Giving Away the Store, Part 9: Experiment

Experiment! I'm working on a sestina right now. A sestina is a 39-line, 7-stanza poem with six 6-line stanzas and one final 3-line stanza. Invented nine centuries ago in France by Arnaut Daniel, the sestina uses the six words ending each line of the first stanza to repeat in alternate positions in the following line endings of the next five stanzas, and the last 3-line stanza contains two each of those words per line, one at the middle and one at the end. 

The sestina is the type of poem that might put off readers as too repetitious and irk writers as too complex and restricting. But poets should practice as many forms as possible in deference to their predecessors and in honor of the craft. I have written one before, 47 years ago, which appeared on the National Council of Teachers of English website in 2014. Notice the repetition:

 On Living Near The Bronx Zoo: An Urban Sestina

This block where we live in the heart and the soul of The Bronx
You’d say is the last place you’d find any culture or art.
Eleven miles down the IRT tracks, the world
So lavishly watches the latest Shakespeare-in-the-Park,
A Mozart festival opening in Carnegie Hall,
Or a Jackson Pollock at the Whitney Museum. The streets

In what they call The City ain’t our streets,
Ain’t our city. We who live here in The Bronx
Don’t say New York’s where we’re from. Our screaming halls
Are us. Our neighborhood, yeah, is all about art,
From paisons playing softball on the asphalt park
To amigas taking the stoop as if it’s their world,

None too far from that fabled zoo, its monkey world
Screeching in sorrow but not as pained as the street,
Where hitters stalk hookers as darkness takes the park
And dropouts pipe ashcans in mailboxes. Our Bronx,
With blaring boom boxes making a nuisance of art,
Lives and dies like echoes through those empty halls.

And heading west you’ll find another Hall,
This one of Fame. It shows folks of another world,
Their busts marred with graffiti and bubble gum, this art
The boys be doing when they’re wilding the street
As off-duty cops drink pitchers in Chuck’s Bar. The Bronx
Belongs to these boys, they own the streets, the park,

The halls, and everything else but the animal park,
Where mandrills ape each other in the monkey hall,
The elder dragging his nipples through the dirt of The Bronx,
Face blue and red, conjuring still another world
Thousands of miles away without the streets
Covering the dankness, the rot. This human art

Of entombing earth so we could live; the art
Of growing trees from all the world in one park
To remind us the world is bigger than our fabled streets—
The mountains, the deserts, the oceans—as if our halls
Were not enough, as if the natural world
All boiled down to what you wouldn’t call The Bronx,

But it does: the ultimate art, the footsteps and echoes down the hall,
The breaking of benches in the park, the nickel-and-dime world
We call our community’s streets—that’s what we call The Bronx.

Another rarely used form is the pantoum, originating from Malay. The pantoum usually contains four 4-line stanzas with repetitive alternating lines in specific positions. Here is one I wrote 46 years ago,  as soon as I learned of the form. It appeared Motherbird in 2001. Again, notice the repetition.

Back at the Ranch: A Pantoum

One birch bends, the other splits in two.
Upon both trees one cardinal nests;
A tabby scales both trunks in rue
And claws the roots and never rests.

Upon both trees the cardinal nests
Far from the tabby’s reach;
He claws the roots and never rests
And blanches the bark of each.

Far from the tabby’s reach
The cardinal flits from branch to branch
And blanches the bark of each,
Disturbing all the ranch.

The cardinal flits from branch to branch.
The tabby scales both trunks in rue,
Disturbing all the ranch.
One birch bends, the other splits in two.

The point is that writers need to practice, and practice appears in many forms. Research them. And keep experimenting.

Giving Away the Store, Part 9: Go Back

Go back can mean a lot of things for a writer. It can mean go back to your last draft and try to improve it. It can mean go back with a family member or friend to an episode you experienced in common to get their take on those moments. It can mean go back to a restaurant or museum or sports center to compare experiences then with now. In this post, I note three other go-backs that I do periodically. They usually inspire some creativity.

1. Go back to your roots. For me, going back to my roots means two places: the Bronx, New York, where I grew up, and Mgarr, Malta, where my parents grew up. When I go to the Bronx, the James Monroe Housing Projects in particular, I could swear I see my ten-year-old self racing friends around the apartment buildings, playing in the softball field, and hanging on the bench with my childhood friends. When in Mgarr, as I'll be next month for the eleventh time in my life, I see the police station where my father served as a police officer. I see the fields where my mother, as the eldest of 11 children, fetched water from the well for my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Stories are behind my every step in these places.

2. Go back to something you've read. I am fortunate to have read books like John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to my grandson Delano. These are fiction pieces I read in high school or college, and as I read them a half century later to my grandson between his eighth and tenth years, I not only connected with him—always a good thing—but I got new perspectives as a senior and from Delano, 10 years younger than I was when I read them. There's a story somewhere there, right?  

