Creativity: Writing, rather than Writing About Writing

This week I have been sorting through piles of books and CDs, deciding what I can live without. I need to thin the herd, lighten the load, divest. Yesterday I unloaded a satchel full of books at a used book store, one friendly to the obscure, the academic, the poetic, the literary.

I realized, in my sorting, that I have over time amassed an entire library on LGBT/queer/gender theory and LGBT history, all these heavy-duty big books written from an academic and philosophical viewpoint. I've read them all, and realize I'm not going to read them again. There are a very few of these that I will keep, as the only ones I'm ever likely to re-read or consult ever again (like John Boswell's books, Martin Duberman's history of Stonewall, etc.). But most of these need to find another home. Yesterday, the used book store took them all in, and will pass them on. (The recycling of ideas.)

But in truth, the more important realization here is: I'm an artist.

To engage with LGBT studies in future for me is to make art about it, rather than to read or write a dissertation about it. Now that I've embraced being an artist, it's time to let go of my academic background.

And one way I do that is to make art about how I respond to LGBT life, rather than to write a theoretical paper about it. Thus, I have a two-page spread of artwork in the current issue of RFD Magazine, in their brand new "Qweer Arts Issue." (And I plan to participate in the art gallery show that is being planned to highlight artists from the issue.)

Writing, rather than writing about writing.

There are limits to the intellectual and academic study and analysis of the way we live our lives. There are limits to talking about it, as opposed to doing it. I went through graduate school. I can actually read and understand these kinds of heavy-duty high-theory academic books. I know the lingo, I know the theories, and I know the history. (I am a data sponge.) I was actually read good in graduate school: I was an excellent, thorough researcher, and a good writer of thesis-like papers. I got good grades, and was well-liked by most of my professors, one or two of whom thought I could be a brilliant scholar in future.

But that's no what happened. Academia, the university as an educational and research institution, has its own rules of survival, "publish or perish" being only the most famous example, that I could not adhere to, in the end. Grad school politics did not engage my heart, and so I did it poorly. Even though I was very good at the scholarly side of academic life, I failed at the political side.

Most importantly, however, I left grad school, I now believe, because I knew on some level, at the time still a pre-verbal level, that I'd rather write music than write about music, I'd rather make art than write about making art. Making art is what I do best. I'm pretty good at writing about making art, too. But I never wanted to be a Critic, an intellectual who analyzes the artwork of others and never makes his own. I know now that I never would have fit in, in academia; I might have been a good teacher, but probably not a good Professor.

I still write about making art and making music, although I write about it because I'm interested in the creative process as a process. I make notes. I leave breadcrumbs. I document and study the process itself, out of fascination. I have written a great deal about the creative process, and the arts. It's one of my main topics as an essayist.

And I enjoy reading what other artists and writers and poets and composers have to say about their own creative processes. (Stephen King's book On Writing is a wonderful book, even if you don't like anything else he writes.) I love that kind of book, and have an entire library of "poets on poetry, writers on writing" sort of books. I have an entire library of John Cage's books.

But I don't want to read another academic book about queer theory, LGBT theory, or theoretical models of queer living, when what I'd rather do is go live life as a creative gay shaman artist poet composer painter, and respond to life lived as an artist instead of an academic.

I have no regrets about the academic period of my life—except perhaps for one: I never should have let anyone convince me that I was supposed to write ABOUT music, rather than writing music. But even that is a minor regret, because it was part of the path that led me to where I am now.

I embrace that I am a maker, not one of those who talks about makers, although I think it's okay for makers to talk about what makers do. I write, rather than write about writers writing. I embrace the paradox that I am writing, now, about writing about writing. But I'm still writing about the creative process, not about the "product" that I produce. I have little interest in telling you how to think about the art I make, or telling you what to believe it means: I'd rather you discovered that on your own.

As the haiku master said, centuries ago: The poem is only fulfilled when the reader completes the poem by bringing his own life-experience to the reading, filling in the gaps with those things we all have in common, just because we are human.

Things Ray Bradbury Said That I Know To Be True

More from The Paris Review interview with Ray Bradbury:

INTERVIEWER:
You’re self-educated, aren’t you?

BRADBURY:
Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

All my librarian friends ought to be pleased with this. I certainly agree with it. Libraries are the great teachers. I go to my small town's rather good library regularly, and always find something new to be passionate about. Lately I've been impressed with their DVD collection, which includes a large number of movies you wouldn't expect to see in a small town public library, controversial films, films of poetic and artistic merit, a lot of The Criterion Collection.

Even though I did go to college, more than once, I can honestly say that Bradbury is right: your best education is self-education. Things you learn through experience, through living, which you store inside yourself forever. Things you learned from diving into libraries and reading late into the night.

INTERVIEWER:
How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?

BRADBURY:
I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

This passage speaks to me very personally. Lately I've been able to admit to myself, after years of trying to please others and inhabit that consensus world that Bradbury was fortunate enough to avoid, that the only task I'm any good at is making things: creativity. It's become clear to me, maybe because the illness and surgery stripped away all the chaff, that my purpose in life has been to make art. It seems like I'm the last to know. I guess I've always been a late bloomer.

In several places, Bradbury talks about how he lives life intensely—things like saying dinner is beautiful rather than just good—and I know that's true for me as well. I know I live life very intensely. I know that hasn't always been easy for people who know me. I've decided that I don't care. It's my life, I'll live it however I choose to.

The day I decided that drugging uppity kids in the classroom was evil, and that anti-depressants should be looked at with suspicion, was the day I overheard two friends talking about me; it was a rough period in my life, and it been recommended to me that I try an anti-depressant to help me cope, so I did. I overheard two friends talking about me, saying that they both liked me better on the drug, that I was calmer and less volatile. Meanwhile, I had been feeling like I was made out of cardboard, that there was a foot of glass wall between me and the world, and I couldn't touch or feel anything. That was a formative experience for me, and those people are no longer my friends.

That doesn't mean I don't have bad days, still. It doesn't mean that I'm a raving opera queen all the time—a lot of the intensity of experience stays on the inside, and comes out mainly in the creative work. But it does mean that I feel very much alive.

INTERVIEWER:
The week after your wife passed away, you got back to writing. How were you able to do that?

BRADBURY:
Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!

Work is indeed the only answer. In fact, work is survival. I have repeated so often lately, because it's true, that many days the only thing that gets me through the day is making music, making art, writing a poem. Making art has been my way to survive. If even on the worst days I can make one new thing out of nothing, I can count it as worth it, and a reason to go on. As the illness and surgery took away the chaff from my life, I began to truly realize how important work is. Like Bradbury, my art is my work. (Elsewhere he comments that he's grateful that his work is so much fun.) I don't expect to ever retire: I expect to be writing, or making art, or music, on the day I die. That's what Bradbury did. Even after his stroke, late in life, he still wrote via dictation when he could no longer type. A new book of stories came out not too long ago.

INTERVIEWER:
Do you write for an ideal reader or a particular audience?

BRADBURY:
Every time you write for anyone, regardless of who they are, no matter how right the cause you may believe in, you lie. Steinbeck is one of the few writers out of the thirties who’s still read, because he didn’t write for causes at all. He wrote human stories that happened to represent causes indirectly. The Grapes of Wrath and his other books are not political treatises. Fahrenheit 451 is in a way a political treatise, but it isn’t, because all it is saying, emotionally, is: Everyone leave everyone else alone!

INTERVIEWER:
Does literature, then, have any social obligation?

BRADBURY:
Not a direct one. It has to be through reflection, through indirection. Nikos Kazantzakis says, “Live forever.” That’s his social obligation. The Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. All of Dickens says live life at the top of your energy.

It means a lot to me that Bradbury mentions Kazantsakis, and particularly The Saviors of God, which is both a summation of Kazantsakis' worldview and a call to live life to the fullest. It means a lot to me to have Bradbury validate my own life, indirectly, by mentioning a book, The Saviors of God, which changed my own life, and influenced so profoundly that I can rarely even talk about it. (If you've never read it, or read about it, here it is in full.)

Elsewhere Bradbury talks about how literature is a mirror that reflects the world. Science fiction is really a funhouse mirror in which we see the present through the lens of the future. He uses the metaphor of Perseus seeing the Medusa in the mirror of his shield, which allows him to survive her gaze, and take her head off. So the last thing literature ought to be is a sermon. There's nothing duller than a novel that preaches at you, that tells you how to behave, but has no life of its own.

Literature (and all art) can be a prayer, in that the best prayers consist of two activities: to praise, and to say "Thank you."

A lot of Bradbury's writings are praise, which he rarely admits to directly, but you can see it in the very intensity and pleasure of his writing. Whether he describes flying a kite, or running from a dinosaur chasing you, his language takes you into the experience, and makes you feel alive. Between the lines in Bradbury's writing, between the actual words themselves, there can often be found an inarticulate joy that can't be contained in words, something so profound that it settles into your bones, something that his words manage to evoke without ever saying so directly. And when you finish reading one of Bradbury's short stories that ends in one of those moments of articulated inarticulate joy, you often feel like saying "Thank you." My gods, that was a beautiful dinner!

