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 A guest showed at our workshop last night, one who attended a reading I gave in October. I’d presented Mainline poems from 45 years ago along with Chalcedony Songs and talked about how the voice, in both, uses the world and emotion as reflections of a personal journey.
But I don’t know exactly what intrigued our guest. We do often invite people to see what the workshops are like, and the invitation goes out to whoever displays a spark.
This guest brought a poem with intense heartbreak in the first stanza, and the next three stanzas seemed to spin away from the trauma. Our guest used highly interesting language, but the feeling in the first stanza was not developed. We couldn’t tell what the motivating impulse might be, whether to explore the heartbreak, to accept it fully, to complain about its injustice, or to expose its ironies. Or something else.
We gave feedback, reading to each other lines that we liked, pretending the author was not in the room. This protocol is designed to give our guest the sense of eavesdropping on an honest conversation. There were a number of lines that we liked quite a lot.
The questions was then asked, “What does the poem need?” The imbalance of emotion was noted, and we discussed two strategies. One, to develop the heartbreak, at the same depth it was presented, in the remaining stanzas. Two, to dilute the feeling and spread it, more or less evenly, throughout the poem.
Next we asked the author to join the conversation. We were thanked for our feedback, but our guest had nothing more to say. I couldn’t tell if our comments had struck a chord. And today I received an email thanking us for the invitation and declining to attend another session, on grounds that the workshop was not a fit.
A goal of mine currently is to be more honest, so my reply contained more than polite noises. I made a guess at the forces underlying the previous evening.
“I’m sure you gathered that our workshop believes writing that’s hinged to one’s personal journey is by far the most powerful. Your piece clearly started there. When you’re ready to develop that connection, please feel welcome to join us again.”
Poetry should be accessible. And I believe the only poetry that works over time is direct and totally understandable. Poetry’s ancient and continuing role is to carry our culture from generation to generation, and we don’t join that tradition if our primary impulse is to show off our brilliance. Or to be witty, or to make money. We do well when we join the tradition with full humility.
Today, of course, this role is debased, but less than one might think. It seems debased partly because of how we define “poetry.” Advertising fits several definitions of poetry perfectly, and it certainly carries much of the culture, even as it drags us down. Spoken Word is totally accessible, and it’s poetry, and it’s carrying the culture for many young people. Same for Rap.
The reading public’s complaint is correct, though: what is termed “mainstream” poetry is often inaccessible. But we should understand “mainstream” is a misnomer. It’s a marketing tool, and there’s nothing mainstream about it, other than that some successful publishers and their audiences use the term. Most mainstream poetry is oblique lyrical poetry. It’s designed to be meditated on, rather than understood. But, to give it its due, mainstream poetry can be far more accessible than procedural poetry, for instance, or Language poetry.
If you read my poetry, you’ll see one way of working through this problem. There are many ways. We should remember how accessible most of our favorite poems are, and “accessible” does accurately describe much poetry. What’s inaccessible about “rosy-fingered dawn” or “money doesn’t talk, it swears” or “the poem does not lie to us, we lie under its law” or “we were very tired, we were very merry” or “be kind to yourself” or “the pure gold baby that melts to a shriek” or “I heard a fly buzz when I died” or “mango warmth fills my belly”?
 “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” writes Mary Oliver in “The Wild Geese.” This line has become an anthem for this generation, and for those of us going through changes. It might be the most quoted line of this decade. We need this growth and spiritual advice desperately.
Not easy to let the soft animal love, though, if you own upbringing has been difficult. One poet in our workshops is far into the journey of discovering what that might be. Who she is, what that soft animal might love. And poems are a powerful aid.
The journey might not be pleasant, and the poems can be dark. In fact, we were working with our poet and her poem, which has all the pain of being orphaned in a few compact lines. The images were energetic and troubled. The poet worked into the trauma and took a step forward. That step was dripping with pain, and it was only one small step. But the step was forward.
We could feel her exhilaration. We could also feel the darkness.
