This Wondrous Thing from Our New Poet Laureate

(NOTE:  Best read aloud, at least four times daily.)

Turtle

by Kay Ryan

Who would be a turtle who could help it?

A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,

She can ill afford the chances she must take

In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.

Her track is graceless, like dragging

A packing-case places, and almost any slope

Defeats her modest hopes.  Even being practical,

She's often stuck up to the axle on her way

To something edible.  With everything optimal,

She skirts the ditch which would convert

Her shell into a serving dish.  She lives

Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery

Will change her load of pottery to wings.

Her only levity is patience,

The sport of truly chastened things.

Every Writer Needs a Friendly Critic

In Howard Gardner’s book Creating Minds, the author examines the idea of creativity through the lives of seven major artists and thinkers of the 20^th century, including Freud, Picasso, Gandhi, and T.S. Eliot.  As a writer myself, I went immediately to the chapter on Eliot, which opens with a discussion of a draft of The Waste Land discovered in 1968, in a collection at the New York Public Library.

Eliot had originally given the draft of the poem to his wife Vivien and to his friend and fellow writer, Ezra Pound, also an ex-pat poet living in Europe.  Pound, it turns out, suggested changes to the original “that reduced the poem to approximately half its length.”

Later in the chapter, Gardner becomes more specific: ”While highly suggestive and full of sections with undeniable power, the original manuscript was bloated….There was much indecisiveness, repetitiveness, and monotony: too many voices and too little sense of overall direction, control, and locale.  Pound’s feat was in carving away the overstated sections that pulled the poem in diffuse directions and in both sharpening the remaining verses by crossing out unnecessary or misleading words or phrases and eliminating many hedges and ambivalent tones.”

Vivien, Eliot’s wife, also made changes that Gardner says “nicely complemented Pound’s,” changes that were the result of her “excellent ear for specific lines.”  Gardner refers to both Pound and Vivien as Eliot’s “friendly critics,” helping him to create this masterwork of early 20^th century literature.

It gave me great comfort to learn this.  Those of us who write and teach writing know that though done in solitude our stories, poems, and essays are really collaborative efforts, dependent on our own “friendly critics” to help make them tighter, more focused, more engaging.  And while it’s not always easy to hear that we haven’t created a masterpiece on our first, or fifth, or even twelfth try, we recognize the value of the input we receive from our first readers. 

And as I tell my students, we may not make all the changes suggested by others—we are, after all, the final authority on our own writing—but we are grateful for what these comments teach us.   Which is why I open every writing workshop with the LaChapelle maxim:  "When one of us learns something about writing, we all do."

And so may we all, as Eliot did, use our "friendly critics" to help us find the great work lurking within our own literary efforts.

 

Stein on Writing

At a literary event I attended in August, one of the panel presenters highly recommended Sol Stein’s book, Stein on Writing.  Always in search of new ways to think and talk about writing, I’ve been making my slow way through it.  (Full Disclosure: My totem animal is the turtle; “slow” is how I do most things.)

Though most of the chapters are dedicated to fiction writing, Stein has many good things to say—or re-emphasize—to those of us writing nonfiction, including that writers learn their craft by reading and analyzing other people’s writing.  This is why writers benefit from workshops, classes, and writing groups; they not only have their drafts read and responded to, but also read and comment on the work of their fellow writers.  Both activities help us become better practitioners of the craft.

In the book’s final chapter, Stein lists his Ten Commandments for Writers.  My favorite is the last, “10.  Above all, thou shalt not vent thy emotions onto the reader, for thy duty is to evoke the reader’s emotions, and in that most of all lies the art of the writer.”

Amen, I say to that, Brother Stein.

The Dangers of Listening to the Radio

One of my favorite NPR programs is the Bob Edwards show, which is broadcast on Sunday mornings here in Chicago.  

A couple of weeks ago he interviewed Denis Dutton, author of The Art Instinct (Bloomsbury Press), who mentioned a website he edited called Arts & Letters Daily, www.aldaily.com.  I made the mistake of writing it down, and now I'm hooked.

Updated six days each week, Arts & Letters Daily contains links to articles, essays, and book reviews on literature, language, ideas, and the arts compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The pieces are originally published in magazines, newspapers, and book reviews from all over the world, making them a must-read for writers.

And if you start to feel guilty about all the time you spend in idle reading, remember what the great Dr. Johnson said, "I never desire to converse with a man [or woman] who has written more than he has read."

P.S.  Happy 300th Birthday, Dr. J!