Unless It Moves the Human Heart Read online

  “And it was a way to be themselves. Watch people you love in the act of reading. Never will they look more beautiful than at that moment. Sometimes I sit with my granddaughter on the couch, both of us reading. I am aware of her silence, how sublime she looks.”

  “Are writers really that different from other people?” asks Sven. “It makes me uncomfortable to think so.”

  “Sounds undemocratic,” says Jasmine.

  “Democracy has nothing to do with it,” says Suzanne. “He said ‘different,’ he didn’t say ‘better.’ ”

  “We are different. Writers do not give up on people. When characters in real life cease to be interesting because they seem to fall into categories and are subject to easy generalities, people no longer pay attention to them. That is precisely the moment when writers pay the keenest attention to them, for there is nothing stranger than the ordinary-seeming man. Either he is more honorable, or more treacherous, or more anything else than he appears, but he is never what he appears.

  “And this world of ours is not comfortable.” They sit back and smile, ever amused to watch me on a roll. “It is strange, full of strangenesses. Writers do not seek what other people seek, no artist does. Other people seek what they feel most content and comfortable with, whereas writers do the opposite. We seek anger, dread, the event that rocks us back on our heels. The world of the writer is the world of shadows and howls and bloodstains. Our senses are different, our memories different. I seem to remember only the strangenesses in my life—the doctor with the German name in Westport, Connecticut, where my family vacationed when I was five, the one who shot kittens in his basement; the tormented girl in my school who, in a fight in the girls’ locker room, bit another girl’s finger to the bone. A thousand more, all of the same sort. These are the subjects writers husband, and cherish. Let others go for quilts and hot chocolate. We covet shit and guillotines.”

  “If a writer profits from close reading,” says Donna, “does he prefer writing for other writers? Is the writer’s relationship to the reader who is not a writer different from one who is?”

  “I don’t think writers write for other writers,” says Nina. “Writers are too finicky.”

  “Yet other writers can appreciate things that ordinary readers can’t,” says Inur.

  “I think regular old readers appreciate many of the things writers do,” says Sven. “They just don’t make a big deal of it.”

  “It’s interesting. You read something you admire as a writer, and you tend to take on the skin of the person who writes it. You see how the writer came up with what you’re reading. You can sense another mind making this choice and that. In that way, every time you sit down to write, you’re in the company of writers who have written before you. No one writes alone. I don’t know. The more you write the less you may enjoy the act of reading. On the other hand, the more you lose yourself in someone else’s book, the less you may feel like writing one yourself.”

  “So good readers make no writers?” asks Diana. I walk around the table and bop her on the head.

  Chapter 6

  A Fine Frenzy

  Up on the green blackboard go quotations from Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, and from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. I often write quotations on the board before a class meeting. Sometimes I refer to them during our discussions, sometimes not. I mean them to serve as epigraphs to the work that follows, as if each class were a chapter in a piece of writing. From Johnson:

  “The business of a poet,” said Imlac, “is to examine not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest; he is to exhibit his portrait of nature, such prominent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind; and must neglect the minute discriminations, which one may have remarked, and another have neglected, for those characteristics which are alike obvious to vigilance and to carelessness.”

  From Shakespeare:

  The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,

  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

  And as imagination bodies forth

  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

  A local habitation and a name.

  Earlier I suggested that teaching is like publishing something you write. The use of my epigraphs suggests that it is also a little like writing itself. A class is a book. You begin a semester with a general idea of where you want your students to be at the end of it. In the Writing Everything class, I know I must spend so much time on short stories, so much on essays and poems, and leave room for at least one session before the course is over to see how far we’ve come. There is no point to a writing course if the students do not write better at the end of it than they did at the beginning. Everything you put into teaching the class week by week has that as its aim. Come May, the same people will sit in the same white room at the same white table before me. They will appear exactly the way they looked four months earlier. But like the landscape, they had better be changed.

  In a way, they evolve like characters in a story. They have minds of their own, and will go where their minds lead them. You as teacher or writer need only determine where these characters want to be, what they want to achieve. You’re Virgil, not Dante. It’s their adventure. What you must do is make sure they do not lose sight of their own goals, and try not to substitute your goals for theirs. Your understanding of your students deepens the longer you’re with them. The better you know them, the better you get at helping them be themselves, just like fiction.

  And the mystery of writing appears in teaching, too. I will enter a classroom with a plan of things to say. No sooner have I embarked on my straight and narrow than a student—George or Sven or Diana—will bring up another subject from left field, and at once I will veer in that new direction, never to return to my original map. In the very least, it makes for better theater this way, more nervous, more alive. We all remember with a shudder the teacher who lectured from the same yellowing notes year after dreary year. Better to use no notes at all, to create a high-wire act in which the students join you on the wire and nobody knows if we’ll make it safely to the other side. To be sure, I may permanently forget whatever it was I originally planned to say. But it is much more exciting to allow oneself to be swung into a new and foreign path, just as in writing when you find yourself in the middle of the strangest sentence, and wonder how you got there.

