Emily Dickinson

Appreciating Those Who Write – Timothy Greek

~ carlamcgill ~ 33 Comments

Interested in the habits of other writers, I usually ask those who write about their methods and practices. I like thinking of the many ways that writers practice their craft, the environments they create in which to write, the types of materials they use, and their routines for getting started. I carry the images with me when I sit down to write, and it helps me to realize again how we find our way through the process in so many different ways.

Timothy Greek is a long-time close friend of ours (he and my husband have been friends since their high school years participating in theatre performances), who has had the same writing practice throughout his lifetime. A poet, now in his sixties, he has always carried around several 3 x 5 cards on which he jots down the lines to poems as he thinks of them. I recall him in his twenties, usually carrying a science fiction novel that had 3 x 5 colored index cards tucked away in between the pages. You can imagine how many cards he must have now.

It may take some time before they emerge in typed form on a regular sized page, and when they do, the result is as distinctive as his method. Here is a poem from our reading in Redlands, California with Luanne Castle over at Writer Site after her first collection, Doll God, came out:

Detached Virtue

The wine of Jesus had legs.
Though in his day,
They would say
It would float on water
Like a healing oil
At that osmotic line
Between heavenly fruit and earthly salt.
Only his feet could crush
The two into one.

You can see that he enjoys word-play. Here’s another:

Honest Ambiguity

So far, comme ci, as above
So good, comme ça, so below

Hear the confluence of listening
Sans the clutter of contiguous ubiquity’s froth

Swells clarity’s pulse,
The wealth of the heart that is open.
The rhythm of above and the beat below.

So far, comme ci, as above
So good, comme ça, so below

Choosing swine and judging pearls
Ah the whetting stone, used to guide the edge,
not thrown or hurled.

Intent, unlike the truth-bearing blade, is whole
Undivided by dichotomy.

So far, comme ci, as above
So good, comme ça, so below.

A regular at Starbucks, Tim is an almost daily customer. Even in our twenties, we met at coffee shops to discuss poetry and literature, and if I could recall the “enfoldments,” Emily Dickinson’s term for epiphanies, that we had during our conversations, I would record them in a book. Actually, I remember many of his comments as I used to jot them down. One of them comes to mind now: “It is short, aggression, but creativity is long and beautiful.” Coffee plays a large role in his regular process, though in the main, it is his original mind that perpetuates such interesting poems. Recently retired, he will be writing more frequently now that he has the rich gift of an abundance of time.

Here we are at a party, toasting to poets throughout time! Feel free to post your habits, practices, customs.

 

 

 

 

Poetry and a Clean Surface

~ carlamcgill ~ 23 Comments

Wistful, melancholy, looking off into the distance. All I want, I tell my husband, is a clean surface in the middle of a clean world. I say this because while I abhor clutter, I often have much of it on the surfaces I use to write. My desk in the study, the dining room table, a wooden card table I sometimes set up just to be out in the living room. Piles of files. Mail. Envelopes. Photos. Labels. Folders. Books. Computer cords. Notebooks. The photos, especially, seem to have multiplied supernaturally. I was just looking for one or two, and now they are heaped upon the table like mounds of leaves.

I did find the one I was after. I took it while my mom and I were in Boston. We decided to visit Amherst to tour the home of Emily Dickinson (because who doesn’t like her?). We took the bus during a snowstorm, and when we got to Amherst, the town seemed hushed, like a scene on a Christmas card. Here is what the Dickinson property looked like that day.

DickinsonHouse

We were part of a small group touring the Dickinson grounds and home. I could almost believe in ghosts when we saw her bedroom with her small writing table where she wrote close to a thousand poems, only found by her sister, Lavinia, after Emily’s death.DickinsonroomPhoto taken from http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Back to the clean surface. The line comes from a favorite poem by Billy Collins, included in his collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001). The poem is called, “Advice to Writers”:

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

When I chatted with Billy Collins after his reading at Azusa Pacific University a few years back, I told him it was my favorite poem as he signed my book, and I think he understood my conflicts intuitively. My friend, Holle, another Collins fan, was with me, and here is a photo of them both.

CollinsHolle

It is National Poetry Month, the 20th anniversary celebration, started by The Academy of American Poets, and on their site you can find ways to join in. If you enjoy poetry, it might be fun to take a few moments and peruse their website, perhaps lingering over a poem or two by one of your favorite poets. I belong to the organization, and I enthusiastically support them for their efforts to permeate culture with poetry.

They suggest memorizing a poem. I must mention here our Aunt Pat, who at nearly ninety years old can recite many of the poems she memorized as a child. She recited Longfellow’s poem, “A Psalm of Life,” at the funeral of her sister (my husband’s mother) in December, as that poem was a family favorite. Their grandfather had been a “recitator” in the pubs of Ireland, an elocutionist, who read to them as they sat around the fire in the evenings, most often reading poetry, the Bible, or a Shakespeare play. Here is Aunt Pat, enjoying her vacation after reciting Robert W. Service’s poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee.

IMG_2226

It is also the month of NaPoWriMo, in which participants write a poem a day. They were inspired by NaNoWriMo, where participants write a novel during the month of November every year. Lots of poets are contributing to NaPoWriMo, so if you are interested in reading their poems, visit the blogs of James Rovira and Jennifer Barricklow. Tim (a close friend) and I celebrated early, writing a poem a day in the month of February, although I only made it to day 7, and I think he has caught up in April with an additional dozen or so poems. I have to catch up to that by tomorrow morning when we meet to do Tai Chi and review the last week’s writing, and I can only get started at about 11 pm when we get home from seeing Dana Gioia, another poet, who is speaking tonight in Pasadena. So no time now to clean the surfaces.