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.
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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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