Category: Creative Process

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I Prefer My Poets Dead: Why ‘Making It New,’ or Anything New, Is So Dang Hard

The movie you watch in English class when you have a sub is not called ‘Living Poets Society.’

Virginia Woolf on why we prefer our poets dead:

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet.

—A Room of One’s Own, p. 14

Stan, from Mad Men:

Everything good I have is from a long time ago.

When an earnest thread on Facebook emerged asking for good work by contemporary poets, I responded by paraphrasing the Woolf quote above. When the friend who started it asked me for recommendations, I came up with a list of favorites and highlighted what might be a best fit, only to have A Random Dude respond that Bob Dylan and Tom Waits were better than any contemporary “self-identified” poets. (Please insert eyeroll here and also a note that I am pretty sure Bob Dylan would lose it if he could no longer walk out to the “Poet Laureate of Rock and Roll” introduction you know he approved.) This annoyed me, but also gave me a good laugh, because clearly Random Dude, according to Woolf, who has earned more of my trust, might say he just longs for how Dylan and Waits were able to make him feel a long time ago.

With respect to Dylan and Waits, many of us can only keep our dead poets alive in our hearts. It’s what brings us such magical imaginings as Mary Ruefle’s “My Emily Dickinson.” It’s why some poets (asininely) opine about dying young, like Keats, or part of why Plath skyrocketed to fame quicker than some of her contemporaries. (Dead longer.) And it’s why those of us poets who still count ourselves among the living are awful cagey about the subject. “We’re working here!”: a rough translation of so many Twitter posts and essays on the non-death of poetry. The dead poets are rich compost people can use to make their daily lives flower and give fruit; us living sods’ works are the pile of eggshells, mown grass, and aromatic vegetables left in the back of the fridge too long, waiting to help. One’s a tool; one’s an eyesore that will someday be a tool. (And if you love Dylan, which, ugh, I do, you’ll know his “folk process” often involves churning up the words of obscure dead poets in his own lyrics, only to be called a poet while he’s living.)

Maybe it’s unfair that readers ask death of us to consider our poems as ones that have “passed the test of time.” But so it is. It’s nice to be a martyr.

As a modern (lowercase m) poet myself, I can even feel this way about my own work. Longing for old writing styles of when I felt or perceived differently—almost as if by another person. Often, poets at readings will say something like, “Many poets will tell you their new work is their favorite; I am no exception.” I guess I am an exception. Which I’m recognizing especially now as I begin work that is not for my debut collection, Rodeo in Reverse. I’m suspicious of new work; sure, loveable maybe, the sounds it makes especially, but I long to do work as good as my old work—and sometimes worry I won’t.

Yes, I worry I peaked at 17 when I wrote a sexy villanelle about hooking up in a car that inverted lines about volume, wheel, up, down; the lines were short—two or three words apiece maybe? My teacher, a favorite, not an effusive praiser, read it out loud to the junior class, which made me elated—my poem was good and maybe the junior class would not think I was a virgin. To me, it’d felt important not to seem like a virgin but also to try and be one then.

Been chasing the ghost of that poem, which is lost to floppy disk and trash heap, for years since.

And if nostalgic for my own past work, one might imagine the case for others’.

Maybe 5 years ago I read an essay on the internet that argued every book you read before age 25 affects you more deeply than those that come after. This is an unfortunate view. I’m not far enough out from 25 to a- or disa-gree, but I wonder how many people are able to read many books after age 25, by which time career and family and responsibilities are likely to be settling in.

I count myself among the lucky few and look at each blank page, each new title askance—in suspicion and flirtation. Who knows? This might be the one I’m looking for. If not, it still does its work in the compost pile.

Besides, dead poets have everything going for them but life, which is a great advantage. Whatever you make today will be old in no time.

