Suss: another literary journal

These hes­i­tant stu­dents seem to regard lit­er­a­ture as pos­sess­ing some hid­den mean­ing, some mes­sage embed­ded in the text like encrypted secrets that we, as seri­ous read­ers, must tease out by dint of hard work and alchemy. For those who believe this, writ­ing then becomes a near impos­si­bil­ity, as any suc­cess­ful piece must have within it a grand pro­nounce­ment on The State of Being Human. This is a ter­ri­ble weight to bear as a begin­ning writer (a ter­ri­ble weight to bear as an estab­lished writer, as well) and can make any blank page terrifying.

Over the years I have attempted to lift some of that weight off stu­dents and con­front this idea at the start of every course. What fol­lows is a vari­a­tion on the talk I give toward this end. While it attempts to break art into an equa­tion, this is more short­hand than dogma. That is, the equa­tion below is not an art-generating algo­rithm one might plug words into in hopes that a story pops out the other end. Instead, it merely breaks up the think­ing about art into pieces, less­en­ing, I hope, the fear so many have con­fided in me of feel­ing. And as the num­ber of those whis­pered con­ver­sa­tions has decreased, it seems likely that fear is lessening.

The Equation

There are a finite num­ber of sub­jects an artist can address in his or her work: love, death, grief, anger, the gen­eral plight of human­ity, the tur­moil of individualism—any spe­cific will even­tu­ally boil down to one of the great abstrac­tions of exis­tence given enough scrutiny. Whatever sub­ject is being tack­led, how­ever, we can rest assured that it has been tack­led before—an infi­nite num­ber of times before, in fact. There are smaller sub­jects, to be sure— email eti­quette or the class dis­tinc­tion inher­ent in store-bought fruit juice—but even those can be dis­tilled to some­thing larger and more abstract. And those as well have no doubt been writ­ten about a great num­ber of times.

The ulti­mate task of the artist is what we’ll call the imag­i­na­tive objec­tive: What makes this piece of art mine? he asks. Is it orig­i­nal? Why? Is there some­thing in it that belongs to my under­stand­ing of the world, to my expe­ri­ence, that doesn’t exist any­where else? In essence, how can I make this sub­ject that has been writ­ten about an infi­nite num­ber of times become inter­est­ing and worth the time of any­one out­side of my imme­di­ate fam­ily, my room­mates, and my fel­low bus pas­sen­gers whom I read aloud to every morn­ing dur­ing our shared commute?

The answer lies in find­ing the right vehi­cle to present that sub­ject through—to find the right story, the right occa­sion or speaker for a poem, the right shape inside the slab of marble—in order that the new work is both orig­i­nal and nec­es­sary. Only then can one rightly define the degree of her sub­ject. The voice she takes on or the story she crafts or the fig­ure she carves will work to delin­eate just what angle she’s tak­ing on love, on grief, on what spe­cific aspect of humanity’s tur­moil she’s address­ing. There are count­less love poems in the world; she needs to fig­ure out what sep­a­rates the love poem she sat down and wrote from that giant pile of love poems in the ever-growing time­line of writ­ten art.

Remember that we do not work in a vac­uum. There is a vast ocean of work that we merely drop ours into, some­times with­out so much as a rip­ple to prove its exis­tence. What will make ours some­day rise to the sur­face? The answer lies pri­mar­ily in some­thing that sounds ter­ri­bly hokey yet is no less true for that fact: because you are unique, your work, if it remains true to your vision, will itself be unique. This is not to say that your cre­ative work should be a pure expres­sion of your soul made man­i­fest for the world to mar­vel at; it is instead to say that you nec­es­sar­ily under­stand the world in a unique man­ner due to the sim­ple fact that no one else inhab­its the space within your cra­nium. (We hope.) Provided you write from that vision and not from one you guess at or per­ceive to be expected of you, your work will be unique as well. Martin Amis once said, “You write the book you want to read. That’s my rule.” Make it yours as well. Discover the vehi­cle of your work this way and nine times out of ten you will be on your way.

But what do I mean by vehi­cle? Consider this: both Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” and Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” while wildly dif­fer­ent on their sur­face in nearly every con­ceiv­able way, are at their core sto­ries about thwarted love. Their core sub­jects are the same, but the man­ner in which the sto­ries are told—the vehi­cle or form that sub­ject takes—is what ulti­mately sep­a­rates them. All of the details you are now using to com­plete the sen­tence “Well, that and…” are merely aspects of the vehicle.

As for the actual craft of making—writing, in our case, putting down words on a page in a defined and sys­tem­atic and styl­is­tic manner—it is, in the end, ter­tiary and in ser­vice of the vehi­cle, which, in turn, is in ser­vice of the sub­ject. Those three indi­vid­ual pieces work together toward one end: art. And while we have arrived last at craft, it is by no means the least of these parts. On the con­trary, with­out craft a piece can­not be completed.

