, Martin Puryear etching and charcoal that sent us running from the tour, Noah Purifoy’s sculpture about the Watts Riots, Ed Ruscha’s photos of Santa Monica Boulevard and his fold-out lithograph of every building on the Sunset Strip, Jack Pierson’s set up of a record player on a table, Didion and Dunne’s screenplay movie posters, Los Angeles neighborhood photos by Henry Wessel, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, Robert Bechtle’s reproduction painting of a yellow Pinto in a driveway and photos of the Blank Panthers and Hells Angels which Didion wrote about. There are also Vogue photos of the interior of Didion’s Malibu house.

Her 1975 essay “Planting a Tree is Not a Way of Life” ends the section and is an almost perfect essay on the self-deception of the writer. It was a commencement speech delivered for the University of California-Riverside. “We all struggle to see what’s going on…that’s the human condition.”

The final room was called Sentimental Journeys (1988-2021) and it included later-day Juergen Teller photos of Didion, Doninique Nabakov’s areal photo entitled “Jogger in the Park,“ Cuban artists Ana Mendieta’s areal photographs of blood in the surf, works of other Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Salvadorian artists Ronald Moran and Walterio Iraheta (interesting photographs of worn Salvadorian shoes).

The last essay was “The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic” about the creation of the Broadway stage production of The Year of Magical Thinking.

I actually get a lot out of these artist mash-up exhibits, making connections between different types of artists and thinkers, looking for conversations in art pieces. It reminds me of one of my favorite books produced for an exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It was called Shared Intelligence, American Painting and the Photograph and it showed how the early modernist photographers and painters were conversing with each other through their work.

It looks like the next stop in my Joan Didion obsession is going to be the New York Public Library once they finally acquire and process all of Didion and Dunne’s personal papers. Can’t wait.