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How Do We Write Now - Tin House
How Do We Write Now - Tin House
How Do We Write Now - Tin House
The following essay was originally given as a lecture at the Sylvia Beach Hotel as
part of our 2018 Poetry Winter Workshop.
The alternate title of this, of course, is how the fuck do we write now.
Just as the customary greeting of hello has been replaced with what the fuck is
going on, and you grab your friend’s arm almost against your will and shake her a
little bit and say no seriously, what the fuck is happening.
Just as your face has been replaced by a question mark immediately followed by an
exclamation mark immediately followed by another question mark.
Just as your heart has been replaced by what happens to a bunch of seagulls when a
dog comes running down the beach.
Just as your blood now carries in its current the Jaws theme.
Just as some days I put my bra on inside-out and it seems too hard to fix so I just sit
there staring at the news in an inside-out bra.
Just as whenever you read one of those super-positive Lin-Manuel Miranda tweets
that’s like
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G’MORNING. 0
YOU’RE A GORGEOUS RAY OF BABY LIGHT THAT SHINES ON ALL HUMANITY
you picture the president reading it and nodding and thinking, he’s talking about
me.
That your attention is in one sense the most precious part of you, it is your soul
spending yourself, to teach you that there’s always more.
That your attention can be diverted and used to power the devil’s Hoover Dam.
That we live in a time where people pay to be locked in a room together and have to
find a way out. That this is fun to us now.
That if you feel like you’re being slowly digested by a sarlacc pit you’re not alone.
That if your deodorant doesn’t seem to be working anymore you’re not alone. We
stink together.
That if you sometimes try to comfort yourself by thinking, Cows don’t know about
him, you’re not alone.
But the pure concentration that you live in when you write a poem is still there, is
still just beyond us as the green dimension. It can still be accessed through the door
of yourself, you can still swing it open, though the hinges scream.
I think that we go there when we die, but do not have to wait to die to go there.
If you live there all the time you probably grow at a different rate, like Robin
Williams in that movie where he was actually a mental child except super hairy all
over.
The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone first
thing the phone becomes my brain for the day. If I don’t look out a window right
away the day will be windowless, it will be like one of those dreams where you crawl
into a series of smaller and smaller boxes, or like an escape room that contains
everyone and that you’ll pay twelve hours of your life for. If I open up Twitter and
the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he
swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind. It will
install a gold toilet there. It will turn on shark week as foreplay and then cheat on its
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English will come out of it wrong, and then English will come wrong out of me. 0
The scaramucci is not just a unit of time, it is also a unit of conspiracy against you,
and the work you were put here to do.
The feeling you get after hours of scrolling that all your thoughts have been replaced
with cotton candy — or something even nastier, like Runts or circus peanuts — as
opposed to the feeling of being open to poetry, to being inside the poem, which is the
feeling of being honey in the hive.
The single best way to give the morning back to myself is to open a real book as I
drink my first cup of coffee. I’m not sure why real books are best. I think the pages
remind me that I have fingerprints. I think I like to see what I have read lying
sweetly by the side of what I’m about to read, like a wife.
It sometimes helps to let someone else tell you what to do, so listen: GET IN THE
TUB and make it so hot that your heart bumps stupidly against your rib cage like a
manatee. Read Saki’s short stories out loud. Read the most minute descriptions you
can find about other artistic processes: Moss Hart writing plays with George S.
Kaufman, his teeth glued together with terrible fudge; Maya Angelou on the road in
Europe with the company of Porgy and Bess.
If you have an afternoon, cook something that takes a long time, it will think along
with you.
Keep a physical notebook. Remember how to use the kind of pen that runs out. Go
into churches, mosques, temples because even when their ceilings are low, they
impose a shape on great height. Go to the post office, with all its sounds of being
sent. Learn the names of trees.
Read diaries, which make the day permanent. Read anything that slows you down to
the pace of real life, like Zora Neale Hurston’s preservations of dialect that walk in
dresses down dirt roads. Read one of those Annie Dillard books where she watches
an ant fuck for like fourteen straight hours and at the end of it somehow believes in
God even more than she did already.
Read Georgia O’Keeffe’s letters and say the name Stieglitz hatefully to yourself as
you piss. Read The Woman Warrior and think yourself on that mountain with her,
undergoing the same apprenticeship, until finally you can point at the sky and make
a sword appear.
