S.D. Lishan, Tales from a Writing Life: November 2013

Winter is coming.

Today, two days before Thanksgiving, winter storms have rummaged through the heartland and are moving east. Thanksgiving plans will be thrown into a tizzy for much of the country as snow and icy rain delays plane and car travel. Where I live in Ohio, between two-four inches of snow is predicted tonight. The last few nights the temperatures have fallen into the teens. So even though it’s still officially autumn, it seems a good to ponder writing and winter, which leads me to this week’s blog post, and an assignment that I concocted for my poetry-writing students during the cold days of January 2012.

It’s an assignment that takes students out of their comfort zones, literally. It makes them go outside in the winter, hang out alone, and listen, and write. It’s called “’For the Listener, who listens…’ Listening to Winter.”

The title of this writing assignment comes from that famous poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” and the preparation for the assignment involves the students gathering around in a group outside, bundled up against cold, and listening to Steven's poem. The preparation also includes listening to poems about winter by Robert Frost and Tomas Transtromer, as well as an lovely excerpt from a little prose piece by Jane Hirschfield about listening, in which she focuses on that famous passage in Song of Myself, section 26, in which Whitman declares that he will do “nothing but listen.” And then the students listen to that section of the poem, as well as a wonderful poem by Mark Svenvold about listening to the racket of sound coming from a ceiba tree in a forest in the Yucatan. ‘’

And then the students are sent out to find a special place, what for each of them might be, or become, a sacred space, or at least a place that might be inclined to lean toward that status. At Ohio State where I teach, we spread out among the acreage on our campus’ restored prairie. It gives us plenty of space to spread out and be alone, to listen, and then to write.

I’ll show you the assignment in a moment, but first, here’s one of the poems that arose from it when I first taught this assignment. It’s by a very talented young poet named Tim Giles:

uninhabited wind

The planet breathes.
Inhales, then gone.
It breathes.

There is nothing
but the hum of it.
Within vacant terrain.

The deep breath
passes through leaves
of bare trees.

Impossible to fathom
a single image
of the phantom.

Stop the breath
to let
the sunset be serene.

by Tim Giles

I especially love the first three stanzas of Tim’s poem. I can almost feel the silence pressing in as the wind rustles through the barren branches of the oaks and the sycamores that stand near the creek that edges the prairie, the stems of asters and goldenrod in the prairie itself, the curled-up fists of Queen Anne’s Lace blossoms, and the lonely rattle of crinkly burdock leaves. I told Tim that his poem is like a Tomas Transtromer poem meeting Wallace Steven’s snow man. It's an impressive poem, I think.

Here’s the assignment that inspired Tim’s poem. Whether you’re a teacher, a writer, or both, feels free to riff on this assignment in any way you like in order to make it more useful to you.

Thanks for listening.

S.D. Lishan

“For the listener, who listens…” Listening to Winter

Quotes of Context and, Hopefully, Inspiration

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the Pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

By Wallace Stevens

Midwinter

A blue light
radiates from my clothing.
Midwinter.
Clattering tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled across the border.

By Tomas Transtromer, Translated by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

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.

by Robert Frost

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy EveningStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

From "Section 26 of "Song of Myself" and Whitman’s Listening”
By Jane Hirshfield

Whitman is a poet of all the senses, but listening, it seems, engaged him with special force: many of his work's best-known passages set down what had come to him through the ear. No gesture of style so pronounced can be accidental, and I would guess that the turn toward hearing was a necessary counterweight to Whitman's extroversion. To listen means to be quiet oneself. It is an action demanding inaction, requiring reception. For a person whose genius was kinetic, whose artistic ambition was virtually all-consuming, to listen was to renounce the bounding realms of ego. The ears hear what comes from outside the self. We cannot choose to open or close them, and the sounds of the earth come to us, entering our bodies and touching the ears’ attuned bones and hairs. Whitman’s listening, then, is a kind of synecdoche for his passion: through it he invites inside himself all of existence…..