  It is week twelve, late April. The men are in shirtsleeves, the women in colorful outfits. Green has returned to our window view, and a warmer light.

  They have written their poems, which we distributed at the last class. They take to writing poems, though none in this group plans to be a poet. I applaud their enthusiasm, but I confess I’m growing tired of modern poetry, and of the qualities that make it modern—principally the poet’s responses to the impetus of small events. I acknowledge the gifts of the moderns—their ability to make something great out of something small. But in the end, it is the smallness of even that greatness that is beginning to wear on me. I cannot forever read about Lowell’s mind not being right, or even about Marianne Moore telling me that the mind is an enchanted thing, or about Richard Wilbur telling me that the mind is a bat. And these poets are among the best of the lot. I am far more interested in the general moral behavior that was the subject of Johnson, Gray, and Cowper in the eighteenth century, of which I never seem to tire. In the end I prefer to survey mankind from China to Peru than to stare at a single representative in the act of losing his marbles.

  What it comes down to is my feeling that most of modern poetry is not all that important. I did not always feel this way. When I toted around Louis Untermeyer’s anthology in high school I was steeped in the poets of the day, and wanted to join them. Nothing was more enchanting to me than their reactions to things, coupled with their ability to
address my secret sins and darkest shames by expressing their own. But as I grew older, the time-tested heroic themes came knocking to remind me of their staying power. The last lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which I used to quote to illustrate their unthinking simplicity as compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, or to Robert Graves’s “Ulysses,” I now hear as meaningful and true: “One equal temper of heroic hearts” vowing “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Czesław Miłosz, in a poem called “Preface,” said that “serious combat, where life is at stake, / Is fought in prose.” Then he added, “It was not always so.” I find myself yearning for the poetry of serious combat. Is this what Yeats meant by “This is old age”?

  Yet my students plunge in happily. For most, if not all, poems probably represent their original introductions to literature. They grew up on nursery rhymes, Mother Goose, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poems, Edward Lear’s limericks, and so on. They can recite poems. They have their favorites. (Kristie will rattle off “Jabberwocky” at the drop of a hat, which no one drops.) For this, the ninth week of classes, I have asked them to bring in a poem by a poet they admire as well as their own work, and they have no trouble producing three or four in a crazy salad that includes Wordsworth, Ted Kooser, Linda Pastan, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Frost. More than the other forms, poetry speaks to them directly. It may be the most difficult form to do well, but it is probably the easiest to do at all. In my Modern Poetry class, I have the students write a love poem, to get the feeling of how the poets they’re studying deal with the subject, and even the least experienced of them does a fair job. This may be because poetry is also the music of the genres. No work of prose, no matter how beautiful, is aptly called a song.

  There is also something less threatening about poetry. It seems to be conjured up and conceived in a space so removed from the world that the world, however admiring of it, does not take it seriously. Thomas Hardy said that if Galileo had announced in a poem that the earth moved, the Inquisition might have let him be. And yet poems of the ages go on and on, differentiated from prose by an ethereal quality derived from elliptical thought and their deliberate avoidance of understanding. A poem should be at once clear and mystifying—in Shelley’s terms, “the words which express what they understand not.” Prose, on the other hand, strives to be understood, especially in its own time, which accounts for both its strength and its weakness. In that same poem “Preface,” in which Miłosz conceded the power of prose, he said nonetheless that “novels and essays serve but will not last,” as compared to the weight of “one clear stanza.” It may be that poetry is favored by my students, including those who do not write it or intend to, because it seems like history’s protectorate, kept safe for no other reason than its aim of beauty. In ancient Ireland, poets were called The Music. When one king would attack another, he instructed his soldiers to slaughter everyone in the enemy camp, including the opposing king. But not The Music. Everyone but The Music. Because he was The Music.

  Another thing about poems: if you write a bad one, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. Yet if you write a good one, it is certain to show what a good writer you are. We take up Diana’s “Small Bursts” first:

  It’s the usual Sunday night slump

  and I begin by failing

  the way I always do:

  throwing words everywhere—

  ringing against the walls with

  lots of—(one will fall

  into that space, you wait) but little sense—

  hoping that something

  hits. Hits hard.

  On the phone, Mike tells me to write

  about the epic march of

  Binghamton basketball to

  Memphis to join the NCAA dance

  about a man he’s just made up

  who has bet nearly his life

  on a losing game,

  the wife who will leave this man. . .

  This is his love story, not mine,

  but if it were I would tell it

  in small bursts like

  balls bouncing off wood:

  a screech, a shout, a thud on rim,

  the pause, the fall.

  In spite of the “I’m just a kid” impression she makes, Diana is a first-rate writer, and all grown up. After the group says how much they like her poem, we look closer.

