The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Mechanics

  • Seaweed Cabbage

    Seaweed at Refugio_4135518072_m

    What was that she said about the skin
    on his hands and forearms,
    seaweed cabbage
    boiling on stove, “That looks bad.”

    Blue dark wet orange oil damp oars drift awake
    dawn dress coffee smoke brown falls upon brown
    slow walk down curved sandy path to the water
    empty nets sea grass tired boats in fresh tide wait.

    Surf sound spooning shingling
    smooth rocks growing on his arms
    that opposite real rocks grow larger
    with each receding tide.

    He thinks about love water
    work moon sleepy fog
    legislated blather laughter
    unrequited smiles.

    He’s not an especially proud man
    unless provoked unnecessarily.
    He has a few books on a shelf
    in the kitchen he touches evenings.

    He thinks severity and frequency
    as all men do capacity purpose
    of hymns folk songs and surf music
    and silence at the end of the path.

    He’s no interests but cars and guitars
    stars in her eyes sand on her skin salt hair
    gloss on her fingernails white
    daisies between her wiggling toes.

    Wave after wave forgotten fishes
    swim past her hands sleeved
    sheathed knives
    embraced recorded let go.

    At the cannery he never did learn
    to stand still that fisherman’s value
    he no longer wanted his friend
    who now fished a desk in Admin.

    The smell of tar and turpentine as he cleaned her feet
    shampoo that smelled like bubble gum
    steel shavings and lead chips the plumber left behind
    carob seeds rotting on fog wet boardwalk.

    Ocean fish air and orange crabs on ice at wood wharf stalls
    after shave and Brylcreem Saturday Night adjectives
    bingo sock hop carnies and a new noun in town
    cool morning breeze on an angel’s moonburned skin.

  • A New Denouement Comes to The Eidolon

    A moon rose pure placebo the day
    the dismantlers came to The Eidolon.
    A puppeteer hidden in a hard hat
    worked sticks and wires from a crane,
    his rude yellow wrecking ball
    a scraping bald knuckle
    -hyphenating-
    the yore tony a la mode pink marquee:

    –

    I

    D

    –

    –

    O

    N

    They hadn’t seen a movie there in years.
    Instinct drove to the location
    now hairy with graffiti and wounded windows
    boarded up. “Turn left there,” she pointed ahead,
    and here in the V of what used to be
    a local lemony clichéd Hollywood and Vine
    hung the vertical sign of rainbow chasing lights
    popped and glum, now a moon at noon.

    -OW -LAY-N-

    The wrecking crew worked amid yarns,
    a thrilling tale of piracy, or chivalric ennui,
    beach tar and feathers and a damsel tied to a rail.
    Though no one was actually tied down,
    back in the days of pretend, when make-believe
    waved sun and sea of the bottle bags of beggary,
    and kids danced to the possibilities of being free.

    SW-P -EE-

    They drove across town to watch the razing
    crew with crowbars and heavy metal
    tear down the slumping palatial playhouse,
    where teens once held hands,
    listening to rock and roll bands,
    and before them, kids spent summers in buttery
    fingered and fizzy toothed afternoons
    matinee rapt in spinning film,
    a veteran vaudeville player changing reels.

    -HIS SAT-R–Y

    Nothing could save now the last-gasp plight
    of this episodic imperilment, and the moon fell.
    The two cold cats sat on the bus stop bench
    across the street from the deconstruction,
    a couple of stoned Cupids deprived of sleep,
    sagely reminding one another to be brave
    and behave, lest they be kicked out again
    like the day they adlibbed Beatles
    and lit bee dough up in the loge.

