Following the Brush

Yesterday I took David Shumate’s IWC class, “Following the Brush,” which was about where poems come from, how to cultivate the posture of the of the mind that invites them. We talked about the importance of letting your guard down in the first phase of writing a poem, messing around, not working toward a specific goals. "Think of yourself as a witness to the poem coming," Dave said. "Recognize that the poem has an intelligence of its own." 

The early process is prelinguistic: impulse, image, development of a notion, he said. Not words. The proper state of mind is: I don’t know what to do with this. Let’s see where it goes.

“Follow the brush” is a Chinese term that describes this early process. The brush is the tool, the implement. It knows better than we do where to go. You have to allow the brush to emerge. This was a new term to me, one I like very much.

In this state, you are the “pilgrim of the poem,” a representative of the real “I.” The pilgrim disengages immediately from the “me,” allowing the pilgrim to discover vicariously what might happen. The pilgrim is utterly willing, naïve, stupid to go out on these pilgrimages in the first place. It disengages hesitance to let the “I” do things it wouldn’t actually down. 

I like the idea of the poet as a pilgrim very much, too.  And the idea that being in this state gives you entry to the territory of myth, where the ordinary world filtered through the prism of the imagination.

Early in the class, Dave asked us to describe where/how we get into the posture of mind that allows poems. I misunderstood, sort of, what he meant—and instead of describing my writing place, I tried to recreate how poems most often come to me (when they come, which I wish happened more often.)

Fall day, last leaves, yellow against the blue sky.

I’m sitting in a glass building, considering

where poems come from and notice a dog outside--.

red as the fallen leaves, straining against the leash.

A woman in a blue jacket—blue—hurrying after him.

It’s always blue that stops me. Blue moving

Across the landscape, becoming a poem.

Right now I’m thinking now about “blue.” The blue of the Italian paintings I love: the blue of the Madonna’s robe, the blue Italian sky. And “View of Delft.” Vermeer’s blue that captivated me for years. Early in the class, I said that when I write a poem it’s usually about something I want to own, to keep—but know I can’t. Looking at whatever it is the way I need to look to make a poem reconstructs that thing in my head in a way that makes me feel like I own it. 

Which is, of course, what I’m always writing about: trying to keep, to hold something I love (a painting, a person, a time, a place). When the little poem (draft) came yesterday I thought it was the opposite of that: something totally random. Now I see it captured a moment that trigged a few thoughts about my own process that I wanted to keep:

1. Whatever blue is often delivers me to the posture of mind that invites a poem to come.

2. Dogs don’t need to write poems; they just are.

3. Which, (of course) paradoxically, puts the poet in the posture of mind that produces the brush to follow--then somehow, magically, become the brush herself.

4. Ergo: the poem on the page is made of who we are…when we aren’t.

These ideas aren’t new to me. But it was lovely to revisit them by way of a poet I deeply admire, such  a delight to follow a brush that made them present themselves in a new 

way--and carry me to the holy place that invites poems (stories, novels) to come.

Learning Italian Slowly

It’s barely six weeks before I leave for Art Workshop International in Assisi, and I have been procrastinating about getting to work on my Rosetta Stone Italian course. It’s a brilliant program, and I can tell that I really could learn Italian if weren’t such a slacker.

The other problem is that I am such a word person I'm horrified at the prospect of butchering Italian in the way I know I will if I actually do get up the nerve to speak. Still, travel is always better when you at the very least have the means to give the language a try. It’s not writing like writing a novel, for Pete’s Sake! The words don’t have to be perfect. I just need to learn enough so I can communicate in the most basic way when wonderful opportunities arise.

Like this one, which happened in 2000 when when I spent a month in Montone, a little Umbrian hilltown.

It was a beautiful day (of course) and I was taking a long walk, listening to the Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense,” which always makes me happy and was particularly making me happy that day because I already was so happy in that place. I walked down a long hill, past a farm where there was a kennel with thirty or so dogs, most of them hunting dogs. Spotted, sleek. They barked and howled in their cages as I walked past. I waved at an old lady out on the balcony of the farmhouse. She waved back. I walked on, past grape arbors, the bushes flattened against wires so that the sun would touch the greatest possible number of leaves. Then I walked past a line of olive trees.

I saw an old man coming up the road toward me. It was blistering hot outside, but he was wearing long pants, a cardigan sweater, and a fedora. He walked with a cane, but steadily.

I said, "buon giorno" when we met.
"Ah, buongiorno!" he said, and stopped. He asked me a question.
"Non capisco," I said. I don’t understand.
But he was determined to have a conversation--and we did!
He asked, pointing at the town at the top of the hill, if I was staying in Montone.
"Si," I said. "Bellisima." Beautiful.
He beamed. "Umbria e bellisima," he said. He asked me where I was from.
America, I told him.
"Bambini?" he asked, indicating the size of a small child with his hand.
"Non, ragazzi." I said, indicating bigger children.
"Yo sono escrivo," I added, getting a little braver. I am a writer.
"Romanza?"
"Si." Novels. I tried to say I meant to put Montone in a novel, but I don't know if he understood.
"Buon caminare," he said when we parted. Good walk.
"Buon caminare," I responded.
He hesitated before moving on. “Tres gambi,” he said, smiling, pointing to his cane. Three legs.
I was thrilled to get his joke. I tried to say he was a teacher, teaching me Italian, but couldn’t remember the word for "teach." I said (something like) you are good for my Italian.
"Si," he said, smiling.
"Grazie," I said. "Arrivederchi."
"Ciao."