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Misaphonia and the Needs of an Imperfect Artist

Recently, I discovered a writer I admire (who happens to be a friend) cannot stand mouth noises. For the uninitiated, mouth noises are those ones people make while eating. They include but are not limited to vocalized swallowing, an exhalation of “ahh” after sipping from a Coke, clacking a spoon around in a jaw, or scraping the tines of a fork against a ceramic bowl. When I found out, I howled. Another person on the good side of misaphonia. I also cannot stand mouth noises. Even when my dog makes them. I love dogs with abandon, but no infatuation can overcome this defect. Ask my husband.

When my sister and I want to get on each other’s nerves, we text videos of ourselves, internet animals, or our pets making mouth noises. (Lil Bub is particularly good for this.)

To concentrate, I require silence. Much like the fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock in The Phantom Thread, merely buttering one’s toast too loudly can ruin my whole morning:

“Please don’t move too much.”

“I’m just buttering my toast. I’m not moving too much.”

“You are. Don’t move too much.”

“Maybe you’re paying too much attention.”

“It’s like you just rode a horse across the room!”

(You can read an interview with the sound designer here that is fascinating. Apparently white toast and sourdough are the most annoying.)

I do not want to be this way and work hard not to be, but I cannot deny that my husband has eaten breakfast in the bedroom instead of the dining room for fear of interrupting my writing with crunching or clinking. (And it is hard work.)

In the movie, when Reynolds is hard at work on a wedding dress for the princess, closed in a room by himself for hours on end, Alma, Reynolds’ live-in girlfriend/model/sewist, makes the mistake of bringing him a tray with tea. What would be a kind act for a high percentage of humans is, in fact, an unkind one to someone in a flow-state. Or, as Reynolds says less politely but more succinctly:

“The tea is leaving, but the interruption is staying right here with me.”

Confessing that I relate is embarrassing but also a fact. People who are trained to be sensitive their whole lives (and who often enter creative professions because of this sensitivity) have a tendency to be, well, sensitive.* My sensitivity, which I regarded for most of my life as the worst part about me, is the part that poems and songs and empathy come from. It’s not good or bad. It calls me to who I am. I’m called to observe, so it’s difficult when the task is to ignore or let go.

I think of vocation, which we often call “a calling.” In the South, people often say “God called” them to do a thing, to stop doing a thing. It’s the best shorthand for what’s inexplicable but necessary. What calls you? When that calling is a siren song, the work can be done most intensely, and it’s absorbing but fatal. I once stayed up for three days seaming and rearranging quilt squares and writing poems. I felt satisfied and also like hell afterward. The come down is intense. Still, I miss that feeling. Alma loves Reynolds best in this mode, or maybe better put, is able to love him best then—caring for him, nursing him, snuggling him, being still. When he will not cease, she poisons him with mushrooms. Not enough to kill. She makes him sick so she can make him well. Maybe she makes him sick so he can be well:

“I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open with only me to help. And then I want you strong again. You’re not going to die. You might wish you’re going to die, but you’re not going to. You need to settle down a little.”

It’s in sickness he sees how ugly the dress he’s made for the princess is. It’s in sickness he’s reunited (through hallucination) with his dead mother, whom he’s missed desperately for decades, whom his work honors. Of course, lovesickness is equally torturous and transformative. Figuratively speaking. I don’t plan on eating any questionable fungi.

Our work calls to us, and we need something (or someone) to call us from it.^

It isn’t easy to make space for another love in a life. In mine that’s a husband, a dog, a home. The work—doing it and thinking of doing it and preparing for it and reading for it and finding what belongs in it—can take up ceaseless days. It can take up all the flat surfaces in a house. It can invade meal times and the will to exercise and conversational skills beyond enthusiastic monologues and grunts. The work is selfish; it may be made for consumption but it consumes.