  • Haiku on Dog Cloud Piano for Guitar and Voice

    Dog Cloud

    Press yes to play here the balls fall for free hear them drop and roll english orb orbit for texting eddies
    no to go away in pool hall heaven chalk up your cue stick break like a big bang syllabicating
    maybe to come back no need for quarters green felt of grass field consider the balls men who cut their tongues
    some day some day soon 8 ball in corner in the universe across the table gaming without words
    tonight not that moon pocket that was quick full of dandelions stars stripes black and cue ball white as the moon
    semiquantitatively microdirectionally yet who can’t get no no no unsatisfactorily twisting down the back alley
    sociodemographic ideologically seven syllable word count so what is the so what here pseudointellectual
    imperceptibility suspicion grows this is all pseudopoetically irresponsibility what can I say you  reading
    waxing then waning away autobiographical compartmentalization social media neither social nor mediational ideas
    unsystematically superficiality huge lack of self confidence just give us the artifice we’ll know what to do with it
    without rhyme or reasoned sense oversimplification he likes unconventional individuality cosmopolitanism
    syllables all connected he seems influenced by John Cage and that explains anything we seem to be moving to microcommunication
    We appeal to fruit the nature within seeds meat juice and skin figuratively and then the real fig
    banana orange grape raisin ugli miracle passion fruit worms flies mildew self-preservation
    and vegetables puritanism free love free fruit gloss dogs and cats and kids seal it with a kiss
    cherry red pepper baked raspberry pie apple cloudberry running toward the surf rub it in your palm
    garlic and onions coconut olive oils and buttery fat when it is cold now back to the sea

    Press yes to play here                                                                                                the balls fall for free                                                                                                hear them drop and roll                                                                                                english orb orbit                                                                                                for texting eddies

    no to go away                                                                                                in pool hall heaven                                                                                                chalk up your cue stick                                                                                                break like a big bang                                                                                                syllabicating

    maybe to come back                                                                                                no need for quarters                                                                                                green felt of grass field                                                                                                consider the balls                                                                                                men who cut their tongues

    some day some day soon                                                                                                8 ball in corner                                                                                                in the universe                                                                                                across the table                                                                                                gaming without words

    tonight not that moon                                                                                                pocket that was quick                                                                                                full of dandelions                                                                                                stars stripes black and cue                                                                                                ball white as the moon

    semiquantitatively                                                                                                microdirectionally                                                                                                yet who can’t get no no no                                                                                                unsatisfactorily                                                                                                twisting down the back alley

    sociodemographic                                                                                                ideologically                                                                                                seven syllable word count                                                                                                so what is the so what here                                                                                                pseudointellectual

    imperceptibility                                                                                                suspicion grows this is all                                                                                                pseudopoetically                                                                                                irresponsibility                                                                                                what can I say you are right

    waxing then waning away                                                                                                autobiographical                                                                                                compartmentalization                                                                                                social media neither                                                                                                social nor mediational ideas

    unsystematically                                                                                                superficiality                                                                                                huge lack of self confidence                                                                                                just give us the artifice                                                                                                we’ll know what to do with it

    without rhyme or reasoned sense                                                                                                oversimplification                                                                                                he likes unconventional                                                                                                individuality                                                                                                cosmopolitanism

    syllables all connected                                                                                                he seems influenced by John Cage                                                                                                and that explains anything                                                                                                we seem to be moving to                                                                                                microcommunication

    We appeal to fruit                                                                                                the nature within                                                                                                seeds meat juice and skin                                                                                                figuratively                                                                                                and then the real fig

    banana orange                                                                                                grape raisin ugli                                                                                                miracle passion                                                                                                fruit worms flies mildew                                                                                                self-preservation

    and vegetables                                                                                                puritanism                                                                                                free love free fruit gloss                                                                                                dogs and cats and kids                                                                                                seal it with a kiss

    cherry red pepper                                                                                                baked raspberry pie                                                                                                apple cloudberry                                                                                                running toward the surf                                                                                                rub it in your palm

    garlic and onions                                                                                                coconut olive                                                                                                oils and buttery                                                                                                fat when it is cold                                                                                                now back to the sea

