December 15, 2016

This past November I finished my novel of historical magic realism, MISS EMILY’S BOOK OF SPELLS (BOOK OF THE FIRST PART: WHERE I ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY, AND ENCOUNTER MANY AND SUNDRY ADVENTURES AS I TRAVEL NORTH AND COME TO MEET MISS EMILY DICKINSON AT LAST) BY HECHIZAR SPELWOMNN. Yea! Good for me! It can be a long slog completing a novel. Now that I am finished, I marvel at the beginnings of such endeavors. Besides the simple faith needed to keep going, when success is never assured, how does a novel even get started? Where does the impetus of the seed come from? How does it sprout?  For me, in this case, my third novel, the impetus of the story first came to me over three years ago. It was just a thought, the briefest of notions: Perhaps one reason why Emily Dickinson's poems are so captivating and spell-binding is that there are actual spells imbibed, embodied in the words themselves. As the seed took root and began to sprout inside me, I started to do research, and in fits and starts to find the "voice" of the story. 

It took about a year until I found it, or, rather, until the voice found me, Hechizar's voice, daughter of a Romani shape-shifter father and a mixed-race Cajun mother skilled in the ways of hoodoo healing, whose own mother was the great voodooienne, Marie Laveau. I needed to have a plausible way in the story for my character to get close to the great poet, you see, which is how shape-shifting, spirit-shifting, and the folk medicine practice known as hoodoo, or root work healing, became part of the makeup of my narrator, that and a wide and deep but somewhat idiosyncratic education. In other words, the needs of the developing story dictated the composition of the main character, which eventually led to the voice, the music, the rhythms of the novel, which spoke through me. Hechizar, wise, kind, generous, and, oh, so deeply an outsider in the worlds of both black and white people, and as a result so deeply in need of love. In many ways, she was like the great poet herself, I found. And so the voice honored me by letting me be its vessel, and the pages slowly accumulated, until, nearly three years later, the novel felt finished. The novel felt done.

 Early readers of parts of the novel have been ecstatic in their praise, readers like Lee Martin, my colleague here at The Ohio State University, who felt deeply compelled by the voice of the novel and the overall arc of the story. But am early response of a careless reader, who responded when I sent a draft of those early pages to a writing contest, has stuck with me, even after all the subsequent praise. She basically accused me of engaging in a sort of literary minstrelsy, writing in the voice of plantation slave. How could I, she accused me in so many words, presume to tell "their" story?

Well, first off, Hechizar spends less than a day of her life as a newborn on a plantation, before her father rescues her from the bosom of her dead mother. Secondly, growing up in Cleveland, in the household of the abolitionist, Harvey Buell Spelman, she is very well educated, due in part to the efforts of by Mr. Spelman's daughter, Laura, who will grow up to marry John D. Rockefeller and become one of the founders the institution that is now known as Spelman College. Thirdly, this novel -- which deals in part with the Trail of Tears and the Underground Railroad, with rapists and murderers and slave catchers, as well as with grace and deep abiding love,  this story narrated by such a racial mongrel of a character as it were, -- has never been "their story." It is "our" story. It has always been "our" story. 

I've started to query agents in the past month. I've tried to be very selective, writing only to those few whom I most deeply respect and would be most honored to be represented by. In my letter to them, I refer to the novel as a "dream memory of our country as it once was." The dream memory of OUR story: That is what MISS EMILY’S BOOK OF SPELLS (BOOK OF THE FIRST PART: WHERE I ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY, AND ENCOUNTER MANY AND SUNDRY ADVENTURES AS I TRAVEL NORTH AND COME TO MEET MISS EMILY DICKINSON AT LAST) BY HECHIZAR SPELWOMNN is, and what I hope THE BOOK OF THE SECOND PART will continue to be. 

And so with Hechizar, buoyed by the breath of life that words can give,  I wish you all the love and joy of the season, and beyond the season as well. Hechizar would insist that her wishes for you be no less than that. 

All best,

SDL

On another poet's passing, Mark Strand

 December 17, 2014

My first wife, Kathy Fagan, and I were both graduate students at the University of Utah in the early-mid 1980s, and Mark, besides being an exciting and inspiring teacher, was very generous to us. A couple of times we house-sat for him in his big brick house up in the Avenues, not too far from the "Continental College of Beauty, a beauty college about whom he wrote a very lovely, wise, and funny poem. Mark even gave us his hand-me-down car, an old rusty Fiat whose front passenger light was held together with bailing wire. Mark had bought the car from Artist, William Bailey, so it had quite a pedigree, that old Fiat.

Mark was married to Jules then, a big, brassy, filled-with-laughter personality, and he had two of his three children during those years, Tom and Fritha, who were both lovely babies. His other child, Jessica, who was more our ages, also visited him, and we hung out with her a bit, too.

Mark, with his Ferragamo loafers, his exquisite wines, and his Cashmere scarves, jackets, and sweaters, was one of the more fashionable people whom I've had the pleasure to know (He used to joke that Joseph Brodsky told him once, "I have a genius for poetry, Mark, but you, you have a genius for life"), and I'll always remember his generosity (he helped a number of us young poets get published and get our first jobs), as well as his acute intelligence, and his sharp, ironic sense of humor;  however, what I think I'll remember most was a cold late November evening in class when he kept us all spellbound well beyond our ending time as he talked about poems, poets he had known, and poetry. There seemed an almost palpable glow around him then. I saw remnants of that glow at other times, mostly when he read poems or prose -- he published his book of short stories, Mr. and Mrs. Baby during that time, and he was writing for Vogue Magazine then, in what he called his "high style" of prose -- but, for me, the glow was most fiercely bright on that cold late November evening. I feel blessed to have witness it.

