Expansive Poetry & Music Online Essay
SEARCH FOR THE
REASON
essay by
Joan Malerba-Foran
Before I matriculated into a creative writing program, I was borderline
prolific and always terribly sincere. Now my fingers have a version of
being tongue-tied, and I feel like a fraud whenever I’m referred to as
a poet or writer. I'm not saying that my writing ability is ruined. The
problem is, and was, with my thinking. When it came time to declare my
major I made a decision based on the needs of my ego. I understand that
now. A degree in creative writing seemed to carry status and validation
of talent—Hark! I am creative enough to have earned this degree. Maybe
I’ll get a Master of Workshop next, followed by a Doctorate of Inspiration.
Seriously, though, I was filled with self-doubt. Although I had maturity
and its handmaiden experience, intelligence and its partner curiosity,
I lacked formal instruction. Ironically, it was a series of readings in
my course that has led me to the position I hold today, which is that creative
writing is not a profession; it is an approach. Even as I type these words
the keys click like hollowed-out eggs, ready to fracture under my finger
tips. I’m fragile right now, since I’ve another year before I receive my
BA and it's disheartening to be slouching toward a mirage. The anticipation
I felt upon being released from stay-at-home-mom status to get my college
degree has been replaced with apprehension.
My apprehension began in a class on realism. I did a term paper on William
Dean Howells and his influence as a writer and editor. I learned that Howells
had a personal investment (read that as gender issues) in taking the feminine
art of letter writing and making it masculine; in other words, a paid profession
manned by men. The history that led up to the successful appropriation
of the "feminine art" made me squirm a little, but not much. I was just
the innocent recipient of history’s bile. It did give me pause, though,
because visions of money lined the secret closet where I hung my writing
aspirations. The following semester I took a course on modernism and read
T. S. Eliot’s essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Eliot’s ideas
caused a philosophical shift in me. Slow down here, for it’s important
to understand the importance of that statement. The only other philosophical
shift I’ve had was when I was twelve and it began with a complaint to Sister
Joseph. I’d heard someone call the Garden of Eden "a cool story." Catholic
hormones surging, I’d wished that child a brief spell in hell and tracked
down Sister to confirm his reservation. Sister listened and replied, "It
is a wonderful story. One that carries a tremendous lesson for us
all." I clutched her black skirt. "No," I insisted. "It’s not a story.
It’s true." She replied, "The Garden is our attempt at explaining our imperfect
condition of Original Sin." Her parting words left me with my first taste
of cynicism.
Eliot’s essay produced a similar reaction. I’d stumbled against what
appeared to be another big lie and I needed to make sense of my world.
I was in a prestigious college with a high GPA. My writing was being fostered,
challenged, mentored, and workshopped. I had every opportunity the college
could create to express my creativity. Yet an essay from one of the great
minds of our time claimed that the unique, also called talent, is of little
importance. Tradition is what carries value, and should inform every poet/writer’s
work.
[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain
it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense…
and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness
of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to
write not merely from his own generation in his bones, but with the feeling
that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the
whole literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes
a simultaneous order.
Art must have meaning grounded in the symbols and values forming the culture.
Symbols are not produced in a vacuum. They have profound—even if unconscious—historical
significance. It was/is a writer’s job to consciously use the symbols in
a way that retained meaning, while adding something of the author. Eliot
viewed talent as a distraction from the production of art if it was not
shaped by the embers of history..
One of the facts that might come to light in this process [of criticism]
is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon the aspects of his
work where he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of
his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence
of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from
his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to
find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed.
I did not want to hear any of this, plus I was getting behind in my course
work. I needed to push "Tradition" aside and do other course work but I
continued to study it, highlighting relevant parts until it fairly glowed
with its own light. I’d never considered the angles and depths that Eliot
presented. For example: "To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of
the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a
lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or
two private admirations…" (Okay, so I was going to have to loosen my
grip on Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson)…"Nor can he form himself
wholly upon one preferred period. He must be aware of the mind of Europe—the
mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more
important than his own private mind…"(Nobody ever told me anything like
that before, especially in the arts)…"a mind that changes, and that
this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does
not superannuate Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian
draughtsmen." (So much for "out with the old and in with…").
Eliot’s arguments helped me realize that in pursing a creative writing
degree, I’d hitched the clichéd cart before the horse. Worse, I
wasn’t even in the cart. I was standing behind the mare and shoving with
all my might. I was trying to force my work through the sieve of society’s
dictates. At best, I was producing well-written confessional pieces. But
my realization that I was on the wrong path only began with Eliot’s essay.
It ended with a reading of Rilke’s, Letters To A Young Poet, a book
on the "further suggested reading list " for my poetry course. Rilke’s
first letter, dated 1903, was in response to a poet’s need to verify his
talent. The advice could have been written 100 years later—to me.
You ask yourself whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have
asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with
other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts…I
beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all
you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is
only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids
you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest
places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to
die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the
stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep
answer.
I linked Eliot’s counsel for a writer to have a perception of the past
and to "write not merely from his own generation in his bones," with Rilke’s
lyric, "ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?"
If my answer, pulled from the stillest hour, was I must write,
then I must shape my work not to modern tastes, but to the standards of
the masters. And that work, coming from the deepest place, would be essential.