    Press yes to play here the balls fall for free hear them drop and roll english orb orbit for texting eddies no to go away in pool hall heaven chalk up your cue stick break like a big bang syllabicating maybe to come back no need for quarters green felt of grass field consider the balls men who cut their tongues some day some day soon 8 ball in corner in the universe across the table gaming without words tonight not that moon pocket that was quick full of dandelions stars stripes black and cue ball white as the moon semiquantitatively microdirectionally yet who can’t get no no no unsatisfactorily twisting down the back alley sociodemographic ideologically seven syllable word count so what is the so what here pseudointellectual imperceptibility suspicion grows this is all pseudopoetically irresponsibility what can I say you are right waxing then waning away autobiographical compartmentalization social media neither social nor mediational ideas unsystematically superficiality huge lack of self confidence just give us the artifice we’ll know what to do with it without rhyme or reasoned sense oversimplification he likes unconventional individuality cosmopolitanism syllables all connected he seems influenced by John Cage and that explains anything we seem to be moving to microcommunication We appeal to fruit the nature within seeds meat juice and skin figuratively and then the real fig banana orange grape raisin ugli miracle passion fruit worms flies mildew self-preservation and vegetables puritanism free love free fruit gloss dogs and cats and kids seal it with a kiss cherry red pepper baked raspberry pie apple cloudberry running toward the surf rub it in your palm garlic and onions coconut olive oils and buttery fat when it is cold now back to the sea

  • One Night At Flobe’s Pizza Below Frye’s Apartment

    Whale Moon
    Potato Bear Claws
    Buskers on Hawthorne
    Neighborhood Poetry Post
    Grand Avenue Beach
    Flashing Lights

    Flobe’s Pizza below my friend Frye’s apartment one night last April was puzzlingly rowdy, so we climbed down to see what was up. The place was steaming, crowded, people sitting on the ceiling, hot cheese slipping, falling pepperoni pieces and mushrooms, while a string band fiddled. The open mic was live, with Pepper, Herb, and Fava’s trio in line on the sign-in sheet to perform Joe’s “Surf Surge.”

    Frye and I occupied empty seats at the end of a rambunctious table in the corner, and Joe got in line to order some pizza and orange soda. The porthole sidewalk window next to our table was occluded with steam, the string band zipping, and a couple without a table was dancing, one with the pizza the other with the beer. Suddenly, Willa and Raymond took the stage with ukulele and tambourine.

    They sang of an old photo of Joan Didion sitting in a Corvette, holding a cigarette. A young man riding a piebald pony rode up to the takeout bar and ordered a veggie pizza with extra garlic and sauce. He fed his pony a breadstick. Joe came with the orange soda and said the pizza was a forty-minute wait. He poured us each a glass from the pitcher, sparkling yellow, not as orange as we had expected.

    Joe sat by the porthole orb. He saw flashing lights, paisley globes filled with silver and gold light. The bubbles flew like electrified parameciums escaping down the side of the window, along its tarnished curved brass edge. Big Dada announced Joe’s pizza would not be ready until September. By then no one would be reading poetry any longer than a tweet, and that before they realized what they were hearing.

    By the time Joe’s name was called (“Pizza ready for Joe!”), he had grown a pony tail and Frye had gone bald. Pepper, Herb, and Fava were on tour somewhere in the Midwest. I had tired of waiting and moved back down to Southern California to be near the beach. Every day I ride my bicycle along the Strand, watching the surfers come and go without a thought for pizza or poetry.

  • A Brief Statement on the Comma

    San Juan Islands FerryThe comma, which gives one pause; the comma which does not give one pause; the comma, at which point one pauses; the comma, a cockroach in the corner of the closet after all the clothes are cleaned out and the conversations are forgotten, hollow and cold; the comma that defies erasure, the comma that sticks; the comma that permits addition but sometimes subtracts; the comma a foot soldier, a drone wearily drove, the first key to fade; the comma a banana peal only a curmudgeonly grammarian with scruples would slip on; the comma a red light where turning right on the red without stopping is ok; the commas lined up like cars waiting for the ferry to return to cross over to the islands:

    ,,; ,, ,,; ,, ,,; ,, ,,; ,, ,,;   .     .       .         .           .            .            

