Flash Memoir Friday: Windows and Mirrors
Looking at "Poem (The day gets slowly started)" by James Schuyler
As E.M. Forster noted in Aspects of the Novel, “[characters in fiction] are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible. And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.” Literary texts reach out across time and space and provide a window into the consciousness of others, partly bridging the mystery of the the separateness of human consciousness, but also respecting it.
When I was teaching at a creative writing camp for high schoolers at Meredith College this past week, I gave the students the following poem by James Schuyler, and we discussed Schuyler’s use of concrete detail.
Poem (The day gets slowly started)
The day gets slowly started.
A rap at the bedroom door,
bitter coffee, hot cereal, juice
the color of sun which
isn’t out this morning. A
cool shower, a shave, soothing
Noxzema for razor burn. A bed
is made. The paper doesn’t come
until twelve or one. A gray shine
out the windows. “No one
leaves the building until
those scissors are returned.”
It’s that kind of a place.
Nonetheless, I’ve seen worse.
The worried gray is melting
into sunlight. I wish I’d
brought my book of enlightening
literary essays. I wish it
were lunch time. I wish I had
an appetite. The day agrees
with me better than it did, or,
better, I agree with it. I’ll
slide down a sunslip yet, this
crass September morning.
James Schuyler (1923-1991)
I asked the students to examine how long the poem stays with listing the sensory details of the speaker’s morning before turning to the straightforward telling of ideas or emotion. They did a great job with pointing to the concrete details the speaker lists about his morning before he comes out and tells us, “It’s that kind of a place.” (The poem likely references treatment Schuyler received for bipolar disorder.) We also discussed the turns in the poem’s conclusion— “The day agrees/ with me better than it did, or,/ better, I agree with it. I’ll/ slide down a sunslip yet, this/ crass September morning.” The surprising turns of those last two lines!
After our discussion, I asked the students to write a poem describing their own mornings and listing some of the details of it, following Schuyler’s form to the extent they wanted to: a list of morning details, including food, the weather, and a grooming product; a line of dialogue; a straightforward moment of “telling”; a series of “I wish” lines; possibly a turn at the end. That kind of thing. What I noticed when a few of them volunteered to read their drafts was the tender humanity that comes in hearing about a relative stranger’s morning routine, something we usually only know about those closest to us.
In a poem or a flash piece, we must make choices, provide glimpses. A window. Maybe even a bit of a mirror. Consider the end of the poem “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe:
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deepfor my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
In poems and flash memoir, there is a chance to see the loveliness of everyday life and its grief, and to see and appreciate those things more in the people around us. Maybe in ourselves.
Upcoming Classes
Tomorrow (Saturday 6/24) is the last in my series of 2023 Generative Writing Workshops. There is still space, if you’d like to join us! We’ll meet 12-3pm Eastern.
There is also still space in two five-week online summer courses that start July 11th:
Memoir in Collage, Instructor Megan Baxter
Writing the Lyric Essay, Instructor Joanna Penn Cooper
Details at the links!