All artists have been here. Some
days you’ve got it, and some days you don’t. Here’s Over the Rhine, one of my
favorite musical acts, on this phenomenon: “And it's got nothing to do with me /
The wind blows through the trees / But if I look for it, it won't come / I
tense up, my mind goes numb / There's nothing harder than learning how to
receive.” You can try what Hemingway suggested: Write one true sentence. (Isn’t that just so Hemingway, by the way?) Sure. OTR suggests it’s about learning
to open and receive, which assumes something arriving from either outside
of your consciousness or from below it. A modern, post-mythological take on the
presence of the Muse. Hemingway soldiers on, forcing the creation anyway of a “true”
result, no matter how small. You can think of it either way, or, like me, just build
small abstract sculptures out of paper clips, thumbtacks, and the little springs
that fall out of ballpoint pens when you screw them open.
In writing as much poetry in the
past four months as in the 25 years previous, I’ve found that writing poetry is
actually much more difficult and much more taxing than writing prose, and when
you finish a poem, you have to understand that there will be a few days of
emptiness before the well fills again. In spite of my impatience with the sociopolitical
impropriety of B.’s chauvinism from yesterday, he was still a heck of a prolific
poet, and a very good one. He was zoned.
But the zone only means that you’re ready to do the work. You still have to
push, and it’s heavy. The zone provides a context in readiness for the work. The
effort is up to you. Discipline and preparedness make you more fit for the job,
but it takes the same effort. He was driven to work his ass off.
The problem is that if so much of
ones sense of self-worth and justification for eating is predicated on that
work progressing, then the inevitable days that arrive when the work refuses to
unfold feel like death more than for most people. It should be healthy to on
occasion just say screw it, and go mow the lawn. B. would mostly get drunk,
believing that the rush of booze through his veins carried the inspiration along
with it. Booze forestalled imaginative death, in other words, even as it
hastened the onset of the physical one. There’s the problem right there in
separating the body from the spirit. From what I’ve heard, heroin-addicted be
bop jazz artists were big into chemical inspiration, finding out they were mistaken
only when it was too late. It has always seemed to me that if you listen to
Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Wooden Ships” closely, a great, great song, you
can hear the cocaine just streaming through it. Maybe the booze did motivate Berryman,
or maybe just believing it did made the difference. However it happened, he
worked hard. This poem has a kind of paradox woven through it. It moves
seamlessly from blockage or exhaustion into death and decay, and the movement
is understandable for one whose life really only matters when the work is
progressing. To not work is death. It leads to a really nice moment in the poem:
“These men have access. Sleepless, in position, / they dream the past forever.”
They have access, now, don’t they?
B., with death figuratively looming as well, finds his inspiration in writing
about not having any inspiration; he finds life in death approaching. He writes
about not being able to write, and it resulted in one of my favorite Dream
Songs so far.
No comments:
Post a Comment