On Timing, Currency, and Hopefulness

I begin this, again, without an audience. This, then, is not unlike the rest of my writing. I have scribbled, typed, scrawled, processed, scratched, and posted plenty of  poems, notes, essays, stories, and other minutia. I begin again today not out of a renewed sense of confidence, but out of a renewed sense of need. You see, I have been lucky enough to come upon a very interesting juxtaposition of readings over the last few days including a set of letters between the American poets Robert Bly and James Wright, an essay on reading by Christian Bauman, “Not Fade Away," a novel by Colum McCann, Songdogs, and the new blog of my old friend Melissa.

In the summer of 1958, one year before Saint Judas was published and five years before the groundbreaking The Branch Will Not Break, James Wright decided to quit writing poetry. Then Robert Bly sent him issue #1 of The Fifties, a new American literary magazine Bly and Bill Duffy had just published. Bly and Wright had not yet met at this point. This issue of that magazine and the fervent correspondence that ensued between Bly and Wright began again a writing career that was to become very important to American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. To quickly illustrate the point that Wright used these letters as a chance to begin again being a poet instead of merely a man of letters who teaches, I will quote from Wright’s second letter to Bly. The context is that Wright is including a copy of his most recent poem for Bly’s thoughts, to prepare this reading, Wright explains: “I honest to God don’t know whether it is worth a penny or not. It might be. It more probably isn’t. But I have got to learn how to open myself more and more to the imagery which is ours and only ours, and to crack the iambic shell which used to be—and usefully, I believe—a mold.” The fear and doubt and yet the hope and faith of a struggling poet (albeit one that had already won the early love of poets the likes of Auden and others) are open for Bly (and now us) to seize upon for good or ill. Bly’s response was positive and honest and a long-lasting and fruitful friendship was born—and with it came a banquet of new poems and translations that are a blessing to the poetry of America and the world. These letters found me in a time of extended personal doubt with regard to my own poetry. Though I am not yet convinced against quitting (as Wright was by Bly), I have taken heart from their friendship as I had previously from their poetry.

The essay by Christian Bauman was entertaining and interesting in that he represented in his piece that passing but uninspired student that may or may not one day become a professional writer but who was present then went from my classroom without locating my teaching as a mile-marker on that journey. I know there have been many in the last ten years whose pans did not catch fire but that since have or someday will. I do not begrudge them this, nor do I fully blame myself, but Bauman’s article reminded me that timing—in reading a particular text, as in everything else—matters most. Let me not get too stuck in my ways as a literature teacher, and may I look a little closer for the look that suggests "I could use something else right now, what’ve you got?"

A recent recommendation from a dear and reliable friend put the name of Irish/American novelist Colum McCann in my ear and Half Price Books put his first novel Songdogs in my hands. Though it wasn’t the recommended title (National Book Award winner, Let the Great World Spin was), Songdogs, within the first several pages became the right book at the right moment for me. I am not a great theorist, but I do have a couple of old-standbys that I have come to rely on as a teacher and a writer. One has to do with the idea of currency. By that I mean not only those tokens of monetary worth that change value over time, but also the movement of water, wind, and electricity (that is, current) and also the middle aspect within the concept of time: that which is current is now and yet always changing—moving forward--relatively speaking. In storytelling, these three meanings of current or currency all unite. In McCann's novel this idea is useful in three meaningful ways:

1) The narrator's father is a photographer whose plates and prints the young narrator finds in the attic and uses to create a sense of his father's and his mother's individual pasts. McCann uses these instances of stopped time (photographs) rhetorically in order to build a narrative and a narrator capable of saying things such as: “The women would move around in the photographs for me, come behind the camera, take me by the hand and lead me somewhere no lens could watch […]” (22) and “It was as if by taking a photo he could, at any moment, reinhabit and older life—one where a body didn’t droop, or hair didn’t fall out, or a future didn’t have to exist” (23).

2) One of the first symbols of the novel is a river. In fact the opening sentence of that chapter’s second paragraph is “Not even the river itself knew it was a river anymore” (3) and later, linking the river both to time and narrative, “But I can imagine [my father] sauntering through the sun-yellow streets, […] constantly struck by the rivers of moments that were carrying him along, slamming him from one bank to the other, ferrying his way ferociously to no particular place” (30-31). This is obviously a common metaphor (river/time/memory), but McCann uses it brilliantly in this section of the novel to allow the son to tell both his own story and his father’s simultaneously.

3) When the narrator returns to County Mayo, Ireland to secure his Visa to continue living and working in Wyoming, he come upon his father, aged, ailing and alone, fishing for a “giant pink salmon” from the shore of what used to be a swift moving river. It is the tripling of the concept of currency (river, time, economics) that provides the early novel with its narrative and its energy and its pacing.

There are several reasons why this novel struck me as directly and as significantly as it did, but it was the way that the story was told that made me feel as if I was its best audience—that it was on that shelf for me alone to pick up pay a few dollars and read in my car as my two sons took a nap and my wife shopped for an Easter dress. Timing is nearly everything after all.

This brings me to my dear friend Melissa. The time was right for her to begin publishing again, and the time is right for me to be among her audience again. We have written together before—in a former life—when we were four would be “Oread Poets” who taught and wrote together near a hill in Lawrence, Kansas. It has been years, but here we go again. I couldn’t be more excited to be a reader in her audience again, and perhaps she'll return the favor—If I decide to send the link.

To conclude, this inter-web that I am submitting these meanderings to, though in theory it increases the likelihood of these writings being read, does not guarantee that they will be located by an audience. In fact, knowing this, and having considered the impossibility of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the "superaddressee" (that very particular and perfected audience every utterance exists to reach--that is an audience that understands completely), is perhaps why I chose this theoretically infinite and yet pragmatically tiny audience as the place to cast out these exercises to a larger world. How large or small that universe becomes and whether it is expanding or contracting is yet to be known. But thanks to you for visiting it, at least for the length of this post.