Is it too much to say that the writer or imagemaker must strive to evoke experience or approximations of experience in the audience? My experience with Interactive Fiction calls up an evoking of the simulated space and the slow emergence of that space in time, leaving an afterimage of the textual world. The experience is weirdly visceral.

Here’s William Carlos William’s The Red Wheelbarrow.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Why does the object matter? We talked about this in CW today, worrying about how much the author must try and let the reader read and experience, rather than doing the work for the reader or disallowing the possibility of experience. In IF the equivalent is to solve the puzzle for the reader.

Why does the object matter, this kind of sight?

We need to ask Lorca, who writes in The Spilled Blood:

Let my memory kindle!
Warn the jamines
of such minute whiteness!

I will not see it!

. . . . . . . . . .

But now he sleeps without end.
Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull. . .

It’s good to see another narratist aboard. Welcome Beverly.

A recent assignment in Creative Writing was to write a poem on death. The condition was to make it funny. We are working with lots of conditions. Anyway, the writers are going to have problems with this. Conditions interupt natural development of a line of thought, but they also force the writer to consider technique, to concentrate on an image that may gell later.

A poem on death could begin:

Death smiled.

or

Death came for me, then changed his mind.

Sounds like Emily Dickinson.

or

The dead man told jokes

or

Jim yelled, “Tell my mother to put me in clean socks.”
Then he jumped. Into another century.

That sounds like Soto.

Each line here is a decision.

Reading a literary magazine can be fun. This is one way of reading one.

Get a copy of Confrontation and just start reading. Read the poems. Just read them. One of the pieces will catch your eye. Linger on the one that catches your eye. Read it again. Make a note of that author.

When you’re done, keep going. Maybe something else will catch your eye. Pause on that one and make a note of the author.

You won’t enjoy everything. But a poem will catch your eye. Stop on that poem. Make a note of the author. Go out and buy the author’s books, if they have any.

That’s basically it.

The last stanza of Geoff Brock’s poem The Last Suburbia (see New England Review, Spring 03) goes this way:

Cicadas hum their scratched-brass elegies
as dry, unhinging winds shake the tall trees.
And all around me, winged seeds descend.

Throughtout The Last Suburbia, the reader will find very few abstractions, such as the word “beautiful.” Beautiful is a classificatory word not a description. It’s also a loaded word, meaning that when we use it something else is usually going on. Beautiful comes “after” experience. Once we figure out the insect, then we can figure in what slot to store it: worker or warrior, winged or just legged. Some, I guess, would argue that “beautiful” is an aesthetic term.

Two people are watching a sunset in El Paso, Texas. To the west the land is black, the sky aflame with orange and red illumination, the view as wide as Connecticut itself. You can see individual trees miles away on mesas or hills.

“Wow, that’s beautiful,” he says.

“Yeah, sure is,” he number 2 says.

In this case, neither he nor he 2 are trying to write a poem; they’re reacting to “the experience.”

Brock writes these stanzas to begin the poem:

You’ve come to lie here by this stand of ash.
The hard clay path behind you is a long
abrasion arcing away, over the swell

and down toward unseen rows of houses where
neighbors settle for dinner and their children
chatter and their dogs dig toward open fields.

There’s something to learn here as we pause and wait “over the swell.” Can you see the rise and the fall, the arc in the arrangement:

. . . over the swell
and down . . .

The trees, the clay path are with us. The reader is experiencing the space. The path points back toward things outside of view, which we can also experience: the houses, neighbors, children, dogs.

The poem may be about grief. But that last stanza is loaded with stillness, even though there are seeds in the air. The falling seeds mean a lot. Beauty means nothing.

Wanderlust is after something in her house. She writes,

So I dusted, scrubbed, mopped, and polished every square inch to fall on my “Ah-hah!” moment, and I finally did find it. A little piece of rock, hiding shyly behind my closet door, just waiting to be put on a pedestal. This tiny, but beautiful pink rock, streaked with shades of grey, speckled with even tinier pores that the wind and the rain left behind, and all the other bits and pieces that it took under its wing.

Here the author gives the rock character. It hides “shyly,” “waiting to be put.”