Still, the work, the part of the artist that needs to create, needs a protector. Cyril, Reynolds’ sister, protects his creative space and his time, eating silently, arranging his schedule, and breaking up with girlfriends once he’s through with them. Of course, I don’t mean a woman to deal with all the details; a protector could be a person in your life, or it could be an autoresponder on your emails. It could be Saturdays you’re unreachable. Un. Reachable. It could be as simple as a closed door. But the protector doesn’t suffer the artist’s complaints. The protector wears blood-red nail polish and, just like Alma, will knock the artist out when he tries to argue with her, “Don’t pick a fight with me, you certainly won’t come out alive. I’ll go right through you and it’ll be you who ends up on the floor.” It’s worth noting that Cyril is protecting Alma, not Reynolds, in this conversation.

Cyril likes Alma, in spite of their disagreements; however, Cyril can enter breezily and slam doors, seen as a necessity, while Alma, even tiptoeing or seductive, is seen as interruption. For artists, maybe, or at least for me, the protective part is like a sister, a relative, blood of my blood. We share DNA. The love that interrupts, however, is foreign, my cells don’t recognize it. It’s bewildering and requires attention, attention to its oddity at the very least. Not a muse. A necessary distraction. Or maybe, the work is the necessary distraction.

One kind of love draws us closer to the work, the other away from it. Both knock us out cold when we cross them.

Romantic love, other interests, responsibilities take time from the work, and they may not make the work better. But love demands we rest “open and tender.” It clacks its spoon in its teeth and goes dancing without us if we sketch dresses on New Year’s Eve. And love does respect the work; Alma rescues one dress from a ruinous end.

Rather than a New Year’s resolution centered on productivity, this year, I am wondering how to eat the poison mushroom delightfully and to appease the person who makes my omelet.

Work can draw us inward to the deepest place, protected and dangerous like a fable forest; but something (or someone) else must draw us out—call us out—homeward—serve us a dish we won’t forget.

A garment, a painting, a book; none of it is because of one person’s genius. It’s because of a genius spirit that dead mothers, lovers with toast, sisters with teacups, teams of women in white jackets with pockets for shears, and whole houses foster. In this way, I believe the film can be seen in a feminist light—showing the difficult work many women do to help a man create a single dress (though I’m interested to read more on gender roles in the movie).

Sometimes the myth of the artist, particularly maybe the writer, is one of loneliness. Sometimes I like to buy into this myth. It helps me to believe I’m so good or so rotten, as is my work. But of course a truly lonely person would be unable to write. Literacy necessitates a someone else and a before; it presupposes an after. Sometimes our friends are our sisters, sometimes our lovers, sometimes models or muses or ghosts we can’t conjure. They’re all here. To quote Oprah paraphrasing Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as ten thousand.”

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*This predisposition isn’t an inevitability, however. Sarah Bakewell notes in her biography of Montaigne, How to Live, for instance, “Even when Montaigne went off to his tower to write, he rarely worked alone or in silence. People talked and worked around him; outside his window horses would have been led back and forth from the stables, while hens clucked and dogs barked. In the wine-making season, the air would be filled with the sound of clanking presses.” (173) Terrible. Terrible.

^My husband read this statement and asked, “Why?” I do not know why; I only know this statement to be true. It isn’t as a muse, really, or for amusement—though I’m sure it can be either. I guess maybe to live a life?

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Elegy for 2017: Right Poem, Right Time

My view during this instance of right poem, right time, and elegy

On my last day off, I was doing one of my favorite things: reflecting on the past year and planning for the coming one — essentially, writing. (In the third grade I created homework for myself. This is who I am.) The radio was on — some background music, the tea was hot, a chance of snow that never came; it was a woo-woo person’s cozy dream. I sat with my head tilted like a confused dog and stared; wrote and wrote. The radio program changed to Fresh Air, and I turned the sound down so I could remain focused. Yet.

I didn’t recognize the name of the guest, Patrick Phillips, immediately, but I did recognize the book he’d written, Blood at the Root. Terry Gross and Phillips talked about Forsyth County, Georgia, its history of racist violence, and Phillips’ upbringing there. I drifted in and out of the conversation, in and out of my writing. Specifically, I was reflecting on my father’s heart attack and open heart surgery.