The years when I was a graduate student at the University of Utah were filled with poets and writers who went on to make publish books and establish reputations, such as Kathy Fagan, Liza Wieland, Scott Carins, Gail Wronsky, Chuck Rosenthal, and Kevin Cantwell. With the exception of Chuck, who wrote fiction, we were all Mark’s students.  After we graduated and moved on, I didn't see Mark until years later, in the mid--late ought 2000s, at a conference, MLA or AWP, I think. I had grown old and hoary by then, and Mark didn't recognize me when I came up to him. He had to look twice at my name tag, as he exclaimed in surprise at how much the ravages of time changed me. But Mark still looked the same, over twenty years later, just a little craggier around the face is all. And just as brilliant. And that glow was still there. I feel privileged to have known him.

On Hearing About Galway Kinnell's Passing

October 30, 2014


I just read an e-mail written by an ex-student of mine, in which he announced that the poet Galway Kinnell had just died. Here's what I wrote him back:

Thanks, Tim.

Yeah, I heard about Galway's passing this morning. Sad news, but he had a long life's worth of many beautiful and moving poems. Some of my memories of him:

I remember reading his great book-length poem, The Book of Nightmares, when I was a teenager. I was sitting at my dad's old desk, where he would make his insurance salesman calls. I remember reading parts over and over again, like the end of the poem's first part, "Under the Maud Moon," and then staring awestruck at my dad's lead cards afterward. I'm not sure I had ever encountered language that powerful before.

Part of my undergraduate senior thesis at Reed College was on Galway's work, and he was kind enough to send me a card thanking me when I sent it the finished copy. I still have it somewhere. He wrote that my reading of his work was more erudite than that of many "adult," much more professional critics. I think now that it was his way he was making fun of them.

I also saw Galway read from his work a few times, and he was always a pretty powerful one. Once, when a phone rang in an adjoining room, he revised his poem mid-reading to include a ringing phone. Another time, in Portland, someone fainted in the back of the room while he was reading. He waited patiently, not moving, not saying a word, as the poor fellow was carried away. Then he asked if should start his interrupted poem from the beginning again. I think it was at that reading, when he read the last section of The Book of Nightmares, about the birth of his son, he came to the section about first holding him after he was born:

 

When he came wholly forth

I took him up in my hands and bent

over and smelled

the black, glistening fur

of his head, as empty space

must have bent

over the newborn planet

and smelled the grasslands and the ferns.

 

 It seemed to me that the whole audience rose to our feet as one when we heard that simile.

 

Later on, when I heard Galway read at Columbia in the 1980's when I was a graduate student there, he seemed a bit needy at the time. I remember him looking at me, sitting in the front row off to the side, as if for approval, and then smiling when I nodded my head at him.

I first met him when I was an undergraduate, when he came for a reading at Reed College. He leaned over as he shook my hand, and whispered that James Merrill would like me very much. I read Galway's poem, "The Bear," to my English 2260H (Honors Intro to Poetry) students earlier this semester. Most of them stared at me afterward, looking a bit stunned and silenced by the gravity of its words and music. I don't think they had ever encountered a poem like that, or even knew if this poem, about, among other things, a bear hunter who eats bear turds in order to survive in the Arctic, was even a poem at all. I think now, many weeks later, they know.

And that's the important thing: Galway's poems still live on with us and thrive, even if the poet has passed on.

He will be missed.

Hope you're well, my friend,


Stuart

April 28, 2014

I haven’t posted on this blog for a few months because I’ve been so busy with my novel, Miss Emily Book of Spells, but I just got back from New York City, where I presented a paper to a small but enthusiastic audience at the Transitions and Transactions II Conference, and I thought it’d be a good occasion to break my silence (and I promise, dear readers, to post most often). In spite of an ending to the trip marred by institutional indifference, incompetence, negligence, and even dishonesty on the part of the MTA, which caused my wife and I to miss our flight home, the trip was very successful and very fun.

The focus of the The Transitions and Transactions conference centers on literature and creative writing pedagogies, and its audience is college professors at the community college level, or university professors like me who specialize in undergraduate instruction. My talk, which the chair of my panel, Irwin Leopando, Co-Director of the Composition Program at LaGuardia Community College, described as “beautifully written,” was entitled Later in the Early World: Positing a Changing Role of Poetry and Creative Writing in the Undergraduate Curriculum. Though updated, it’s based on the chapter that my colleague, Terry Hermsen, and I wrote for the International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, and which was published by Springer in 2007. For those in the audience who asked me where they could get a copy of this paper, and for those in the wider world who may be interested, I am pasting in my talk below. I hope you enjoy it.

All best,

Stuart

Later in the Early World: Positing a Changing Role of Poetry and Creative Writing in the Undergraduate Curriculum

Toward the end of his introductory college-level textbook, Poetry the basics, Jeffrey Wainwright notes the “growth of creative writing in all parts of the English curriculum. Its best practice,” he writes, “is always… in concert with reading, and its principal project is… to add an expressive field to study, to enable students to discover the possibilities and the difficulties of working in language, and to understand the process and nature of literary texts by means other than the ‘reverse engineering’ of analysis and criticism” (213).  

This is a good and succinct statement defending the use of creative writing, not as an end in itself so much, but as a process that can actively enable students to enter into, engage, and learn about literary texts in ways that go beyond the traditional pedagogical means that have been the standby of the English curriculum for so long.

