Reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

From Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar:

I remember the day he smiled at me and said, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?”
“No, what?” I said.
“A piece of dust.” And he looked so proud of having thought of this that I just stared at his blond hair and his blue eyes and his white teeth—he had very long, strong white teeth—and said, “I guess so.”
It was only in the middle of New York a whole year later that I finally thought of an answer to that remark.
I spent a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a couple of years older than I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him I had to work to keep my head above water.
These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I’d really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying, “I guess so.”
Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?”
“No, what?” I would say.
“A piece of dust.”
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, “So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.”
And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.

I have a weakness for writing about writing. I can’t get enough of it. Any time a novel touches on the timeless topic of why we write in first place, I am right there lapping it up. And Sylvia Plath writes so beautifully. The dialogue (and inner dialogue) is right on, and so many of the details throughout the book are written in a straightforward, but poetic way.

One of my favorite lines is when Esther refuses to return to the psychiatrist who gave her shock treatments, and her mother replies, “I knew you’d decide to be all right again.”

Whoa. Now that’s writing.

Haiku North America

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Seattle gum wall
searching for words
that will stick

Haiku poet Garry Gay with Michael Dylan Welch just next to him and mostly out of view.

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Haiku North America, which took place in Seattle on August 3-7, was an incredible experience. I will not try to chronicle the events here, but if you are interested in a detailed and witty account of HNA, please visit Melissa Allen’s blog at http://haikuproject.wordpress.com. While I had a lot of fun reconnecting with old acquantances, meeting new people, and hanging out with good friends, I felt as if I was only half there at times. A difficult few months with my mother, who has suffered some intense health problems, kept me from feeling fully present. In any case, I am so glad I managed to get away. Among the highlights of HNA for me were: Carlos Colon’s Elvis poems, seeing Jerry Ball designated as the next honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives (well-deserved), meeting Minako Noma and Makoto Nakanishi from Japan, attending presentations by Terry Ann Carter (on teaching haiku), Eve Luckring (on video renku), Abigail Friedman, Carmen Sterba, Debbie Kolodji, and Tanya McDonald (on how to start and run a haiku group), Emiko Miyashita (on food kigo), Jessica Tremblay (on haiku comics), and Fay Aoyagi, Melissa Allen, Gene Myers and Don Wentworth (on haiku blogging). As is always the case with haiku meetings, some of the most interesting and fun conversations took place at meal times and late at night over drinks. Not surprisingly, I returned home sleep-deprived, but reinvigorated.

Zuihitsu: Following the Brush

A week between posts stretched to a month, then several months, and here I am returning to my blog with my tail between my legs. What happened to my good intentions? More importantly, how to get back on track?

Deadlines, even self-imposed ones, are generally the key for me to keep the flow of words going. A promise to a couple of writer friends is enough to unleash a sudden torrent of scribbling so I will have something to share when we get together. A larger, more formal writing group also pushes me to get words down on paper and nudges me to take the time to comb through what I’ve written to get the tangles out.

A blog is different, though. The promise to produce something worth reading is more ambiguous here, and my audience is less clearly defined. I don’t have to look you in the eyes and read what I have written out loud for you (but I can assure you I DO always read these posts out loud – even if only into the quiet air of my empty kitchen—before I click “publish”). Worst of all, perhaps, is how forgiving you are. Even after months without a new post, steady traffic continues through this site. How am I to be held accountable with such permissive readers?

While deadlines help keep me going (and yes, I will have to manufacture some to keep myself on track), a force pulling in the opposite direction is my desire to publish only polished work. I have to let this go. Of course, I want to keep an eye on quality, but when it gets to the point of stifling the flow of words, I need to quiet the inner critic and remind myself this is a blog, not a book.

This brings me to a topic that has been on my mind recently after reading Kimiko Hahn’s powerful book of poetry, The Narrow Road to the Interior. She uses a Japanese literary genre known as Zuihitsu, which literally translates to “following the brush,” in which the writer’s thoughts flow in a seemingly random, diary-like way that is intimate and casual, while still well-crafted.

The concept of following the brush—as opposed to forcing the brush (or pen or keyboard) to follow some preconceived notion of narrative—is incredibly appealing. In fact, the end result is pleasurable to read in a very different way than a story or novel or even traditional poetry is enjoyable. The fragmentary nature of zuihitsu reflects more accurately the flow of consciousness. It is human nature to jump from one topic to another without necessarily tying together our various strands of thought.

So, here is the question. Can zuihitsu guide me in recreating my efforts to maintain this blog? Instead of trying to craft complete haibun (prose pieces with haiku), what if I just wrote whatever happened to be on my mind on a particular day? For now, I will keep the timing flexible and see how it goes. No promises to post weekly or even monthly, just the permission to post whatever strikes me (though I do intend to keep the posts at least loosely connected to writing and haiku).

To help get the flow going again, I have also decided to take part in NaHaiWriMo, in which participants pledge to write one haiku a day for the month of February. So as not to clutter the blog with these daily poems, I have signed up for Twitter and am “tweeting” my daily haiku (see the most recent tweets on the sidebar or follow me @susanantolin).

