Jonathan Gottschall, in The Storytelling Animal, writes that humans process life through stories. That may explain why I love years. By that, I am not talking about the events of any particular year -- though I am thankful to say that I have never had an entirely bad one -- but the concept of years themselves. They are not stories, but we gladly treat them as though they are. Magazines reserve their final issues to write about trends and identify the most significant people. Statistics take on a new resonance. Award groups begin compiling lists of contenders, and critics finalize top-ten lists. (When I was a teenager, awaiting Owen Gleiberman's favorite-movies list in Entertainment Weekly was a secular ritual of sorts.) Again, there's quite a bit of contrivance -- wishful thinking, really -- in pretending that a sequence of events that began on Jan. 1 reaches some kind of resolution on Dec. 31. From March 25 this year to March 25 next year will cover a 12-month period too. But it's tidier to align those bookends with the actual beginning and end of the calendar, and part of being a storytelling animal, after all, is imposing order on chaos.
Or, think of it this way: Even if we're not ready for the new year, the new year is ready for us. Grand statements are in order, and those can be fun. In my last newsletter to the sixth grade, I started with a quotation from Van Morrison's song "One Irish Rover," which doesn't actually mention dates but has been known to resonate over my classroom speakers in December: Tell me the story now, now that it's over. Wrap it in glory for one Irish rover. Tell me you're wiser now; tell me you're older... The story (let's just call it that) of 2023 is over, and I will let the pundits of the world wax philosophical about it. For the purposes of this space, I will simply thank John Brantingham, Jane Edberg, and the rest of the staff of the Journal of Radical Wonder for providing a wonderful platform -- not just for me, but for all the other poets, essayists, critics, fiction-writers, and artists who contribute to its scroll on a weekly basis. Through the Journal, I have made new friends, reconnected with old ones, lined up guest speakers for my classroom, and in general relished the act of creation, which is our greatest antidote to despair. I also commend the magazine for giving me the incentive to revive this blog, which had sat dormant for nearly four years before the Sunday poetry feature began in March. Most of the poems published in Radical Wonder have been old ones, but just blogging about them has awakened me to how I've grown as a writer and thinker. It is nice to have a voice. As the weeks neared Dec. 31, I mulled over which poem I would use to cap off the year. The easy choice was "Desert Highway, New Year's Eve," especially given that New Year's Eve falls on a Sunday this year. Then, I realized that the poem had a pair of sequels; in my catalog of poems, I have one that is set on Jan. 1 and one on Jan. 2. The three poems were not intended as a series and originally appeared in different books, but they work as a sequence when put in order, at least for me. I asked John if he would be up for publishing all three poems on their respective dates, and he gave the go-ahead. So today's poem will be the first of a trilogy, to be followed tomorrow by "To Rachanee, Laguna Beach, Jan. 1" and Tuesday by "Day After New Year's." Starting with the first poem, then: "Desert Highway, New Year's Eve" dates back to 2010 and grew out of a single line that I jotted years ago on a bus ride in England. It was late in the day, and the fading colors outside the window gave the trees a damp, congealing look. I grabbed a scrap of paper and scribbled the words "The earth grows tighter in the bleeding dusk," and a variation on that line later made its way into the poem. "Desert Highway" is not about that bus ride, but rather about two fictional characters who stop to view the sunset on a less-than-harmonious drive. The man feels that he has let the woman down, and as he lies in bed later, he fantasizes about her being the only person left on Earth, savoring the wonders of creation with no meddling partner in her way. Scientists predict that the world will end in 7.59 billion years. The poem's protagonist imagines it ending tonight. On New Year's Eve, we sometimes think in those hyperboles.
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Last week on this blog, I wrote about the poem "Bonfire at Cape Cod with Marge Piercy's Workshop," which raises the question of which papers we burn and which we keep. One page that belongs to the second category is a piece of recycled paper tucked in a plastic container in my bedroom. This page contains the first and only draft of my poem "December," which I wrote in the Mesa Court cafeteria at UC Irvine on Oct. 16, 2001 -- I know the date because it's scrawled at the top of the paper. (Back then, I typically dated my first drafts in case that information would be of later interest to historians; you really can't fault English majors for thinking in those terms.) It's rare that I remember the actual act of writing a poem, but I know for a fact that I wrote "December" in about 45 seconds in between bites of dinner; I literally had a fork in one hand and a pen in the other. The original copy has one revision, as I initially wrote the last line as "in a strong pair of hands," then crossed that out and wrote "in your hands" instead. The other lines seemed to work, so I scribbled a title at the top ("December," even though it was the middle of October) and pocketed the pen again. That's what my right hand was doing, anyway. I can't remember what entree I was spearing with my left hand.
