study in gray and green
see a lot of paintings, see a lot of poems
Before getting to the grays and greens, I wanted to direct your gaze toward some people I care about who make art and whose work is available to you. Jon McGregor, whose writerly friendship has been a gift for so long I had to really think to remember how we met, some years ago founded a journal called The Letters Page. It’s out of the university where he works, and it’s directed now by very capable and thoughtful students. A year or two ago, they changed format: each issue is now an aerogram, sent in the mail to all subscribers (and the subscription model is also really nice). The Letters Page only publishes work in epistolary forms, so if you have something letter-shaped, or you have an idea for a letter, send it to them! The most recent aerogram contained scanned leaves and one real dried leaf. Very charming.
Late Night Copies Press, a collaborative, artist-run photocopier press based in Minneapolis, MN, has just put out a new laundry zine ($6). If you read the post here in November with gift ideas, you will have seen my enthusiastic review of this one. I love what Late Night Copies Press does (including their open copy nights) and you might, too.
Finally, my brother, who generally makes things you can’t have in your house (institutional kilns, big machines, installations), gave himself the challenge of spending time this year making things that could hang on the wall, and that would be affordable for most people with a salary. (He also gave himself the, to my mind, more daunting challenge of actually putting these things up for sale.) His work is about industry and family, memory and material, in the context of the deindustrialized Upper Midwest/Rust Belt US. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, there are about eight works up in his online shop now.
One of my students wrote in her final reflection that she now sees poems everywhere. The best possible result of a poetry class. My god. The world is full of the things we call art and poetry, all for free, all moving, all teaching, all around us. Sure, poetry and art are the nomenclature we use when someone puts their hands, the camera, a pen, a viewfinder cut in a piece of paper up to the world and holds it still for us. But it’s all right there.
In class, at talks, at writers’ conferences, at the end of readings there are often questions about inspiration. How do you, writer at the front of the room (whoever it is) “get inspiration”? Where do your ideas come from? And in class with apprentice writers I often hear someone say “I don’t have any ideas”, or “I only write when I have a lot of inspiration”. Similarly, and not only in the classroom, I have heard: “I don’t want to read too much in case it changes what I think” and “I need to keep my ideas fresh”.
At what point do we forget or unlearn, culturally, personally, that the ideas aren’t in us at all? That ideas aren’t boundaried like that (and, really, neither are we)—that everything we can think has been given to us or crossed into us, from the highest theory right down to the organizaton of the world into A–B–C? I think children know that ideas aren’t in them—they are always looking, asking, touching. No, ideas aren’t in us. They are in the world. The world has the ideas. We make the frames.
Practice in the arts (which means learning to see and name the received forms, modes, styles, etc., as well as to learn to improvise and respond to the formal, textural, linguistic, etc. pressures in one’s own thinking) gives us ways to see pattern, see relation, see difference; it gives us the discipline to continue to look—listen—touch—gather sense data of all kinds (including the kinds called ‘reason’ and ‘intellection’) even when we don’t feel inspired. Because inspiration is rare. But the world is always there. Practice in art gives us the muscle memory for arrangement of the things that are. And, later, it allows us to regard what we have arranged with a critical (and self-critical) eye, to try to understand it. It is, after all, now also in the world, part of the world. It has become something that can give us ideas.
I do not know any way to ‘find inspiration’ or to ‘be inspired’. I recognize the elation of a moment of real epiphany, and I remember from my early 20s the feeling of excitement when I ‘had an idea for a poem’. I now think that these feelings are the celebrated or more visible parts of the ongoing and often less glamorous process of being in the world as a writer and artist. I am convinced that it is that being-in-the-world part, not the tangible results it sometimes leads to, that makes one an artist or a writer. I’m interested in how to see that process-time, the middle time, as the active part of artmaking and writing. What that asks of me is not to write anything off as uninvolved with what I think of as “my art” or “my ideas”, and not to give up. Okay, not always easy—but it’s something I can do tomorrow again even if I failed today.
What I do know, reliably, because I have based all of my work on this method, is that trying to perceive what is around me will make me think—with my eyes, ears, hands, nervous system, education, etc.—and give me things to think about in new ways (or in repeated ways). I know that boredom is often a sign of something interesting happening that I haven’t yet been able to see. I know that doing the same thing over and over can make interesting work even if the doing doesn’t interest me. And I know also that the reading of books and the viewing of artworks and the listening-to of music (just another kind of trying-to-perceive-the-world-around-me) will have given me forms that I can repeat, borrow, adapt, refuse, etc. In short, I know that I am not the only one responsible for making my work, and I know that the interest there is doesn’t have to be my invention—a walk will work as well as, or better than, a blood-from-a-turnip session at the computer.
There is no shortcut, but there is also no delay. It’s all right there: all the inspiration in the world.
Still against the bombing of Gaza, the occupation of Palestine, apartheid, empire, all wars, all dehumanization, all destruction of land, water, air, living things, by the way. Still walking around with this song in my head. How do we do it? Not alone, that’s for sure (there are five links there, O you reader!).
Thank you for reading! See you in a week. Since you made it so far, here is a utopian vision from Mr. Seeger. And here’s some courage—sing along with him and I think it would be hard not to feel it.