To be rote and sim­pli­fy­ing, we might con­sider this equa­tion a stand in for the preceding:

SUBJECT + VEHICLE + CRAFT = ART

All of these ele­ments must be present in every­thing one makes in pur­suit of a fin­ished work of art. A story or a poem should never sim­ply be a story or a poem. It should first be about some­thing, have some­thing at stake, some idea or issue or con­cept that is being addressed: the sub­ject. It should sec­ond be engag­ing enough that a reader would not want to go out and watch traf­fic rather than move on to the sec­ond line. The story or nar­ra­tive or lan­guage exper­i­ment (lin­guis­tic nar­ra­tive?) should be both fit­ting and—even if requir­ing much work (intel­lec­tual or emotional)—accessible: this is the vehi­cle. Lastly, the art of its words, the very lan­guage it is made of, should be as tight and as nec­es­sary as pos­si­ble: this is the craft.

All of these ele­ments are inter-related and are only pieces when sep­a­rated from a whole. A well-written, well-crafted poem with noth­ing at stake is merely an exer­cise, prac­tice toward some­thing greater, but not, stand­ing alone, a piece of art. Likewise a press­ing, res­o­nant sub­ject pre­sented within an inter­est­ing and engag­ing vehi­cle but slapped and pieced together slop­pily, hap­haz­ardly, with seem­ingly lit­tle atten­tion paid to craft is also only partly com­plete, not yet fully a work of art. And art should always be our ulti­mate goal.

Now, do not pre­sume that these steps need to come in the order I’ve pre­sented them—subject then vehi­cle then craft. I can­not think of a sin­gle instance from my own writ­ing life when work has emerged like this. More often, I’m struck with a line, a title, a rhythm, some dia­logue, a rough char­ac­ter sketch. Only in mov­ing beyond that, in writ­ing it out, do I finally get a sense of what my actual sub­ject is, what is at stake in the world of my poem or my story, and even what the vehi­cle should be. But by then I’ve got two of my nec­es­sary elements—the sub­ject and the vehicle—and the third, the craft, is only a mat­ter of work (the good work, work in the best sense of the word), in get­ting the words down on the page and spend­ing myself in their refinement.

For oth­ers, I know, sub­ject does come first. They might say, “I want to write about my grief [or my joy, my insom­nia, the pres­sure brought into my chest at the sight of signs printed in Comic Sans]. How can I go about doing this?” Then they seek out their vehicle,

their form, and bring the idea to life.

There are report­edly moments when every­thing comes together at once, when idea, vehi­cle, and craft present them­selves in a sin­gle, neat, obvi­ous pack­age. It is a great moment, I imag­ine, a fright­en­ing moment, and, like most plea­sur­able rar­i­ties, some­thing to savor. Perhaps the most famous exam­ple of this is Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The story has it that Frost spent a long night writ­ing “New Hampshire,” fin­ished his revi­sions, then sim­ply turned a page of his jour­nal and wrote out an ini­tial (and nearly pol­ished) draft of “Stopping by Woods.” Amazing. And even more amaz­ing, given the infre­quency with which an event like this hap­pens, that it should hap­pen with one of the best loved poems of the twen­ti­eth century.

For our pur­poses, we’ll be think­ing about [the course’s genre focus] as being made up of those three parts: sub­ject, vehi­cle, and craft. In terms of teach­ing, it is extremely hard for any­one, much less me, to ever teach a per­son how to respond to or deal with a given sub­ject. For instance, if you hap­pen to be the type of per­son who man­ages your way around the tur­moil of grief by mak­ing jokes or find­ing some­thing to laugh at, then my or any­one else’s telling you to write a sin­cere, dour poem about loss is just not going to work. So, as far as sub­jects go, you’ll more or less be on your own. There may be times I sug­gest you try your hand at a love poem, say, or an elegy. That’s a pretty loose con­fine­ment for your imag­i­na­tion; where you take that is up to you.

Which leads us to vehi­cle; for the time being we’ll be neglect­ing that as well. This is not to say it’ll never come up—it will. It will come up ini­tially, how­ever, only in con­junc­tion with our dis­cus­sions of craft, in how the two inter­act and co-exist and play off of one another. For instance, how might the four­teen lines of a tra­di­tional son­net affect enjamb­ment and inter­nal rhyme? How does an instruc­tional prose poem nec­es­sar­ily affect, say, dic­tion? There will be times when I ask you to try on a spe­cific tone or give you the begin­nings of a nar­ra­tive to work with or ask that you find a nar­ra­tive based on pieces x, y, and z. Those are prob­lems of vehicle.

The bulk of our dis­cus­sions, how­ever, will be focused on craft, the one essen­tially objec­tive piece of the puz­zle. As regards the equa­tion above, we’ll be work­ing back­wards, begin­ning with the small­est bits of the process and mov­ing out from there.