RIP Ray Bradbury

One of the grand masters of fantasy and science fiction, Ray Bradbury, has just passed over at age 91. It's all over the literary news, although I doubt many who aren't readers or writers will notice. Bradbury was a writer's writer, revered by writers and readers alike, who impressed and captivated everybody from generations of science fiction fans who later became writers themselves, to Christopher Isherwood, who thought Bradbury to be one of the most original writers he had ever read.

One mark of a great writer is that you can go back to their books years later and still have the same experience, be immersed in the same feelings and images, that you had the very first time you read them. They endure. The list of writers I can honestly say this about, that each time I read them is like the first time, is a very short list; it includes, among a few others, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ray Bradbury.

For me, there have been only a few writers who ever successfully conveyed the experience of being a young teen boy in small-town Midwestern towns in summer as well as Bradbury did. His novel Dandelion Wine is one of the best novels I have read more than ten times, each time as fresh as the last. Something Wicked This Way Comes was a novel that actively terrified me when I read it as a teenager; and it remains compellingly scary. His essential short novel for young adults, The Halloween Tree, is a great adventure story that also is a detailed history of the roots and origins of the festivities of All Hallow's. Many people know Bradbury best for his themed collections of short stories, many of which have been made into movies, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. And then there's Fahrenheit 451, an Orwellian novel about a repressive future society in which literacy itself is banned.

Bradbury has often been ahead of the literary curve, writing in styles or exploring subject matters that other writers only came to decades later. His short story "A Sound of Thunder," about the dangerous changes in history that can be caused by tiny careless mistakes made by time travelers, has been adapted into more than one movie, has turned up in the literature again and again, been the premise of TV shows, and even has a connection to the origins of chaos theory and fractal mathematics. The principal known as the butterfly effect is what I'm talking about here. This is so common a theme in speculative literature now that it's become an archetype itself.

When I was a young reader, already having read lots of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and other "hard SF" writers before encountering Bradbury, and already having had some science training myself, I was at times put off by Bradbury's relaxed interest in accurate scientific detail; he openly admitted that he was interested in the human stories first and foremost, and often skated on the technical details. But my initial doubts about the details of his stories were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer intense and powerful beauty of his language, and I was quickly won over. What Bradbury was, was a master storyteller. Sometimes his stories were set amidst the trappings of science fiction, such as rocket ships, and trips to other planets, but they were always human stories. He made you think, and his stories remain in memory long afterwards. I can think of several of his stories that are clear in my memory still, in many different genres.

Dandelion Wine is technically magical realism—written long before that term was coined to apply to Latin America authors such as Garcia Marquez; so in a way Bradbury invented the style—but what is so incredibly engaging about Bradbury's novel is how emotionally real it is. It is incredibly personal. You know people like the characters in Dandelion Wine. Perhaps you've even been those people, at some point in your life. The episode in the novel, that was originally published as a short story called "The Sound of Summer Running," is one absolutely vivid in my imagination, because it perfectly conveyed the total experience of getting new sneakers at the beginning of summer, and what that meant to a boy just freed from school for the season—right down to the smells.

So I'm feeling sad tonight. I will miss not seeing more new stories from Ray Bradbury, who wrote every day for decades. I will miss Bradbury not only for his fiction but also for his commentaries on life. His book on writing, Zen in the Art of Writing, is essential reading for every writer. It's one of the most genuinely inspirational books on writing that I've ever read.

Finally, I will let the master speak for himself. Here is an excerpt or two from Bradbury's Paris Review interview:

INTERVIEWER:
Why do you write science fiction?

RAY BRADBURY:
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

INTERVIEWER:
Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?

BRADBURY:
Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.

Standing By Words

April is annually dedicated as National Poetry Month. There is even an annual proclamation that comes out of the White House. (Another annual White House tradition of course is to have the President use his executive powers to pardon a turkey every Thanksgiving, which then lives out its life to its normal lifespan, and is not eaten.) What does National Poetry Month mean? Not much, really. It means that many stereotypical events happen, mostly.

Many poetry workshops and organizations sponsor "A Poem A Day" rallies, wherein participating poets are invited to write a poem a day and share them. Poetry readings multiply in number for a month. Poetry is given a higher public awareness profile for a month, after which most non-poets go back to completely ignoring it. Schools often teach a month-long unit on poetry study and writing.

I rarely take any of this seriously. I have in the past, when I was involved with online poetry workshops, occasionally participated in poem-a-day gatherings. But as I have often pointed out, I write when I write, and when I write on demand it usually sucks. I can recall perhaps two, maybe three, poems written by myself during poem-a-day rallies that were worth salvaging, rewriting, and finishing.

Always excepting haiku, of course, which I can pretty much write on demand—which are also pretty much the only kinds of poems that I can write on demand. I'm not really sure I can explain why haiku come easily to me. Perhaps it's the result of lifelong immersion in their aesthetic. It's true that when I'm sorting through photographs, as for example I am still doing after the recent roadtrip out West, I often am spontaneously moved to write poems to go with the photos. More often than not, those poems written to photo prompts are haiku. This is also of course a variety of ekphrastic poetry: written in response to visual art.

Anyway.

I've managed to ignore National Poetry Month this year for most of the month. Now, however, I find myself reading as I often do books of poetry criticism by poets. This is actually some of my favorite reading: books by writers about writing. I have quite a stack of such books, which I add to from time to time. So, this year, what I will do to memorialize National Poetry Month is give some excerpts and quotes regarding books on poetry by poets.

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Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living writers. A national treasure, his books are on a special shelf in my library next to others I feel are essential reading. He is a poet, a novelist, and an important essayist. His viewpoint is rural, conservative in the sense of conserving what is good and real and true, and rooted in his day job, which is farming. Many of his poems are accessible windows onto the philosophy of rural life, and the way of the earth. At times Berry seems to reflect a very deep land-based, earthen, belief system, something that all people who have lived close to the land have shared, regardless of whatever religion they nominally follow. The flow of seasons and the life of the land is a deeper system than received beliefs.

I have been reading Wendell Berry's book of six long essays about poetry, Standing By Words. I find reading Berry's essays on poetry to be essential, even when I disagree with them—which I do moderately often, finding them to be even reactionary at times. Rural myself, I am not as traditional as he. Yet Berry's voice is one of those you must encounter and deal with, regardless of whether you end up agreeing with him or not. He must be confronted and reconciled. Reading Berry helps you figure out your own stance, your own values and opinions. He is incredibly well-read, has a good grasp of the history of literature, and thoughtfully explains his positions. His writing is among the clearest of essayists', his thinking always presented without affectation or unnecessary device. There is an elegant simplicity in his writing that one can learn from, simply by reading.

Although Berry's opinions do feel to me sometimes to be reactionary and anti-modern, overall his views on poetry are congenial to my own approach and attitude. When he writes about what has gone wrong with contemporary poetry, I often find myself in agreement; although I may not always agree on the historical choices that led to the current situation, nor with his proposed remedies. We share a concern with where poetry may have gone off the rails, even if we don't always agree on how to restore it to life.

The basic premise of Standing By Words is encapsulated by a quote from the book itself:

My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps one hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.

Berry makes the connection between the debasement of artistic language and the debasement of general language usage, from broadcasting to the political sphere, where the loss is particularly toxic. Politicians who one day say one thing, the next day say something opposite and deny that they ever said what they said before—in other words, blatant unabashed lying—are prominent and obvious more so than ever. The obfuscation of clarity that is the essence of bureaucratic writing has led to deliberate misuse of language. If you don't feel you can trust people in positions of authority to tell you the truth anymore, you are not alone. Berry is not making causative connections here; rather he believes that both artistic and general language have become debased from the same root causes, which are inherent to and reflected by the Modernist enterprise: social fragmentation, the loss of moral center in culture, the sense of uncertainty about what really matters in life that began with the Industrial Revolution and reached a peak of global insecurity in the 20th C.

None of this is strictly necessary. We have taken fragmentation and disconnection and disjunction and existential angst to be the norm. In fact, Berry argues, they're relatively new phenomena, and are connected with the changes in culture that began during the beginning of the radical changes in technical craft, when the agrarian norm morphed into the new urban industrial norm. With the rise of the Romantic period in the arts, there also arose the romantic myth of the solitary, suffering Artist. (Starving Artist, Lone Misunderstood Sensitive Artist, and all the other variations on the theme of Artist-as-Other.)

In the essay "The Specialization of Poetry," Berry writes:

History certainly offers examples of unhappy or obsessed or mad poets, but it offers more examples of poets who sang or wrote in the exuberance of sanity, health, wholeness of spirit. One instantly credits Ann Sexton's statement that "Pain engraves a deeper memory," not because one believes it invariably does, but because one senses, in the modesty and brevity of the sentence, the probability that it sometimes does. . . . One is simply aware of too much joyous poetry that has been the gift of the Muse, who apparently leaves the ratio of pain and joy to be determined by the poet. To attribute to the Muse a special fondness for pain is to come too close to desiring and cultivating pain. There is, I believe, some currency to the assumption that a fragmented, diseased people can make a whole and healthy art out of their fragmentation and disease. It has not yet been done.