But almost fifty years before Professor Wainwright suggested an alternative to the “‘reverse engineering’ of analysis and criticism,” a man named Elwyn Richardson, an educator at a rural school in New Zealand, was already hard at work, or should I say “hard at play,” putting into practice just this sort of alternative pedagogy. In his classic text, In the Early World (1964), Richardson, documenting his work with elementary school age students at Oruaiti School in northern New Zealand in the early 1960’s, seems to have had an intuitive awareness of how creative writing could function in this way in the classroom. He brought poetry back into the hands of his students and linked it to the whole of their study, demonstrating how creative writing can become a bridge for integrating and uniting a whole arts-based curriculum. Not an advocate of “anything-goes-just-express-yourself,” Richardson tried to develop in his students a responsive yet critical eye - for the shape of an argument, a piece of clay pottery, the line of a lithograph, or the turn of a poem that they were studying. Writing became an art and art became a way of making meaning. As such, by placing creative writing at the center of a web linking all of his students’ learning, he anticipated many of the discoveries concerning the impact of the arts on student learning that have emerged in subsequent years.

One of Richardson’s methods was to make a habit of requesting what he called “ten minutes thought writing to a set topic” (p. 108), the strategy of free-writing that scholars like Scott DeWitt have documented as being so important to the invention part of the writing process (DeWitt, 2001). “We found it useful to write about unfamiliar things that were still close enough to our experience to warrant some attention” (p.111), Richardson writes. He describes how one student chose to write about “Feeling a Pine Cone in my Hand” (p. 111), or how others described seagulls or the sounds of engines (pp. 110-111), or the “Warmth of the Kitchen” (p. 108). The same year that Richardson’s book appeared, J.R.R. Tolkien published his now famous essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” in which he explains his notion of “Recovery” (1964, p. 46), one of the “prime values,” he argues, that fairy-stories offer. We “need recovery” (p. 57), he explains. “We should look at green again and be startled anew [….] Recovery […] is a regaining – regaining of a clear view” (p. 57). Recovery is exactly what seems to have been occurring among the students in Richardson’s classroom at Oruaiti School.

Of course, using creative writing as an inherent part of the curriculum did not begin exclusively with Richardson; however he did, at that time, produce one of its most sustainable models. But there were progenitors. Several decades before Richardson, for example, Louise Rosenblatt, who taught English Education at NYU for many years, and before that at Brooklyn College, as way back as 1938 suggested a way of responding to literature that involved a “personal sense” (p. 60), “an unself-conscious, spontaneous and honest reaction” (p. 67). In a similar vein and around the same time, anticipating the metaphor revolution in the late 20^th century, in which theorist after theorist, (such as Giles Fauconnier & Mark Turner, 2002; Roman Jakobson, 1971; George Lakoff & Turner, 1989) demonstrated that societies are structured around signs, symbols and embedded meanings, Robert Frost, in his more plain-spoken way, claimed in his essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes”:

Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history […]. (p. 39)

Taken together, Rosenblatt and Frost suggest that poetry in particular and creative writing in general can be the vehicle, the medium of expression by which a personal, unself-conscious, honest reader response can be integrated into a “proper poetical education” (Frost, .p. 39),” one which enables us to delight in bodily rhythms that in their roots go back to the heartbeats we first heard in the womb; a process of knowing, and of understanding ourselves and of empathizing with others beyond ourselves; and a metaphorical, attentive way of living more completely in this world and in our experiences past and present. At some level Elwyn Richardson seems to have understood this.

     One of the most valuable aspects of Richardson's work in In the Early World is his demonstration of how the use of creative writing can lead to an appreciation and understanding of other disciplines and vice-versa. after one nature study class, for example, where students wrote short creative pieces about wasps, he concludes: 

Unless the interest had been deep, unless the subject had been followed in fullness, and unless there had been a certain amount of the thrill of achievement through making advances on the basis of certain criteria, the impression, and hence the creative expression, is unlikely to be good. Nor will the process be of interest to them. (1964, p. 168)

Richardson suggests it's a two-way process: Using creative writing helps to enable the "deep interest" into a subjet, which allows it to be "followed in fullness," to the successful outcomes we all wish for in our lessons. Likewise, such engagement leads to greater creative expression in the writing. 

     Others have followed Richardson in the decades after In the Early World’s publication in 1964, writers and teachers who have utilized creative writing in a number of ways to ignite that “deep interest” on the part of students as they engage a particular subject. Christian McEwen and Mark Statman, for example, in their book, the alphabet of the trees: guide to nature writing (2000), provide a comprehensive follow-up to Richardson’s work in nature study. Based on the idea that writing enables the two-way process described above, McEwen and Statman claim that creative writing in the teaching of natural science is a vital activity, since “most students [….] see nature as ‘Other’” (xv). An introductory essay by Gary Snyder suggests a context for the book, an intimate interdependence between the “wild tune” (Frost, 2003, p.984) that Robert Frost claimed poetry to be, and nature: “Wildness […]”, Snyder writes, “the essential nature of nature [can best be articulated in] language [… that] does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects is own wildness back” (p.1). 

Besides being a vehicle to help in the teaching of the natural sciences, another natural ally for creative writing is the teaching of the humanities, of course.  One very productive use has been in the teaching of history. For example, Kane and Rule (2005), writing in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, report that “there is a convincing literature base showing that teachers in a variety of content areas [are using] poetry to enrich their curricula” (p.658) and cite as an example one teacher who wrote, “I have found that poetry is a particularly useful and engaging vehicle for revealing the complexities of a historical moment” (p.659). In a similar vein, Cynthia Stokes Brown (1988), in her book, Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History, shows how students might write oral histories and how teachers might assess such projects. Likewise Bill Roorbach (1998), in his book, Writing Life Stories, explains how students can create detailed memory maps of their earliest neighborhoods (pp. pp. 18-34) as they work to uncover and collect material toward the writing of memoirs, and Mary Fortunato Galt (1992), in her book, The story in history (Writing your way into the American experience), uses creative writing to help students enter the lives and times of historical people and events. “When we study history at arm’s length,” she writes, “with more emphasis on facts than on individual human responses [… t]he past remains distant, not quite real, safe.  But when we invite imagination to enter our study of history, we open the door to character, emotion, irony, and the magic of metaphorical language” (p. 165).