Remember a time, not so long ago, when email was good. Imagine every email you
ever received being delivered by a very small guy on a horse, galloping through an
ether landscape. Think of Sylvia Plath — My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold A
Mailman On The Street! Think of her fresh red heart.
Look out the window the way Dorothy looked out the window in The Wizard of Oz —
as if the tornado has plucked you up and next you might see anything. Pretend that
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you’re a child and homesick and get a sleeve of saltines and a stack of books and
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read the choicest parts of each one of them. If you can’t work, watch a movie. Before 0
every movie, play exactly one of those old 30s cartoons where the worst thing that’s
happening in a mouse’s life is that a bee won’t leave him alone.
Think about who you are writing for, who you are writing against.
Think about what isn’t in poetry yet that you could put here.
I have in mind the very particular sensation of holding your second toe as you paint
the nail, rolling the joint back and forth between your fingers.
Draw the thing you used to doodle in science class. Imagine someone sketching you
with a very soft pencil until you can feel the detail of your face from across the room.
Plant your feet on the ground and breathe in deep and let your chest rise rusty as a
partridge’s and sing.
Stand exactly in a doorway like a cat and try to feel the religious feeling that a cat
clearly feels when it stands in a doorway.
Imagine yourself being ejaculated by a cloud. Imagine you’re a living chess piece and
a hand in a black leather glove is making long sweeping moves with you.
Think about the days on Twitter that are really good, like when two llamas escape or
an angry goat on roof only respects one man, and think of everyone in the world
pouring their faces into their phones and just thinking llama. llama. angry goat on
roof. which is the closest the current population will ever get to united opinion,
which is the closest we will ever get to peace.
That the line in you will one day be memorized by other people, even repeated by
them silently as they brush their healthy teeth.
That your similes can make things love each other. Mary Ruefle writes:
Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event. A poem
must rival a physical experience and metaphor is, simply, an exchange of energy
between two things. If you believe that metaphor is an event, and not just a literary
term denoting comparison, then you must conclude that a certain philosophy
arises: the philosophy that everything in the world is connected. I’ll go slowly here:
if metaphor is not idle comparison, but an exchange of energy, an event, then it
unites the world by its very premise — that things connect and exchange energy.
That the place in yourself where metaphors wait is a place where all things in the
world are one, where the globe is all possible circles imposed on each other and we
are the final Venn.
You are completely at its mercy and it is your kingdom. The apples are all the things
you have ever compared to apples. The stars are all the ways you have tried to
describe the stars. Paradise is not just the day when the poem pours down like
Niagara with the hottest couple in the world kissing steamily behind it, it is also the
day that you spend changing the word A to THE and back again. That concentration
is reverence. You are passing the beads of things through your fingertips and your
head is bowed and your mouth is moving and the preexisting rhythm has found its
place in you.
I’m not saying you’re lucky to be there. I’m saying as long as you live there you are in
opposition to the powers that rule the world. You are the opposite of money. You are
against presidents, oil spills, slaughterhouses, Young Sheldon. You’re the opposite of
the red button under Matt Lauer’s desk. You’re the opposite of the red button that
ends it all. You have never been so hard in your own name. Nobody has you.
Last week I was revisiting my own first book. What a physical thing it was to me but
also how it was a place that I went, like the diner to be discovered, like the pet shop
to simply be washed with the pure colors of the tropical fish. It lasted an eternity. All
I wanted, in a life that might offer anything, was one of those deeply ugly covers that
was like a public-domain closeup of some guy in a nightgown holding a lyre.
Of course, it was never published, which is the fate of most real first books. By the
time you’re in print, they’re second, third, fourth books, and something is missing
from them, that initial wild leap into the idea that you can do this.
I will put you back in that time. Bill Clinton was president, then George Bush.
Thongs were huge and it was cool to pull them up over your low-rise jeans like you
were tempting little kittens to play with your string. The shirts that we wore to the
club were basically napkins that tied in the back. The kittens liked that also.
We had all recently gotten addicted to chocolate-covered coffee beans and were
operating in a state of permanent caffeine psychosis.
There was a terrible passion at that time among poets to talk about things fisting
themselves, like “the sun is fisting itself on the horizon,” which has thankfully mostly
passed, though sometimes I miss it, because it was hilarious.
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Volta 0
Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all the
worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of two poetry collections, Balloon Pop
Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, and a
memoir, Priestdaddy. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New
Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and The London Review of Books. She lives in
Savannah, Georgia.
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