When it came time for the poet to speak, she was full of gratitude. “My previous workshops got so they wouldn’t read my poems. Too dark!” She mimicked those folks, holding up her hands with her index fingers crossed to ward off evil. “Don’t read us your poems!”
We looked at each other in astonishment. Hadn’t we just been given a few stations of her journey as a gift? Tough though it was, we were honored to join her.
I can’t speak for others, but for myself, my own journey is so difficult, I’m grateful for anyone sharing their own troubles. It’s trusting, for one thing. For another, it affirms the faith that we are together in this difficulty called life and there is common ground. Thanks are due her, from us, for such a gift.
I looked the poet in the eye. “I’m grateful for the company.”
(With help from D. Jayne McPherson.)
 A date wanted to bring her portable drill to my bedroom and put up new paper blinds, all because I mentioned the old ones were soiled and tipping. She hadn’t even seen my bedroom. And I had spent barely two hours with her, she couldn’t have known whether I’m handy. I wondered what was going on, and I winked at her. “Maybe I should accept whatever you offer.”
“Whatever” sounds limitless. I thought I might be in for quite an adventure.
When Chalcedony offers something, I don’t have the choice of refusing. I don’t have the critical apparatus to make a choice, anyway. She exists outside my ken. I write whatever she wants, and afterwards, sometimes years afterwards, I dive into the poem and hope it will offer up its essence.
My date read a couple of these poems and, as fits her lack of gender bias, wondered why we don’t hear the boyfriend’s responses. Especially since Chalcedony is often ranting, taking him to task for his cluelessness.
I didn’t have an answer, and later it occurred to me that some of the songs might be the boyfriend’s responses. But his push back comes disguised in Chalcedony’s voice. Flamboyant and feminine as it often seems, it sometimes does not have any gender clues.
I never saw the drill, and my blinds are still soiled and tipping.
“Maybe Chalcedony is the redhead?” asked a reader.
But the redhead in “Dream One” feels like a soul sister. She isn’t wild enough to be Chalcedony, the spirit woman who writes songs.
A fearful excitement permeates the dream: the lions embody something powerful, untamable, and injurious. It’s startling that the lion’s den is also my writing studio. While the lion’s aren’t stationed at a portal to some treasure, this is the sense of the dream. There is a portal, however: the studio window. It looks back into the coliseum where the lions are, back into the ordinary world.
One doesn’t have to travel to find the – what to call it – the mythic? The other world? The super real? The dream indicates that the ordinary and the beyond ordinary are in the same place. It is everywhere, superimposed on, or beneath, or through, consensual reality.
Lions do guard the access, and Chalcedony lives in that territory. It fits her boundariless mind, her disregard for convention, her extreme passion. She is less a human than a spiritual, erotic force, or a deity. She is close to chaos. And in Greek mythology, everything comes out of Chaos. Chalcedony must be one of the first generation.
The portal is like a vagina. For the moment I look through it, with the redhead beside me, I am Chalcedony. She experiences much of the world through her vagina (though she’ll take issue with this idea, or with its common interpretation). And I must pass the lion’s scrutiny before I see her.
Does this mean letting go of my mind? My conception of what art should be? Of what life is? “It’s the creative process when there’s danger, when the conscious mind knows it’s at risk.”
A lot drops away when I’m in her presence. I recognize I’m there by a feeling in my body, so I’m spared any ratiocination. The barriers between us fall away as easily if they did not exist.
Chalcedony wants me as much as I want her.
(With help from Sarah Rees, Ezra Matson-Ford, and Lonner Holden.)
The woman spirit Chalcedony sends more images and feelings through my thin, tattered psyche than I can follow, much more. Not enough time or energy to sort them or find them places. One friend, who knows better, gave me high praise and said I was a “hero person,” when I’m mostly slogging though mud, trying to keep up. Then he tempered his words, lest we poets become proud.
“But remember, – who said it? – ‘I want to wash when I meet a poet’: I hope someone might say it about me. It’s elemental primitive with an enthusiasm and never give up. The trajectory of nakedness and slime still oozing from the
water’s edge.”
