Friday, February 4, 2005

It's getting physical around here. Must be the 50-degree days and all this sunshine. Yesterday I tracked down grass hay in quantity but was able to carry only five bales in the little Isuzu. Drove down south of Alturas and bucked 'em into the pickup's inadequate bed and labored the 20 miles back home. Emptied out the garage to make a hay space (no barns on this place!) and then unloaded and stacked 'em. I wasn't able to bring two tons in last fall, so I've been buying it a couple of bales at a time all winter from the feed store. But their small-potatoes grass hay is almost gone, and there will be no more baling until June, so I'm dragging it home from all over just to be sure we don't run out. On the way back from getting hay I spotted a roadside firewood guy and wrote down the phone number on his sign. I'll call him tomorrow. The wood looked good and dry. So yesterday I'm tossing around hay-bales and today I walked the two-and-a-half miles down this awful road and met my friend Sally out at the highway. Sally drove me to town where, after Thai lunch together, we drove to the repair place and I finally took possession of my bashed, sad little minivan. She's home and happier now; she got a new clutch system back in November and has been waiting there for me ever since. I couldn't bring her home until this road cleared; it was 4-wheel-drive-only here until last week. So now we're all home, and all is well. I managed three more drafts of my poem before I left this morning; it's getting interesting. At night I read Richard Hugo's little book of essays and lectures called The Triggering Town. He has some interesting things to say: A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or "causes" the poem to be written,and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing. That's not quite right, because it suggests that the poet recognizes the real subject. The poet may not be aware of what the real subject is but only have some instinctive feeling that the poem is done. *** The initiating subject should trigger the imagination as well as the poem. If it doesn't, it may not be valid subject but something you feel you should write a poem about. Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it, a wise man once told me. Not bad advice but not quite right. The point is, the triggering subject should not carry with it moral or social obligations to feel or claim you feel certain ways. If you feel pressure to say what you know others want to hear and don't have enough devil in you to surprise them, shut up. But the advice is still well taken. Subjects that ought to have poems have a bad habit of wanting lots of other things at the same time. And you provide those things at the expense of your imagination. *** ...You are after those words you can own and ways of putting them in phrases and lines that are yours by right of obsessive musical deed. You are trying to find and develop a way of writing that will be yours and will, as Stafford puts it, generate things to say. Your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words. ... Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life. The relation of you to your language gains power. The relation of you to the triggering subject weakens. *** Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work. 4:54:50 PM    comment []