I still remember the day that launched me towards El Paso. It was late afternoon. I remember it being in the summer, but it could have been spring. In Texas heat hits early. I sat on a picnic bench near a pond at the apartment complex of one of my professors. There was a weeping willow down by the water, and its leaves glistened in the late afternoon sunlight as its long stringy arms swayed in the warm breeze.
His last name was Cohen. I don't remember his first. After I'd requested to see him, he asked me to drop by and talk about an assignment I'd written for his modern poetry class. He'd given me a choice: redo it or fail the class. I was hoping for a third option, and that is why I was there.
The class had been given an assignment to write a one page definition of modern poetry. Instead, I'd written an eight-page fictional account that began like this:
As an experiment in aesthetic, I hammered myself down to my hometown. My goal was to understand effect, what makes grade grade--you know--the texture of a line lick-able.
In the exposition of the narrative, I (the protagonist) went to the library and dug up some quotes about modernism, including, "The world in which modern poetry grew up in was neither Christian nor moral; and poetry in our age has felt little able to rely on any structure of belief outside itself" (Hough).
Not willing to equate modern poetry as simply a mirror of the banality of life, I set off on an adventure to prove that modernism is "a way of seeing, a way of making words lick-able, touch-able". I wondered, "What makes a word so hard you can kill with it? What makes a word nibble so softly, it tickles you like cold cream on hot skin?" And then I set off for my hometown where, in the dead of winter, I nailed myself to the gravel road that leads to the cemetery.
From the eight-foot-tall plate-glass windows of my parents home, I watched the snow cake on the hills above. I turned inside, anticipating my mother's reaction when I told here I was going to nail myself to Cemetery Road.
"What? Why? You'll get a cold. No, you'll die of cold!"
Determined, I went ahead with my plan, riding an ATV over to the cemetery in the dead of winter:
Then, just before the city limits, where the ice-packed road ends and the salted, black one begins, at first grainy like pepper, then slick like obsidian, I stopped cold. I got off, walked to the back of the ATV, it's cherry red metal blue, reflecting the winter sky. I attempted to unlatch the black rubber straps on the glove box without taking off my gloves. It didn't work. My skin was exposed as I drew out a steel hammer, metallic blue in in the winter light, along with two large tent stakes and two leather bands with silver rings attached.
Next, I walked to the center of the road, my big black boots sounding like slowed-down jackhammers on the metal ice. I crouched down, so as not to slide and break my back, and laid myself down on the frozen road, hammer in one hand, straps and tent stakes in the other. I slid the glove on the left hand, wrapped it in the leather strap, and turning on my side, hammered the stake through the attached silver ring. I decided one secure arm was enough for effect, put the hammer down, and relaxed.
Looking up, the sky was so gray it was blue, and so cold, it seemed to crack. Bits of glassy ice fell to the earth and pelted me in the face, scarring it hot. A quotation from Dickinson came to mind:
"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways, I know it. Is there any other way? (Dickinson).
I'm glad to say that I'm not that intense, and that after five minutes of being strapped to an ice sheet, I quickly decided I could sit by a fire and enjoy poetry that didn't make me "feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off". But, I did learn that modern poetry, is for me, undefinable. It just is. Some words grab, some don't, and it's not the word itself, but the surroundings, the words that neighbor the word, and the relationship between them. Beyond that, I can't define modernism.
Professor Cohen had written something like, "Very amusing and well-written; now do the assignment as assigned or fail the class."
I, so stubborn back then, sat, watching sunlight glaze a weeping willow as I waited to make my argument against redoing the assignment.
He came down the grassy hill wearing Bermuda shorts and a dark green t-shirt. He had dark wavy hair, glasses, and a thick, well-trimmed mustache. I normally notice things, not people, so I'm not sure why this memory is so vivid. Perhaps some part of me knew my life was about to change. Perhaps without me knowing it, my mind was savoring this volta in my life. It has remained the pivotal moment between yearning to be a writer and becoming one.
He sat down on the picnic table and we talked.
Basically, it came down to this. He saw that it was his job was to teach me to write literary criticism well. I, on the other hand, saw that it was my job to learn to be a writer, not a critic. He said I was probably at the wrong school then.
And then he did the most amazing thing. He said, "Drop my class, and go chase your dream." He even provided me a route forward, suggesting the writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso as my entry into that world.
And that was that. From that moment forward, I was no longer a literature major. I was a writer. I was no longer living in Dallas (at least not mentally). Instead, I was headed for El Paso, right across the river from the corner of Calle 16 de Septembre and Ugarte which had so awakened my senses on a trip to Juarez not long before. Sitting there, it seemed so right.
The other night I had a dream. I don't remember all of it, but in it, Marci and I lived in an apartment complex. Our dog barked each morning and woke me up. It aggravated the hell out of me, but when I got up to let him outside, I'd hear the most amazing rendition of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". I'd look outside, and there on a balcony across the road, in the blue light of early dawn, was this old man with his guitar serenading the sleeping city. His voice was thin, crackly, almost broken. But the emotion it carried was thick, black and full-bodied. It was so serenely beautiful. On mornings our dog didn't bark, I'd sleep in and miss it altogether.
The artist's job is to be awake, to be singing, no matter what the world is doing. I knew that well when I roamed the streets and calles of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. I'm not sure I always know it now. But with this book, I'm at least sliding the glass door open and walking out onto the balcony.
References
Dickension, Emily. Selected Letters. Ed.
Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
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