In the years since that buffet-fueled moment of inspiration, "December" has become probably the most popular poem I have ever written. It is not my personal favorite, as fond as I am of it. (I don't have an official favorite, but a short list of contenders would include "Segue," "Ride Home," "Alaska Airlines Nonstop to LAX," "One Word," "Blues Man," and a handful of others.) Still, writing is about communication, and "December" has communicated with a great many people. The Poetry Foundation features it on its website, and thanks to that platform over the years, I have had undergraduates email me questions about it, seen it posted on blogs, and even discovered it being used by artists in other mediums. A few years ago, someone created an animated video featuring the poem as narration, and a short story on a Marvel Comics fan-fiction site used it as the internal romantic thoughts of a superhero. (When I checked this morning for the video and fan-fiction story, both were not to be found on Google. If you are among the people behind those efforts and are reading this blog right now, please put them back up.) It was not a poem that I thought about much at the time, even while others went through months or years of gestation. But the simple truth is that the reader receives the poem, not the process. "December" may take about as long to read as it did to write, but those 67 words seem to have struck a reverberating note. What is that note, exactly? I have stated before on this blog that, after a certain amount of time, my old poems begin to feel like the work of a different person. Sometimes that leaves me feeling critical of them, other times just intrigued. "December" intrigues me. I remember my undergraduate days well enough to say that nothing really "inspired" this poem in the traditional sense of the word. The poem is addressed to a "you," but there was no specific person for whom it was intended. It involves cars (riding, not driving in one), and I had indeed gotten a new car in August of that year, but I was filled with enthusiasm to drive it; I had no conscious urge to surrender the keys to someone else. Like all spontaneous poems, it was sparked by a feeling. Perhaps it was a feeling that I had then, or one that I remembered, or one that I imagined that I might have someday. If art is timeless, then it obviously can wait for the right occasion. So I will do my best to play poetry analyst (or psychologist) right now and determine what that occasion is. The doctor is in, so let's start with the opening lines. I want to be a passenger / in your car again -- I think the last word must be the key one. The imaginary person here is not a new acquaintance, and the speaker clearly views him or her as a respite. ...and shut my eyes / while you sit at the wheel / awake and assured / in your own private world -- this is love, maybe, but not romantic love, at least not in the traditional sense. The speaker fantasizes about being with the other person, but in his fantasy, his own eyes are shut and the other person is immersed in a private world. The speaker loves this person not for charm or affection, but specifically for his or her driving skills. (Yes, I know the poem can be read metaphorically, but I am putting my 22-year-old self on the spot by taking it at face value.) ...down a long stretch / of empty highway / without any other / faces in sight -- this is an odd image, really, since we usually ponder road safety more when other cars are around us. Of course, single-car accidents happen as well. Perhaps there's a steep ditch by the side of the road. All of that is one sentence. "December" consists of just two. The final four lines are partly a repeat of the opening: I want to be a passenger / in your car again / and put my life back / in your hands. The passive voice, a passive activity, and once more, there are those words "back" and "again." When I wrote "December," I was nearing the end of my undergraduate studies. I already had a graduate school in mind for the year after. Was I subconsciously pining for a time when I didn't have as many responsibilities? Perhaps I had just had a long day of study and was relaxing in the cafeteria. Perhaps the "you" was an imaginary hero, the kind of idealistic fantasy that all humans, not just poets, summon from time to time. (If you study the lyrics of the Beatles' "I Will," it appears that Paul McCartney is rhapsodizing about his love for a woman who may exist only in his mind.) In any case, there is a great deal of reality in the poem as well; I have certainly had many rides that ended without incident. I have put my life in many people's hands, and gotten lucky. "December" appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. I am proud of its longevity. In the spirit of the season, I have reserved it for the day before Christmas. A common question that I get about the poem (at least in emails from students who are writing essays about it) is what the title means. Again, it was the first word that came to my mind. I guess it means that we relinquish control at the end of the year, or at least try to. Workplaces take time off. School lets out. We build bonfires for the year behind us and make resolutions for the one ahead. For that matter, we spend a lot of time on the road. As the holidays begin this week, drive safely, all of you. Or, at least, take a ride with someone who does. Another year is ending, and I have thrown out a lot. That is a pessimistic sentence to open a piece, so let me provide context. I have written a lot this year, as I do in any year. I am a writer in many mediums: poems, blog entries, emails, texts, report cards, post-it notes, grocery lists. It comes naturally to me in a way that singing, dancing, playing sports, and deciphering the stock market do not. Today, I am not even sure how many things I wrote; it's Christmastime, after all, and I must add cards and gift tags to the list above. Many of those pieces of writing were given to others, and I likely will not see them again. Among those that I kept for myself, most will end up in the trash or recycling bin. The days are long past -- so much so that I don't remember them -- when it was astonishing for me to string a series of letters together into a word, or words into a sentence. I take the act of writing for granted now. And that means that the percentage of pieces that I will keep is small, maybe more so with time.