  • Two Hep Cats and the Cool Comma

    Punctuation Marks on Beach Trip Holiday

    Scamble: I met a comma at the bus stop this morning. … Did you hear what I said? I said, I met a comma, at the bus stop, this morning.

    Cramble: Be wary of commas. They’ll be on you like fleas.

    -Did you know the apostrophe is the feminine form of comma?

    -Band of punctuation pirates, the lot of them. Some witch of an exclamation point once hexed me into a pair of parentheses.

    -Yes, life is hard enough without being labeled a parenthetical expression.

    -Imagine impossible to break away from the vice grip of your parents.

    -The bus stop comma seemed a cool enough little fellow.

    -What was he up to?

    -Just pausing, to say hello.

    -I once dated an apostrophe, a beach volleyball aficionado, as I recall.

    -Cool comma wasn’t going to the end of the line, Line 15, though, where the periods have apparently gentrified the neighborhood, the so-called Pearl District.

    -No more comma splices. A few fragments, still.

    -What’s the point of periods, anyway? We never really stop we get up and go again. He got off at the very next stop, the cool comma did.

    -Why I prefer the express bus no all of that stop and go busyness biz.

    –Punctuation implies patience.

  • On Description

    A Cat Egg
    Where did that egg come from? What egg? Why are you sitting on an egg? What egg? Cats are not supposed to sit on eggs. You see eggs? I see nine eggs in the carton. I see nine missing eggs in the carton. Where are the missing eggs? “The future is in eggs,” Eugene Ionesco said, his name a perfect description of an egg. That does not even begin to describe this situation. Do you want to say situation, or predicament? A cat egg is like a mare’s nest. Let’s blow this joint before someone asks what makes a cat purr.

    Embedded in most descriptions is a prescription, instructions for viewing, boundaries stipulated and promoted. What might look at first glance objective enough turns around and around on an axis of theory.

    Qualifications: from a distance; in the waning light of a neon-like moon; on a particularly hot, steamy day, out of season. Adjectives and adverbs cloud the way. References.

    How do we describe description, the process we use to describe, carry across? And why bother? Why describe something others are free to experience for themselves?In any review, isn’t there an implicit recommendation based on a prescription of what is being described, how it ought to have been done, or at least how otherwise it might have been carried out?

    A description of a painting, a Rothko: What is blue, size, warp; from what distance, in what light? Does our description of the Rothko change if others come into the room? The paintings are on the move, constantly changing, even as the museum makes every effort to still them. Description is a distillation of a sensory happening. McLuhan advised touch is the most involving of the five senses. When we paint, we use all five senses at once: paint odors; the brush splash sounds as we touch bristles to canvas. We take a break for lunch and taste oil in our bread. But are all descriptions sensory? What happens when we describe a process, an idea. Must description use words? What does a cat’s purr describe? Can we describe a cat’s purr in a painting?

    Easter Eggs 2014
    Egg Culture

    We come, then, naturally enough, to the egg. We are reminded of Duchamp, his hidden object, if it is an object, which gets us nowhere. We need to get inside the egg for a full description, but once we crack the egg open, it’s not the same egg. We decorate our description.

    It’s easy enough to say that descriptive writing is language that appeals to one or more of the five senses. But words can’t capture experience. Where is the description that activates our taste buds, such that we taste the bread and wine even as our fast continues? Is all description vicarious? We write down, distil, drop away. Description is at the distal end of experience.

  • Verlyn Klinkenborg: “Several short sentences about writing”

    In the beginning was the word, and the word was a sentence.
    And the sentence was an assignment.
    And the assignment broiled in the brain,
    that alchemical brewpub of doubt.
    A devil came near, cooing, “Plagiarize, my dear;
    allow me to serve the sentence for you.”
    A good angel appeared: “Depart, ye fiends of papers for free.
    Ditch, web dwellers of rehearsed research.
    Begone, you bad teachers of bad writing.
    Students can do this on their own.”
    And singing Blake’s proverb, from
    The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
    “No bird soars too high if he soars
    with his own wings,” the angel dropped a book
    into the waiting writer’s lap, and flew away.