There would be no question of good or bad, only of necessity: "And if out
of this turning inward …verses come, then it will not occur to you
to ask anyone whether they are good verses…for you will see in them your
fond natural possession, a fragment and a voice of your life". Rilke then
addressed one of the most frequent problems in writing: finding a fresh
way to describe everyday experiences. He wrote that flaccid writing was
not from lack of training but the product of a lesser poet.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell
yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to
the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place. And even if you
were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world
come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that
precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories.
Studying Howellsian Realism, Eliot, and Rilke—in that order—was how I decided
that creative writing should not be a degreed profession, but rather an
approach. Had I read Rilke’s letters before Eliot’s essay, it would only
have affirmed my original decision. In Rilke’s brief but tender discourses,
I’d have found someone who understood the feeling of being fraudulent and
inauthentic as a writer. After that, Eliot’s words would have seemed—how
I hate to admit this—tired and pedantic. I’d have scoffed at his stiff
stance and rigid morals, nodded with grudging approval over The Wasteland,
taken my racing pulse after Four Quartets, and wished I’d had the
money to see Cats on Broadway. But I’d have sniffed elitism, which
still hovers over the pages, and moved on. As it was, I grappled the "elitist
issue" for weeks. For me, the attitude of elitism, where value is
ascribed, has no justification. It is a simple stand that can be pan-shaken
until one nugget remains—my kind is better than your kind. The position
of elitism, where value is earned, is imperfect but palpable; by this I
mean people still do get excluded, but somewhat on their own terms, though
again that can be pan-shaken. In the ideal sense those who don’t do the
work, do not achieve the results. Eliot put it as, "[Tradition] cannot
be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour." This
carries with it a problem, for not everyone is in a position to have access
to the material to labor with. Michelangelo would have been hard-pressed,
talent or no, to create without the presentation of hunks of marble from
generous or greedy benefactors. I would not be allowed to ever teach without
my car that I drive to the college to get my degree. Still, although people
are excluded for a variety of injustices and oversights in our system,
that does not make them less valuable inherently in a position of elitism.
I spent as much time as I did studying Eliot’s essay because I knew about
his prejudices, and I was nervous that I was being influenced away from
a moral stand to fulfill an intellectual need. It wasn’t until I was able
to make this distinction that I was ready to continue, and that was the
point when I read Rilke’s letters.
Rilke’s philosophy creates a space of peace in a harsh world, both exterior
and interior. The grace of his words soothe me. At the same time, he makes
me hungry. I want to drive a mental arm straight down into my guts and
wrest out a blob of contempt, a fistful of despair, and whittle away at
it until the truth that I was avoiding appears. That is the antithesis
of where I started, which was to hop onto the production line, squat, and
shoot out cow-sized piles of written words. After all, I’m 49 years old
and pressed for time. Yet I’ll be doing myself an injustice if I devalue
my life experiences. The truth is, I’m bringing a tremendous amount of
hard-earned knowledge to my courses, especially in comparison with the
18 year old leaving home for the first time. When I read Virgil and Homer,
I’d already witnessed the tatters and rags that Vietnam produced. When
I read the Iliad, I wept with Achilleus over Patroclus. I waited
along with Penelope, understanding her ache for Odysseus. I’d mourned the
stillbirth of my son, the end of my marriage, my father’s death, and the
betrayal of a friend. Wordsworth, Milton, Joyce, Woolf—the reading list
is phenomenal and that is what it should be: a reading list. The starting
point of thinking. Then students should go out and live. Maybe they’ll
live hard and produce some valuable work in a decade. Maybe, like me, it
will take most of a lifetime. Realistically speaking most should probably
go into insurance, or medicine, or law. My worry is that a creative writing
degree program will attract people who think like—well, like I thought—and
churn out writers like a puppy-mill, which produces darling but damaged
puppies. There are issues that I’ve not addressed, such as the skewed canon
that our traditions work from and the need for it to be opened up. However,
at present my main issue is that creative writing should be an approach.
Writing should always be, first and foremost, about the seamless blending
of ideas with language. Creative writing programs make writing only about
writing.
I’d spent my married years clicking and clunking on a typewriter after
hours—children asleep, husband placated, animals coiled on couches. This
degree seemed to be the shortest route to get where I wanted. Yet I had
it right all along. As Rilke wrote, "—ask yourself in the stillest hour
of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer." I
didn’t know that good writing carries with it a feeling of wrong-ness,
and that doubting myself was part of the whole process. I didn’t know that
if I wrote what mattered then the only question would be, "Was it necessary?"
and not, "Was it good?" Too much writing today is simply for pay.
The words are unnecessary, and worse yet so are the ideas. If the odor
of elitism wafts here, the fact is that not everybody (regardless of what
a well-known writing magazine claims) can be a writer. I am in a program
that supports the misguided idea that anyone can be a writer because anyone
can be taught to write. I don’t believe that because I do not believe that
writing is essential to everyone.
I’ve taken the long-way-round to get us home. I will continue in my
studies, get my BA in Creative Writing, and go for a Masters in Education.
Some of my students will go on to be wonderful writers. Some will not.
I won’t know one from the other and I’ll give all of them everything I’ve
got. But if any one of them ever asks me `what to do next with a writing
life, my answer will be a synthesis from my readings of Eliot and Rilke.
I will say, "You must go into the deepest part of you, in the darkest hour,
and search for the reason that bids you write. If your answer is, because
I must, then seek out the others who, so very long before you, answered
the same."
Joan Malerba-Foran
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