How to Avoid Using Cliches 2: Insight

Pursuing the idea that developing insight is important to poetry, let's start with a reminder about clichés: they tend to be superficial glosses. They tend to miss the point, and all the nuances, because they don't go deep enough. Clichés avoid the hard work of diving into a subject, wading around, and finding out everything you can. Clichés desire to be superficial, because real life is too much work. Clichés are reductive: they minimize every nuance into a rhetorical soundbyte. They overlook the details in favor of a pithy and supercilious remark.

A cliché cannot evoke insight, because genuine insight will supercede any cliché, and show it to be hollow and empty. True knowing, even knowing that you don't know, is the most effective cliché-killer of all.

For example, let's look at a cliché about art, that became a literary/critical cliché in its own right. Calling the Annie Proulx short story Brokeback Mountain the "gay cowboy story," or calling the movie made from the short story the "gay cowboy movie," completely misses the point. It doesn't tell you what the story is really about. Proulx herself has talked about the fact that this was a rural love story set in a rural place, at a time when such a love was just heartbreakingly impossible. It still is, mostly. I've lived in Wyoming and New Mexico; I've spent a lot of time in Texas, Montana, and the other western states; I can say with utter certainty that the story of Brokeback Mountain is still happening, in various ways. The heartbreak isn't a thing of the past; men like this still exist, still stuck in those patterns of belief and culture that make expressing such love uneasy at best, impossible at worst.

Worse, the cliché that such a story is a "gay cowboy" story ignores the context and beauty of the land in which it is set. The story takes place mostly in the Big Horn Mountains, which straddle the borders of Wyoming and Montana. There's a lot of open prairie there, but there are also some of the most beautifull mountains in the western USA. It's horse country, and sheep country, and cattle country: ranch-hand country, cowboy country. The context of cowboy culture, usually shyly laconic or speechless in the face of social gatherings, knows not what to say about two basicaly ordinary uneducated ranch-raised cowboys accidentally falling in love with each other. The tragedy of the story is that it can never work—not because gay love cannot work, but because in 1963 Wyoming "gay love" isn't even a concept on the map. It's not even words anybody would put together, there and then. The geography and environment are like characters in both story and film versions: characters larger and more silent still than the protagonists. The sheer beauty of the land, as well as its harrshness and implacability, are presences felt constantly, in all the scenes in which the actors move. The Big Sky is its own presence, its own character, out there. It's something you can never forget, because it so dominates every vista.

So, if you can still call it a "gay cowboy" story, I pity you. That's a typical ignorant city-bound viewpoint to call it that, from someone who's never lived out there, under that sky, in all that continuous wind.

Ignorance is always curable. It is easily curable. All it requires is the ability to read, a little bit of empathy, and maybe some little bit of travel experience. So, ignorance, being totally curable, has no excuse.

Insight requires you to get your feet wet and your hands dirty. It requires you to wade in there and get dirtied by the mire and blood and messiness of real life.

If you're going to write a poem about some topic you haven't experienced for yourself, get the details right. This is the truth that lies behind the writer's platitude Write what you know—the truth that writing is often more compelling when it's based in experience. But the other side of experience is imagination, and a writer's vivid imagination can go boldly where the writer herself has not. The key to making it work, though, is believability, and believability lies in the details. Get the details: do your research: visit your locales if you can. Notice the quality of air and light wherever you go.

I've had negative responses to some of my poems because I talk about an ineffable quality of air and light in the place where the poem happens. People didn't believe it, they thought it was artistic hyperbole—until I showed them the photographs I took there, and they realized that I was not at all exaggerating, merely reporting. For example, here's a photo of the Taos Plateau in New Mexico.



The Sangre de Christo Mountains are in the background. The sunset light hit a veil of descending rain coming from the low clouds. It was minutes before sunset. I slammed on the brakes, pulled the truck over and ran out onto the plateau to capture as many photos as I could before the light faded. It was chilly and windy, and when I got back to my trailer, a little later, I had a bitter cold night. I huddled in my blankets for hours, doing nothing but trying to read, drink tea, and stop shivering. But it was all worth it, to capture this one photo. The secret of my photography is very simple: Always carry a camera with you, and always be ready to drop everything to get that one photo, if you happen to be in the right place at the right moment. Never hesitate to drop everything. Never hesitate to ignore people staring at you, wondering what the heck you're doing.

So, look at that photo. How would you describe that light to someone who has never seen it, or even been outside the boundaries of their city existences, even if they've moved from city to city?

Insight.

Insight means immersion. It means being willing to drop everything for the sake of a poem. It means gathering experience and memories like fuel for an invisible fire. It means being willing to go well out of your way to make sure your research bears fruit. It means travel—but it means more than mere tourism.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in 1910, in his autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, wrote this, which stands as good advice for any poet willing to immerse themselves in life:

. . . Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,— and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labour, and of light, pale sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. (trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

So, insight takes patience, and work, and time. Time to come to fruition, to grow into our lives. Time well-spent while we appear to be doing other things. (An artist is never not making art, no matter what else they appear to be doing.)

The reason Proulx' short story Brokeback Mountain works is because it doesn't try to impose a false narrative on the messy details of life. The author describes the details well, and gets them right. The story doesn't end: it just stops. It has a concluding thought, but really it just stops. You know that the lives of the characters go on—those still living anyway—and that there are things that happen after the story ends, which are not told. (One mark of the impact of a good story on the reader is, you want to know what happens next, after the story ends.) The story relates the messiness of life to the by not trying to impose a logically coherent narrative, with an artificial beginning and end; the author doesn't try to shoehorn the story into a conventional narrative format, or force an ending that rings like a church bell in some stiff attempt to tie up all the loose ends. The loose ends in the story dangle there, unresolved. The characters get caught up in the mire and blood of real life, sometimes literally. And they go on, as messily as ever, having learned at least not to repeat their same mistakes.