The other factor I didn’t even mention that really keeps me from blogging is time. Who has time for all this? Right now I am in between deadlines for the newsletter I edit and produce (see http://www.hsa-haiku.org/newsletter.htm), so I temporarily have time to resuscitate the blog, but once the next deadline hits, who knows…

“Good” Poems?

While giving a workshop on haiku to teachers in Richmond on a recent Saturday afternoon, one of the teachers asked how to evaluate whether a haiku is “good” or not. My answer – that haiku, like all poetry, is intuitive and touches you in inexplicable ways – failed to satisfy the desire for some objective criteria. I had written a long list of common elements of haiku on the board and emphasized that those were to be used as tools – not as strict rules – for writing haiku. The problem in evaluating haiku is that some poems that meet all of the objective criteria for “good” haiku might still fall flat, while some of the very best haiku might lack some of the key criteria on the list. So, what makes a good haiku? Who can judge the quality of a poem?

One teacher suggested that if a student’s poem fails to get a positive reaction from the rest of the students in a particular classroom, then it is not a good poem regardless of how much the student who wrote the poem likes his own work. Aaagh. No! Wait! I may not be able to give a satisfyingly clear answer to the first question of what makes a “good” haiku, but on this point I am adamant; if a student likes his own haiku, that is a successful poem. A poet writes first to please himself; whether the poem touches other people in a profound way is secondary – it is wonderful, of course, but still secondary to the initial joy of satisfying your own need to write.

This past week I read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, in which he offers the following advice to an aspiring poet:

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not now do. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself.

Rilke goes on in this series of letters to advise the young poet to trust himself, to write of common everyday things from his own life experience, and to read great literature. It is natural to want to rate our work, to see how our own efforts stack up in comparison to the poems of our classmates or of the whole literary world. Rilke’s advice is right on, though, and a good reminder not only to teachers and students, but to all writers. Trust yourself. Don’t let anyone else – critics, editors, classmates – dampen the pleasure you take in creating your poems.

Books

Just out of a matinee showing of a popular but entirely forgettable movie, my teenage daughter and I stepped into a large bookstore next to the theater and bought iced coffee. We browsed the bookshelves for a while to pass the time until the others in our family, who were seeing another movie, came to meet us. We headed first for the cookbook section, where my daughter exclaimed over one book after another, each one more desirable than the next. Cookbooks tend to be large, heavy and expensive, so we didn’t linger too long. We were on vacation in Tacoma, WA visiting relatives, and anything we bought would have to fit into our suitcases for the flight home to California. With no aim in particular, we ended up in front of a shelf of books on writing. Immediately my daughter pulled on my arm, saying that if I started looking there I’d be there for hours. She knows me well. Shrugging her hand off of my arm, I followed her toward the teen books, most of which seem to have some relation to vampires, and then passed her and went in search of something interesting for myself. High on coffee by that time, I had a strong desire to find something exciting to read. But what exactly would I find exciting? I headed to the poetry books and found several possibilities. I ended up with a thin volume of Rilke that I carried around the store for a while, until I changed my mind after reading several poems and not finding the rush of adrenaline I craved. What is it I seek in books? Escape to another world? The chance to peer into the mind of a brilliant writer? The meaning of life? Why not? Simply put, I want a book that will make me gasp. Is that too much to ask? Finally, after I gave up on finding just the right book for my mood, I found my daughter browsing a display of bargain priced books near the front of the store. I glanced down and picked up a hard cover book by the Nobel winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. I read the preface and suddenly had the urge to pull out a pencil and underline a passage. It was just the book I needed.

tucked under my arm
the way into another world
summer breeze

Seiko Baba

I stand at the kitchen sink as the dim early morning light brings the backyard into focus through the window. For this first half hour of my day, the only sounds in the kitchen are my sounds as I pack lunches for the kids and my husband. Today I cut and peel an apple for our youngest child. As I go through the ritual of slicing and peeling away the skin, I deliberately leave a few bits of skin on the otherwise bare slices. This habit of leaving some bits of skin on the apple is an act I refer to as “Seiko Baba.” Seiko Baba was a teenage student in one of my English conversation classes in the late 1980s in Tokyo. She was petite, beautiful and fun loving. She was one of the few students I met outside of school for social events. One day she and a few others ended up in my small apartment where I served tea and snacks. She offered to peel an apple for us to share, and as she did so, she left bits of the peel intact. She explained that she had attended a finishing school for girls and had learned to peel apples this way. The skin left on the slices shows the color and freshness of the apple and that not too much was cut away. She laughed at the absurdity of teaching young women to peel apples with such care, even as she continued to peel away most of the skin leaving artfully thin strips behind. Her ability to laugh heartily at her own culture, while still embracing it, has stuck with me all these years.

I embraced feminism whole heartedly during college and envisioned a life focused on intellectual pursuits. I came from a household where my single mother spared no time for packing lunches. Time was short and better spent with the important things, like work and reading the Washington Post cover to cover every day. Yet here I am alone in the kitchen feeling honestly satisfied as I tuck these apple slices into my daughter’s lunch box. I wonder what ever happened to Seiko Baba. Does she peel apples just this way for her own kids? I know she would laugh if she knew her name has become a household word in our home.

hazy moon—
the things I once thought
were possible

Piano Recital

the missed note, too, shapes the melody—spring birdsong