I Hear America Singing” holds one example of Whitman’s listening. Equally powerful is section 26 of “Song of Myself.” The halfway mark in that work’s liturgical year, it begins, “Now I will do nothing but listen.” Recorded in the lines that follow are the “bravura of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,” the sounds of stevedores’ labor and laughter, of a judge gravely, reluctantly, pronouncing a sentence of death. The passage moves from the sounds of the natural and industrial worlds to those of violoncello, tenor, and a soprano whose voice “wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them.” Whitman asks no less ardor of us. His omnivorous, compassionate insistence that we live as his companion “cameradoes” in the fullest pitch and range of existence—that is the irresistible music of Whitman, for me, the song of all of ourselves.

Section 26 of Song of Myself,

Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,
clack of sticks cooking my meals,
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of
work-people at their meals,
The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,
The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing
a death-sentence,
The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the
refrain of the anchor-lifters,
The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking
engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights,
The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two,
(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,)
I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music--this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

By Walt Whitman

Ceiba Tree, Petac, Mexico

Sunlight falls like cash through the canopy,
One wants to say “filters down,” but really it’s a cascade
of plenty, a rich comedy in which each leaf’s increase
is summoned and rewarded. Q: Can a leaf be as big
as a bus? A: Yes, it can, in theYucatan.
The grackle struts through its portico. Above and all around
the whistle and hoot, the high glissando, the bell and echo,
the flatted fifth, the celestial chitter, the honk, the joke note
on a whoopee cushion, the clarion rising above the clatter,
the squelch and squirch and screech of a manic communique
keeps slipping, like background noise, into the broad cloth
of a morning above us and in us, like some momentary shaft,
of sunlight on the floating seed of a ceiba tree,
that hangs like this and like that in the shadows and subaltern greens.
Meanwhile, the doves, who hoard all vowels,
pass it to one another among the trees: the sky, the sun,
and the great limestone rivers of the dead, are one.
                                  -- Mark Svenvold

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy EveningStopping by Woods on a Snowy Ev

The purpose of this exercise is to help us pay attention, to focus on our attentiveness, to use another sense other than sight, to learn to rely on our journals, and to find some pearls among those icicles out there. J

So here’s what we’re going to do:

We’re going to go outside, with our journals and something to write with.
We’re going to spread out.
We’re going to quiet ourselves.
Like Tomas Transtromer, we’re going to close our eyes.
We’re going to listen.
Write down what you hear.
Possible beginnings:

i. I hear…

ii. I close my eyes…

iii. Or, like some of the examples above, you may want to start out by looking first and describe what you see (“Sunlight falls like cash through the canopy,” “A blue light/ radiates from my clothing”). Don’t be afraid to use figurative language (those things like metaphors and similes).

And like Mark Svenvold, with his “whistle and hoot,” his “chitter” and “honk,” his “bell and echo,” and “whoopee cushion,” try to use active verbs to describe what you’re hearing. Be specific.

I’ll remind you again. Be specific. Don’t say something uselessly general like, “I hear the glories of winter,” or something similarly gloppy. Get down, dirty, and dangerous in your listening.
At some point – you’ll know when – open your eyes and look with the same attention you brought to your listening. Feel free to touch, too. As Elizabeth Bishop says, “Write it!”
These will be rough lines, for, as Diane Thiel says in our Open Roads book, “journal entries are far from final pieces” (7). But it will be a start. When we’re done, we’ll come back to class, rearrange, perhaps cut, perhaps change, and go from there, hopefully warmer in the knowledge that we’ve written some terrific lines.

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Poetry Foundation.
n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.

Giles, Tim. “uninhabited wind.” Message to Stuart Lishan. 25 Nov. 2013. E-mail

Hirschfield, Jane. “Section 26 of ‘Song of Myself’ and Whitman’s Listening.”
The Virginia Quarterly Review Spring 2005: 48-49. Print.

Stevens, Wallace. “The Snow Man. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. 9-10. Print.

Svenvold, Mark. “Ceiba Tree, Petac, Mexico.” The New Yorker. 14 Nov. 2011,
34. Print.

Thiel, Diane. Open Roads (Exercises in Writing Poetry). New York: Longman,
2004. Print.

Transtromer, Tomas, “Midwinter.” The Sorrow Gondola. Trans. Michael McGriff
& Mikaela Grassl. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2010. 69. Print.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself, Section 26.” Walt Whitman (Complete Poetry
and Collected Prose. New York: The Library of America. 214-215. Print.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

S.D. Lishan, Tales from a Writing Life

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

November 26, 2013