Draining the Word Swamp
A friend sits at Starbucks and scripts his novel across the lines of a notebook. Another, before she finds her stories, spreads wet pulp across a screened frame to make paper from scratch. I open my laptop at night and key green letters across the black sky.
Writing has always unfolded this way. Each story starts with a single word. Perhaps it is not the best word, or the only word, but it is the right word because it begins the story.
A second word follows, then a seventh and a seven thousandth. No matter the number, no matter the speed, the writer moves step by step. The first word is the first step, and the rest is finding a way into the forest in order to find a way out. David Jacobson (Read more here )
Over at Ross Gale’s blog in his ongoing series of guest creatives writing about “The First Word,” editor, poet, writer, and beer brewing aficionado David Jacobson delivers a stunning 432 word summary statement. In a literary world sprinting breathlessly on a treadmill pursuing the proper nosology for a poetry that looks like prose, a fiction that reads like poetry, and most especially the proper blog note I am reminded of Supreme Court Justice William O, Douglas’s solution to the conundrum of pornography definition. The crusty jurist supposedly waved his hand and said, “To hell with definitions, I know it when I see it.”
So it was that I arrived at a certain knowing when I read David Jacobson’s prose poem-essay-blog note. Here were true words; beautiful words; enticing words pointing to truths bigger than they could ever hold.
I have spent the last month enthusiastically flooding and then laboriously draining a word swamp. In the last 72 hours I have performed a kind of literary armageddon, a final judgment on thousands of my innocent and unsuspecting words, sending them to that place where, “abandon hope all ye who enter here.” So I gaze at David’s words with a certain awe and envy.
I wonder, if in the DNA of poets there is an enzyme that switches off the need for all buts and excepts, or unique nucleic acid sequences that code for essence rather than completeness, or a receptor for the most important that once tripped, switches all others off.
I never minded when my poet friends talked shop, though I confess I rarely understood much of their critique. All was well, even enjoyable, so long as they kept to meter and concentrated on fragments. But these days more of them, as this essay is ample proof, have co-opted sentences and paragraphs and, if you can believe it, essays. And, these poets persist in infusing sterile syllogisms with a lyric song.
So I must return to my muck. Unlike David, when my cursor blinks in the black it is not the starry sky but more mud that must be drained. But I return to the work because I don’t believe we are defined completely by our genes, we can learn. Perhaps, if I read enough words that sing, I too can learn to hum. I shall copy these words of David Jacobson and leave them close so when I lose hope I might hear again the song.
“I’ve heard them whisper back, my words. Now you see a poor reflection, but one day we’ll be waiting, and you’ll see face to face. I don’t always believe them, but if these words are right, then one day I will discover in the pages of that greater story the denouement of every damned tangle and knot that has ever compelled me to put pen to paper.”
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