            The visual arts are another natural ally of creative writing, and Richardson (1964, pp. 49-70) nicely documented his work in the visual arts over three years at Oruaiti school. At the end of that time he concluded, “I believe that the final success of most of this work came from the forging of a close association of the child’s thinking with some actual experience or observation” (p. 49). What his students were discovering was what Tonya Foster and Kristin Prevallet call, in their anthology of essays of the same title (2002), the “third mind”: “Listening to works of art,” they write in the introduction, “and participating in a conversation with them can produce […] [t]he ‘third mind,’ […] a state in which something new, or ‘other,’ emerges from the combination that would not have come about with a solo act” (p. xv).

An assignment that I’ve developed with Terry Hermsen, a colleague of mine at Otterbein College, called ”X Marks the Spot,” works, I think, in just this way. It’s a writing assignment that asks students to spread out in a gallery space, picking out one of the pieces of art that “hits your eye.” It then asks each student to look at their choice, or a portion of the piece of art for a set length of time, and then to follow a series of writing prompts, such as writing “three lines, 8 words long, each one beginning with the word, It’s’” (encouraging them to feel free to cut out the “it’s later on in revision). The next prompt asks students to write another two lines that begin with the phrase “What I see (or hear, or taste, or smell)…”and then, when they’ve written those lines, to feel free to cut out the “What I see is” or similar type phrase; and then to respond to the piece in terms of opposition, to write the opposite of what they experience as they observe that work of art. Then, on a signal, students are asked to move two pieces of art to the left, say, or to  “Look around and find the ‘piece’ that is most nearly ‘opposite’ the “piece” you just wrote about,” and then another set of writing prompts apply as they respond to this new work of art, and so on.

“X Marks the Spot,” is an assignment in active and engaged observing that not only works when students are collected in a gallery space, however. “Riffing,” that is to say, creatively improvising or changing up an assignment to meet altered pedagogical and rhetorical needs among students in a class, in this case riffing the writing prompts of  “X Marks the Spot,” I have successfully used this assignment not only with my college-level students, but with middle and elementary school students, as well, not only in a gallery, but walking around downtown or in a prairie, or merely sitting in class and rooting about in one of the Norton anthologies. Other colleagues have riffed on this assignment at the college level to teach subjects as diverse as biology and semiotics. It all depends on how you riff the writing prompts.

Likewise, David Morice (2002), in his book, Poetry comics: An animated anthology, also uses the visual arts to teach poetry, by taking well-known poems and resetting them within the field of play of illustrated comic strip panels. One of my colleagues at Ohio State, Nathan Wallace, has used student-created comic strip panels with great success to teach British Literature. The distillation that occurs when students have to choose which particular text and what particular picture should go with that text in a comic book panel, one of a series of such panels that they are creating, encourages, he finds, a level of close reading and engagement with primary texts (Beowulf, say, or a poem by Tennyson, or a scene in a play by Shakespeare) that he’s not easily able to duplicate through other more traditional means of teaching.

In other books (1995, 2001), Morice encourages students to physically play with the materials of language through the use of cut outs and other strategies. Similarly, Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge (1996)  encourages the use of cut-out words, what she calls “creating a wordpool” (p. 10), not only as a way of collecting or “banking” words to come back to and use, but as an aid in the revision process, since the words and phrases, collected on what she calls “word tickets” (p.14), are easy to rearrange.

Wooldridge’s book, Poemcrazy (freeing your life with words), details her experience as a teacher in the California Poets-in the-Schools Program. She finds that “writing poems can help kids shift the way they see themselves” (pp. 97-98), helping them articulate positive self identities. Mark Statman, in his book, Listener in the snow (The practice and teaching of poetry) (2000), has also demonstrated that the use of creative writing in the classroom can help students engage issues such as identity, as well as an understanding and engagement with other cultures, something that Julio Marzán, in Luna, Luna: Creative Writing Ideas from Spanish & Latino Literature (1996) and Lorenzo Thomas, in Sing the Sun Up (Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature) (1998), have also nicely demonstrated. All of these writers and educators utilize creative writing assignments to help students along paths that lead them to that sense of Tolkienesque recovery, as they “shift the way they see themselves.”

            In his “Forward” to In The Early World, John Melser writes:

In much discussion of teaching there is an assumption that a radical difference of kind exists between work which is variously called ‘creative’, imaginative’, or ‘expressive’ – work which is about children’s feelings and sensations – and, on the other hand, work which is distinguished as ‘factual’ and which concerns the ‘real’ or ‘outside’ world [….] It seems evident from the work at Oruaiti that the distinction has little relevance to the work of children [….] Because the children were not required to make a divorce between the parts of their experience, a divorce hostile to their intuitive grasp or situations, they could bend to their work with an enthusiasm and a degree of concentration which ordinary schooling never touches. (Melser, 1964, pp. v-vi)

Writing fifty years ago, Melser hit the nail on the head. Poetry helps heal this “divorce” between the “imaginative” and the “factual.” And when we use Creative writing exercises and assignments as part of a pedagogy of play to not only to teach students those process-level skills of reading and writing, but also to reinforce knowledge-based skills more broadly throughout the curriculum, to assist us in our goals of helping students to develop, synthesize, and organize thoughts, feelings and understandings about a subject, we are fostering the spirit of Elwyn Richardson, so that this marriage between the “imaginative” and the “factual” can prosper. At the same time, as we move ever later into the early world, we are engaging in that process of recovery, of, to paraphrase Professor Tolkien, regaining of a clearer view, that perspective of openness and receptivity so necessary for productive inquiry at all levels of teaching and learning.

