Another compelling distraction from writing ...

... which I don't need but am enjoying tremendously.

One of the great frustrations of becoming an adult, I've long felt, is the need to narrow your field of interests--at least, if you ever want to be any good at any of them.

I've always been lousy at that. Over the years, I've been intensely occupied, at various points, with painting, drawing, dichroic glass, beadwork, and collage. Oh, and making cocktails. Add to that the desire to have some sort of social existence and, sometimes, the desire to hibernate and do nothing but read and avoid all human contact, and I often feel a mile wide and an inch deep, and worry that I'm neglecting the words that have always been my deepest love.

Still ... I do have a good time with distractions. My latest sideline has been gripping me for a couple of months now, ever since I finally got to take a metalsmithing class at Glen Echo. The artist and instructor, Blair Anderson, makes stunning silver (check out this brilliant pendant, which gave me chills: Not only is it a tribute to Ray Bradbury, it has a jump drive with 10,000 books hidden inside it) and is also an amazing teacher, and after a few weeks, I had the silver bug. After a day of moving words around a screen, hammering the shit out of metal and firing up a blowtorch is incredibly satisfying.

Silverwork's not a cheap hobby, though, so I've revamped my Etsy store to include some of the jewelry I've been making in hopes of making it eventually fund itself. It's funny, because while there's so much about the work that is deliciously nonverbal, there are ways it reminds me of writing poems ... specifically in that, like poetry, I often labor for hours and get to the end and it looks a) tiny and b) flawed. But like poetry, also, I can see potential, and every now and then I think, that's actually kind of neat.

Plus: FIRE!! METAL!! HAMMERING!!

Whitman at Armory Square

I’m grateful today to have “Whitman at Armory Square” up on Linebreak. Many thanks to the journal, and to Jason McCall for as powerful reading as I could possibly hope for. It’s Linebreak’s treatment of poems, presenting recordings along with the text, that had me hoping they'd take this piece.

I don’t believe in “explaining” poems. It’s a bit like explaining jokes: If you have to explain them, they didn’t work. And Walt Whitman’s place in American poetry requires no explanation; he is a touchstone figure, often perceived as the towering life-force who changed the landscape of poetry and brought it into a true “American” voice after decades of British emulation. (A brief pop culture aside: Given the relatively marginalized place poetry holds in the mainstream these days, it says something that Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” was quoted in full in an episode of Breaking Bad, and I love that it may end up being Leaves of Grass that brings down Walter White’s House of Meth.)

But to explain why I went to this subject and this form: Whitman worked as a nurse, tending to the wounded during the Civil War, and there seems to be little doubt that what he saw at Armory Square hospital changed him permanently. A few years ago, I read that after his experience, he stopped writing poetry. That struck me as so telling, so poignant—this man who had been welling with life, with love of people and deep carnality, with words, struck dumb by seeing the country turned against itself. And how it almost seemed as though his own voice had been taken over by those of the soldiers who wanted him to “speak” for them by writing their letters home, some of them the last words they’d ever utter.

I wanted to write something that showed what happened when Whitman’s life instinct came up against the carnage of the Civil War, and that’s the reason for this form: the non-italicized lines are the life instinct, the italicized ones the voice of the death he encountered, how it might have transformed his relationship with the body. It was designed, in a way, to be a dialogue between Freud’s concepts of Eros (the drive for life, love, creativity, sex) and Thanatos (the drive of aggression, sadism, violence, death) through the figure of Whitman.

The poem can be read straight through, but also as two stanzas one after the other, if you pull them apart at the spots where they mesh. I considered setting them that way, but in the end, I decided, I wanted them touching, blending, to form one narrative as well as two separate ones.

It’s a form I’ve been working with a lot due to the fact that conceptualizing America sometimes seems to require it: voices in opposition to each other, entertwining to make a whole that may be harmonious or acrimonious. Sometimes these voices even come from within a single person. Can these voices coexist? If not, which one will win out?

I was going to post Galway Kinnell's stunning "When the Towers Fell" today, but this Jane Kenyon poem seems appropriate.