What is the criteria, exactly? In his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King declares that writing is a form of telepathy -- a mundane form of magic in which a writer spirits his or her thoughts into a reader's mind. That's not a bad comparison; writing, after all, is one half of a conversation, the equivalent of the proverbial tree falling in the forest and waiting for someone to hear it. A lot of trees fall unheard, just as a lot of personal notes, emails, and even poems and stories disappear into the wastebasket unmourned. If I consider a piece "kept" (and I may not be the only judge of that), it is because I feel that it communicates with someone. That someone may be another person -- I like to think that my poems and blog entries are being read by a set of eyes somewhere right now, although I frankly have no idea. Then again, the audience may simply be me -- I doubt that anyone else is going to rummage through my bedroom drawer and leaf through the high school newspapers that I've preserved. Any piece of writing lives or dies depending on whether someone cares about it. Case in point: Emily Dickinson's poems, which today comprise one of the most influential bodies of work in Western literature, survived because the author -- who published almost none of them in her lifetime -- opted to keep them safe in her bedroom. Then, of course, others kept them safe. The world kept Dickinson and threw away countless other authors; their words simply stopped speaking to people. So perhaps it's perversely fitting that one of my most vivid memories of the longest poetry workshop I have ever attended is the night when we burned a bunch of papers. In summer 2015, I was invited to join Marge Piercy's annual workshop in Cape Cod, and on the final night, we gathered on the beach and started a bonfire. Our kindling was a stack of copies of the community newspaper, the Cape Cod Times, and I frankly am not sure why we had it; perhaps some local grocery store had unloaded the last week's edition on one of our hosts. But it burned, as all paper does, and I found myself looking bemused at the front page as we wadded up each copy and tossed it on the fire. We didn't value the Cape Cod Times, or at least those copies of that issue of it, as anything more than fodder for warmth. Did anyone else value it at all? At some point, someone had; no writing can exist unless someone finds it important at the moment of creation. Even a post-it cries out to exist for a second or two. Most often, that cry turns out to be short. I used to work at a paper like the Cape Cod Times. It was called the Pictorial Gazette, headquartered in the coastal town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and I covered four small towns there from March 2004 to February 2005. The paper no longer exists, and there is scant mention of it online; an article in another small Connecticut paper, the Middletown Press, tells me that it went out of business in 2008. Perhaps some library around Old Saybrook has an archive of all the Pictorial Gazette's issues; I have not made calls to investigate. When I started working there, it was my first full-time reporting job -- my first full-time job, period -- and I diligently saved three copies of every issue once it hit the newsstands. Now, I may have one or two single copies tucked away somewhere. For all practical purposes, history is done with the Pictorial Gazette. I don't really mind. The articles and columns that I wrote for it were nice, but they weren't the best things I've ever written. Probably, they served as practice for the better pieces I wrote later for the Los Angeles Times, maybe for this blog as well. Sometimes, the purpose of writing is to build up to something grander. I'm sure I could tease a kindling metaphor out of that if I wanted to. What have you kept? If you've read this blog entry up until now, then you muyst be a literary person of some kind. Perhaps you're a writer, whatever your medium may be. In some private (or even very public) place, you have a canon of the pieces that spring cleanings and delete keys have spared. It's not just a matter of tidiness; it's one of the ways that we curate our lives. A few years ago, I did a curation of my own, assembling 50 poems from over two decades into Tea and Subtitles: Selected Poems 1999-2019, which Moon Tide Press generously published. If a massive bonfire devoured my house and I had time to save one creative artifact, I would grab that book. It represents the work that I'm proudest of (at least for now; ask me again in 20 years), with all the false starts and failed experiments eliminated. Among the poems that made the cut is "Bonfire at Cape Cod with Marge Piercy's Workshop," which was inspired by the beach gathering mentioned above and appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. Like all of my poems, it started life on a sheet of paper. I obviously didn't burn it. I have dispensed with others over the years, but perhaps that's a way of staying warm. My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "On Transit," another piece from my manuscript in progress. This one was written in Honolulu this year (in a hotel, an airport, and possibly a plane) and is about the sensation of multiple kinds of travel. I hope you enjoy it.
Here are two other recent pieces worthy of note in Radical Wonder: Nolcha Fox's poem "Blurred" is a short, evocative list of questions in which the author seeks comparisons for herself -- a bit in the vein of Simon and Garfunkel's song "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)." Here, rather than a hammer, nail, forest, and street, we have an antelope, an eagle, fences, and a myriad of natural forces. The closing couplet, "Where does the body end / and the plains begin?", is quite lovely. Dave Alcock, who has regaled Radical Wonder with some brilliant flash fiction, recently contributed a poem, "Broken," which paints the kind of short, pithy vignette typical of his prose. The use of short sentences here ("Her eyes glistened. She sighed on the sofa. She held her knees. Her legs wouldn’t stand.") is particularly effective. Thanks, Nolcha and Dave, for sharing your work. |
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
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