    What book did this fresh, good angel drop, which might bargain anew all the how-tos with writing students and their teachers both in and out of academia? Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing (Vintage, April 2013). Klinkenborg challenges schooled approaches consisting of “received wisdom about how writing works” (Prologue). Klinkenborg turns the traditional writing teacher on his head and shakes the bulges out of his pockets. All sorts of found, useless stuff drops out, lightening the student’s load. Klinkenborg speaks to the writing “piece,” considers genre arbitrary and binding. He eschews genres and schools and rules. But not grammar and syntax. Loves the fragment, not the run-on. His style is controlled by “implication.” Implication is a good sentence’s great secret, its ability to suggest thought. His sentences often illustrate their own attributes. The book as a whole is a study and a reflection on that study of the sentence. The book’s prose is cut into lines that emphasize what’s necessary to read a sentence for its syntax and rhythm and space. Some may see this as mere trickery, and maybe the book is a slow, idiosyncratic, quiet rant. His discussion of “rhetorical tics,” the bane of Freshman Composition that remains through graduate school and beyond like an old scar, is funny and sad (118). If you’ve ever completed any assignments on your own, you might recognize yourself in his descriptions of a web of false writing. I did. But I also saw many hunches I’ve had over time validated: writing is learned while writing and in no other way; a good writer is a good reader, a good proofreader, but also a good general interest reader, which means not having to have something that “interests me” before being able to read it, because good writing creates its own interest; teachers have done so much damage to students that many students would rather risk plagiarism than think and write on their own.

    There are contradictions, difficult to resolve. Klinkenborg says, on page 57, “You don’t need to be an expert in grammar and syntax to write well.” I agree. The apparent contradiction is that he then spends the next sizable section of the book on what we should know about grammar. “You do need to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs,” he says, but he doesn’t say why, nor does he try to explain that difference (though the answer might be found in an implication I missed). If we don’t need to know grammar, why spend time on it? This is an important question. And of course we do know grammar. We learned grammar when we learned to speak. But we may not know how to talk about grammar or to read for grammar or syntax. And some knowledge of parts of speech and what we think of as grammatical terms might be important to certain kinds of reading. He wants us to find words in a dictionary and to notice etymology and parts of speech. This is sound. But some of his precepts seem vague, even New-Agey. Explaining implication, he says it’s “The ability to speak to the reader in silence” (13). Well, John Cage did speak to the reader in silence. And Klinkenborg’s many references to the way we were taught to write in school are at risk of becoming a kind of straw man argument. Has no one tried to dig through the dried up crap of fabricated rules before? But the straw man here, if there is one, might be personified as an industry of text books, so the challenge is worth the charge. Klinkenborg may not be an archangel delivering a sacred text, but his book clears the air for a spell.

    A colleague suggested the Klinkenborg book, and I’m glad to have read it and to recommend it for general interest readers, writing teachers at any level, and students at any level, anyone, in short, in or out of school, interested in reading or writing. Yes, Klinkenborg wants to talk to the whole writing world about sentences. He wants to non-specialize the traditional approaches to thinking about writing, remove bogus rules from circulation, instill faith and trust in aspiring readers and writers.

    Several short sentences about writing is divided into four major sections and many subsections. The book (204 pages) does not wear its skeleton on the outside. The main sections are as follows: 1 – a short prologue; 2 – the central text (146 pages), the sentences arranged in cut lines, like verse (opposite of what we’ve come to expect from prose); 3 –  “Some Prose and Some Questions,” eleven short prose excerpts by established writers, followed by a section inviting analysis of the pieces through reflection suggested by specific questions Klinkenborg provides; and 4 – Some Practical Problems, 33 pages of short sentences from student writing, with short comments by Klinkenborg. It’s not a text book, but it could be used as a text. But that would require, perhaps, changing the mindset of an instructor, or even of an entire English department, or at least calling upon instructors to reconsider traditional “received wisdom about how writing works,” or how the teaching and learning of writing might work.