The Other Side of the Equation

Beginning with the small and work­ing out to the larger pieces is also an extremely good way to think about read­ing lit­er­a­ture. No doubt, at least some of you have reser­va­tions about how to even approach read­ing in a writ­ing class. Let me be the first to say it: poetry ain’t spe­cial. Ditto fic­tion. It’s no dif­fer­ent a process read­ing lit­er­a­ture than it is any other piece of writ­ing. And with any­thing we read—be they short sto­ries, nov­els, essays, biol­ogy text­books, instruc­tion man­u­als for bread mak­ers, anything—the whole of the writ­ing is made up of pieces. A story has char­ac­ters; it has a set­ting; dia­logue; para­graphs; sen­tences; clauses; word; let­ters; sound. Reading the story, we begin to men­tally put those ele­ments together and see how they work in rela­tion to one another until we can finally fig­ure out what’s going on in the story. We do this with­out think­ing about it. The same holds true for poetry: it’s maybe got stan­zas, lines, sen­tences, etc. Looking at them indi­vid­u­ally to see how they make up the whole is the eas­i­est way in.

The biggest sim­i­lar­ity between all of these exam­ples is obvi­ous but needs to be said: they’re made of words. Words are our tools as writ­ers, so it’s impor­tant to look at the ones being used in a poem (or a story, or novel, or essay…) when we’re read­ing. Everything we try to learn in life—a new lan­guage, a new city, a new instrument—is most eas­ily learned when the lessons are bro­ken up into small pieces. Take apart what you’re read­ing into small por­tions and they’ll be eas­ier to digest. (Don’t linger on that metaphor long.)

As for what those small por­tions might be, we’ll get into some specifics going for­ward, but know that you’ve already got ample abil­ity to work it out your­self. For instance, when read­ing a new poem, ask your­self this: who or what is speak­ing the words of this poem? Yes, they’re words on a page, but all poetry has a con­ceiv­able speaker who is not nec­es­sar­ily the poet; who is he or she or it in this spe­cific instance? Depending on the text, this may take some inven­tion on your part; lit­er­a­ture is at least partly about the dia­logue between the text and the reader, so don’t fight it. Once you’ve got that, move on to ask­ing your­self what that per­son or thing is talk­ing about. Just try for the basics of the nar­ra­tive first: is she talk­ing about eat­ing car­rots or dri­ving to school or vaguely about being angry? Once that is more or less work­ing for you, move on to the big­ger ques­tion: why is the speaker talk­ing about what she’s talk­ing about? For clues on all of those ques­tions, look at the lan­guage involved—how are they talk­ing about their sub­ject? What does the speaker sound like? Is she angry? Is she excited? Is she wildly in love or wheel­ing from depres­sion? There’s your in. You can all do that right now. And we’ll keep doing it as we go for­ward, adding to the ways you can use to get into the poem.

In fact, let’s try it right now...

[At this point, I like to look at a piece the class has not seen. It should be short enough that it can be taken in and talked about cold. Some favorites for this exercise:

• Terrance Hayes, “Mr. T—”
• Sherman Alexie, “I Would Steal Horses”
• David Wojahn, “The Days of 1994”
• selec­tions from Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s
• Lydia Davis, “Priority”
• selec­tions from Julio Cortázar’s “The Instruction Manual” (in Cronopios and Famas)
• Raymond Carver, “Popular Mechanics”

We read the cho­sen piece together using the steps out­lined above. Starting with language—poetry or prose—we roughly label how the piece sounds: angry, happy, con­fused, sad. Then mov­ing from that to the speaker or nar­ra­tor, we rough out their stance and pos­si­bly their moti­va­tion (hint­ing that this is in essence the piece’s vehi­cle). Eventually we arrive at a gen­eral sub­ject. At that point we can move back to the smaller parts, start a dis­cus­sion on obvi­ous points of craft (spe­cific imagery, line breaks, dia­logue, set­ting, the choice of one word over another—whatever comes up and seems appro­pri­ate) as a way to more finely tune the gen­eral sub­ject into an actual sub­ject. Explicitly point­ing out the con­nec­tion between the ini­tial equa­tion and this man­ner of read­ing is helpful.

Regardless of what genre the class is focused on, if there is time I might then look at poems found at very​bad​po​etry​.com. The poems they fea­ture are almost with­out fail lack­ing in some­thing of the cri­te­ria pre­sented above and stand as a fine counter-example. The obvi­ous dis­tinc­tion is clear and instruc­tive for stu­dents. If we’re in agree­ment that cre­ative writ­ing courses are essen­tially about help­ing begin­ning writ­ers lessen the num­ber of mis­takes they’ll have to make before arriv­ing at what­ever step would have come after that mistake—to demon­strate both the mis­take and the ulti­mate les­son from it for them so that they don’t have to make it them­selves and thus they limit their time as appren­tice craftsmen—then this is cer­tainly a good one to get out of their way from the get-go.]