Gross typically lands transitions (I take notes as someone who’s not), but in a bit of a stretch, in what felt like out of nowhere, she asked Phillips about his father’s open heart surgery. My head shot up. What?

She asked him to read the poem he wrote about it.

I hadn’t made the connection he was the poet Patrick Phillips. I had never heard this poem. This episode was a re-run, and what an odd coincidence it aired on the same day, at the same moment, I had been writing about my own father.

Writing is powerful in that it makes us pay attention: Phillips’ poem changed me, if only for an afternoon; my own writing put me in the place (literally) to hear his poem.

I sat at the dining room table, staring into the radio’s yellow fog — ON — and the feelings came.

This is the first sentence from the poem he read, “Elegy outside the ICU,” as it appears in his collection Elegy for a Broken Machine:

They came into
this cold white room
and shaved his chest

then made a little
purple line of dashes
down his sternum,

which the surgeon,
when she came in,
cut along, as students

took turns cranking
a tiny metal jig
that split his ribs

just enough for them
to fish the heart out —
lungs inflating

and the dark blood
circulating through
these hulking beige machines

as for the second time
since dawn they skirted
the ruined arteries

with a long blue length
of vein that someone
had unlaced from his leg.

To me, this poem shows strength in its willingness to observe, its looking at and saying what is. Like most courageous acts, this poem is evidence of vulnerability. (What he does with syntax is worth another post for another day.)

I did not witness any of this in my family’s experience. I saw my dad the night before his surgery and hours after — waiting, not watching, being my chief role.

*

In my family, someone cracking her knuckles who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone crying who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone missing an earring is an emergency. Painting a room only hours before guests arrive is an emergency. An actual emergency, however, is anything but.

Shortly after I found out my dad was having a “heart event” (his words), I learned from my sister that he had talked with her to make sure she could stop by and feed the dog dinner. In the same way in which he might if he were working late. It wasn’t until they told him he would need a procedure that he decided to alert us.

Certain members of my family would tell you this sort of stoicism is a show of strength; they loathe criers and huggers and direct conversation, and after three years of art school, I can’t blame them. But often stoicism isn’t stoic — a radical acceptance of reality — at all; instead, it feels like denial, the opposite of strength. Our weaknesses may be what allow us to weather a crisis. Weakness (if unconfessed) may be one sort of salvation.

Once doctors determined my dad would need open heart surgery, my sister leveled with me that it would not be overreacting to come home.

There, the situation was far from humorless: For instance, the night before the surgery, my dad had a second “heart event” much more painful than the first. (Not the funny part, I’m getting there.) As the nurse rushed to her computer coordinating with a doctor, checking whatever nurses check in these situations, my dad’s roommate kept calling for the nurse — not his nurse, using the call button, the nurse trying to stop my dad’s “heart event.” She told him time again to use his call button. Finally, peeved, she said, “What do you want?”

“Could you, uh, get me a Heath bar and some apple juice?”

*

After my dad’s surgery, it took me a while before I wanted to walk into the ICU to see him. My mom had warned us: He won’t look like himself. You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. (He was unable to speak, and for the most part, he was asleep anyway.) When I walked into the ICU, I was nervous. He would be in Room 1. Room 1 was just inside the automatic doors. I looked to my right. There, my father, hair shocked gray, face gray-brown, swaddled in a bud of blue blankets. My eyes opened wide and welled with tears, made hopeless eye contact with the nurse, who whispered, “Your dad’s in Room 7.”

Oh.

The sight of my dad was still humbling — intubated, like a submarine full of portholes, swimming through what? the man who had carried me until I was too big to carry lying drugged on a bed, waiting to make certain small gestures as a sign of maturation, of health. But after Room 1, what a relief. He was the basic peach of many white people — not his colors, tanned leather and red, but a color of the living.