3. Go back to something you've written. I can go back 52 years in my journals, and I often do. I am the same person I was back then, but I am not too. My attitudes and inclinations, even my politics, have changed. I am less hopeful than I was then, but also less anxious. I was angrier then, and I am more tolerant now. Some people who know me may read this and disagree, but what matters to a writer is his own mindset. Regardless of how I feel or felt, I can tap into a reservoir of ideas from those notebooks. And I do.

Giving Away the Store, Part 8: Review Your Entertainment

An easy way to keep writing is to compose reaction pieces of any movie, play, concert, ballet, or art exhibit you might attend, or any book or article you might read. Even a song you hear on the radio, or your music player will do. Forget about the rules of what should appear in a reaction piece. This isn't school. You can compare what you just read to another story, including a personal one. You can explain what a song you just heard means to you. You can note how a painting reminds you of someone you love. There are no rules. This activity is for you, as a means of kickstarting the writing process or  recording an experience. Nobody's business but yours.  

You can find any point of entry into such writing. The more personal, the better. Say you heard a new version of a song this morning that struck you in some way. For instance, I remember the first time I heard Ray Charles sing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!" by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Before that moment in the early 1980s, when I was preparing a family meal, I thought of that tune as little more than a decent Broadway show opener. But when Ray's voice burst through the radio in his singular way, soaring high and descending fast like an eagle after its prey, my breath was taken away. I just had to stop cooking and write down some notes about how Ray Charles can recreate the most ordinary tunes into soulful celebrations of life. I've heard his rendition hundreds of times since as a pick-me-upper. 

More than once I experienced watching a play I had already read that astonished me because of its staging and acting. I can think of Colleen Dewhurst performing as Josie Hogan in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1974, her husband George C. Scott playing Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman the next year, and F. Murray Abraham as Krapp in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape just a week ago—a full half-century later. Their performances were so special that I was sure they added lines to the original script. But upon reviewing the scripts once I got home, I realized I was wrong. That's the power of a great performance. The actors make you hear the lines for the first time.

I could write similar stories about musicians. The first time I heard Billie Holiday sing her forlorn rendition of "Love for Sale," or Stephane Grappelli bend notes on his violin for "Nuages," or Michel Camilo's piano thundering through "On Fire." I could name many more musicians. Or artworks, like when I first saw Chuck Close's "Phil," a 6-by-9-foot black-and-white acrylic on canvas portrait of Philip Glass. Or when I first stepped into the Museum of Modern Art room dedicated to Claude Monet's giant water lily paintings. Or my impression of monumental books like Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

Writing summary reviews is also a good way of compensating for any guilt you might feel over watching too many sitcoms. Write about everything you watch. You'll find a gem in your notes just waiting for you to expand into a poem, story, play, or essay. Just do it. 

Giving Away the Store, Part 7: Speak to a Decedent

I don't think I have ever cried at a loved one's funeral, and I have been to many. But recently I have cried with laughter when remembering some clownish antic of my father-in-law, Peter Kostares, dead 30 years. Not long ago, I have laughed like a madman as I walked down Broadway in New York City over some irreverent remark by my father, Francis Xavier, gone 28 years from this earth. I have cried over the loss of my mother Lucy's unconditional support, who passed away 26 years ago. I cry thinking that I could not communicate with my paternal grandmother, Carmela, now gone 54 years, because we spoke different languages before translation technology bridged such a boundary. 

I cry a lot, almost always when I am alone, and far from finding myself in the depths of despair, I become overwhelmed with joy, glowing with gratitude for being alive with such remarkable forebears to guide my walk through life. I continue to speak to these decedents, as well as grandfathers Philip and Carmelo, grandmother Elizabeth, uncles Emmanuel, Reno, and Fotios, aunts Katherine, Theresa, Salvina, Josephine, Rita, Katherine, and Maryanne, cousin Mario, friends Danielle, Tony, Tom, Victor, Deborah, Lucille, Ann, and Nancie, former employers Ida, Harry, and Mickey, and many more people whose names would run a dozen more pages.

If you are a writer struggling with something to write about, rely on your decedents. They are a source of rich material. They will never let you down. Talk to them. Ask them questions. Listen to their responses. They are wiser than we will ever be in this lifetime.

 

Giving Away the Store, Part 6: Do Something New

My college journalism professor assigned the class to interview someone we did not know and report about it. During this time, the early seventies, New York City's streets were teeming with homeless people much like today. I decided to interview a homeless person. 

