imagination || craft: Experimenting with Spareness
Karen Green's Bough Down & Kim Addonizio's Ordinary Genius
There are two spaces left in “Through the Veil: A Prose Poem Workshop” (10/28), and several spaces left in the self-guided group class “Writing the Lyric Essay” (opening 10/22). Click here and scroll down to find those classes!
I am also teaching my intermediate essay course “Stringing the Beads” through writers.com in November.
Yesterday, I taught a generative workshop over Zoom (one of a series of workshops I’m teaching on the first Saturday of the month). One of the issues I was thinking about as I planned the workshop was the power of spareness and of holding back when writing about emotional topics. In her great writing guide, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, Kim Addonizio has a chapter called “White Heat, Necessary Coldness.” In it, she notes, “One technique you can use to handle emotion on the page is to ‘write it colder.’ This is from a letter written by Anton Chekov …” As Addonizio explains, striking the balance between the poles of emotion and restraint is a process.
Addonizio offers some tools for creating an effective level of “coldness” or restraint. One of these tools is to ground your piece in images (and in essay, I would add, in scenes). She offers the example of Nick Flynn’s poem “Bag of Mice”:
Bag of Mice
I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you’d written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.
In the workshop yesterday, we discussed the Flynn poem, noting the strangeness and power of the dream image, as well as the way the syntax and line breaks further heightened that strangeness, creating an uncanny effect. For example, the brief pause of the line break after the first line creates an expectation that something will be revealed about an actual suicide note, but that expectation is quickly subverted by the image of pencil scrawled on a brown bag, and then further subverted by the mice.
We discussed the effect of having “smoldering” on its own line; of using “scurry” unusually, as a transitive verb— “scurried the bag”; and the effect of the line breaks in the last 4-5 lines: “& as the burning reached each carbon letter/ of what you’d written/ your voice released into the night/ like a song, & the mice/ grew wilder.” What sorts of expectations are created and turned on themselves across the line breaks of “your voice released into the night/ like a song" …” and “… & the mice/grew wilder”? Here Flynn demonstrates what can be done in a short poem to communicate the strangeness and strange dislocation (and liberty? inscrutability?) of death.
Yesterday I also provided examples from Karen Green’s 2013 book Bough Down, and we discussed the kind of power that can accrue within and across collage-like prose fragments. Bough Down was written in the aftermath of the suicide of her husband, David Foster Wallace, and I’d argue that Green demonstrates exquisitely the power of “writing it colder.” Green is also a visual artist, and the book includes reproductions of pieces made from found text and paper objects (stamps, postcards, etc.). I’ll post a few of her pages below.
For me, the power of Bough Down comes in the wisps of reporting of grief-life that reach us as if through a veil or a redacted letter. In these pieces, a living, sometimes conversational voice (“Hold on, hold on”) interacts with carefully selected memories and images (written and actual). So much is communicated in these three sentences, for example: “There was a jacket involved, and underneath the jacket a shirt, and under that the animal nest of armpit hair, cage of ribs, beating heart. All of these moved in unison when he hung up his jacket because he had the natural ability to get too warm or too cool. This just astounded me.”
A writing prompt:
Keep a notebook in which you record images, noticings, memories, and thoughts every day that you can. After a week or two, select and arrange some of these noticings, playing with them to both create enough intrigue and leave enough space to draw a reader in.
Here’s an example of a piece of writing of my own that came about in this way that appeared in my book The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis. I’ll also provide a first draft of this piece that I recently ran across, in case you’re interested in my process of tightening the piece and finding a certain balance.
First draft:
Summer Project
I don’t know what all these stacks are about. C. is standing with his back to me, messing with wires. I’m writing and looking and thinking about the dry, warm difference of men.
Now he’s resting one foot on another foot and leaning his head sideways into his beautiful hand.
When we were children, we were all sort of dry and made of hair and limbs, with boys just a bit warmer and drier.
Then we were teenagers and made of shoulders and hips and different hair.
Many ideas about ideas I could have. Ouija board. Collage. Object. Project. A project
needs a recurring motif and one or two themes. Or one theme and one or two recurring motifs.
Nothing much happened today, unless you count seeing a hawk on a low branch
in Central Park. Unless you count going to the Guggenheim and getting dizzy.
Haunting tries to happen, but I’m too dizzy to notice.
Still no project.
Philosophically speaking, my rods and cones are messed up. I mostly give up wine, and
I drink a lot more coffee. Meeting a friend for lunch, I talk in a very animated way for 30 minutes before the coffee personality goes away again.
Summer birthday. Wildflowers, Hudson.
Thirty-nine and .
Few summer activities to report in July. I travel down Manhattan to sit in the Quiet
Reading Room. I’m looking into Bernadette Mayer. A man follows me into the Quiet Reading Room and sits on the other couch. I make a face at him.
I start reading Bernadette Mayer and making little snorts and chortles. The man gets up and leaves.
C. will think “feminism” is a bad thing if I don’t stop shuffling my feet when he talks.
Quiet. let it. let us begin. Voice says, The purity flowers the hum and click braiding voice says tethered in the paddock (What’s a paddock?) Ouija project.
I call my grandmother and she says, The news has reached me that your mother’s cousin
has lost as much as 39 pounds. She says, I think your mother was a big hit at the school reunion.
She says, Don’t ever allow yourself to get used to something that’s not good for you. Useful all-purpose advice.
For a few days, I skulk around the apartment thinking phrases
like, It liked to have killed him. Some of my family might say such a thing.
Found in summer notebook: Every day I let the fearful notions stop me short.
Found in summer notebook: Stop having ideas about ideas.
Tethered in a paddock.
Yeats said it this way: Tragic joy.
Final draft:
Nothing much happened today, unless you count seeing a hawk on a low branch in Central Park. Unless you count going to the Guggenheim and getting dizzy.
Haunted tries to happen, but I’m too dizzy to notice.
Strong iced coffee. Meeting a friend for lunch, I talk in a very animated way for thirty minutes before the coffee personality goes away again.
Summer birthday. Wildflowers, Hudson.
Thirty-nine and ___________Few summer activities to report in July. I travel down Manhattan to sit in the Quiet Reading Room. I’m looking into Bernadette Mayer. A man follows me into the Quiet Reading Room and sits on the other couch. I make a face at him. I start reading Bernadette Mayer and making little snorts and chortles. The man gets up and leaves.
When we were children, we were all sort of dry and made of hair and limbs, with boys just a bit warmer and drier. Then we were teenagers and made of shoulders and hips and different hair.
Voice says, The hum and click braiding. Voice says, tethered in the paddock. (What’s a paddock?)
I call my grandmother and she says, Don’t ever allow yourself to get used to something that’s not good for you.Useful all-purpose advice.
For a few days, I skulk around the apartment thinking phrases like, It liked to have killed him. Some of my family might say such a thing.
Found in summer notebook: Stop having ideas about ideas. (Tethered in a paddock.)
Yeats said it this way: Tragic joy.
Thank you for sharing this with us, Joanna. Such striking writing you shared—yours and others'. The idea of "writing colder" compliments some of the thoughts I heard Ellen Bass share at a recent online lecture she gave about avoiding sentimentality.
It's definetly helpful to see what you chose to include in your first and final drafts. This line and image resonated with me. "Stop having ideas about ideas. (Tethered in a paddock.)" And I really like how you show us what your thinking and day is like in, "not much happened today, unless you count . . ." Relatable and interesting how we judge something to be worth telling about or not.
I smiled at the notion of "the coffee personality." Oh, and your grandma's advice is all-purpose dynamite. Thanks for letting us in on these words.