This morning, well before 6:00 a.m., I searched through Dreams by No One's Daughter and Natural Histories by Leslie Ullman looking for a quotation with which to start this piece. It seemed only proper as it is about her. Yet, as I've worked over each draft, she has stubbornly refused to enter the room. It took me some time to figure out why, but I did it. It's so simple: I don't know her. So, this morning I got up thinking I could attach a bit of her to this piece by finding the right quote from one of her poems. Although I entered many, walked around, stayed a while even as I watched the clock (My daily writing block is a bit confined by my life), I didn't really seem to find anything that shouted, "Begin with this." However, since I do keep coming back to two lines from "Running", perhaps it would be dishonest to leave them out altogether, even though I don't know exactly how they will connect with what I have to say:
Sometimes I run in Louisiana
where I've never been
Leslie Ulman impacted me as a writer more than any other professor. As her writing style is very different from mine, it wasn't an affinity for voice or structure that affected me so. She was just a damn good teacher. She opened up the world of poetry to her students two ways: her writing workshops and her exploration of the standard works of contemporary poetry. All of my peers loved her workshops, as did I, but they were less enthused about her Contemporary American Poetry class. However, that is the class that impacted me the most.
I'm not sure why the public understands that fields like medicine, engineering, or astrophysics require diligence to enter and comprehend the full glory of the content they explore; yet, that same public seems to think that fields like art and literature mean nothing if someone without a high school education doesn't immediately "get" the work. No, your two-year-old cannot paint like Jackson Pollack. You just think he can. And no, it's not the work that's lacking. No one is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Staff at art museums across the country dedicate their lives to making it accessible, but you've got to be willing to be present. Art is not something you stand before and have an argument with without even getting to know each another. Not that there aren't con-artists in the arts; there are. However, without putting in the effort to learn the vocabulary, one is not qualified to make that call.
Just because I don't understand quantum physics or can't meditate or do yoga doesn't mean they are empty worlds with nothing real going on inside that space.
I'm not an elitist. Sometimes the simple truly is the most profound. My favorite writer is Bill Bryson, who is as accessible as anyone. Other times, though, beauty is complex. Just because I don't understand black holes doesn't render them insignificant. Just because E = MC2 doesn't mean much to me, doesn't mean it has no meaning.
When it comes to poetry, most of my peers were lazy. They were happy enough to explore their own poems, the poems of each other, or even the poems of some of the more accessible poets like Lucille Clifton or William Stafford. However, they were unwilling to put in the work required to enter the poems of someone like Robert Lowell, even with an extraordinary guide like Professor Ullman. Her writing workshops demonstrated anyone can write well with a competent guide. Her literature classes demonstrated that few have the discipline to become poets. At the time I went through the program, there was only Michi and I. Several other students had the natural talent, and there were a few fine fiction writers in the bunch also, but only the two of us had the drive to push ourselves beyond what came naturally.
I too lost that dedication along the way, and only recently started to write seriously again. Yet, I was trained well. One thing Professor Ullman did that facilitated entry into the poems we studied was that she allowed us to respond to a poem in one of two ways: we could write a standard literary analysis, or we could respond to the work through our own work, not so much to mimic it as to dialogue with it. I went back and forth between the two methods, but it is the latter method that really pushed me forward as a poet.
Story Built from Galway Kinnell Bricks
God, I had been working so long,
until midnight I think,
but it felt like three.
I closed up shop,
dragged my weary eyes up the street to Village Inn
for a needle of coffee in each socket.
And then to,
there among the fat men with shiny badges
read Galway Kinnell,
it was like a dream, dark growing tall,
two small boys bearing cornstalk violins
--I swear I saw them!--
outside the Circle K across the street.
Above the Franklin Mountains the moon ate itself out.
Two young lovers sat on the curb,
their tennis shoes in the dusty gutter.
Headlights and hum zipped past
like lion eyes after zebra.
The young just sat there, heads trailed
by the beginning of necks,
shivering in the guarantee they'd be bodies,
flesh rivered by blue erratic wanderings
of blood, saliva passed back and forth,
hands running stone saint smooth stone.
I laid down my tip and lit
a cigarette, a small fire against
the loneliness that I knew would rain
when I tore open my bed like a polar bear
and climbed in and closed her up
to sleep in blood
and pain.
The words in italics are Kinnell's, the ones not, mine. Through this collage method of using bits and pieces of other people's poems to write off and respond to, I was able to get out of myself and expand my options when returning to my solo work. The process, was, I suppose, something like playing jazz.
Lucille Clifton
is woman,
real woman,
so sure of her big, shouting,
swinging, mighty, magic, spell-spinning hips,
she doesn't have to kick me in the balls
to make me listen.