This is a refusal to accept that all artists make art primarily from their wounds, which is one of the most toxic myths about creativity ever. It can be laid squarely at the feet of the Romantic period, wherein the suffering genius artists was first given us as a stereotype. Yet art that endures isn't the art of pain and suffering, it's the art that exalts. Pain is not ignored, nor denied, but it isn't the end-point. There is transcendence.

The danger may not be so much in the overcultivation of sensibility as in its exclusive cultivation. Sensibility becomes the inescapable stock in trade of the isolated poet, who is increasingly cut off from song and story because the nature of these is communal. And isolation, or the sense of isolation, is moving much of our poetry toward the tone, rhythm, and structure of what Mark Strand calls "not overly excited discourse." This is what Denise Levertov calls "an unexampled production of notations: poems which tell of things seen or done, but . . . do not impart a sense of the experience of seeing or doing, or of the value of such experience. . . ." The union of overcultivated sensibility and undercultivated verse cannot produce song. It produces—not prose—but the prosaic, unessential prose. The art does not press hard enough against experience.

Human life is a full range of sensibilities, a full range of experience, of emotion, of the creation of memory. To stay in one mode—fragmentation, disconnection, disjunction, expressing as it all too often does urban angst and Modernist disassociation—is to neglect all the others. To write poems in only one mode means incompleteness. What Levertov is talking about is the same thing that Adrienne Rich talked about: rather than being something written about an experience, a poem should be an experience. When art doesn't press hard enough against experience it becomes virtual, itself disconnected, and doesn't recreate an experience in the reader, it just tells us about one.

Song is natural; we have it common with animals. For humans, it is also artificial and traditional; it has to be made by someone who knows how to make it and sung to someone who will recognize it as song. Rhythm, fundamental to it, is its profoundest reference. The rhythm of a song or a poem rises, no doubt, in reference to the pulse and breath of the poet, as is often repeated, but that is still too specialized an accountingl it rises also in reference to daily and seasonal—and surely even longer—rhythms in the life of the poet and in the life that surrounds him. The rhythm of a poem resonates with these larger rhythms that surround it; it fills its environment with sympathetic vibrations. Rhyme, which is a function of rhythm, may suggest this sort of resonance; it marks the coincidences of smaller structures with larger ones, as when the day, the month, and the year all end at the same moment. Song, then, is a force opposed to specialty and to isolation. It is the testimony of the singer's inescapable relation to the world, to the human community, and also to tradition.

Obviously I would appreciate any musical definition of poetry. (Even though I have at times questioned the many, many times that poets look to music for their definitions and terminology of discourse—not because I think that's wrong in any way, but because it soundly refutes the arguments that some poets make that claim poetry to be a "higher," more abstract artform than music. If poetry is actually more abstract than music, why do you need music's language to discuss poetry? Which becomes the more fundamental artform, then?) Obviously I am likely to agree that poetry needs to have both song and meaning. Well, I do mostly agree.

At a basic level, the entire cosmos is singing: every atom in the universe is vibrating, and according to M-theory even the subatomic particles that make up atoms are vibrating strings of matter/energy. The tiniest level of resolution of scale in the Universe, the smallest particles on the smallest level, are not a void but rather a dancing foam.

Everything in the Universe is vibration: this has been said not only by theoretical physicists but by seers in every religious tradition. The universe is frozen music: what we perceive as solid matter is in fact just slower-moving energy, but everything is still vibrating. Song is the basic organizing principle of the Universe: "in the beginning was the Word. . . ."

Where i do not agree with Berry is his implication that rhyme is therefore fundamental to poetry, because it shares its nature with rhythm. Rhythm, in poetry, is usually called meter. (Again, we're stuck in terms borrowed from music theory.) It can indeed be argued that rhyme, in some conceptual or literal form, is essential to poetry. It can be just as easily argued that poetry is not limited to requiring rhyme, especially where that usage is superficial and literal, blatant and clichéd: you do not create new music only by imitating old music, despite a reverence for tradition. It can be argued that music is organized sounds in time—and that definition can also apply to poetry—without requiring any other aspect of sound that we commonly associate with music. Tradition is defined by cultural expectations of normative forms. But cultural expectations are local, and both musical and poetic traditions vary widely across the breadth of the planet, and over time. The breaking of normative forms to discover or invent new ones is inherent to the creation of new art. Traditions are not static; they never were. Every tradition was once an invention; it is only time that makes it seem to have been always, eternally existent.

Actually, I agree with Berry that poetry that functions purely on the sounds of language, ignoring what that language refers to, to be mostly meaningless. I like pure sounds, I even like language as pure sound, and I've composed music that uses words as its constituent sonic components. But poetry on the page that is purely language-oriented poetry is sensibility rather than sense, to use Berry's own terms. It is exactly the kind of poetry that he finds lacks song and story. On this we agree.

But even more suggestive of the specialization of contemporary poets is their estrangement from storytelling. Typically, one can find this debility cited as a virtue and a goal.

I agree with that, but Berry goes on to a long discussion of narrative, particularly the loss of narrative used in poetry over the past century. This is where Berry sometimes gets a bit reactionary for my taste. In lauding tradition, he sometimes tramples on innovation. He is right to point out that the new does not have to replace the old, but can coexist alongside:

Why is it necessary for poets to believe, like salesmen, that the new inevitably must replace or destroy the old? Why cannot poetry renew itself and advance into new circumstance by adding the new to the old? Why cannot the critical faculty, in poets and critics alike, undertake to see that the best of the new is grafted to the best of the old? Free verse, for instance, is a diminishment of the competence of poetry if it is seen as replacing traditional prosody; it is an enlargement only if it is conceived as an addition. Freedom from narrative is a diminishment—it is not even a freedom—unless it is included with the capability of narrative among the live possibilities of poetry.

This is a plea to not throw the old out in favor of the new. I agree with that, yet at the same time I don't privilege tradition over innovation. I don't reject the new in favor of the old. I think there is room for both, and innovation does indeed add to the tradition. It doesn't have to replace it.

But this is where Berry gets interesting, for me. I have written before about the re-enchantment of poetry, of art, about bringing the soul back into work that often seems too dry, too intellectual, too disconnected from anything but the idea of the body, rather than body itself.

. . . our malaise, both in our art and in our lives, is that we have lost sight of the possibility of right or responsible action. Publicly, we have delegated our capacity to act to men who are capable of action only because they cannot think. Privately, as in much of our poetry, we communicate by ironic or cynical allusions to that debased tale of futility, victimization, and defeat, which we seem to have elected to be our story. The prevailing tendency, in poetry and out, is to see people not as actors, but as sufferers. . . . To how great an extent is modern poetry the record of highly refined sensibilities that could think or feel but not do? And must not this passiveness of the poetic sensibility force its withdrawal into the world of words where, for want of sustenance of action, it becomes despondent and self-destructive? . . .

In the last ten years there has been a reaction against this passivity. But for the most part this has produced only protest, which is either a gesture and not an action at all, or a negative action that either repudiates or opposes. The shallowness of protest is in this negativity; it is also in the short-winded righteousness by which it condemns evils for which it accepts no responsibility. In itself, protest implies no discipline and no correction. . . . That we have no poets who are, in that sense, public persons suggests even more forcibly the weakness of our poetry of protest. In his protest, the contemporary poet is speaking publicly, but not as a spokesman; he is only one outraged citizen speaking at other citizens who do not know him, whom he does not know, and with whom he does not sympathize. The tone of self-righteousness is one result of this circumstance.

The vast majority of contemporary poets never seem to even think about any of this, except perhaps to avoid discussing it. Sincerity is far less fashionable than irony and cynicism. Actually having something to say seems far less interesting to many than the fact that they want to express themselves about something, anything. One sign of the times is the retreat into narcissism, which leads us towards the self-absorbed self-confessional lyric. Another sign is the focus on technique over subject, which leads us to the word-games and puzzle-box crowd. Yet another sign is the (frankly neo-conservative) reactionary attitude of the neo-formalists, which is largely an attempt to simply roll back the clock of artistic progress, no matter what rhetoric they use to veil their purpose.

Berry's response is not to ally himself with the neo-formalists, despite his reverence for tradition, because he does not restrict himself as a poet so obviously. Rather, his response is flexible in form, fluid in approach, if essentially non-Modernist. Berry's poetry and attitude occasionally reminds me of Robinson Jeffers, in that both seek (or sought) a poetry for modern times that is not self-consciously Modernist, and do not believe that fragmentation and disjunction are necessary or sufficient. There is also an affinity in Berry's work for the pastoral tradition—which seems obvious, given Berry's agrarian roots, yet I don't hear it stated that way very often—leading back to the English pastoral poets, but also encompassing contemporary poets like Gary Snyder, William Everson, and Linda Hasselstrom. Poets who extend the oldest human values of all.

