#9: that shouldn't be enough for us
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the ninth one.
Boredom. Here’s a quotation from Susan Sontag’s journals:
At seventeen I met a thin, heavy-thighed, balding man who talked and talked, snobbishly, bookingly, and called me “Sweet.” After a few days passed, I married him.
I encountered this in Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker review of the new Susan Sontag biography. (I’m excited to read the book because I side with its author, Benjamin Moser, in his pro-Adrienne Rich, anti-Sontag stance, which I’ll say more about another time.) I find this quotation repulsive and appealing for a number of reasons...“heavy-thighed”? but thin? heavy...thighed?...and it brings me to a thought I’ve had many times before: that being a famous writer--not a great or good or important writer, but a famous writer--is an act of will. The will to make yourself a monument in support of your writing. Whitman “leaked” to the press Emerson’s “I greet you at the beginning of a great career” letter (which Whitman had practically begged for), then he invented the blurb by putting that “I greet you” phrase on the spine of his next edition of Leaves of Grass, with the full letter printed inside. Ew! I can’t believe he did that! But what a wonderful, willful thing to do: he was Walt Whitman the Poet, serving his poetry. I would never be as bold as Whitman; I would never write something as self-mythologizing in my journal as Sontag did. I once tried to, when I was ten. I was lying on my parents’ bed in the middle of the afternoon, writing in a new journal my grandma had given me, which had a small gold lock and a picture of a bedroom on its cover. I was experimenting with romanticizing my life to make it sound more like the Little House on the Prairie series, which I had just finished. In the entry, I referred to my brother as “Baby Felix.” That’s all I remember, but I find it humiliating to share it with you. Immediately after I wrote that entry, I was disgusted with myself: the idea that I was pretending, or hoping, that someone might be looking over my shoulder. I’ve always wanted to be a famous writer, but doing absolutely pointless, audienceless writing is where my heart and my personality are. I learned about that kind of writing in second grade, when Mrs. O’Sullivan told us about journals. Everyone got a small, stapled, lined notebook with a drawing of a bear leaning against a tree on the cover. We could write whatever we wanted in it, and I filled up mine right away. I kept asking for more journals. In each one, I wrote on the inside of the front cover, the back cover, in the margins of each page. And a few years later, after I wrote that insincere journal entry, I vowed to go back to writing the way I had in second grade. I doubled down. I started writing every night before I went to sleep. It became a habit, something I did after brushing my teeth. I never skipped it. Eventually, in middle school or maybe high school, I switched from nice, pretty journals to notebooks. I have hundreds of filled-up notebooks, which I keep in plastic storage boxes. I’ve written in my journal most nights of my life, thousands and thousands of nights. Brian jokes that I write lots of books at night and he’s going to steal them and publish them under his own name. But I’m not writing books; I’m writing almost nothing. It’s nothing for anyone else to read, nothing I can go back to and mine for ideas, nothing I or anyone else would be interested in reading. I’m just doing it because I want to; it’s where my will is.
Horror. Hilary Plum and I were hoping we would break the Internet and get canceled with the dialogue we wrote earlier this month at Fence about Catapult Books, which is a hip, cool independent literary press, magazine, and “community” funded by the Koch Brothers. The existence of this organization has alarmed me--okay, enraged me--for several years, in part because I assumed that every creative writer in the world knew that it was founded by Elizabeth Koch, daughter of Charles, and that no one wanted to say anything about it because the writers Catapult publishes and promotes are so hip and cool and some of them are our friends. When Hilary proposed writing this dialogue, I was excited at the opportunity to spew bile. But it didn’t turn out that way, because Hilary forced me to think. Hilary writes, in this dialogue and in her excellent books, in a way that is wandering and precise. Like, both at once. She introduced to me the notion that Elizabeth Koch is a human being, with the responsibilities and consciousness attendant with that status. In the dialogue, I asked Hilary if we should do something, knowing what we know about this money, and she wrote back:
I think probably the something we should do is to use our language, to do the work of language, like writers, to make our hard homes in the complexities of language. To make homes for one another. So far Elizabeth Koch has not had to do that work. What she’s written in public is no account, no kind of thinking about the moral complexities her very name announces. If we think we want her money, that shouldn’t be enough for us (even if confessionalism will not save us).
To think of Elizabeth as a human being, behind or on top of all the money, does not absolve her. Actually, it holds her to “account.” It’s like, okay, if you’re a writer, then do that work, the work a writer does.
Toward the very end of the dialogue, Hilary writes:
As writers we should be skilled at naming the meaning of the choices we make, telling the story of those choices occurring in the vast, tender, violent web of the social, the otherness we are.
I still don’t know if writers are truly unaware that Catapult, this thrilling new indie insider, is funded by Koch Brothers money, or if they’re just pretending not to know. But Hilary brought this dialogue so far beyond that question, the thing that had me riled up in the first place. This is a problem about the Koch Brothers’ vast influence, but it’s also a problem about writers. As writers, our very task is to say it, speak it, admit it--like Bishop says, (Write it!).
Glory. In my intro creative writing class this semester, I have ONE GOAL: show that you don’t need to “understand” a poem in order to interpret it. My students are really driven to conclude that every one thing in a poem “means” another thing. This seems to get in the way of liking poetry. I remember that a professor in grad school (don’t remember which one) wondered why people ask what a poem means; they don’t ask what a building means. And we don’t think of a building as abstruse or insufficient if we can’t look at it without figuring out what it means. With this in mind, I showed my creative writing students a photo of the Frank Gehry-designed business school at Case Western Reserve University, my former employer. We have some Clevelanders at Heidelberg, so some students were familiar with the building. Some liked it, some didn’t, some didn’t have an opinion—but everyone agreed that although the building was weird, surprising, confusing, remarkable, they did not feel they needed to determine its meaning; it just IS. So can a poem be like that? I hope so. I had them read the Kazim Ali poem, “Explorer,” that I linked in my Poetry recommended reading list last month. This poem is so beautiful! Why? I don’t know--
Cacti quiver for a century
In the desert I swam myself earthword to know
Sometimes my creative writing students begin an idea about a poem by saying, “This might not be right, but…” or “I don’t know if this is right…” I have to learn to teach them in a way that makes them not say this. Like, I often disagree with their interpretations, but the poem isn’t just looming there with its REAL meaning, that you may or may not be close to “getting.” I’ve been trying to show them poems that are obviously, clearly beyond the scope of “getting.”
One student said that the poem is like Word Explorer, stumbling around looking for another word, the next word, the next word. That seems wonderful—like the first “stumble” in the poem would be that surprising “really” in the first line, which tells you that language is going to be put together in an unusual way here. But another student, who loves outer space, said that the poem is like drifting through the empty galaxy. I think it’s so beautiful that one student read this poem as existing at the micro, brain-searching-for-a-word level, and another read it as existing on the greatest plane there is.
Eye rowed in the guest book of God my many sacred tongues
body and bow
so beautiful.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: That Malcom piece gave me occasion to revisit Terry Castle’s “Desperately Seeking Susan,” which includes descriptions of peoples’ outfits so hilarious they rival Philip Roth’s; Hilary Plum’s books: They Dragged Them Through the Streets, Watchfires, and Strawberry Fields
Unrecommended: Nothing! Reading Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love has encouraged me to be more positive (I’ll tell you more about it soon).