Ah, yes, the nakedness and the slime pull at us, and we are part of its momentum. My friend gave too much credit to others: his insight was his own. He was turning a quote on its head, from a Basil Bunting poem, “What the Chairman Told Tom,” where Bunting writes the words of an educated punk who doesn’t see the value of poetry.
“Poetry? It’s a hobby….
It’s not work, you don’t sweat….
Nobody pays for it….
You’ve got a nerve….
Nasty little words, nasty long words,
It’s unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.”
A study in Psychology shows that washing makes people view unethical activities as more acceptable than if they had not washed. What does this imply? That when our hands are dirty, we know nasty acts – those “nasty words” – are close to us and more likely something we would do? And therefore objectionable. But if we’re clean, what’s unethical seems less likely a part of us, and therefore forgivable.
The muse takes us where she takes us. Into darkness, into a world of myth and power, of intuition, of passion, of chaos, into a world without morals. My friend’s image, “nakedness and slime” at the water’s edge, oozing around our feet, points toward primordial power. It’s far stronger than ethics or reason.
John Wieners’ lines come to mind, from The Hotel Wentley Poems. “The poem does not lie to us. We lie under its law.”
(With help from Ed Mycue, Kate Madden Yee, and April Renae.)
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I dreamt I was walking with a striking redhead, six feet tall, to a Shakespeare play. The show was in a huge enclosed coliseum. People were milling about and tension hung in the air. There was a palpable, fearful rumor that lions were part of the performance.
Peering through the crowd I saw two lions standing together, old lions, not too scary. Between me and the lions was my older brother. He moved at a tilt, staggering as if something had happened that was more than he could handle, and he didn’t recognize me. The lions looked peaceful enough, and as we got closer I saw a young lion next to the older ones.
This animal’s aura different: it was wild and untamed.
The performance was not about to start. The floor was dirt, and my companion and I were drawn to a hut at the far corner of the coliseum. Inside a heavy brick and cement wall and primitive doorway were two rooms, one bare, and a sense of familiarity came over me. In the dream I remembered this was a place I had lived, on Sixth Street in West Berkeley, with quite low ceilings. That house was titled. The floor in the dream was even more steeply tilted. We went up into the second room, and there was a single bed with a stew of bedclothes. I knew this was my bed.
And the rooms were the lions’ den. We were invading their territory, but I felt welcome. This bed was where I wrote my poems and dreamed my dreams. We poked our heads through an opening in the far wall of the room. It looked out on the performance area and the lions were directly in sight. Fear washed through me.
The opening was rimmed with a sort of animal skin, three-inch long hairs in a rim of fur. As I poked my head through I felt wonder along with fear. The lions knew I was there. The opening was like a vagina, the source of life, open into the world.
Chalcedony (Kal-SAID-‘n-ee) would be familiar with this territory. She would find some harmony with the lions. If lions guard the portal to the treasures of the unconscious, we need to make friends with them. We need to do whatever penance allows us to enter those energetic places.
The Bronx in the 1960s was a difficult place, and one of our writers lived there in a sixth floor walk-up apartment with her mother. Rents were cheap, and as immigrants at poverty level they had been attracted to the neighborhood. But some buildings were burning, the streets were contested by gangs, and political groups were in conflict or disarray.
One day the City condemned their building, and all five floors beneath them emptied out. Mother and daughter stayed a while longer. When they came home at night to the deserted hallways, her mother stamped her feet hard on the floor and all the way up the five flights of stairs. Her daughter did the same. The mother called out, again and again, “Hurry up, George!” as if her husband were just behind them. In reality he was at work across town, but the muggers didn’t know this.
Years later the writer asked her mother how she felt about that time.“I didn’t think much about it. I thought it was just the way things were.”
“Just the way things were”? When neighborhoods are burning, and it’s dangerous to walk to the corner store and buy a quart of milk? We wonder what that does to a young writer’s psyche, and how she might react later.