Thank you.

Stuart Lishan, The Ohio State University (lishan.1@osu.edu) 

                                                            Works Cited

DeWitt, S.L. (2001). Writing inventions: Identities, technologies, pedagogies. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books. Print.

Foster, T. &, and Prevallet, K. (Eds.) (2002). Third mind (Creative writing through visual arts).  New York: Teachers & Writer’s Collaborative. Print.

Frost, R. (1966). Education By poetry. In H. Cox & E. Lathem (Eds.). The selected  prose of Robert Frost (pp. 33-46).  New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. (Original work published 1931.) Print.

Frost, R. (2003). The Figure a Poem Makes. In J. Ramazani, R. Ellmann, & R. O’Clair (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 1 (pp. 984-986). New York: Norton. (Original work published in 1939.) Print.

Galt, M.F.  (1992). The story in history (Writing your way into the American experience. New York: Teachers & Writer’s Collaborative. Print.

Jakobson, R. (1971). Language in relation to other communication systems. In Selected writings, Volume II (pp.697-708). The Hague: Mouton. Print.

Kane, S., & Rule, A. (2004). Poetry connections can enhance content area learning. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 47, 658-669. Print.

Lakoff G., & Turner, M. (1989).  More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lishan, Stuart, and Terry Hermsen. “Later In The Early World: The Changing Role of Poetry and Creative Writing in the K-12 Classroom.” International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, Part 1. Ed. Liora Bresler. AA Dordrecht,

     The Netherlands: Springer, 2007. 623-637. Print.

Lishan, Stuart (2012). X-Marks the Spot, wtr. ’09. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from https://carmen.osu.edu/d2l/le/content/10796640/Home?itemIdentifier=D2L.LE.Content.ContentObject.ModuleCO-5366255.

Marzán, J. (Ed.) (1997). Luna, luna: Creative writing ideas from Spanish & Latino literature. New York: Teachers & Writer’s Collaborative. Print.

McEwen, C., & Statman, M. (Eds.). (2000). The alphabet of the trees (A guide to nature writing).  New York: Teachers & Writer’s Collaborative. Print.

Melser, J. (1964). Forward. In Richardson, E., In the early world.  New York: Random House. Print.

Morice, D. (1995). The adventures of dr. alphabet: 104 unusual ways to write poetry in the classroom & the community.  New York: Teachers & Writer’s Collaborative. Print.

Morice, D.  (2001). The dictionary of wordplay.  New York: Teachers & Writer’s Collaborative.

Morice, D. (2002). Poetry comics: An animated anthology: New York: Teachers & Writer’s Collaborative. Print.

Richardson. E. In the early world. New York: Random House. 1964. Print.

Roorbach, B. (1998). Writing life stories (How to make memories into memoirs, ideas into essays, and life into literature).  Cincinnati: Writers Digest Books. Print.

Rosenblatt, L. (1938/1968). Literature as exploration. New York: Noble and Noble. Print.

Statman, M. (2000). Listener in the snow (The practice and teaching of poetry). New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Print.

Stokes, C.L. (1988). Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History. ). New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Print

Thomas, L. (Ed.) (1998. Sing the sun Up (Creative writing ideas from African American literature).  New York: Teachers & Writer’s Collaborative.

Wainwright, Jeffrey. Poetry the basics (2^nd Edition). New York: Routledge . 2011. Print.

Wooldridge, S. G. (1996).  Poemcrazy (freeing your life with words).  New York: Three Rivers Press. Print.

January 7, 2014

For my current novel project, Miss Emily's Book of Spells, a novel based on the premise that there are magical spells embedded in Emily Dickinson's poems, I've been checking out magic spell websites like www.spellsofmagic.com. This is a cool website for the Wiccan types among us and it has tons of cool spells, like this one that you'd use when you want to conjure and chant up a storm (http://www.spellsofmagic.com/spells/weather_spells/rain_storm_spells/13723/page.html). The instructions ask you to gather in a circle with three of your friends. Specifically, you're supposed to "gather in a circle and visualize what it is that you are trying to accomplish. Keep the image in your mind's eye and say the spell":

We call Emena, Mother of all created.
We call the Wind, Son of our Mother.
We call the Earth, Sister of the wind,
We call the Father, Fire and Soul mate.

Hear us Spirits of the world,
Hear us cry your names.
Let wind and earth meat,
Let a storm spring forth.
We call Wind and Water (repeat this seven times)
Let us meet in perfect harmony,
An it harm none
So mote it be.

The note below the spell mentions that the "name of the Goddess depends on who you see as the Mother Goddess. It was written by a close friend of mine and she preferred the Goddess Emena. I substitute if for Isis."

So that's a pretty cool spell. Only thing, with all due respect to that "close friend" who wrote the spell above, I don't feel or find much magic on those words. Now I fully accept that this could be a failing of my part, magic-challenged as I may be,, but when I compare the magic in the spell above  to the magic that I find in the words of  Emily Dickinson, it's not even close.