I was so pleased with myself for listening to those dumb tapes I’d listened to for weeks in the car. I’d surprised myself knowing more than I thought I knew. It gave me the courage to go to the bakery that afternoon, say, "Buongiorno. Posso avere due panini, per favore." I understood when the baker said, "Mille lire." I paid, took my bread. "Grazie. Ciao."

Then I went to the post office, stepped up to the window, and held up my two postcards addressed to the USA. "Due francobolli, per favore," I said. Then stamped my cards and put them in the postbox.

Seriously, is "francobolli" not the best word ever? Try saying it! You'll love the way it rolls off your tongue.

So, okay. I need to do this! And when I feel overwhelmed, I'm going to read and reread this prose poem by David Shumate.

LEARNING ITALIAN SLOWLY

I learn three words each day. It’s been seven months now and perhaps I could carry on a conversation with a Sicilian child. If she spoke slowly. In present tense. And only about pencils and dogs and cheese. Sometimes I feel my new Italian self growing inside me. He’s a little man who gesticulates as he speaks. He rides his bicycle to the market to buy eggplant, anise, and porcini. Then delivers them to his elderly mother. In the afternoon he plays bocce with the older men. The children mimic the way he whispers to himself. The grimaces he makes with his face. When the moon comes out he slicks back his hair and sings beneath the window of the woman he loves. What a sight he is. Down on one knee. His arms outstretched. So willing to make a fool of himself. Over and over again.

So, okay. It's time.

I'm going to boot up my Rosetta Stone software, put on my nifty little microphone device and ask my new, growing Italian self to speak into it. Wearing spike heels and a short, low-cut red dress. Riding my Vespa through Rome, helmetless, my long black hair flying out behind me. Talking on my cell phone.

Begging Bowl

In April, David Shumate, a prose poet, gave the first in a series of lectures about craft at the Writers’ Center of Indiana. Not craft, as in “how-to,” but craft in the deepest sense: where writing comes from and how it is made. In his lecture, “No Maps, No Rules,” Shumate talked about the process by which his poems are dreamed into being out of silence. The poet is an architect of silences,” he said. Poets are hostages to silence; poems are the frames they make around the sacred space that only silence brings.

He writes in the early morning silence. “I wait and I write what comes to me,” he said.

I haven’t written many poems, but what he said made sense to me when I thought about how the poems I had written came to me, as if out of nowhere. It felt like magic, but it wasn’t. I was listening for them. I just hadn’t realized it.

Poet Marianne Boruch says poems come from the begging bowl, which is another way of saying the same thing. The poet humbly begs the silence to give her a poem; it is her sacred task to find meaning in what she is given.

Fiction, however, does not feel that way at all. Especially novels.

Last week, the novelist Patricia Henley gave the second lecture in the craft series, and during the Q&A session afterwards, someone who’d heard Shumate speak described what he had said about silence and asked, “Is it like that for you, too?”

“God, no!” she said—and described waking every morning to scenes unfolding in her head, voice speaking, compelling her to get out of bed.

Yes, I thought. It feels exactly like that.

Poets step into the silence and dream a poem into being; novelists step into an ongoing dream, alive, clamoring for their attention.

Where’s the begging bowl then, where’s the silence?

Once, working on a novel up in Michigan, I drove over to Empire, the little town near Sleeping Bear Dunes where the book was set. Walking the beach, listening to the mix of Sixties music I’d made that evoked my character’s past, I passed a young guy hauling rocks—some the size of watermelons—from the shallow water to the shore and setting them in little piles. On my way back, I saw that he had begun to form them into words. I stopped and looked, couldn't figure out what they were.

“What are you spelling?” I asked.

He grinned. “Will you marry me?”

I hadn’t been able to read the words because I had been looking at them as if he'd spelled them toward the lake. But I saw them immediately when he explained that he’d placed them to be seen from a lookout perch on the high dune that rose up from where we stood. He meant to take his girlfriend there that evening, he said.

By noon the following day, this small gift from the cosmos had made its way into my novel. This happens fairly frequently to me, especially when I’m in the middle of something, totally engaged.

Sometimes the nature of the gift is like the words on the beach: obvious, immediate, a puzzle piece I didn’t know I was looking for that makes everything fall into place. Sometimes I notice something in passing (or maybe I didn’t notice at all) and I’m surprised when, years later, it emerges—exactly what I need.

This is the magic of creative process, which, it took me a long time to learn, can’t be separated from the idea of craft. It’s all true.

You listen. You teach yourself to be fully alive to your surroundings. Poet or novelist, you keep your begging bowl at the ready. You take what the cosmos gives you and dream your own world into being.