  “Why does Diana use the word ‘slump’ to describe her inability to write?”

  “Applies to sports,” says Sven.

  “Does she get out of her slump?”

  “That’s the trick of the poem,” says Veronique. “There’s a love story, not hers, so she won’t tell it. She’s still in her slump. But if she did tell it, hypothetically she would tell it ‘in small bursts.’ So she tells it without telling it.”

  “How much do you need to know about sports to appreciate the poem? Do you know what the NCAA ‘dance’ means?” Some do, some don’t. We talk about why the national collegiate basketball tournament in March, “March Madness,” is also called the Big Dance—how some schools are invited, and others not.

  “The gambler that her friend Mike has invented,” says Jasmine. “He’s doing a different dance.”

  “And a distant dance,” says Ana. “There’s the poet, and her friend, and the man her friend makes up. The poet doesn’t want to get close to her own subject.”

  “I love the final image of the basketball shot, a buzzer shot rimming the basket, going in then out,” says George.

  “Why does Diana mention Binghamton?” I ask.

  “Because she went there,” says Suzanne. “Mere boosterism.” Diana chuckles. “No, I’m kidding. I think she gets Binghamton into the poem because the school is a long shot to make the tournament.”

  “Unheard of,” says Diana.

  Robert adds, “A long shot like the shot at the end of the poem.”

  “Like finding the lightning word in something you write,” says Inur.

  “Just like that.” We look at Ana’s poem, called “OK”:

  He said, “Let’s go to my place.”

  I said OK.

  He drove as I looked straight ahead.

  Oncoming lights.

  I said, “There’s something I must tell.”

  He said OK.

  He drove ahead and then I said,

  “My breasts are gone.”

  He said, “That’s quite OK with me.”

  I thought, “My God!”

  We drove ahead into the night.

  I fell in love.

  “What’s this one about?”

  “Acceptance,” says Nina.

  “Love without judgment,” says Suzanne.

  “And you know it’s about love because she says, ‘I fell in love.’ Right?” They nod. “Do we know that she fell in love without her using that line?” Most think yes. “When he says, ‘That’s quite OK with me,’ does he indicate he’s worthy of her love?”

  “I don’t know that the last line is necessary,” says Kristie.

  “I’m not sure it is. If you tell too much in a poem, you trample on its implications.”

  “But if I don’t use it, what do I put in its place?” Ana asks.

  “You may think of something. But would it be so terrible if you put nothing in its place and the poem ended on their drive into the night, into the unknown?”

  “A three-line stanza in contrast to the others, to suggest something unfinished,” says Donna.

  We go back and forth on the question of Ana’s maintaining or dropping her “I fell in love.” I ask if the ideas of acceptance and love without judgment are what they like most about the poem.

  “I don’t think it’s about love without judgment,” says Robert. “We see the poem from her point of view. The guy may simply be saying he doesn’t care about her breasts as long as he gets laid.”

  “But she wouldn’t have given an easy ‘OK’ to his invitation if he hadn’t shown nobler qualities,” says Kristie.

 
; “Ever the romantic.” Inur smiles at her.

  “We know that Ana wouldn’t have given an easy ‘OK’ because we know what an elegant, discriminating lady she is,” says George.

  “Ain’t it the truth,” says Ana.

  “What I like most about the poem is the setup,” says Sven.

  “Me, too,” says Donna. “I see the two of them facing forward in the car, so intimate yet not looking at each other.”

  “I’d like to discuss Inur’s poem,” says Jasmine. “To get a different view of love.” Inur smiles at her friend, and blushes. She reads her untitled piece:

  The warmth of your hand on my thigh burns,

  It is your touch which makes my heart race,

  And causes something in me to yearn,

  For you to respect my personal space.

  Your sweet words fill the air,

  When, to me, you speak,

  Ever so softly and with delicate flair,

  Yet my only thought is of how you reek.

  My soul cannot lie,

  But I will,

  And so I do not look you in the eye

  When I say I love you still.

  Inur’s poem presents a typically thorny problem for teachers of writing. When the subject matter is personal but witty or has a relatively happy ending, like Ana’s poem, it is not uncomfortable to speak of the writer and the thing written as one and the same. But when, as with Inur, the piece is about a deep personal quandary, you have to be careful to suggest a distance between writer and subject. Of course, the distance is a pretense—everyone knows that—but preserving it is the right thing to do. Inur may have put her life in her poem, but that should not be the same as exposing it to public inspection. My class is very careful with one another’s feelings, and it treats its confessions as a trust. Still, here is a place where teachers must be alert to the possibility of injury, and be sure that we are talking about a poem not a person.

  “The idea that it is his touch and not himself that makes her heart race—that’s great,” says Suzanne.

  “The sweetness of his words as opposed to the way he ‘reeks,’ ” says Donna. “Also great.”