I Wanna Be a Western Writer!

Not a writer of Westerns. But a writer of the West, from the West, about the West. Ever since I first spent the summer of my eighteenth year doing geology in Wyoming, I’ve been in love with the place.

Annie Proulx’ story People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water starts like this, with two introductory paragraphs:

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country—indigo jags of mountains, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky—provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti’d celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.

—Annie Proulx, from Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the story collection that ends with Brokeback Mountain

It’s like that: the land itself is always a main character in the story. Proulx’s Wyoming stories always include the presence of the land, infusing everything. The humans are just players on the shape of the land. The same way that Andrew Wyeth’s paintings use the land, and settings, rooms, and farm implements, as characters. In Christina’s World, that huge sweep of grass, dwarfing the fragile girl, putting her smallness into perspective against the huge sweep of the sky. That’s a familiar feeling, out West.

I want to be able to have lived in a place where I can write sentences like that, just from observing what’s around me.

I want to write like Proulx, or Barry Lopez, or William Least heat Moon, riding his van across the small roads of the USA. I want to be in those open spaces, where my head expands, and my own smallness and pettiness, and hard luck, evaporate against the indifferent sky and empty land. You put yourself into perspective, there. My own Basin & Range works are walks towards those receding hills. Having recently been out there again, and then back, feeling cramped in relatively crowded Wisconsin, it’s an urge for escape, for me, for my dreams, and self. I am a Westerner at heart.

Of course this is all probably romantic horseshit. But no more so than the annual Cowboy Poetry gathering in Elko, NV, which is a festival of familiar tropes, romantic fantasies, and clichés, even though it’s all done with fun, spirit, and a good heart. Even in my romantic fantasy moments, I feel a lot more hard-headed about the West than some others I could name. I’ve been out in those salt pans, out of water, a hundred miles to go. I’ve slept on the lava flows, under more stars than most city dwellers can imagine or have ever seen. And the silences: they linger with you. Sometimes you need to go back there, just to listen to the wind, which is a constant presence that paradoxically deepens the silence.



The Real West is hard, bleak, dangerous, and bitter. There are a thousand ways to die from accident, stupidity, mischance, or intention. There are million isolated places where such deaths, by whatever means, will go undiscovered for some time. Maybe not a long time, but long enough till it’s too late. Search and rescue efforts often become forensic clean-ups. It’s the nature of the land: there’s a lot more space than there are people.

Gertrude Stein’s seminal comment applies to the great West, especially: In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is. There is a lot of truth in that, and when you drive out West, and stop in small towns in the middle of nowhere, you feel it directly.

I want to write like Edward T. Hall, one of the best writers of philosophical anthropology of the past century. His book West of the Thirties, about his early experiences among the Navajo and Hopi, is a classic.

And I want to write like Loren Eiseley. The geologists and paleontologists who take up literary writing are marked by the lands and peoples they have studied. The remnants of what and who used to be there echo through their contemporary awareness like revenants.

I started my own geological fieldwork early, age 18, by spending a summer doing geology in the field, based at Hoback Junction, south of Jackson Hole, in Wyoming, near where the Hoback flows into the Snake. I had started studying rocks much earlier, and was in the Geology Club in school from ninth grade on. That summer I learned to exist in the field. I learned to travel light. A Wyoming cowboy told me that summer, and I’ve always known it to be true: “When you head out in the morning, don’t take a drink of water till later in the day. if you drink early, you’ll be thirsty all day long, and never get enough water. If you wait till noon, you’ll be good. Otherwise, when you’re out riding all day, you might run out of water too early.” I was never much for big breakfasts anyway, and only do them when I need to, which is rarely. My experiences that first summer in the field set my habits in place for a lifetime. I still don’t drink water too early in the day; although I often drink a lot, later in the evening.

Geology has marked me, especially Rocky Mountain geology, and continues to be an obsession of mine. I learn a great deal about a place I am visiting, just by looking at and smelling the land. Humans do reshape the land, but the land also shapes us, directs us, nurtures us, and destroys us. We might successfully commit cultural suicide, but the land endures. We are not capable, as the apocalyptic doomsayers claim, of destroying all life on our planet; life is too resilient. We might do great damage, and we might wipe out our own civilizations; but life will find a way. It is arrogant and presumptuous to believe that “the end of the world” means anything more than just the end of our world, our lives, or our way of life. “The end of the world” doesn’t mean the end of the world: it just means the end of us.

I find myself in alliance with the proponents of ecopoetics, many of whom are Western writers. My own poetry has once or twice been compared by others to Gary Snyder’s—a claim I would never presume to make myself. But I feel a kinship of interests and preoccupations there.

But maybe I’m always going to be (just) a Midwestern writer. It’s where I’m from, and I suppose I have the attitudes. On the other hand, I did spend the first half of my childhood living in India, so my attitudes have never been classically and only Midwestern. I’ve traveled a lot, and I have the attitudes of a global nomad, not someone who was born and bred and still lives in his hometown. I don’t have a hometown. I have a home base, but that could be almost anywhere, as long as I like the place. And travel is in my bones. So, I will be spending time out West, and writing while I’m there, and writing more once I am back at home base.