"A poem is an empty suitcase..."

I’ve started a new residency as part of my teaching artist work with the Just Buffalo Literary Center. I’m at a school on the East Side of Buffalo, which is primarily African-American. The culture of some of these schools is challenging. I hear more yelling in the classrooms than I did at my elementary schools, and I definitely feel like the kids hear more yelling than they need to. Someone said to me yesterday that if you lower your voice, kids have to force themselves to listen. It makes sense: adults tune out loud people. Wouldn’t kids logically do the same? My first grade teacher Mrs. Ehrlich was a yeller, and was known as a yeller. It was not an enjoyable experience, that yelling, and I can’t imagine that these kids enjoy it either. What they do enjoy, and what I enjoy, is working with each of them one on one during the writing sessions. I like crouching down beside their desk and looking at each of them in the eye, and talking to them and listening to them and helping them work through a little problem in their poem. I like seeing them with two front teeth missing. I like trying to reach out to the kids who seem to have the most “issues”. That’s part of the fun of creative writing—your “issues” can be turned to power. The theme of this particular residency is “identity” and I’ve been trying to push the kids to write away from the subjects and ideas that are typical of this age and demographic—sports, video games, money, food. But sometimes I’d rather have them write period, and writing about what they know (or think they know) is the best way to get them to write at all.
On Thursday evening I am doing an event with the Tuscarora Indian School and Niagara Wheatfield High School. I was tracked down on the Internet by a high school English teacher who wanted an American Indian poet to conduct a poetry performance workshop and then appear as the featured reader. I was a little surprised by this, and have been thinking about what in the world it means to be recognized as an American Indian and a poet to boot when I still have no idea what those things mean to me. And having never conducted a poetry performance workshop before, I had no idea what to do, but I came up with a lesson plan and was really helped by the recent residencies I did in conjunction with Arts In Education. Those residencies involved how to connect creative writing to the processes of Afrorican jazz, and I had to work with a music teacher. She is also an actor, and having the chance to co-teach really gave me confidence about doing the Wheatfield performance workshop. The workshop was a lot of fun. It’s so inspiring to see kids using their minds, both the creative side and the thinking side. I had them blindly pull objects out of a box at one point and use them in a recitation of their team poems. One kid had “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and he pulled a basket out of the box. He laid down on the floor of the gym and held his arm up with the basket inverted on his fist. When we asked him what that was supposed to be, he said, “The lamp next to my bed,” and I just thought that was so wonderful and imaginative. Kay Ryan, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, says in the current Paris Review that "a poem is an empty suitacse you can never quit emptying." She means that it's a like a clown suitcase, or Mary Poppins' magical carpetbag. You can keep pulling things out of a poem. I can’t wait to hear the students own poems, which I haven’t heard yet, and discover what they've packed into them.

Midsummer in Winter

A year ago this week, I dropped 225 invitations in the mail for an event that was an new sort of undertaking for my brother’s ballet organization. The event was the first fundraising benefit his organization had ever attempted. There was nickel-and-dime level fundraising and grant applications that often went nowhere. But in the course of my first Nutcracker season, one of the volunteers said, in passing, that it would be nice to do something more adult one of these days. I told her I was thinking the same thing. And as I became more aware of my brother’s ambitions and my sister-in-law’s more modest goals, I thought we should try it. We should try a serious, grownup, fundraiser, along the lines of being the organization my brother envisioned. In the parlance of another strand of development, we should “act ‘as if’…”
The benefit was a smashing success, as I’ve written here before, and yesterday, a little earlier than I might have expected, my brother and sister-in-law premiered their production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at UB Center for the Arts. I was not involved in the production much; I did, however, offer to organize a reception to celebrate the premiere, and with the help of Tracey Martin, the friend who was so involved in the Spencer business, we put on a nice, grownup cocktail party. Tracey was instrumental in getting a number of donations, and a couple whose daughters dance at the school offered to sponsor the primary costs. That was a pleasant part of the evening, but the real highlight was to come.
My brother has had some of these students their entire dancing lives. Several of them are straining at their small-city tethers, dreaming of dancing in New York City or elsewhere. Several of them are well on their way to professional careers. Many of the students are going to be able to do something with dance or theater. Whatever they do, I hope they remember this production. Considering that these are largely not professional students, the quality of the performance and the production was spectacular. Yes, I do have some bias, but I’m also capable of standing back and viewing with as much perspective as possible. I overhead many of the parents commenting afterwards that the leap forward from the last dress rehearsal was considerable. I had a brief glimpse of part of the rehearsal myself, and can attest to the fact that the finished performance was about as good as I’ve ever seen from these kids. They did themselves proud, and my brother and sister did as well. I know that they were still sewing butterfly wings on costumes an hour before curtain; I know that they did not sell out the house. I know that many parents were wondering why they were doing another production so soon after Nutcracker. I only wish that more of the community could see the results. I hope that they will.

Late Winter (and not a moment too soon)

The weather here in Western New York has finally begun to turn. I’m sure that we will have more snow before spring temperatures arrive for good, but it’s such a relief to feel that warmth will be here after a long and monotonous winter. My first winter here wasn’t so bad; the snow didn’t start in Buffalo until the first week in January, and though it stayed until March, it was an experience. But this winter started in early/mid-November. Yes, it started snowing then, and it seemed to snow steadily until the end of January. January itself was a long run of whiteness and grayness. And because I was in transition back out of Chautauqua, and anxious to get back here, and because that car crash on the 8th of the month was such an unwelcome if fortunately-only-temporary turn of events, the first month of 2009 went on and on and on. And on... I am looking forward to the sight of the first leaf buds, which will be the real sign that spring is here.