Elsewhere in Standing By Words, Berry speaks positively of Gary Snyder, who is one of the few poets who do succeed in making a new poetry rooted in the very old; Snyder has openly stated that his values are not Modernist, but Paleolithic, encompassing ecology, myth, bioregionalism, and human partnership with the land. (Which is one reason Snyder is one of my own touchstones as a poet.)

What Berry is describing in the passage above are the conditions of artistic mannerism, which I have also discussed before: the retreat from engagement with the world, and the simultaneous focus on the small and inward.

I think there's a hunger for the poetry that Berry describes. I see this partly in the revival of interest around poets engaged with the world, with social issues as well as ecological ones. Snyder has already been mentioned. But the revival of the reputation of Robinson Jeffers reflects this trend, as does the growing revival of interest in Jeffers' disciple William Everson. Hayden Carruth is another. On the same page as Snyder, with his interest in and promotion of deep ecological values and the relevance of Paleolithic myths and values to modern life, is Clayton Eshleman. There are others.

Despite the cynicism of many of the louder voices in contemporary poetry—one notices that this cynicism is often simultaneous with urbanism and the view that humanity is more interesting than anything else in the world—there is a growing re-enchantment with the older values found in the land. Wendell Berry speaks most elegantly of this. His ideas are well worth our discussion, even if at times his ideas seem reactionary rather than revolutionary. I have tremendous respect for him as a person, and a writer. I find myself enjoying his writing style so much that he can almost talk me into agreeing with him even in those areas where I don't. The world is more alive when he describes it. That too is a kind of re-enchantment, a valuable one.

Those End of the Year (Reading) Lists

Those bloody end-of-the-year lists. Top Ten lists of the "best" of everything. The annual ratings and beratings and appropriations and dismissals. Lists of good things, bad things, nothing special, personal lists masquerading as definitive critical statements. It's just the annual ritual to make lists. It's the thing people expect of you, expect of each other. It's what expected. It's one of those end-of-the-year rituals that people do without thinking about it overmuch. They just do it.

I'm not very big on just doing something because you've always done it. I'm not big on living life by rote, by habit, without thinking about it very much. I'm not big on not-thinking, on received wisdom that is accepted without being examined first. Ironically, of course, those people who most cling to their opinions as being their own are often those same people who don't really have any ideas of their own, but thrive instead on parroting received wisdom. "Everybody knows. . ." is the phrase that most often precedes a flurry of thoughtless, unexamined opinions.

Most lists are pointless. It's not even that they're predictable, dull, and always the same sort of thing as they were last year. It's that they change nothing. The world doesn't ripple with their passing. So lists, especially Top Ten lists, don't seem very useful. Nothing changes: mostly the status quo is affirmed. (I'm not alone in this opinion.)

Far more interesting are lists of things people have accomplished during the past year, including such lists as Stephen Mills' list of what books he read. That's an appealing idea. It's actually the only idea for an annual list that appeals to me right now.

Yet when I thought of compiling a list of what I've read in 2011, to be honest I was daunted, as it's a huge list. People who know me know that I'm a voracious reader, usually reading more than three books at any given time; I read quickly, and retain most of it. I actually couldn't give you a complete list of what books I read in 2011, because I didn't count or keep track; and to be honest, a couple of months are blurry in my mind, following the surgery at the end of June, when the anaesthesia was still fogging my memory and cognition pretty badly. At the same time, when I was first recovering from the surgery, I wasn't very mobile, and sat around reading a lot for a few weeks. In fact, I had laid in lots of unread books on my sun-porch table, to read as I was moved while recovering. I got through some of those, but not all of them. Well, there's another surgery to get through in the coming year, so it's good to stack on hand for then, as well.

And then there's the long list of books I've re-read, read again, read for the umpteenth time—because as unfashionable as it is in many critical circles I do read for pleasure as well as for edification; so I come back to re-read some books every so often. Every couple of years or so, I re-read two or three of Raymond Chandler's novels. This past year also includes a lot of Virginia Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse, which I've been thinking about a lot this year, as a work of fiction that tells much truth about what it is to be an artist and a person.

I also re-read, as I usually do, some favorite novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres—as problematic as I find the whole literary-critical situation around "genre," especially in the way mainstream "fine art literary fiction" tradition tends to look down its nose at SF, claiming literary quality for itself and denying it to "genre" fiction, which is bloody nonsense—including a couple of SF series by C.J. Cherryh and Chris Claremont. I also read a series new to me, by Jack McDevitt. And some other SF classics that I hadn't actually had the chance to read before, like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Notable reading this year in poetry has been getting further into Kenneth Rexroth, re-reading Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin and In Search of Small Gods, and a few other things. I've found a number of small books by poets I hadn't heard before which I quite enjoyed, for example, Elizabeth Dodd's Archetypal Light and Brendan Galvin's Whirl Is King. There's been more, both critical reading and pleasure reading of actual poetry, as heretical as that seems to be in some quarters nowadays, a list too long to detail without having to spend an hour compiling it. I did re-read a poetry classic, Love Alone by Paul Monette.

I read a lot of non-fiction. I get a lot out of good creative nonfiction writing, on the level of John McPhee and Barry Lopez. This year I read a couple of Michael Pollan's books on botany and our human interaction with it. I re-read some Henry Petroski, who is one of my favorite creative nonfiction writers, taking delight in the things that people make and unmake. One of my favorite reads this year was Annie Proulx' Bird Cloud, her memoir about her home in rural Wyoming, which she built on land full of wildlife and beauty. I enjoy reading writer's books on writing, both memoirs of life and of writing; it's not that writers make better or more self-aware critics of writing, but when they speak as artists talking about art, it often leads to insights about creativity itself.

There's more, of course, but I'll stop there. Needless to say, reading is a continuous activity in these parts. I don't apologize, though, for being well-read. It adds a lot of layers to living. And makes life more interesting.

The Shamanic Art of Writing

I just spent an hour reading (re-reading) a novel so compelling that it pulled me entirely inside its own world building, so that I lost track of my own world, and my own self. This is what I call immersive reading. You become an active participant in the story, not merely a detached observer. When I emerged from the book after an hour of reading, I felt like I had lived an entire lifetime, and yet it was still the same bright morning. I found myself blinking in the light as though I had just woken from a very long night of dreaming.

For awhile, that other world seemed more real than this one, which also happens after particularly lucid and involving dreams. A week should have gone by in the world, while I was absent, but it was still Sunday, only Sunday, leaving me all the rest of future time to inhabit, even though I had just spent a lifetime in another universe. It is a strange sensation of two kinds of time overlapping, a lifetime's experience lived, and yet it wasn't yet tomorrow, as if time in the outer world had flowed much more slowly, had barely advanced. As if you have already lived a full lifetime, yet still have a full lifetime left to live.

(At least this is what happens for me. I've heard from some writers that they can never lose their sense of self when reading, never get wholly immersed in the worldbuilding of what they're reading, never turn off their inner editor and observer, never lose that part of their mind that sits in judgment, that edits, that comments on the writing as they go along. I struggle not to pity that lack of loss of self, because judging others is not a good game, yet I can't help feel sad for some writer who can't allow herself to fall into a book headfirst and inhabit that world, and that world alone, for the duration of the reading.)

Emerging from the other world, as if from a long dream, that sense of doubled time lasts for awhile. You only slowly begin to return to inhabit so-called normative time. Which is consensus time, really. Even so, one of the mysteries of consciousness is that time does change its rate of flow, both subjectively in terms of how we inhabit our lives, and objectively in terms of Einsteinian relativity. Most people think time is steady and constant—but it's not. Time is lumpy and uneven. It clumps. It takes longer to go around some objects in its flow than it does others. Space warps time; a heavy gravity field slows time down relative to its flow elsewhere.

And delightfully, when you lose your sense of self, in reading or in meditation, you lose your sense of time, and inhabit only the present Now. Physicists and experienced meditators agree about this: time is never as fixed as we think it is. Consciousness itself is time-binding; the ability to bind time into linear flow is in fact one definition of consciousness. And as Einstein said, The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. So it's no wonder that time goes away when the sense of self goes away, too. Consciousness is time, in this sense. Self-conscious self-awareness can become hell if we bind ourselves too tightly to time.

Sources tumble onto my table next to my writing desk, sometimes it seems of their own volition. Or I have been slowly gathering them, finding books and articles here and there over a period of time, not really consciously, till of a sudden a pattern emerges. When a pattern reveals itself, or takes shape, or suddenly becomes obvious, I am sometimes tempted to berate myself for not noticing the obvious earlier. But I've learned not to do that; instead, I remind myself that we all are much broader and deeper in mind than we usually realize, or admit to, and once again, the smarter, deeper, silent, unknown, more-tuned-in part of myself has been working behind the scenes until it was ready to dump realization on my doorstep once again, and bring me to my knees. I used to get annoyed, and resist. These days, even if I get annoyed, which is mostly annoyance at the timing, I accept affairs more readily, and just roll with it. That kind of acceptance comes with practice, with experience, with repetition. You learn to understand your own process, and accept its working habits. You learn to give up trying to mold your process into some idea of what you think it should be—"should" is a very coercive concept—and just let it unfold in its own time and manner.