*

By the time my dad was moved out of ICU, my immediate family was exhausted and on each other’s nerves. One edgy, irritable, unable to stifle any comment or let any errant noise go; one traditional and a bit of a martyr; one cruel because she is the most fragile of us all. At one point I used pantomimes for eating cheeseburgers when my dad tried to blame my mom for his dietary habits. We are not people whose great strength reveals itself in times of trouble. But we are people who show up for one another. We sit in waiting rooms and endure rude doctors and frantically demand nurses switching shifts give showers pre-op and work our ways through mazes to find bathrooms and then attempt to relay directions. We drink and eat like gluttons because we are gluttons and know we will not eat like this again for a long time. Food has been there for us. For me, so has poetry. My dad’s life restored to us, given, gifted, like this poem was to me, except I would have never known the difference if the poem hadn’t arrived in my little house. This revelation, a paper dressing gown, leaves much to be desired, some embarrassment, more questions than answers — EKG, meter, heart, syntax, morphine, mystery. Enjambment for now instead of end-stop.

Phillips’ elegy for a father still living is really an elegy for a moment, a certain understanding of self and relation to mortality and parents. An elegy more like a notch nicked into a tree trunk or a glance at a watch — realization at the time it is: incredible and brutal and here already. It’s usually our understanding of time, our marking of it, that adds meaning and heartache. But an elegy isn’t just mourning loss, it’s freeing space for what is and what is to come. One year passes and another, like a lizard tail ripped off and growing back, comes to take its place. One view of the self passes and another, like skin over a scab, grows over. I love my family newly now; I love writing newly, too; love a never-ending autotomy; the elegy for what once was opens, like a cavity in a chest, like ribs, “just enough … to fish the heart out.”

You can listen to the full episode of Fresh Air with Patrick Phillips here.

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Title Changes and Impostor Syndrome

Concrete donkey statue behind a wire fence.

Hi. My name is Lindsey Alexander, and I’m here today to talk about impostor syndrome.

In August, I found out that my manuscript, after seven years of work (and rejection), will be published with Hub City Press as a New Southern Voices Prize winner.

Once the prosecco wore off, I dove into revisions. I reworked, rewrote, and tinkered with poems, based on the suggestions of my editor, Leslie Sainz, who is brilliant and who should also be sainted. (Follow her so you can read her poems first.) The biggest suggestion was to change the title. Leslie sent 10 new potential titles, and then explained several that piqued my interest.

After much fretting, I sent back the manuscript revised, retaining the original title, which included the word “impostor,” and sounded like it belonged in a different genre. I hit send with a smug, comfortable satisfaction.

My publisher responded to (kindly) explain its reasoning for the change, in the way one might try to talk down a hissing cat from a tree, and at that moment I knew I had to kiss it goodbye. I emailed them that I understood and was ready to “come to Jesus.” And then I sent an immediate follow-up email to clarify, the hallmark of true confidence and sanity.

Meanwhile, instead of acknowledging to myself that I’d been wrong in trying to keep the title, I worked at convincing myself I’d been right. (As Kathryn Schulz writes, being wrong feels a lot like being right.) It took a while (and this in the Bible Belt) to find Jesus. I went for a long walk, fuming, certain my dog, who is a food mercenary, was the only one I could trust. It did not initially occur to me that (duh) my publisher wanted my book to sell well (likely sales matter more to them than to me). It did not initially occur to me that a team of smart people who were dedicating hours of their lives to sharing my work and who had read my book could understand its context, especially in the market, better than I did. No. I had selected the hill I was going to die on: Having the word “impostor” by my name on a cover. This is how overidentified I was with seeing myself as a phony. (I swear I must’ve read Catcher in the Rye too early in life.)

After an afternoon sulking, I was assuaged by a well-reasoned email from a friend, pointing out some of these fallacies. Oh, right, I had been granted a wonderful team, publication with a press I admired, and a big opportunity, and I wasn’t letting myself feel the glory of that gift.