A week ago I picked up a book by an author I’ve never read. The novel was Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel laureate, and it is an astonishing book. The cliché “I couldn’t put it down” applied. The story and the means in which it is told are simple, but as I was reading it felt like a great deal about Africa, South Africa, race, post-colonialism, history, and mankind were distilled into spareness. I don’t know how much Disgrace resembles Coetzee’s other books, and I mean to pick up something else by him again as soon as I can. I think it was the awarding of the Booker to Life and Times of Michael K. that I first heard of that particular prize. I intend to get to it soon. But I’m also trying to work my way through those titles I’ve never read on the New York Times list of “best American novels of the last twenty-five years”. I’ve read a number of them, but of the top five I’d only read Beloved. If I had to defend myself against the charge of neglecting greatness, I don’t have a defense handy. I was simply reading other things. I can say that at the time the hoopla accompanying literary events like the publication of DeLillo’s Underworld turned me off. It’s like the advance buzz that comes with a certain kind of movie; when I feel myself being bullied into going, I’m likely to go the other way out of sheer contrariness. But I’ve realized that if I don’t get cracking with some of these novels, there are a lot of them I’m going to miss out on, and that might be worse. Besides, the hoopla with most of them has subsided. Now I’m only have to face down the fearsome reputations of some of the books. Perhaps it will be easier to read about Rabbit now that Updike is gone. R.I.P.
I’ve read a lot of Philip Roth, and there is no question in my mind that he is one of our country’s greatest writers ever, but the stature of American Pastoral intimidated me. It was one of those books where I felt, “What if I don’t like it?” But I’ve been going through it at a pretty brisk pace, and it reminds me in superficial ways of Joan Didion’s Democracy. Didion’s compression in that novel now strikes me, compared to Coetzee’s in Disgrace, and compared to Roth's take in American Pastoral, as a kind of signature neurotic mannerism. I say that with great respect for the style's strength and power in her essays, reportage, and memoir. Another parallel: her Hemingwayesque style in her fiction, and its compression as compared with the extravagant prose of some post-war American male novelists like Mailer or Wolfe or Pynchon (I've read some of each but not all of them), reminds me of the most superficial as well as some of the deeper, essential differences between Dickinson’s poetry and Whitman’s. It is inarguable that Didion was trying to get at what happened in this country in the Sixties and early Seventies in her novel, although Roth clearly dug much deeper into the subject. Whether I decide to take on Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies remains to be seen. I rather doubt it. Rabbit awaits.

A Better History Lesson

With fear and hope in equal amounts and an oil-water mix, I just electronically sent off the manuscript for my book to an agent I’ve been in contact with since 2001. I’m nervous because I see some areas that surely could benefit from some work, but I am more afraid that I would have procrastinated to the point of paralysis and perpetual incompletion. Ultimately I thought, what the hell? I know the MS is substantially better. In fact, it is a completely different book from the one I was working on back in 2001. I wish it had a different title, but the title is so good I have never let it go. And it’s so good that I have always been afraid the book wouldn’t live up to the title (thereby creating yet another vicious hamster-wheel for my fears and hopes to run, chasing after each other in perpetuity).
That manuscript experience from 2001: I was living in Queens and working as a waiter at Babbo, the famous restaurant in Greenwich Village. I was drinking and drugging too much, and was aware that I had a serious drug and alcohol problem, but I was also trying to fight back by writing. Because I wasn’t clear about myself and a number of other things, I was writing from the wrong place and for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, when I wasn’t hungover or sleeping off another binge, I was finishing a messed-up collage of a manuscript that was dishonest and ambitious.
In an incredibly irresponsible move, I quit my job at Babbo before I could get fired. It was the second-to-last week of August. I was living in northwest Queens, and it was hot as only the outer boroughs in August can be. Being someone who lived hand-to-mouth, I was nearly broke, and it took the last cash in my account to print out a copy of that manuscript and deliver it by hand to the literary agency office on Union Square. I didn’t believe in the book; I didn’t really believe what I’d written. Nevertheless, I had a shard of a prayer in my heart that by some miracle a publisher would see that, somewhere behind the words, there was a writer with a story, and would have pity on me and my efforts. I remember that day: it was one of those humid, rainy days in late summer. The manuscript box got wet. I must have looked like a million other writers with a dream rooted more in despair than in discipline. And because of that, I was doomed to fail. I deserved nothing more.
The agent said that the manuscript was acceptable, but something about the communication conveyed the idea that it was marginally acceptable. I was told that the submissions to publishers would go on the week after Labor Day. Probably on Tuesday, September 11. With that glimmer of hope in my heart, I decided to make an effort at getting my act together. On Monday, September 10, I registered with a temp agency, and got a work assignment with one of the municipal election campaigns. The next day was Tuesday, Primary Day, and I was told to report to an office out by JFK by 7 a.m.

Somewhere during that next terrible day I had the utterly selfish realization that I’d already been given the answer about my manuscript. More importantly, the little hope I’d had was gone. The world had been altered in a morning and my manuscript, already an insignificant thing, was rendered even more so by the scale of what had happened. I accepted that on some level, but it would take another kind of change, and an earthshaking one, before I could start to write again. And before I could write the story of my family the way I wanted to. I haven’t included any of this in the book itself, but maybe that is the story I was trying to tell. If it’s supposed to be in there, I hope the agent will tell me so.