Improv & Poetry

Yesterday I listened to Radiolab, my favorite podcast of all time. They did an unusual show (for them) about two improv performers, TJ & Dave. TJ & Dave are unusual among the improv set in that they don't take suggestions from the audience, or from any kind of random generator of ideas. Instead, at the beginning of their show the lights go down, then back up, and at that point, TJ & Dave wipe their minds clean, stare at each other in silence as if the entire world is unknown to them and must be learned starting from that point, piece by piece, and then they wait for one of them to speak. There are no preconceived ideas, and all they ever know is what has just happened on stage between them.

When asked about dealing with that kind of pressure to come up with ideas, one of them said that the way they visualize it is that there are ideas and stories floating around us all the time, generally going unrealized, and when they as performers dim the lights, all stories but one disappear and they just have to be tuned in to find that story. They don't see themselves as generating ideas at all, but as identifying one of a myriad of ideas that are free-floating around them all of the time.

When I heard that, I almost stopped in my tracks, because I had had a similar thought last month. I don't really believe that stories and ideas exist independent of the human brain and sensory system, but I still had had this thought recently. The impetus was the very productive three months of writing I've had from January to March of this year. Instead of struggling with writing, I've written fairly fluidly and continuously, working on a few poems at once, having new ones starting as old ones finished up, basically without the angst and struggle between poems that I normally have (within poem, yes, some struggle and angst, but between them, almost none recently). It seemed to me as though there were ideas floating all around me and if I just paid attention, if I just tuned in, I could pluck them from the air. I felt the quality of my attention was allowing me to see details and images that embroidered themselves nearly seamlessly into the poems in progress or very naturally suggested new poems. And I had the idea that those ideas were always there, had ALWAYS been there, circling me and everyone, and it was the quality of my attention that has in the past (and undoubtedly will in the future) kept (keep) me from seeing them.

I don't actually believe this, that ideas exist independently of a perception apparatus (or do I?). But it was a useful image for me, one that kept me writing happily as it seems to keep TJ & Dave able to perform their improv under such pressure. Self-delusion, maybe, or just a useful way of visualizing the creative process--I don't know. But I was interested to see that it worked for other creative people too.

Why I Am Not a Buddhist

In my free time, I sometimes read books about Buddhism. I'm not a Buddhist but I find reading about meditation and emptiness and being in the moment counterintuitive and therefore interesting and worth thinking about.

Last night I was reading one such book that stated it was going to enumerate four steps of a given practice. It then enumerated three steps. And this is why I'm not a Buddhist--because I absolutely could not let go of this. I kept rereading and rereading the passage, looking for the missing fourth step (the first three were labeled, First, Second, and Third). I could not move past this part of the book because I needed to find the fourth step, and until I did, I could do nothing else. For me, there would be nothing else until the errant fourth step was located.

I even tried to convince myself that this was perhaps an object lesson--that the book was trying to teach me to let go and not be so committed to a fourth step, promised or not. To just be in the moment with the three given steps.

I could not do this.

And I realized this is why I am not, cannot be, a Buddhist.

And why I probably need to be.

But can't.

House on Fire II

Earlier today I wrote a post about my childhood home burning down. And I wrote about how after some years of watching the video again and again, weeping over the loss, dreaming about my house burning down, talking about it, worrying about it, finally the image has found its way into a poem.

What I didn't mention is that it is one line in a poem about a larger topic. All that straining with emotion, all that angst, all that cogitating over the meaning of the loss of a childhood home, particularly in such a spectacularly violent manner . . . all that is manifest in a single line of a poem about something else anyway. (Actually part of a line, not even a complete line.)

This is not unusual. People wonder why poets take so long to write poems, why such short pieces take so long to write. That's why. Behind every word choice, there is a history, or there should be, if the choice of words and images is to leave an indelible and only partially explainable mark. That is where the power in the poem comes from, from all the history between the poet and the word and the world that is allowed to show only barely.

Which isn't to say I won't someday write a longer poem about my childhood home burning down. But I'm not counting on it; I've spent that currency, and it was a fortune for such a few words.

House on Fire

A few years ago the house I grew up in burned down. Because it was a four-alarm fire with a flashover that was caught on video, it's all over the internet, and the footage is now used in fire fighter training as well. The family who bought it from us was living in it at the time, and they lost a family member in the fire.

My brother, who still lives not too far from where we grew up, was the one to notify the rest of our family that our old home had burned down. My brother kept getting calls from his old friends to say, "Dude, your old house burned down." But I was the one to go online and find this video of it, which my family found ironic, that the person living farthest away was the one to find this:

For weeks I'd watch this several times a day, crying the whole time. I watched our family room up go (that's where the flashover is), saw my brother's bedroom reduced to a bare burnt scaffold. My kids would wander into our office and see me watching the video and say to one another "Mom's watching her house burn down again."

I knew that this image would end up in a poem, and last night it finally did. Which prompted me to get out the video, which I haven't watched for quite awhile, and watch and weep all over again.

What's Neat on the Net VI

Happy Easter and April Fools. Here's what's neat on the net recently:

1. Featherproof Books offers free mini-books. You print them out, you fold them as directed, you staple them, and you have mini-books. With titles like The Karaoke Singer's Guide to Self-Defense (by Tim Kinsella) and The Miniature version of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature (by Patrick Somerville), how can you go wrong?

2. Flavorwire has photos of authors as teenagers, including Hemingway, Beckett, Atwood, Sendak, Karr (Mary), Salinger, Nin, and more. Oddly, fewer of them seem to have gone through that awkward stage (or were photographed in the awkward stage) than I would have imagined. They certainly don't look like social outsiders (well, maybe Gaiman and O'Connor do, and Ginsberg, but Toni Morrison is a knockout) ... Enjoy!

3. Open Culture has compiled a list of 500 free audiobooks for download. Some of them are through iTunes (including Jane Austen and Stephen Crane), and some are from Audible.com (Robert Louis Stevenson and George Eliot), and others are free MP3 and zipfile downloads at sundry sites (Miranda July, David Foster Wallace, and Jamaica Kincaid). Scroll to the bottom of the page for a list of other sites that offer free audiobooks, including Librivox, an organization putting public domain works online in audio form (you can volunteer to be a reader for them too), and Lit2Go, the University of Southern Florida's audio collection. The Open Culture list has links to famous speeches, poetry, and non-fiction, as well as the expected fiction. Enjoy!

4. I recently discovered The Electric Typewriter, a tumblr blog that has collated links to work of some of the best writers and journals ever. There are 15 essays by Joan Didion, for example; 25 essays about the big topic "Life" by Sheila Heti, Annie Dillard, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, etc.;  topics in linguistics by Joshua Foer, Stephen Pinker and Jack Hitt; and on and on. Pretty much  every topic you can think of is covered: here's David Shields on tattoos for The Village Voice, for example. Yay!