    Here’s an example of a wonderful Klinkenborg sentence fragment: “The faint vertigo caused by an ambiguity you can’t quite detect” (55). This is quoted unfairly out of context (is there any other way to quote?), but who is “you” here? What kind of reading experience must one have to get dizzy reading a poor sentence? And here’s an example of the way he challenges the august teaching community: “…The assumption that logic persuades the reader instead of the clarity of what you’re saying” (117).

    By implication, at least, Klinkenborg’s sentences touch on many of the topics usually covered in composition classes: research, authority, argument, outlining, chronology and sequence, style, ambiguity, rules, rubrics, writing models, imitation, rhythm, revision, editing, meaning, figurative language, transitions, reading, reader, clarity. The sentences wit and cut new paths through this overgrown field.

    If you are into marginalia, this Klinkenborg book is a lepidopterist’s field day. I found myself chasing sentences around the book as if they were butterflies. My copy is a mess of notes. I was inspired to try my hand at an original sentence. Here goes nothing: Thoughts without sentences are like flowers that never bloom, each tightly wrapped petal a word waiting to become part of a sentence to be smelled, to be read or heard in a single breath. Klinkenborg would say it’s too long, ambiguous, cliched, doesn’t breathe. And it doesn’t make sense. Do we hear through breathing? Sounds like something a Woody Allen character might say, the audience erupting in laughter, the irony on you. “The most subversive thing you can do is to write clearly and directly…” (132). Easy for him to say.

    Related Posts:
    As You Like It: Rules for Writing
    Ticker Tape Sentence
    A Year From the Use and Misuse of English Grammar

  • Notes on Experience, Story, and Voice

    Joe Linker Pizza Face by Emily“The idea that everyone has a story to tell (which underlies the notion that anyone can write since all a writer needs is a story) is strictly correct,” Jenny Diski said, writing in the London Review of Books (7 Mar, 21) about Marco Roth’s memoir, “The Scientists: A Family Romance.” Well, Henry James thought so, anyway. Continued Diski, echoing James, “If you were born, you’re in there with a story.”

    “Every talk has his stay,” James Joyce said. But does every story have a voice? Is the writer’s job to tell the stories of those without voices? Is the critic’s job to decide how long the voice’s stay is welcomed, if at all? Not if Joyce had anything to stay about it: “Why? It is a sot of a swigswag, systomy dystomy, which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze. Why? Such me” (FW, 597). But even if one has a story with an illuminating voice, should one talk? And once one starts talking, must one tell all? Well, maybe not all, there are time and space constraints, after all. Ah, and there’s the rub, what to tell, and what to withhold.

    Memoirs, like all forms of writing, have narrators: is he, or she, reliable? What have they left out? And even if they’ve tried to put everything in, there’s the problem of point of view. Would the story tell of the same experience related from another’s point of view, someone else who was witness? A memoir doesn’t contain fictional characters, but real people, but to the reader who has never met them, they may feel and sound like characters. The characters speak, but are their words reliable? The memoirist creates a set, described, composed, like a family photo album, and adds tone, the attitude toward the experience, all drawn with words that suggest as well as denote. And there is that slippery, mercurial ball of memory we always seem to be chasing after. We might call that ball ambiguity.

    And writing in the March 18 New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says, “Thanks to the Internet…anyone can write” (21). The assumption is that not everyone should. All these amateur bloggers serve up knuckle balls to the professional writer, though the proliferation of adult amateur softball leagues doesn’t seem to hamper the work of pro baseball players. How many family garages or basements sport bands? That they don’t all reach Nirvana doesn’t invalidate their experience, as much as it might hurt our hearing. Why is the amateur spirit more tolerated, if not enjoyed, in music, arts and crafts, gardening, cooking, and sports (golf, anyone?) than in writing?

