imagination||craft: How are you?
On learning from the poets, giving ourselves space, and telling new stories
How are you doing, really? I keep both asking myself this and also wondering how the people around me are doing— really. One answer is, “I’m ok.” I’m mostly ok. I have food and shelter and people who love me and ever-shifting moments of joy and respite, love and irritation. Everydayness. Another answer is that lately I’ve been experiencing some of the bone tiredness of grief, one that is familiar to me from grieving loved ones who have died, but one which now feels more diffuse— existential, seasonal, global. The news of so much human suffering happening (in such extreme and violent ways, in such a short period of time) is impossible to fathom. And our systems— the individual human systems of those of us who are safe— don’t know what to do with it.
Megan Baxter’s course “The Writer as Researcher” begins December 11th, and I will leave it on sale for $250 through Monday November 13th. If you are a writer (of any genre) who is interested in finding resources, guidance, and community around adding research to your writing, check out the details at the link! Payment plans are available at checkout.
I was listening to the “Ten Percent Happier” podcast today, and I found this episode useful: “Three Buddhist Strategies for When the News is Overwhelming,” featuring the Buddhist nun Kaira Jewel Lingo. One of the strategies for when you find yourself doom scrolling is to allow yourself to keep taking in information, but to pivot away from news for a time. So, for example, if you are wanting to be informed about the ongoing war (one of the ongoing wars) and be a witness, you could take a break from news to take in some of the art and writing from people of that region. The episode also talks about tending to your system. If your impulse is to sleep less, sleep even more. Eat foods that nourish you. Care for yourself.
In general, I’ve been thinking about the importance of witness and also the importance of imagining new stories, new ways of being. I’ve been thinking about how writers like Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich constantly sought to estrange the familiar versions of history and ongoing injustice, to help us see it anew. Writing is so many things— witness, renewal, seeing anew, call and response. A call to awaken, to connect. (“Only connect,” as Forster wrote.)
Any truly revolutionary art is an alchemy through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, "blind sorrow," and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the What if?—the possible. What if—?—the first revolutionary question, the question the dying forces don't know how to ask.
–Adrienne Rich, from What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
This poem by Adrienne Rich has been coming to mind for me lately:
What Kind of Times Are These
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
I want to include here some material from a class in speculative nonfiction that I’ve offered in the past. (I may offer a self-guided version again in the spring.) In the class, we examine ways into writing nonfiction that imagines the “perhaps”— what might have been, what could have been, and also what could be. Here’s the excerpted material:
Any truly revolutionary art is an alchemy through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, "blind sorrow," and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the What if?—the possible. What if—?—the first revolutionary question, the question the dying forces don't know how to ask.
–Adrienne Rich, from What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.
--Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" from the collection Sister, Outsider
Poets excel in offering us glimpses of "what if." In contemporary American poetry, we have many masterful examples of poets exploring the edges of what is possible in terms of reimagining human society. Additionally, from poets we can also learn about "estranging" our usual understanding of reality, so that we can see human movement through time and place with fresh eyes. As you read Audre Lorde's essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” think about the ways that Lorde suggests poetry is "an illumination." How might we apply that idea to speculative nonfiction, as well?
Our recent Poet Laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo, has many poems that speak to the grief of worlds ending and the possibility of new paradigms emerging. As a white writer, I'm interested in how the non-indigenous among us might respectfully learn from a Native poet like Harjo about what it means to re-imagine worlds, as well as how she is a shining light for writers and poets of color. (Perhaps part of our learning, as a society, is to read more poets and writers of color.) Read the poem "Perhaps the World Ends Here.”
Also read Franny Choi's "The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On", thinking about what this poem might offer us as essayists, in terms of granting permission to freshly see injustice and disaster, and perhaps to reimagine our lives, personal interactions, and social institutions.
So, I’m finding moments of respite, many of them from poets. I’ll leave you with one more poem, one by the remarkable poet Jean Valentine:
Sanctuary
People pray to each other. The way I say "you" to someone else, respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says"you" to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely ...—Huub Oosterhuis
You who I don’t know I don’t know how to talk to you
—What is it like for you there?
Here ... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship—
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices—
What are you afraid of?
What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death.
What happens when you die?
“... not scatter the voices,”
Drown out. Not make a house, out of my own words. To be quiet in
another throat; other eyes; listen for what it is like there. What
word. What silence. Allowing. Uncertain: to drift, in the
restlessness ... Repose. To run like water—
What is it like there, right now?
Listen: the crowding of the street; the room. Everyone hunches in
against the crowding; holding their breath: against dread.
What do you dread?
What happens when you die?
What do you dread, in this room, now?
Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin.
To die, not having listened. Not having asked ... To have scattered
life.
Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to
follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.
I became aware of that Choi poem just a few weeks ago and have been thinking about it and carrying it around inside me ever since, it's wonderful.
Thanks for this post, Joanna, and sharing the the writing of others too.
Love these lines from "Sanctuary,"
"Here ... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship—"
"Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to
follow it back to life"