And that's how I most often operate, creatively. I've learned that forcing the process never yields a good outcome: it either ends in a stubborn block, or I produce crap I wouldn't want to share with anyone, anyway. So my job is usually just to be prepared for whenever the process happens.

On the other hand, I've learned that I can coax and cajole, invite and hope. I can encourage that larger, smarter self that's responsible for most of my best work to come forward. I can invite in the wild things. i can leave the door open, and let the wolves wander through. I can open wide the windows inside my own soul, and let the wind and the silence move through, and blow away the accumulating dust.

All I have to work with are metaphors (wolves, windows) and analogies. This is too big and too mysterious a theme to write about definitively, or fully. I keep circling back to it, as part of my own process. I can only dip in and out, and hope each time I contemplate it to learn a little more, go a little deeper.

So here are few small aspects, in unreal order:

1. Because writing creates new worlds to inhabit, because it is worldbuilding, and travel between worlds, it is shamanic. Or at least it has the potential to be. Writing can activate its shamanic potential through content, style, and context of presentation. Traveling between your ordinary world and another one, invented or real, is what a shaman (or wizard) does. This isn't escapism, though; more on that later.

2. Sometimes we write to understand, rather than to describe or explain. Sometimes we don't what we think or fell until we write it out. The process of writing is the process of revelation, of becoming. The creative process is a process of self-discovery, but since we are all One, self-discovery also means discovery for others. The shamanic artist makes art in part to share the fruits of the journey of discovery. Traditionally, the shaman took a journey to the other worlds for the sake of healing the person, or the community: the knowledge brought back for healing was meant to be shared publicly, not kept privately. (Of course there are always confidences and secrets whose privacy one maintains.) If writing is shamanic, then it have that effect on readers.

3. The artist is a shaman in the sense that he or she goes into the other worlds via imagination, intuition, vision, and brings back the archetypal gold of new truth, new beauty. Shamans are divers of the deep waters of the self, who dare to explore the hidden and invisible world of the psyche. What knowledge and wisdom is brought back aids in coping with what is. Thus writing is not escapism, it is completion and conjoining. Context matters.

4. Art, in whatever medium, when it is shamanic in nature and function, can be identified by its liminality and numinosity. Its effects on the reader (viewer, audience, etc.) can be traced by the event of personal transformation, no matter how large or small, either in the moment of art, or later on after contemplation. Art can change lives. One way that we recognize great art is that it does indeed have that kind of effect on people. Shamanic art also disturbs. It can be uncomfortable to confront.

5. In order for writing to become shamanic, the shadow, the darkness, the wolf at the door, must be allowed to enter. You have to let the outside night in. You have to give control over to the unconscious, to the inner forces, to that larger, smarter self. You have to let go of the ego-personality's need to be in charge, in control, to consciously direct art-making. You have to allow for unpredictability and chaos. You have to be willing to tell the hard truthful stories, the difficult ones that most people turn away from because the content disturbs them. You also have to be willing to tell the stories that transcend experience, that are almost impossible to fit into words, short of the exultant poetry of ecstatic praise. Don't stint. And don't censor yourself. Be a prophet. Be a voice crying in the wilderness.

6. Shamanic writing is about process, about change, about reorganizing the kernel of the word into a new, hopefully shape. The contents of the story matter less than that the story is told. The story must be told. The process of telling is essential to your own process of internal change. Don't censor yourself: write whatever it is that you must write.

7. If you assume there is only one reason to write, you kill a million universes in which other reasons are even more essential. Writing can be therapeutic, but the end-product of writing, the written poem or essay, etc., is not itself therapy, it is only the record of therapy, or the product of art therapy. No matter how attached to it you become, because writing it was therapeutic, don't assume it's good art. Making art can be cathartic, to both the maker and the viewer, but art is not inherently a catharsis. Don't confuse the process with the product or the purpose.

8. The archetypal stories are the oldest stories, and have been with us the longest. The narratives of shamanism, or myth, of deep psychological roleplay, all recycle the same stories. So don't fret about originality. If anything, if we write a numinous, evocative story it will evoke the oldest resonances in the psyche, and trigger the archetypes. That feeling you get when the small hairs on the back of your neck stand up. That feeling of standing on the threshold of a brave new world, about to take a first step into the unknown. So don't worry if your story isn't the most modern, the most ironically postmodern, the most original: let the old resonances in, let the oldest echoes ring through. That's how you get at the journey to the other worlds, by remembering you've already been there.

What I'm Reading This Summer

First off, I've been reading a lot of pamphlets and information packets relating to medical issues. There's even an illustrated booklet describing the surgery I've had, and the next planned surgery, too, co-written by my surgeon. There's lots of forms and papers and guidesheets to various issues pre- and post-operative, and more than one pamphlet on dietary needs and restrictions. Not to mention the exciting "how to" books about the ostomy appliances. These were all real page-turners.

But if that's not exciting enough, there are other things to read, recently acquired. I'll get to some of those in a minute.

First, though, I need to remind myself that I was completely out of commission for almost a month. I didn't go anywhere for weeks, and the truck didn't even get out of the garage for about three weeks. The engine turned over just fine when I finally got around to starting it, and this week I got the front brakes fixed, which had been waiting to be done since before my first date with the scalpel. Since then, I'm still catching up with life. I've spent a little bit of money on books and CDs since I got going again. I spent a fair bit before the surgery, too, laying in DVD movies to watch and books to read while recuperating. I didn't actually get to all of those I'd picked up, usually at random and mostly used at thrift stores for very cheap, but the pile is still there to be gone through. I didn't acquire ephemera, during that pre-surgery stocking-up period, I bought things I knew I'd want to watch, with pleasure, and re-read and re-watch again later.

I was thinking about doing what "What I'm Reading Now" post anyway, earlier today. Then I ran across some online literary friends' thoughts on the same thing, which pushed me over the edge. I've had a difficult night sleeping tonight, so it's the middle of the night now, after I did sleep for awhile, with vivid dreams, and I'm waiting until the pain pill kicks in and I can get through the rest of the night's sleep with better comfort. The idea was to post very short lists of what we've enjoyed reading lately, particularly for summer reading. Some other online poet friends have joined in with their lists, so since I was going to write about what I've been reading anyway, I thought to myself, why not?

Border's, the large bookstore chain, is going out of business. I have very mixed feelings about this. When I lived in Ann Arbor, I was a regular at the original Border's Book Store, the original store before it was ever a national chain. It was a haven for lovers of books. I discovered many treasures there, and they also would order anything you wanted. They were at the time an independent bookstore, the like of which is fading into the past, now. Then they became a chain, but they were still good, and I shopped there often. Now, with their going out of business sales, I've gone down to the closest store and spent a significant amount of money, acquiring rarities that I will treasure for a long time, divided more or less equally among books, CDs, and DVDs. One thing I always liked about Border's is that they were willing to stock music concert DVDs, a particular pleasure of mine, including some rare and unusual ones I never saw anywhere else. In recent years, for example, I picked up a couple of documentaries about Glenn Gould, a German film featuring an historical John Cage concert, and much more.

I've also been having luck at the local Goodwill thrift stores, after not having been to any of them in over a month. That's enough time for stock to turn over, and new things to appear. I found some real treasures earlier this week.

So here's a short list, as recommended, consisting of summer reading: 2 non-fiction books that we have enjoyed; 2 new fiction also enjoyed; and 2 old favorites we've recently re-read. To that list I'll add 2 poetry books also recently enjoyed, as part of this summer's post-surgery reading feast.

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Non-Fiction:

I read a lot of non-fiction. I've usually got several books going at once, dipping in and out of them on different days, when particular topics catch my attention. Sometimes I will become absorbed by a particular book, and finish it that day, ignoring everything else. This list is a very brief and very incomplete overview of what I've been dipping into this summer, both before and after the surgery.

Allan J. Hamilton, MD: The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with surgery, the supernatural, and the healing power of hope. Most surgeons, indeed most doctors, are trained to be highly materialistic, treating the body almost as a malfunctioning machine. There has been change, however, in my lifetime, towards a more holistic, multi-factored, and empathetic practice of medicine. The return of family practice is one sign of this trend. And surgeons like Dr. Hamilton are another. He is one of those who is willing to explore alternative medicine, both as a complement to allopathic medicine and on its own terms. There are stories in his book, all based on his surgical practice, of miracles of healing, and also miracles of spirit. He knows the difference between "healing" and "curing," the latter being the removal of disease, the former being the healing of the soul regardless of whether death is evaded or not. This is wise material. I was very impressed with book, and often surprised. As a patient myself, as the son of a doctor who has been around medicine and hospitals his whole life, I cannot say it better than Dr. Hamilton says here, near the end of one chapter: One of the great secrets of medicine is that, as a physician, you have unparalleled entry into the lives of others. Every patient is an existential conduit to seeing your own struggles. Each patient brings you one step closer to seeing the truth about yourself. I read part of The Scalpel and the Soul before I went for surgery; I will continue reading it through this summer, before my next surgery, and probably again after. It helps a lot.