I created word lists and theme lists and began creating titles I’m sure a bot could’ve come up with based on keywords from the manuscript. I conducted straw polls. Finally, a friend (fantastic writer Natalie van Hoose) with fresh eyes landed on Rodeo in Reverse. There it was: it had been between the manuscript and the word list and Leslie’s suggestions the whole time. I loved it. My publisher did too.

*

The only editorial work left was responding to a few new comments on the manuscript in a final round of revisions. A couple weeks later and I was receiving emails—you know the ones: polite, asking how a project was going, the kind from a kind person after you’ve missed or pushed a deadline.

Thing is: I was pretty much finished with revisions on the manuscript and had been for several days. At this point, I had a couple (just two) lingering small edits (whether to cut or retain a line, whether to add or leave out a short stanza), and in both cases I knew what I’d end up doing. I was creating false dilemmas for myself.

Chief among: searching phrases from my book to be sure they weren’t plagiarized. Taking small phrases and whole sentences and running them through Google, with quotes. If it didn’t return results, I’d look it up without quotes. If it did return a result—even a coincidental match on a random blog, I’d spin out, having proven to myself I was a fraud, not a real writer, much less a poet.

Which phrases was I searching? Any phrase I thought was good.

Why did I do this?

I felt uncomfortable. I mistook that discomfort for guilt, for having done something wrong, one of the grave sins of writing being plagiarism.

*

After some consideration, I recognized it for what it was: impostor syndrome.

I couldn’t be convinced I came up with anything good; therefore, if I like part of the book, it must be from somewhere, and someone, else.

I had insisted (gritting my teeth) on holding onto a title that my publisher felt it would be best to change. It had the word “impostor” in it.

Luckily, I’ve spent the last few months reading all the Brené Brown. (I don’t mean that as Internet speak. I mean I read all of it.) So I knew that “shame thrives in secret.” I needed to name it (impostor syndrome: done) and tell someone.

Being a good Millennial, I chose to share on Instagram Stories (which is private and only my really good friends and the occasional bored scroller would see), then after 24 hours it would disappear. Oddly, this medium mirrored the anxiety I was feeling: once named and shared, my shame (in this instance) no longer made sense.

Many friends reached out with an encouraging word—one even to say she’d had the same issue when she had a story accepted for publication at a Fancy Magazine.

Reading a section from Rising Strong helped me understand why I battle impostor syndrome in the first place: I have trouble accepting gifts—from others, from the universe. Like many women, it’s hard for me to accept even a compliment without reversing it thoughtlessly or mentioning where I got my dress for how cheap. A gift that’s a talent, unearned, an inkling honed into something bigger than the self—which I believe each one of us has—well, that’s nearly impossible to accept.

The thing about gratitude is, it isn’t hard to feel grateful once you allow yourself to feel joy, to accept goodness (including your own). But that means actually that gratitude is tough to access until it isn’t. Denying gifts isn’t a higher plane of maturity or understanding—it’s the road to ruin. Being kind to myself is oddly brave for me.

*

The title of my debut book, a poetry collection, is Rodeo in Reverse. I get to work with a caring, badass team of women to make it. I’m a writer and no more or less of an impostor than anyone else, which is to say, I’m human.

I wake every morning trying to lean into and learn from joy, to feel my gratitude. This means I am working on things like “being a hugger” and doing things like tearing up when I see my husband reading or thinking of how good my friends are. I say “I love you” to friends and acquaintances who are used to me not saying anything at all, or maybe “yeah, man.” I go to parks and sing with strangers at jams. (Okay, I did this once.) I thank the roof above my head for holding steady. I thank my stars for bringing me here. It’s the hardest and most embarrassing work I’ve done, and I don’t know where it will lead, but I trust it.

*

Have you ever experienced impostor syndrome? When? How were you able to turn the corner?

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