For example, here's a storm spell I sculpted  out of Emily Dickinson's poem # 224:

Awful Tempest mash the air -                                                           
Clouds be gaunt, and few -
Black – as of a spectre’s cloak
Hide Heaven and Earth from View!
Creatures chuckle on the Roofs -
Whistle in the air!
Shake your fists -
And gnash your teeth -
Swing your frenzied hair!

Ah, I find much more magic in those strong, active verbs like "mash," "Shake," "gnash," and "Swing," and in those metaphorical "gaunt" clouds, and in that figurative language, "as of a spectre's cloak." For me that's where the magical power in the language lies.

But that's just one spell, you might say. Okay, let's try another. Now that we've conjured up the storm, let's stop it. Here are the full instructions on the spellsofmagic website for stopping a rain storm (http://www.spellsofmagic.com/spells/weather_spells/rain_storm_spells/10418/page.html):
When it is getting dark, Chant this with faith and concentration:

"Gods of power, Gods of might,
I bid you now, stop this plight,
Stop the rain, we need no more,
Let it fall, nevermore."

Put a lot of feeling in stopping rain from falling from the clouds and it will not fall, it will simply move to an area away from where you are and then fall.

But again, I have to say, with all due respect, compared to the magic I find in Miss Emily's words, this spell for me falls piteously short. Check out this stop-the-rain spell that I sculpted out of Dickinson's poem # 1703:

Wind, draw off                                                                          
Like hungry dogs
Defeated of a bone
Through fissures in
Volcanic cloud --
Yellow lightning shine!

Again, we have that brilliant figurative language, this time of the wind being like "hungry dogs/defeated of a bone." Great! For me there's no contest. When it's magic I need, give me the words of Miss Emily every time!

Wishing you all a wonderful, joyful, healthy, magical, and spell-bindingly beautiful new year!


S.D. Lishan

December 16, 2013

The good folks at Bedford St. Martins sent me an e-mail last week, asking me to sign a permission form to use my little piece of memoir, "Winter Count, 1964" for the eleventh edition of their college level Reader for writing classes, Literature, The Human Experience, Reading and Writing. The piece has been in the last few editions of this excellent Reader, edited by Richard Abcarian, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen, and I'm honored to be in it. "Winter Count, 1964" is in the "Love and Hate" nonfiction section and I'm right behing "1 Corinthians 13," by Paul, and "No Name Woman," by Maxine Hong Kingston. Not bad company! I posted "Winter Count, 1964" back in September when I talked about an e-mail exchange that I had with an MFA student about the "truth" of creative nonfiction, but so you don't have to go hunting for the that post, I'm going to go ahead and repost the story below.

Winter Count, 1964

      When Sherri Luna rammed Jerry’s Kruger’s crew cut head into the handball court wall at Kester Avenue Elementary school on February 15, 1964, I knew she loved him, a swirling butch, embarrassed sort of love that denied itself even as it was expressed. She loved him the way a 9-year old beefy-ankled, white socked, scuffed-up saddle shoed, valley girl Chicana loves a drawly red necked, red haired, red freckled, cracker son of a Pentecostal preacher from Oklahoma who wouldn’t let his kid slow dance in Miss Arlington’s A4 class, not because Miss Arlington was a wafer thin woman with a 2-foot high beehive hairdo that made her look like an alien from some planet of white porcelain doll people with blood red lips and finger nails long and sharp as steak knives, but because Jerry’s preacher pa didn’t believe 9-year olds much less anybody should be cradling another’s body in their arms and breathing softly on their necks as they swayed to music. Nosiree, Sherri Luna didn’t love Jerry that way, the slow dance, fandango way, where holding someone close is as sweet and natural as lying on your back in the back yard watching the clouds and letting the sunlight kiss your cheek, but she loved him just the same. I knew it when I first saw her rub her body up against Jerry’s blue jeans as she slugged him in the arm by the water fountain the first day he came to class that winter. Plus, she didn’t want to slow dance, not because she didn’t believe in it, but because she was constitutionally against any request that curled out of Miss Arlington’s pouty lips.

      “Just do it, honey.”

      “No.”

      “Please?”

      “No, I said!”

            So, “Ka-Chunk,” went Jerry’s head, cradled in Sherri’s gentle headlock when Miss Arlington was putting on a scratchy waltz on the mono record player that Ricky LaConte had lugged out onto the playground after lunch. Ricky, a fat kid who liked to have us punch his stomach in the boy’s room until his bubbly flesh was filled with blotches like lesions, liked to do such favors, his arm shooting up like a rocket ship out of its socket every time Miss Arlington asked with those pouty lips just who would like to do this or that for her. And that’s a sort of love, too, don’t get me wrong, only it wasn’t Sherri Luna’s sort of love. She needed to touch the someone she loved, even if she didn’t understand what the yearning in her heart was asking her nine-year old body to do.

            So, “Ka-Chunk.”

I was breathing my face into Melinda Coates’ blond ringlets, getting hairs twisted in my glasses’ hinges and imagining myself in heaven and then feeling embarrassed for even thinking such a slack-brained thing as that when I heard it.

            “Ka-Chunk,” echoing into the mauve plastic handball court wall that rose out of the blacktop playground surrounded by bungalows, chain-link fence, and honeysuckle rustling in the winter breeze like our breaths on one another’s necks as we danced.

            “Ka-Chunk.”

            “That was fun,” Jerry laughed. “Do it again,” with “again” drawled out so long, so slow, that it slobbered and dribbled out of his mouth into a dopey-grinned, three-syllabled, shrieky “a-gaaa-in.”

            “Do it a-gaa-in.”