The author is “experiencing” the rock. She’s also investing in it. That rock could tip the scales of things. Only problem: the word “beautiful.”

Alice Munro in Walker Brother Cowboy writes:

So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.

This paragraph, the second to last in the story, is filled with mystery and depth, shades, a sense of closure in light, landscape, and mind. There’s the car, the road, the little brother hoping for glimpses of rabbits, and then the speaker glimpsing something else in her father. Something obvious but far off, familiar but unfamiliar. The idea closes with the idea of distance. The narrator’s father has become alien, nearer but also further. She understands he had a possible other life, that things could have been different, the “present” a fragile thing, and, most of all, that he’s thinking the same thing. A scary ending, trembling with inertia, the long sentence stitching out its pearls.

For the creative writing students: the final category of the course has been reduced in expectation. For the poetry and the fiction there is the requirement of three drafts; for the final entry–play. whatever–I’m reducing the expectation to just two drafts. Let’s reduce the tension a little so relax on the third entry and we will concentrate on the creative process of seeing into the one-act play.

Over at Jason’s Blurty they’re discussing revision, a subject which grew out of a conversation in Creative Writing.

In my mind the real work of writing happens during revision and the metaphor for the process grew from M. Angelo per discussion. We mustn’t, however, take the metaphor too seriously. Nor should we take the 30 revision number as an absolute. No one knows how many revisions any given story will take until, of course, a story is done.

Learning to write stories, which is different from learning to tell them orally, has a lot to do with experience and lots of reading of the kinds of stories a writer enjoys writing. But revision is rule-less. All we know is that character and narrative force happen slowly in development. First comes the inspirational rush, then the detailed and slow rewriting for form. How many times to go over? Who knows. Intuitions claims as many times as necessary. Reason claims how many times? One story may demand many, others not so much.

Other than that I have no answers. I do know that self-perception can be powerfully deceptive. The writer teaches this: if you think that one thing is right and proper, you’re most likely wrong. Whatever is believed true should be held with the greatest skepticism (translation: if you believe the story is done, you’re wrong). This is not my idea though: it’s Hugh’s. If you can live with this, then write. If not, then fill your down time building model cars.

Remember the arialists.

Spinning writes:

A housefinch is trapped inside the birdfeeder this morning. All I can do is open the top lid and try to talk him out, Lift! Lift! J.s at work already. I dont like fast jumping, fluttering, hopping creatures like spiders, frogs, flying bugs and birds. The only bird I ever had the nerve to approach with a towel to cover and carry to safety was a hummingbird beating against a window seeking freedom.

There’s something subtle but powerful about “touch” in this writing, the human coming closer to the bird and the mention of the towel and hummingbird. The suggestion of contact, without ever seeing it.

I think Hugh would like this.

We’ve been talking a lot about place in English Literature and Contemporary Fiction and writing. Fiction deals with space in multiple ways: one being the places where stories are set and, another, the story itself as a “space,” the latter being of prime concern to writers. The empty page is a landscape waiting to be painted over. The page or screen is a paradox: flat but mythological.

In class I often use my relationship with CT to illustrate peoples’ intimacy with space and place. I have yet to write a story set in the North East with the exception of something that I’m writing now. But this story deals with New York and Cambridge minimally. The primary setting is New Mexico and Arizona. I have to admit to often teasing CT for its bad weather and crowded feel, and, I think, unfairly. In the language of human geography, CT is distant, New Mexico is close, even though physically the opposite is true.

This is a problem that Hugh of St Victor is trying to teach me to work through. He writes in the Didascalicon:

He is still weak for whom his native land is sweet, but he is strong for whom every country is a fatherland, and he is perfect for whom the whole world is a place of exile. The first confirms his love for the world, the second disperses it, and the last extinguishes it. From boyhood I (Hugh) have lived in exile, and I know with what grief the spirit sometimes deserts the narrow limits of the poor mans hut, and with what sense of freedom it afterwards despises marble halls and paneled ceilings.

This is what I would call an example of dead-on writing. Hugh is a great teacher of teachers (who should also be students). That quote is a prime example of a wow factor.