Scott Herring: Another Country: Queer anti-urbanism. One very important truth about living gay in the United States was crystallized for me by several arguments I got into with other, very urbanized, ghetto-living gay men, soon after the movie Brokeback Mountain came out. I found myself confronted again and again with the truth that one of the most significant rifts in queer culture was not, as often postulated, between gay men and lesbians (and trannies, etc.), but between those who assumed that if you were LGBT you must move to one of the big city gay ghettos and live urban, and those who had chosen to stay in small towns, in rural areas, and make their lives there. As a gay man who has lived in big cities with major urban gay cultures, including San Francisco, but has always enjoyed living in small rural towns outside the big cities, as i do now in Wisconsin, the publication of this book has been a validation, an affirmation, and a blessing. Scott Herring has presented us with a very well-written, readable, and also seriously academic-theoretical book that is one of the best discussions of what lesbina cartoonist Alison Bechdel (who features in a long chapter in the book) "the complicated intersection between topography and destiny." This is a book about queer regionalism. It makes the point that not everybody who is queer wants to or likes living in the big city; nor do all of us like the bar scene, or the urban anonymous cruising scenes, or any of the other big-city scenes that have become the clichés of gay life in media presentations ranging from movies, books, and popular music, which are all assumed to be the pinnacles of gay life. The metropolitan lifestyle has been almost exclusively the focus of queer scholars and queer studies, to the point where it becomes an assumption that is never questioned. But Herring questions and deconstructs such assumptions, presenting several alternatives as they have been developed by individuals and groups outside the gay cultural mainstream. The Radical Faeries are mentioned, a decentralized group of misfits of misfits within gay male culture, which I am affiliated with. So are the rural lesbian communes of Albion, CA, in Mendocino County, which I have visited and enjoyed. The history of queer publications, both rural and urban, is compared and contrasted. And a whole lot more. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who is interested in alternatives to the urban gay lifestyle and subculture, who is looking for something different, or just plain likes country living. This book, one of only a few in its positional genre, is a revelation.

Victor L. Wooten: The Music Lesson: A spiritual search for growth through music. You probably know this author's name, if you know the music scene at all, as one of the greatest bass players currently living. He has his own band, he frequently plays duos with fellow bassist Steve Bailey, and he's with Bela Fleck & The Flecktones. Victor is also a genuinely nice person. His book falls into that small genre of memorable writing that you're never quite sure is either memoir or fiction, an absolutely true story or a fantasy made up of true elements. This book's closest relatives are books such as Richard Bach's Illusions: The adventures of a reluctant messiah, or Dan Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior. This is that kind of book. It gets at the difference between being able to play all the right notes, and being able to make Music. That's a distinction I've always made for myself, as a player and composer; I will never be the best player on the planet in terms of technique, but I can play a wide range of instruments, and when I play them I make music. Victor's book not only validates this attitude, he shows how great technical playing really can also be part of making Music—but the attitude has to come first. I have just started this book, but I already find it true and inspirational.

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Fiction:

I don't read much mainstream literary fiction anymore; mostly it's not very good or interesting these days, despite all its pretensions. One of the worst of those pretensions is that mainstream literary fiction places itself above "genre fiction" in terms of writing quality, interest, and relevance to ordinary readers—none of which placements are defensible on the evidence—while denigrating "genre fiction" as basically pulp fiction, all the while ignoring that "realistic narrative mainstream literary fiction" is itself a genre. This attitude is promoted by the guardian gate-keepers of literary artistry, those literary critics who promote prose fiction as great art, usually with an agenda. But for the general reader, a pleasurable rather than critical ideology is more important; and on that criteria, genre fiction is at least as good in terms of writing quality as anything in the post-modernist literary mainstream, and often far more readable.

Jack Vance: The Demon Princes omnibus. Not exactly space opera, not exactly a novel of revenge, not exactly a baroque fiction, not exactly an adventure of discovery, not exactly a 19th C. bildungsroman, not exactly a 20th C. science fantasy escapade—but at the same time, all of these. Vance's style, well known in SF as inclined towards the Baroque, is in fact highly readable and very straightforward, even when it seems its most non-linear. Consisting of five novels originally published between 1964 and 1981, this five-part adventure is also a deeply moral fiction, not only in terms of its plot and its characterizations of future good and evil, but also in novelist and critic John Gardner's sense: a novel of adventure that is also a novel of ideas, with a moral compass that the reader leaves having learned from, beyond the plot itself. Vance was well-known as a great literary stylist, both within SF and in everything else he wrote. His stories were always inventive and colorful beyond the norm, truly a literature of ideas. Reading through these five novels has been great fun, and a reminder all over again that a good space opera can also be just a good story, period.

Patricia A. McKillip: The Bards of Bone Plain. Though this fantasy novel repeats some of the themes that the author is known for, notably the bardic harper on a quest for self-knowledge, which involves some very ancient magic and some very ordinary love—one of the things that attracts me to her fantasy novels, to be honest, of which I have most—in this shorter novel she takes everything to a new level. The key elements of this fantasy, around which all the action orbits, are poetry and music. These are the threads that run all through the story, that are woven into both cause and effect. The characters drive the plot, as it should be, with both good and bad choices having consequences. The culminating scene, in which many mysteries are revealed, was spine-tingling and unpredictable. Some things end conclusively, some threads move on without being tied up—very much like real life. In sum, these is indeed very realistic fiction, very true to life and experience, very natural in execution, with characters both believable and likable, with individual temperaments and quirks. This combination of modernistic realism and ancient magic is McKillip's unique trademark as an author; it's what makes her stand out as feeling very realistic a writer, even as her stories are wound with fantastic elements. If McKillip were not relegated as an author to "genre fiction," she would be a continuous best-seller along the lines of "mainstream" authors who dabble in speculative fiction without being labeled as "genre" writers.

By the way, Patricia McKillip could just as easily go onto my "re-read list," as some of her novels I have read multiple times, each time getting more out of them.

Gene Wolfe: Storeys from the Old Hotel. This collection of short stories and metafictions, experiments, dreams, and more traditional fantasy tales, underlines many critics' opinions that Wolfe is one of the greatest living stylists we have, whether or not you consider any labels for his writing. Like Ursula K. LeGuin, he is one of a handful of "fantasy" authors who has been published in The New Yorker magazine, a publication notoriously picky about what it prints. Wolfe has been called a literary giant, not only in science fiction, but in general, and this collection of stories showcases his talents very well. Contents range from single-page metafictions, including the title story, to longer fantasies, and even a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. I first read Wolfe back in the 1970s, and his writing then was like nothing else SF had to offer: clearly literary in the best sense, and rich in texture and deep in resonance. I can still remember the images evoked in my mind by such early works as "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and other stories." Wolfe has continued to be on the literary leading edge, no matter what genre you try to place him in. I'm still reading this collection, savoring each piece as I go. I'm taking my time and enjoying each piece on its own, as I'd recommend any reader do, as well.

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Old Favorites Re-read:

Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business. The short stories and novellas featuring Chandler's great character Philip Marlowe. I re-read Chandler periodically, both the novels and the collections, enjoying them anew every time. Even though I have this paperback edition, I found a fresh copy of it at a thrift store just before surgery, in nearly-new condition, for almost nothing. So I took that as a hint, and enjoyed re-reading Chandler again.

C.J. Cherryh, omnibus edition of the Chanur saga: The Pride of Chanur, Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur's Homecoming. Four novels set in a particular future history that Cherryh has set several of her novels in, but what makes these unique and different is that humans are the aliens, newly-discovered, and barely comprehended. This is one of the most successful series in SF history for the story being told from an alien viewpoint, with a richly-detailed alien psychology and cultural context. Not only the hani, the lead viewpoint characters, but four or five other alien cultures, all interacting in trade and politics. It's also one of the most suspenseful space operas I've ever read, making you want to go back and re-read it again and again. I've re-read the entire series three times this summer, particularly right after the surgery, when I wanted something comfortable and familiar to read when my mind was still fogged with drugs, and I was tired all the time. I even took this omnibus edition along to my hospital room; I didn't read much of it there, but it was like having an old friend along for comfort's sake.