    Henry James, in his essay “On the Art of Fiction” (1894), talks about experience, and answers a question about whether or not one individual’s experience might be more valid and valuable than another’s when it comes to writing about that experience. James is speaking of fiction, Diski of memoir. But memoir might be the most flagrant of fictions, since it attempts to disguise its narration as truth. But what makes any experience worth writing and reading? For James, the more cloistered a life’s experience the more opportunity for close reading of that experience. The only requirement is that one pay attention: “The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military…The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience, and experience only,’ I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’”

    Maybe everyone has a story, but not everyone has a voice, but through certain kinds of experience one might discover one’s voice, the expression of which might be realized in writing. But the expression of one’s story might also be realized in music, nursing, or plumbing. Maybe the writer’s job is to tell the stories of those without voices. But a more instructive way of thinking about experience, story, and voice might be to say that the writer’s job is to reveal voice where story is found in any one individual’s experience (not necessarily the writer’s), so that a reader might enjoy a kind of reading epiphany, realizing it’s the significance of their own experience being reflected. The reader hears her or his own voice. One need not be a writer, or a reader, to experience one’s own voice. But first we must find our voice, and where will we find it amidst all the wrack and ruin, the dry brine, the commercialism and the consumerism and the garbage sloughing like wax dripping from our ears, and deep in our ears a muffled sound like gigantic iron church bells echoing? But if indeed that’s our experience, how should it be voiced, or should we keep it silent?

    We might read something and question the author’s authority, the authority of his or her voice. But the author of the writing should not be confused with the speaker of a narrative. Even if the writer who tells us the “I” of her poems is indeed her own voice, and that is the reason she writes, to describe her world, her reality, using her own voice, we still might think in terms of author and narrator, not necessarily the same. How does the writer decide what to put in and what to leave out of her poems about her reality? That decision making is the process of narration. Because as authors of our own narratives, our own stories, we still create characters, even if we call those characters ourselves, as in the memoir. This is why I said above that the memoir is perhaps the most flagrant of fictions.

    Maybe no one has a voice, and we are all voiceless. We might all have stories, but we are all helpless, writers and non-writers alike, to voice those stories. This is why we keep writing, why there is no end to storytelling, amateur as well as professional. Earlier this year, a couple of houses on our block replaced their sewer lines to the street. I watched the workers and the job progress. I had done this kind of work with my father, years ago, and I marveled now as I did then at the simplicity of the technology, which has not changed much over the years. “Just remember, shit runs downhill,” my Dad said, handing me the shovel to dig a sewer pipe ditch. “That it do,” he said, concluding his short story, the voice of experience slowly dripping off as he walked away to more complicated, but no more important, matters on the job.

    Related Post: Correcting, Grading, and Commenting: Right, Wrong, and Indifferent

  • ABC Blocks

    ABC

    ABC 2

    ABC 3

    ABC 4

  • Samuel Beckett’s “Molloy” p. 161

      1. I

  2. I

  3. I
                                                 I
                   I
my
       us      I          I    
I      I     
                             I              my
       I                          my                  me
                                    my                me
                    I                               I
                              I

               I
                                   I
                                          me
             my                          
                                              my
                      I 
             my
me                                 me
           I
   I                           my      my

   myself
                                                I
                                       I
      I                                          my
              me         my

                                                          I
                  I

     I
                                     I
                                                         my
                                         me
   me
   me

    The above, expunged page is from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molly, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (First Evergreen Black Cat Edition, 1965, Seventh Printing). Page 161 was selected not quite at random (I liked that it begins with the numbers), though any page might work, to illustrate, in concrete poetry style, the proliferation of personal pronouns throughout Beckett’s text. The excised page, each pronoun appearing in its place from the original page, the surrounding words cut, makes for an effective and lovely concrete poem expressing one of Beckett’s themes, the individual immersed in white space, floating. Although an equally provocative reading might suggest that each pronoun is a separate individual, each reaching out for another. Try reading the concrete poem aloud, pausing between words just for the time it takes for your eye to locate the next one.
    Three Novels by Samuel Beckett

    page 161