Three Things #10: Stop & Go
The essential difference between English and American musicians could be very crudely defined in these terms: American musicians will always ask, How do we end? English musicians only ask, How do we begin?
—Elvis Costello (from the liner notes for the Ryko reissue of King of America)
1: Interviews
I was interviewed at the magnificent online lit mag, talking about strawberries all of the time. You can read it here.
My publisher also interviewed me recently as part of the impending marketing frenzy leading up to the publication of Vessels in December. The interview will appear some time in the next few months, I’m not sure exactly when. You’ll know when I know.
2: Origin Story
Both interviews asked questions that led me to talk about how I got into poetry in the first place. There was some overlap between my answers, of course, but they varied considerably, each emphasizing different elements of my first creative steps on the road to poetry.
And in both answers, I picked up the story at very different points. In one, I started in high school and college. In the other, I glossed over almost everything before the mid ’90s, with only the most gauzy flashbacks to middle school and elsewhen.
Therefore, I left out many details that some (including myself, frankly) might have considered important. In neither interview, for example, did I mention Lewis Carroll or A.A. Milne or Edward Gorey. Nor did I mention Dead Poets’ Society or Koyaanisqatsi or The Heart of Saturday Night. Cummings’ 73 Poems never came up, or the long-forgotten doggerel verse of Sam Hoffenstein, or the countless radio jingles from the ’40s and ’50s that both my parents knew by heart and recited from memory at the dinner table. I didn’t mention all those D&D campaigns, spinning stories with a handful of dice. And I didn’t talk about the journalling assignment from fourth to ninth grade, where we were required to write a certain number of pages each week, every week, with more weekly pages every year. All of which would have added just a few more oddly-shaped bits in the jigsaw of where a poet like me came from.
So. I have been thinking about the idea of the “Origin Story,” and how often there is some single, overwhelming THING that explains everything. A radioactive spider. A burst of gamma rays. But real origin stories are (like everything else in the real world) extremely messy, staggeringly complicated, and almost impossible to cram into the clean, well-lighted boxes of “narratives.”
It is not the crackling thunderbolt late in the story that causes the inevitable and shocking transformation — but rather the long, slow, crawling concatenation of tiny, insignificant moments as they build inexorably, gradually, imperceptibly forming the submarine, subliminal, subconscious accretion of personhood, like a sort of psychological river delta.
The real work is so mundane, so boring, so tedious. Lightning will flash, from time to time, in the sky. Its strobe blasts the room with a stark revelation like a crisis, all adrenaline and defibrillators. But the room looks out on a river delta, which was built up over millennia by the endless rain of sediments from uncounted and unnumbered seasons.
How do you explain the delta when people usually just want to understand the thunder?
3: Change Everything
This is the most challenging, most fundamental work of the artist: To ask, Where do I start? Where do I stop?
The answer to those two questions will create the shape and scope of your art. Change either answer, and you change everything.