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Poetry:

William Everson: Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a literary region. Published in 1976, this remains an important study of Pacific Coast literature, including historical writing, prose, fiction, and poetry. Everson was a poet, printer, once a monk, and a student and friend of some of the most famous names in California literature, not least among them Robinson Jeffers, who Everson championed for many years after Jeffers lost popularity with the fickle masses. Everson's thesis is that the coastal West creates its own literary style, and presents convincing arguments. It is quintessentially American writing, the end of the frontier West where it runs into the ocean, and encounters Asia. it is writing that treats nature as a living character, as a dominant feature of literature, not as a mere backdrop for human-centered dramas. Everson draws on many examples, and considers many famous West Coast writers in this study. I'm going to have to read it at least twice before I can absorb it all, but it will be worth it. Everson validates in this study what I've long believed to be true, which is also supported by many other writers of the West, from Jeffers to Gary Snyder, and many others.

Patricia Donegan: Haiku Mind: 108 poems to cultivate awareness and open your heart. A haiku-based self-help book? Why not. Actually, despite that caveat, this is a pretty good read. The author is an experienced haiku student and writer, and a long-time Buddhist meditation leader, so the credentials are in place. The book is divided into 108 chapters, each a meditation on the theme of the haiku cited at each chapter's beginning. The haiku themselves are a mix of classical and brand new, written by writers from Japan, America, and elsewhere. Some are well known classical masters (Basho, Issa), others their modern heirs. It's an interesting idea for a haiku book, and it works rather well; although, it's not really a book about poetry, but a book about life and healing and transcendence that uses poetry as its touchstone. So don't expect any poetry criticism here, but do expect some genuine wisdom.

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Music: What I've Been Listening to This Summer

I also want to mention some CDs that I've been enjoying this summer. I've been on a lucky streak at the thrift stores, finding CDs both new to me, and filling in the gaps in my album collection with some old favorites that I've never owned before, but are classic albums of various kinds. I've been on a, well, not exactly nostalgia kick, but call it a historical review. Great albums from the past I've been picking up here and there to fill in gaps in my music library.

Simon and Garfunkel: Sounds of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Water

Dave Brubeck: a special five-CD edition of all the original "Time" series albums, boxed as a set, with the CD slipcases reproducing the original liner notes and cover art. I'd already acquired the special edition of Time Out, but I'd been looking for Time Further Out for some time now (ahem), and this filled in that gap. The set also includes: Countdown: Time in Outer Space; Time Changes; Time In.

Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen: Poetry for the Beat Generation. A classic with Kerouac reading his poems accompanied by Allen's piano and jazz stylings. This is one of those great albums that anyone interested in mid-20th C. poetry and music needs to hear at least once in their lives.

Igor Stravinsky: Miniature Masterpieces. A large compilation of several short orchestral and chamber pieces, many of them only rarely recorded or performed. The "Dumbarton Oaks" chamber concerto is here, probably the best-known work on this album, but so are the two Suites for Small Orchestra. Even rarer still are the wonderful "Circus Polka" and my personal favorite among Stravinsky's rarely-performed short works for large orchestra: the "Greeting Prelude," which is his arrangement of "Happy Birthday," a very witty and wry orchestral setting of the familiar song.

Various Artists: the original musical soundtrack for 2001: a space odyssey. I wore out two copies of this on vinyl, back in the 1970s. It was my first exposure, as a budding teen proto-composer, as I'm sure it was to many other listeners, of the music of Gyorgy Ligeti, whose dramatic and abstract works figure prominently in the film. Also included of course is a full performance of Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube," which still in mind evokes those spacecraft and space stations dancing gracefully in Earth orbit. This CD gives us all the music exactly as it was used in the film; in many ways, the long passages in the film in which the only sound is music prefigure my ongoing interest in non-verbal cinema, of which 2001: a space odyssey can be seen as a precursor of the entire genre.

Antonio Vivaldi: Cello Concertos, Vol. 4 as performed by cellist Ofra Harnoy. I've been listening to a lot of classical music again this year, and Vivaldi and Telemann have both been prominent in my listening. This CD was a revelation, giving me the chance to experience several beautiful concerti I hadn't really heard before. My favorite here is the Concerto in E-Flat, RV 408, which contains a middle-movement adagio of sublime beauty. It's a lovely cantabile, full of deep ardor and high emotion, which I find both soothing and mournful to listen to.

What's Your Favorite Novel?

I was having a discussion the other evening about what were out favorite novels. The truth is, I'm not sure I could pick just one. I'm not even sure it's a valid question.

One criterion for choosing one's favorite novel is: How many times have you re-read it? For example, every two or three years I get the urge to re-read Raymond Chandler; I think The Long Goodbye is a great novel, and I often re-read that one.

A contrasting criterion, however, is to choose a novel one reads, thinks very highly of, enjoyed the style and content and would recommend that others read, but one doesn't feel the need to re-read it often, if at all. For example, when I pick up Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, which I think is a great novel, I usually only re-read a favorite section or two, not the entire work, cover to cover. I thoroughly enjoyed James Joyce's Ulysses, but I don't feel the urge to re-read it very often.

How is one to choose a favorite novel, therefore? I'm not sure I can.

I could provide a long list of many novels I've enjoyed reading over the years. That list would contain as much science fiction as it would mainstream literary fiction (which is itself a genre, even though critics claim it is the non-genre by which they define, and usually dismiss, other forms of "genre fiction"). The list would also contain books by a select group of mystery writers, from whom it would be hard to pick one best novel out of the overall oeuvre; for example, Raymond Chandler (again), Tony Hillerman, Dana Stabenow, Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon is a great novel, very well-written, that I re-read less often than Chandler.

I could compile a long list, therefore, but it would be impossible to pick one novel out as my favorite novel. There are too many favorites, almost all of equal regard. I don't think I could pick just one. And it would be a very long list, as I'm an avid lifelong reader, with an unschooled knack for reading relatively fast and retaining most of what I read. (I can still remember the smell of the paper, and the breeze coming in my bedroom window, and the color of the sky, from one day the summer I was thirteen and read my first Isaac Asimov novel.)

The urge to compile lists of "Best Novels" is an urge that is mostly useless. It's a fun game, but it's also a subjective one. Hardly any two readers, or literary critics, would agree on all choices.

I'm not even sure I could pick one favorite writer, and his or her works, as my favorite. Different writers give me different pleasures.

For example, I thoroughly enjoy reading Arthur C. Clarke novels such The Songs of Distant Earth for his dry wit, his scientific imagination coupled with a cool humor regarding human foibles. I enjoy reading Isaac Asimov because of his characters and ideas; he has been called an intellectual writer, but he has a knack for making the reader care about those ideas his characters are tied up with, in novels such as The Gods Themselves or stories like "Nightfall." Kate Wilhelm has summoned in me an atavistic terror, a fear for my survival, because she gets me so involved in her well-depicted characters and the threatening situations they find themselves in; I can still feel the gut-impact of her novella "The Gorgon Field" just by thinking about it. Thomas Merton activates in this reader a living, active contemplation of world, self, and spirit; I think about my place in the world, my purpose, even as Merton describes (or photographs) what has moved him to feel that same way. I periodically re-read Ernest Hemingway's "The Nick Adams Stories" because these compiled stores and fragments are some of his best, most compelling writing; I've often thought that Hemingway shined brightest in story rather than novel form; and the Nick Adams stories are semi-auotbiographical, many of them in northern Michigan, my home state as well as Hemingway's, and thus the stories carry a special resonance for me, right down to my experiences summering in the some of the very same locales. (I've also visited Hemingway's home in Key West, and have a feeling for his work set in those locales, as well.)

In providing examples, I'm already making a list. My reading tastes are all over the map. I go for good writing, I don't care what "genre" it falls into.

One of the typical arguments I have with mainstream iiterary critics is their stubborn insistence on dismissing "genre fiction" when in fact much of writing in genre fiction is as good or better than one finds in mainstream literary fiction (again, a literary genre even if it claims not to be)—which these days is often bland, tepid, self-involved, and contains a lot of characters it's hard to have any empathy with. One of the reasons I find certain famous living authors over-rated is that they haven't managed to make me give a damn about their characters, stories, or quality of writing. A good story, well-written, is what makes for a great novel; mere style alone cannot sustain interest very long. Nor can the writer's fame alone make me want to read their new novel, if I found their previous novels uninteresting. People tell me I'm supposed to like and revere Philip Roth and John Ashbery; try as I might, I never have been able to.

One sometimes comes to the conclusion that the mainstream literary fiction (genre) one is "supposed" to adore is all about self-involved, angst-ridden New England urban dwellers; none of that speaks to my life or interests, dwelling as I do in Midwestern heartlands that most New Englanders neither comprehend nor want to. (I still laugh when a friend in New Hampshire was astonished by the fact that, out here in the Middle West, one can drive all day long and still only cross one state border.) Those of us who live in the "flyover" zone, who often live in smaller towns, or more rurally, than the literary denizens of either urban coast, often seem to live in another universe entirely. Even those who live in our large Midwestern metropolises, such as Chicago, Detroit, or Denver, have a different attitude towards life than those in Los Angeles or the New England megaplex. For one thing, the sky is simply much bigger out here. Under that big sky, it's easier to contemplate the horizon. One sometimes wonders if the reason New York City is so self-involved is because there can only see themselves reflected in their shiny glass-and-steel buildings, and can't see enough sky.