In those days, I was living in the James Monroe Housing Projects in the Bronx. That neighborhood, a euphemism if there ever was one for the projects, was a drug haven, so I had seen plenty of gang members, dealers, junkies, pimps, and prostitutes. But homeless people were scarce in the projects. Riding the graffiti-covered, unwashed, fetid subway cars from the Bronx, where I lived with my immigrant parents and siblings, to Manhattan, where I studied and worked, was an adventure, frequently a scary and dangerous one, replete with vagrants, panhandlers, gangbangers, and muggers. During nighttime rides home, I would act crazy, pacing back and forth on the train platform and talking to myself loudly enough to be heard in the hopes of keeping everyone at a distance. Those were strange times for an 18-year-old man. The specter of being drafted into the Army to serve in a battlefield 9,000 miles away to kill strangers or die myself lay heavily on my mind, but sometimes I wanted to get away so badly that I thought about enlisting in America's war machine.

I don't recall why I chose to interview a homeless person. I'm sure I wouldn't have without the prompt from my journalism professor. I did pay close attention to homeless people whenever I emerged from the number 6 train at Twenty-third Street and Park Avenue South. Whether they were sleeping on the sidewalk against a storefront, pulling down their zipper or lifting their dress to pee in plain sight, screaming at invisible demons, or dragging their possessions in a shopping cart with a missing wheel in the midst of rush hour traffic, I was always shaken by their circumstances and feeling privileged to be in my own humble, relatively fortunate, situation.

With an hour to kill after classes before heading to work, I walked to Madison Square Park, two blocks away from Baruch College, where I was a student. The park is far more attractive today than it was in 1972. The benches were occupied by the nameless, the crazed, the hopeless, the wasted, the forgotten. Most businesspeople would walk a long detour around the park, which stretches from Twenty-third to Twenty-sixth Streets between Madson and Fifth Avenues, rather than make a beeline to their offices by walking through the park. Not I. I was young enough, curious enough, foolish enough, romantic enough to walk out of my way to enter the park whenever I could. I wanted to observe, to bear witness, to the most miserable humans on Manhattan Island amid some of the wealthiest real estate on Earth. The contrast got to me. I wanted to write about it.

I'll leave this post here for now. It's not important how many times I was unsuccessful in getting a coherent, cooperative interviewee before I met a forty-year-old Korean War veteran named Sal. It doesn't matter to the point of this story where Sal was from, what he did before his residence became Madison Square Park, or how he descended into such a desperate situation. I have long forgotten the angle of my writing assignment or the grade I received. But I do know that the assignment I chose changed me. Everything we do changes us. That's what writers do. Experience. Report. Change. Repeat.

Giving Away the Store, Part 5: Ask Questions

Writers ask questions. They are among the first people who will ask questions about someone or something that piques their curiosity. Why did your parents give you your name? At what age did you l arrive in America? Why have Black men held the 100-meter dash world record over the past 65 years? What are the first and last places on earth to see the sun rise? Are typewriters obsolete worldwide? How did a grand piano get into a tiny basement jazz club? What do the colors of the Timor-Leste flag signify? How often to do you visit your family in Bangladesh? Can people who speak Mandarin and Wu understand each other? Why are five years necessary to graduate from architecture school? Why do most people consider this person more attractive than that person? 

Of course, questions can get too personal. We should not be surprised if someone we question out of pure curiosity answers, "It's none of your business." Worse, we might become victims of the inept ethics police. But the problem is everything is a writer's business. Asking questions may not necessarily get us the answers we seek, but the imaginative journey is all about asking questions. Carson McCullers might have asked, what if people saw a man's deafness as a mighty advantage, which led her to writing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Ernest Hemingway might have asked, can an old, poor, defeated man endure even more than most of us while remaining true to his principles, before writing The Old Man and the Sea. Alice Munro might have asked how can a woman reconcile her love of someone she believes to be a murderer, sparking her to write "The Love of a Good Woman."

Almost any good story probably comes from a writer asking questions, and the stories they write engage their readers, not necessarily by answering those questions but by making their readers ask questions as well. 

Giving Away the Store, Part 4: Living in Libraries and Bookstores

Writers read. Reading fuels writers. It feeds their perception, jumpstarts their animation, sparks their inspiration, ignites their innovation. While electronic media increasingly make research and reading accessible and immediate, writers still call libraries and bookstores their home. I passed one today, the Book Trader Cafe in New Haven, and found there a long-sought used book in excellent condition at a deeply discounted price. 

The title of the found book is irrelevant for the purpose of this post. What matters is that writers are continually on the lookout for information: data to interpret, stories to adapt, ideas to cultivate. They capture this content from what they read. (They also find source material in the art they see, the music they listen to, and the people they meet; these wellsprings will serve as topics of future posts in this series.) 

Wherever I go, I visit the libraries and bookstores, many of which I have mentioned in WORDS ON THE LINE over the past twenty years. I am a card-carrying member of two city and three college libraries. I feel rich. If you are an aspiring writer, I suggest you go home, to a library or bookstore.