            Poor Ricky. He was right next to me, swaying sort of sad-like, out of time and out of step with Louise Dolan. He wanted to be in that headlock, too, I guess. Maybe he thought that the bumps on his forehead would go with the blotches on his stomach. I don’t know, but I know this. Sheri would have none of him. Ricky wasn’t Jerry in any way, shape, or form and Sherri Luna loved Jerry. That was that, end of the story. We were dancing that Strauss waltz you see in 2001 when the ship docks with the space station, and I swear I saw her gently bend over as pretty as you please and nibble out a tongue-licked hickey on that sun-burnt, freckly red neck of his when she thought no one was looking. We stared and stared. Not even the creamy touch of Melinda Coates could keep me from it. No one in Miss Arlington’s A4 class in 1964 had ever seen such a thing.

And then she counted to three. And then she did it again.

And then she did it again. And I swear she didn’t miss a beat, not a one, not a single one.

One of the things that I love about the piece being in Literature, The Human Experience are the "For Analysis" questions at the end of the story. I was never very good at answering those sorts of questions when I was a student, and I at first I was amused when I read the questions for my piece. But on further reflection I found them pretty smart and intriguing. Here they are:

1. Why does Sherri Luna bang Jerry's head again the ground? Why does he ask her to do it again?

2. Why does Ricky let people punch him in the stomach? What about the 'blotches' left by the punches parallels the hickey Sherri leaves on Jerry's neck?

3. A "winter count" is a story or oral history used by certain Native American tribes to mark individual years in tribal history by retelling an event from that year that is memorable or significant. Why do you think the incident retold in this essay is significant enough to mark its year?

"Winter Counts, 1964" is in large part about the inarticulate need  kids have of expressing physical intimacy towards one another, and these "For Analysis" questions get at that, as does the first of the two "Writing Topics" prompts that follow them:

In what other way do people (of all ages) manifest the combination of desire for and fear of physical intimacy. Reflect on ways in which you and people you have observed or read about deal (or don't deal) with this tension.

By now I'm thinking these editors are really smart! One often writes, as Frank O'Hara wrote, on one's "nerve," and, while we might intuit these larger ideas in our poems and stories, we often don't fully articulate them as we're writing. At least, I don't. And so I'm happy, and also a bit humbled, that Messrs. Abcarian, Klotz, and Cohen have made these connections in my work.

In between the "For Analysis" questions and  the "Writing Topics" prompts are two "Making Connections" questions, in which they ask students to compare my story to a poem by one of my favorite contemporary poets, Galway Kinnell (I wrote my senior thesis on his work when I was at Reed College many moons ago), and one of my favorite fiction writers, Toni Cade Bambara. I thought that was pretty cool, too, as was their final "Writing Topics" prompt:

"'Ka-chunk,' went Jerry's head" (para. 6). Write a short essay in which you relate an incident or a moment, using the vivid transcription of sound."

It all makes me wonder, how would I answer these smart prompts and questions? How would you?

I hope your writing is going well this week.

All best,

S.D. Lishan

December 12, 2013

I've just finished reading and grading the last of the portfolios of poems written by students in my Poetry Writing II class this past autumn semester at The Ohio State University. It was a good class, and I love my students, but all semester long I feel that I've been haranguing them about their lack and misuse of punctuation in their poems. Some of my students, of course, use punctuation well, eloquently even, but others seem to take it as a point of pride and of their right of personal expression to eschew the use of commas, periods, and the other tools they have available to them in their grammatical toolbox.

I'm all for their right of personal expression, of course, and I've told my students so. And we've talked about poets who eschew the use of punctuation and who write beautiful and extraordinary poems that have no punctuation at all. For example I've shared with them poems like this one by W.S. Merwin, from his book, The Vixen (published by Knopf, 1996), on p. 69:

Vixen

Comet of stillness princess of what is over
     high note held without trembling without voice without sound
aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets 
     of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught in words warden of where the river went
     touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished
window onto the hidden place and the other time
     at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting
in the moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born
     you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me
you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you
     even now you are unharmed even now perfect
as you have always been now when your light paws are running
     on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you
when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer
     when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars
from the creeds of difference and contradictions
     that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications
as long as it lasted until something that we were
     had ended when you are no longer anything
let me catch sight of you again going over the wall
     and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures
guttering on a screen let my words find their own
     places in the silence after the animals.


On might even say that the lack of punctuation in Merwin's fine, fine poem is crucial to what Frost called "the sound of sense"; that is, in this poem in part about the slipping away from the "creeds of difference and contradictions" that separate the "I" in the poem from the female fox s/he espies in the moonlight, part of that process of becoming a part of that something greater beyond the self is to slip away from the halters of punctuation, that peculiarly human invention.  Punctuations, with its pauses and divisions, plays no part in the more interconnected world that the "I" in Merwin's poem desires, a place where his/her "words find their own/ places in the silences after the animals."

But such was not the case for some of my students. Too often the lack of punctuation hindered the sound and sense of their poems. For these students, as they talked about it in class, punctuation was a hassle, a bother, something that, because it needed to be attended to, prevented them from fully entering the unfettered worlds of personal utterance that they so ardently desired. These students kept to these beliefs even as I pointed out what they were giving up by avoiding punctuation: the ability to create and control their meaning, to create more nuance, to be more expressive in their tone, to have, in effect, an even more powerful personal utterance.

As an example of how punctuation, even at the level of an addition or deletion of a humble comma, can make a difference in a poem, I shared with my students Robert Frost's "Stopping  by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Here's the version of the poem that you can find on the Poetry Foundation's website (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171621):

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.