This may also be an aspect of my long list of favorite novels, many of which are weighted heavily towards novels that broaden the mind, that stretch outwards into the sky, that have a sense of wonder that is expansive rather than narcissistic and claustrophobic. Many novels on my list of favorites are novels that opened my mind in new directions, that gave me insight into cultures I never encountered or understood before, that explored ideas and relationships beyond those merely human-centered and social. This accounts for the large number of novels of speculative fiction on my list. It also may account for what attracts me to certain writers, while there are others to whose works I am unable to connect at all. E.F. Forster famously prefaced his great novel Howard's End with two words: "Only connect." And not only is that the theme of his novel, it's a good rule for living: only connect. Those people, real or fictional, with whom we are able to connect, all give us something for living. And connecting needn't be limited only to people like ourselves. Another reason I feel little connection with much mainstream literary fiction these days is that it has become very parochial; frankly, in my experience, writers from New York City are a lot more tunnel-visioned and parochial than writers from rural South Dakota (Linda Hasslestrom) or Michigan (Jim Harrison, a genuinely cosmopolitan writer) or California (a long list indeed).

Some writers we read for their content, their subject matter. I enjoy reading John Muir's diaries of his solo treks in the Sierras. Robinson Jeffers appeals to me as much for his creation-centered observational poems as for his writing style presented as an alternative to hermetic (obscurantist) Modernism. Both Hemingway and Harrison appeal to me because we're all Michigan boys at heart, although their appeal spreads out in many other directions, as well.

So I can't tell you what my favorite novel is. I don't know myself. There are too many available choices, potential possibilities, a long list of favorites. I could compile a list, but perhaps I already have, at least in part, simply by giving examples here as I meandered across the terrain of this topic. I might someday try to make a list. Yet list-making itself is something of which I am skeptical, veering as it does so close to canon-making. Such lists ought to be appreciative, not prescriptive: unlike most critics with an axe to grind or an ideological agenda to pursue, I don't insist that every other reader like the same novels that I do, even for the same reasons. A list of favorites would be only my idiosyncratic list, even if others agreed with me on many choices.

"Only connect." We do our best. But I think it remains better to connect out of love and common humanity, as Forster intimates in his novel, rather than out of an aggressive will to impose our social standards upon each other. So make your own connections, and make your own list of favorite novels. If we connect, thereby, that's all to the good.

Notes on the Writing

Pretty much all true. I don't make up much, except connections and associations. This morning's poem, Distinctions,, for example, completely unexpected as it was to be writing a poem this morning, fell into place more or less as recorded. I might leave out a few unnecessary, topical details, in hopes of being more permanent, more universal. Writing is about leaving just enough detail in to activate the imagination, but not putting so much in that it stifles or becomes over-specific or too thought out. Over-writing is usually about putting too much in, not leaving enough out.

I might look for the best turn of phrase, the inspiration of saying something perfectly in a poem that might otherwise be slack in conversation. The perfect phrase is usually concise and detailed, accurate and fulsome. Revision for me is usually about reducing, like a sauce on the stove, concentrating flavors into a denser broth. I take out the chaff, I leave in the grain.

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I'm reading every day, although I don't write every day. Reading is part of writing. In fact, you should read a lot more than your write. Let it percolate through the strata of your being, let the limestone filter it as it drips down into those caves inside your unconscious, and were the springwaters re-emerge on the surface, it will be changed, transformed, sweetened, made more drinkable by being laced with minerals leached out of the rock. That's an extended geological analogy, but it's absolutely true. It's an analogy that goes all the way back to my ancient Celtic and Nordic roots.

I read every day. I read eclectically, usually reading something first thing in the morning—except a poem bubbled up from the spring first thing this morning, so I didn't read anything—that gives me a spiritual push, an awakening, or something to contemplate. I do a lot of my spiritual reading in the morning. Later in the day I'll read something literary, a book of poems, or a commentary on poems, or an essay about the arts. Reading in the bathroom can be anything, but it's often science fiction.

I read a lot more than I write. You can learn how to write from your reading. You take it all in, let it stir around inside you—another analogy, this time one based on the alchemy of cooking—and it will come out eventually in a changed form, made yours by having been passed through you. What you write is made yours by having been passed through your system, no matter its origins or influences. Don't think about this too much. Just let it happen.

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I'm writing more poems, again, suddenly, unexpectedly. As usual, I don't know why. It might be linked to the recent bouts of insomnia—lying awake at night, unable to turn off the brain, which is still turning things over even though I'm dead tired and want to rest. That constant churning of re-activated lifeforce that was quiescent during the past year of heavy illness. Now I'm preparing, and getting stronger, to get ready for some major surgery this summer designed to kill my chronic illness and give me my life back. Maybe the restlessness is because I have more energy, now, than I know what to do with. I'm working out, exercising, taking walks, starting to think about this year's flower garden, noticing the tree is starting to bud, out back. Maybe it's that my energy is returning.

Maybe I'm writing more poems because I'm writing more lyrics for the new music commission. I'm also writing music. I improvised and found a lovely, lyrical chord progression on the piano yesterday, and wrote down two pages of score. Now I have to find the words to fit to the piano part. The frame is there. I just have to choose the lyric, or write a new one. This will be in the new piece, it will be a lyrical piece, a quieter piece focusing on the beauty and fragility of life. We'll see where it goes. I plan to work on it again today or tomorrow.

Why am I writing more poems again? For no reason that I can think of; those possible reasons listed above are just guesses. I don't mind. It's just unexpected. And I hope it's a sign of surplus energy now being available, because I don't want to have to budget myself with regard to the new music commission. There just seems to be an excess of energy. I actually have to find ways to tire myself out. This is no complaint. It's just a novel experience, after a long time being short of energy for most things. I have to get used to it, figure out how to use it well.

Reminder to self: Creativity as an energy is an infinite resource, not a scarce one. It is not subject to being used up or wasted. It simply cannot be wasted. Nonetheless, my discipline has to be, right now, about staying focused on what I most need to be working on. The truth is, I have catching up to do on mundane chores like sorting the mail. Priorities. As much as I'd rather not have to deal with the mail, there it is, waiting to be dealt with. Meanwhile, another new poem. Another piece of music. Let the pieces fall into place wherever they wish, and focus on making them fall into place often and more.

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it's best to read for an hour at most, then go do something physical. The balance is essential. I do a lot of my best thinking when walking around the block, or driving on the interstate. Read for awhile, then absorb it by going out for a walk. Reading too much in one sitting, like writing too much in one sitting can degrade the experience and product.

Oh yes, it's entirely possible to write too much at one sitting. When the writing gets stale or rote, that's when it's time to take a break, or even stop. I don't believe in forced writing habits, like a-poem-a-day, or set hours for writing. On the occasions when I followed some writer's advice and tried writing that way, I produced nothing but crap. Or in some cases études. But nothing worth keeping. So some creative writing teachers view me an undisciplined, which by their standards I suppose is true. What they can't account for is that I produce poems they like in my very undisciplined way. The truth is, it's just a different kind of discipline that I practice.

I have to get up and move around for awhile. Let the physical counterpoint to the writing make a balance, and come back a brief while later with fresh ears. When I was writing this morning's poem, I got up and made breakfast while I waited for the poem's ending to bubble up. It wouldn't come for awhile. Then, having walked away from it for awhile, ti came easily and obviously. I probably got up and walked away from this poem a minimum of four times today. Then, when you're walking around or cracking an egg, the phrases start sounding in your mind again, the spring bubbles over, and you go back and fill in some more lines. This is how I normally write, these days.

Poems in this form are invited to ramble by the form itself. The form being a Letter rather than a sonnet. I find it interesting, though, how each digression in the poem turns out to be essential. Sometimes the getting and walking around is when the clues start to converge, the shape emerges, the final form, and you know when to end. How to get there might take awhile. But you can feel when a poem in this form is ending. Digression is part of the fabric. Each digression really does mean something, though. They turn out not to be random. Which often is a surprise to me as well as to any other reader.

When I'm writing music score, I have to get up and walk around even more often. It's even more urgent. It's like sitting and writing music score builds up a static charge. I need to walk over to the stove, or across the living room, to ground the charge, to shed the extra voltage, before I can sit back down again and focus. I learned this a year or so ago when I was writing Weavers of Light. It still holds true. So it can take all day to write just a few pages of music. Maybe it's because most things I'm writing lately, music or words, tends to come out at white heat. You need to give the nozzle of the furnace a little time cool down, before you extrude the next segment of melted ore. Another analogy, maybe the best one yet, because it accounts for the cooling periods in between emergences of creativity that all seem to come out at white heat. I need to walk off the tension that builds up. Ground the static. Let the smelter cool down a little. Then I can go back and work again at white heat, until the next cooling cycle. This might mean that the writing takes a little bit longer than you'd expect, but it also seems to mean that when the ore emerges, it's worthwhile, and not a waste of effort.