She needs no combat boots.
She's got roots
and God and babies and girls and boys
and collard and kale and kinship and roaches
and green trees and tree talk
and nations of wood and nations of words,
words galloping out of her mouth,
crazy and wild,
wild and root,
speaking loss,
deep, black loss,
cutting greens to give back life,
forgiving Daddy to get on with life,
calling the kids home from the movies:
"The picture be over. Stop making some babies
and raise them!"
Her black breasts pressed against the windowpane
every inch of her woman converting me to myself, man,
making me run through the streets naked, crying in tongues
while she bellows WOMAN!
and invites me to join in the song and dance
in spite of Zora Neal Hurston's
Joe Starks (that bastard!)
telling Janie,
"Somebody got to think for women and chillun
and chickens and cows.
I god, they sho don't think none theirselves."
In that poem, I no longer even know what words are Clifton's and what are mine, and it doesn't really matter. The voice is clearly hers. That was the point of the exercise: to expand my options as a poet so that I wouldn't always respond to my own previous lines in the same old predictable ways. I believe it worked. I'm a pretty versatile writer and can take on multiple voices even in the same piece. I'm not sure how mature or significant I am as a writer; that is for others to determine. What I do know is that I was good student, and that I had a great teacher, Leslie Ullman. Those are prerequisites for most, if not all, good writers. Artists are not born in vacuums. They use and expand a language handed down to them. It is a mentoring system. Leslie Ullman was a master mentor, and for that I'm grateful.
That's why this post seems a bit odd to me, even disjointed. Leslie Ullman the teacher is here, but not Leslie Ullman, the person. Perhaps that is how it is with the best teachers. While teaching, it's not about them; it's about pulling out the best in their students.
Of course, I do have memories of Leslie. I did attend a few parties and social events where she was there. I remember well how she carried herself, how she could command the attention of an audience, even college students not much more mature than high-schoolers. I could describe her looks. Bright blue eyes that danced with light but unlike some eyes didn't necessarily invite you to enter. Not necessarily guarded--just enjoying the space between self and the outside world. I realize now, I don't really know her, even as an acquaintance. I know some shop keepers in town much better. I don't rule out writing about anyone or anything, but I don't feel any particular need to write about them. Whereas, I do feel any memoir about my time in El Paso must include a section on Leslie Ullman. It's not that she never shared anything personal. She did. It was just that her class wasn't about her; it was about us. She allowed herself to all but vanish in that setting so that we could grow as writers.
She did the same when she discussed the work of Anne Sexton, Mark Strand, or whatever poet we were studying. The poems entered the spotlight full-bodied, as she, the presenter slipped back into the shadows.
Yet, because she taught me how to write, how to really read, how to do what I was put here on earth to do--explore life through words, I love her. That is how it is with mentors. Their greatness comes by not drawing attention to themselves but by bringing out the best in others.
For a time I was an ungrateful student. I got too caught up in living life. Like many of my peers were not willing to give the poems we studied their full attention, I was not willing to get up at 5:00 a.m. to write, and more importantly, to stick with something when it became hard. I don't know if I'll be able to get this book published or not. I'm not sure it's the type of book that can generate any interest outside close friends and family, but I do know this: I'm almost there; it's almost done. I have almost completed this journey. Soon, I will be able to say to myself, "I have written my first book". That will make the next one, whatever it is about, much, much easier.
Now, I understand why I was drawn to those two particular lines of Ms. Ullman's:
Sometimes I run in Louisiana
where I've never been
She allowed me to run in places I'd never been. The poems she opened up and made accessible to me grew inside me and became part of me. The way those writers handled words became ways I could handle words also. I do not know if I'll get this book published, or even the next one, or the one after that. I do not know if at some point many people will read my words or if my writing will vanish soon after my body.
But I do know this:
I can run with writers;
I am one of them.
But I wouldn't be without Leslie. I'd write, I'm sure. I did that before her class. But I'd be like that hobby painter who picks up a paint brush now and then to paint a scene of the daisies in the back garden without ever having stood before a Claude Monet, an Edward Hopper, a Richard Diebenkorn, or Jackson Pollack and uttered "Damn!" totally amazed at possibilities formerly unimagined in his own work.
To grow, you must run in place's you've never been. It helps to have a good guide. Leslie Ullman was among the best of them.
References
Brown, Steve. "Lucille Clifton." Sell-Outs
Literary Magazine 1993: 32.
Ullman, Leslie. "Running." Ullman, Leslie.
Dreams by No One's Daughter. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1987. 28.
No comments:
Post a Comment