To the Poetry Foundation's credit, this is the version of the poem that was printed most often during Frost's lifetime. But after his death in 1963, Frost's publisher, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, brought out a collected edition of his poems, The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. This was the edition that most general readers of Frost encountered in the years after the great poet's passing, and the edition from which many anthologies took their texts of Frost's poems. However, as the poet Donald Hall wrote in a now famous article,  "Robert Frost Corrupted," which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in March, 1982, "the text is corrupt: the editor has altered the rhythm of Frost's poems by repunctuating them." You can find the whole of the article reprinted online at the PN Review (http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=6740>).

Hall cites Lathem arguments that he was regularizing and tidying up the punctuation in Frost's poems for the general reader, but Hall is still critical on the grounds that Lathem messes up the music of Frost's poems. Here's an excerpt from the sixth paragraph of Hall's article:

Frost cared for the sound of verse. He went so far as to claim that words existed in order to make noises: 'Words are only valuable in writing as they serve to indicate particular sentence sounds.' Frost seemed not to have cared much for assonance, lush vowels rubbing against each other. He cared most for the cadence of talk, with the nudge and thrust of intelligence in pace and pitch. In his work he continually referred to a semantics of noise. 'Remember,' he told us, 'that the sentence sound often says more than the words . . . . 'There are tones of voice that mean more than words.' Another phrase he liked was 'the sound of sense', the way cadence makes sense and sense makes cadence.'. . . if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skilfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre.'

Nicely put, but Hall is most critical of Lathem's changes to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," particularly of the comma that he added in line 13 of the poem, not so much because the sound of the line was altered, but because the meaning was. Hall writes, "Frost wrote the line 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep'. We do not find this line in The Poetry of Robert Frost. Instead we find: 'The woods are lovely, dark, and deep'. To say that the woods are 1) lovely, 2) dark, and 3) deep differs considerably from claiming that they are lovely in that they are dark and deep. In Frost's line, the general adjective 'lovely' is explained by the more particular modifiers 'dark' and 'deep'. In the editor's line, the egalitarian threesome appears to be parallel, but of course it is not -- it is as if we proclaimed that a farmer grew apples, Mclntoshes, and Northern Spies.

In other words, Frost meant "dark and deep" as an appositive, "a word or group of words that renames the noun or pronoun that comes before it," as Lynn Quitman Troyka and Douglas Hesse write on p. 341 of Quick Access, Reference for Writers. "Dark and deep" are what "lovely means, Frost tells us; they're not separate from it, as Lathem's grammatical change claims. Big difference!

I think it's precisely the lack of that comma between "dark" and "and" in line 13 that helps make "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" so great. It enables the poem to rise into the realm of deeper, more profound meaning. To be "Dark and deep" is to be "lovely." Lovely. Happily, Hall's article had an effect, and, as the Poetry Foundation's example above shows, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is now more often than not printed as it was in the poet's time. Also lovely.  

And so I've been thinking of my dear students and of Donald Hall and Robert Frost, and of poor, misguided Professor Lathem, and I've been on the lookout for beautifully punctuated sentences in my reading this week. I could of course go to favorites like Jane Austen, but here's one more recent, in the first volume of Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative, which I've been having a gas reading to help me bone up on my Civil War history as I work on my novel, Miss Emily's Book of Spells.  In this paragraph on pp. 166-167 that ends section 2 of the book, Foote is describing the end of the first year of the war, 1861, and of how, as the year ends, the two presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis are peering out their respective windows one hundred miles apart, keeping their vigil on the war from opposite directions. "At the far ends of the north-south road connecting the two capitals they strained to see and understand each other, peering as if across a darkling plain," Foote writes. And then he writes the following two sentences:

Soon now, that hundred miles of Virginia with its glittering rivers and dusty turnpikes, its fields of grain and rolling pastures, the peace of generations soft upon it like the softness in the voices of its people, would be obscured by the swirl and bank of cannon smoke, stitched by the fitful stabs of muzzle flashes, until at last, lurid as the floor of hell itself, it would seem to have been made for war as deliberately as a chessboard was designed for chess. Even the place-names on the map, which now were merely quaint, would take on the sound of crackling flame and distant thunder, the Biblical, Indian, Anglo-Saxon names of hamlets and creeks and crossroads, for the most part unimportant in themselves until the day when the armies came together, as often by accident as on purpose, to give the scattered names a permanence and settle what manner of life the future generations were to lead."

Two sentences, the first 84 words, the second 74, with their clauses building upon clauses, showcasing Foote's affection for the people and of the land, sentences parsed by commas that lead each of these sentences onward to their next clause and poetic utterance, and that help the sentences become a road of connections, too, like that road connecting Washington and Richmond with Lincoln and Jefferson at its ends. Foote reminds us, if we needed it, that there's a sound and sense, as well as a poetry, in prose, as well.

And so I've been thinking about punctuation in my own work as well, too, as in this little poem that I've been working on recently, as the cold has descended on much of the country these past few weeks:


Midwinter

Since noon you've sat

on a sofa's pillow,
like a drowsy cat
by a sunlit window.

You stretch and purr

and walk about,
inmate in stir
who can't get out.

Outside it snows;

the wind bends
its touchless touch

toward what it knows:
the endless ends,
its hush-less hush.

Just as that comma in Frost's 13th line in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" caused such consternation in Donald Hall, I've been fretting on the comma in the 13th line of my little poem. What indeed does the wind know in midwinter? And is what it knows truer with the comma, or without it? "The endless ends/ its hush-less hush," or, as the comma suggests, is "its hush-less hush" that which comprises "the endless ends"?  Not quite what the definition of "lovely" is perhaps, but still beguiling I hope.

Which version do you prefer?