But the writer calls herself a “recovering MFA graduate” and says she likes staying in touch with chaos. She did five years traditional training in literature and, ultimately, she found it boring to her creative impulse. She must have felt some resonance with the chaos, or its familiarity made chaos necessary to her work, or part of her recognized that at least some uncertainly is a quality of life. Everywhere. It was certainly present those years in the Bronx.
She says, “I invite chaos into my writing.”
Chaos is familiar territory to Chalcedony (Kal-SAID-‘n-ee), the spirit woman in my collections Chalcedony’s Songs. She lives in the passionate, archetypal currents running through our bodies, and the ride is often rough. Often chaotic. Her world doesn’t conform to our wishes, certainly, of how things should be. But Chalcedony likes the wildness and the rambunctiousness, and wants everyone else to enjoy it, too. Or at least to come to terms with it.
Especially her lover. Doesn’t he recognize that parts of life are always spinning out of control? In “Song Three” she admonishes him, one day when boundaries had dissolved and their impulses were overlapping. Everything was mixed up and intertwining, even at the atomic level.
“You think this is aggravating?” she shouts, “You think this isn’t the way of the world?”
 “I’m having a lot of fun writing this,” said a beginner in Tuesday night workshop, thirty pages into a first novel.
The writer needs to meter out drama and character-building details in a smooth, believable, organic trance. This has to be complicated, and it cannot be an easy project. But what could be better than to have fun doing it? That would be a measure of one’s competence and ones’s daring. And more, a measure of belief in one’s competence.
People having fun as they write made me suspicious when I first started teaching, thirty-some years ago. How can you get to the energetic depths, if having fun is the overall tone? It fits intuition that there must be some unpleasant struggle somewhere, just as in life.
But another writer dispelled this prejudice, saying for that writer, writing is play. “Play like what children do: totally encompassing play.” Where the writing becomes the entire world and the entire world is one’s playground. One can map a lot of struggle, I understand from this, over into the child’s playground, and it won’t seem painful. “Deep pleasure in the writing,” said another writer, who added that a lot of practice goes into the pleasure. Lining up the vast creative unconscious in a harmonious way with that small part of us that recognizes pleasure.
Do you know the Robert Frost quote? “No tears for the writer, no tears in the reader.” It might also be true: “No fun for the writer, no fun for the reader.”
(With help from Sandy Olsen, Deborah Janke, and Jeff Karon.)
We gave a new twist to a writing exercise at Art Camp in the Sierra. It grew out of a discussion the month before at Wilbur Hot Springs, in the seminar “Writing and Powerful Experience.” The question of what is powerful circled around core issues as the answer, around what’s at the center of one’s personal journey. Facing solitude? Touching some vast creative energy? The sorrow of heart’s desire? An ocean of truth all around us? Sex or love bonding?
Each person , for the first part of the exercise, picked a word, said it aloud, and we wrote it down. An intimate workshop of seven writers, we had seven words. Part two, we each wrote seven sentences, each sentence using one of the words. In our chairs next to Spanish Creek outside Quincy, over our heads the Jeffrey pines swaying in the sunlight, we might have written the purest lyricism.
So far, a familiar exercise. Sharon Doubiago has used this a number of times, and you could probably find it in a variety of writing texts. Part three was to write something, a story, poem, essay, or play, with one of the sentences as the opening.
We are trained to write the best piece we can, so automatically we look for material and style that gains the most approval. But our twist was to find the sentence that’s at the core of our journey. Or one that points to the core. The sentence we chose could be the first sentence of our piece, or the last sentence, or its content could be, or could suggest, our central issue.
Powerful experiences can be all light of course, but I suspect there’s generally another sense, of darkness or difficulty or frustration or foreboding, that is key. By making a core issue our subject, we turned the exercise 180 degrees. We reversed its direction. We aimed for darkness, chaos, trouble, flames, the unknown.
I’ve watched this emphasis produce marvelous pieces, many times, over the years I’ve been leading groups. The writers headed off for lunch, the forest, swimming, camp events, solitude in their tents, and at some point the pieces were written.
It’s not at issue whether we’ll hear good writing the next day, when we share our work. We should rather worry whether we’ll start a forest fire.
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Clive Matson