* * * * *

Stephen Dunn, in an essay from Walking Light, says that “A person scrupulous about language these days would not say ‘Have a good day.’” Although I yield to his authority in most cases (because he is right), this declaration stops me short.  I must admit, I use that phrase with regularity. But just because when I say it I really mean it—I do want people to have good days (what else is there to wish upon another?)—is the language any less dead? We all understand this complaint; the distinction between poetry and throw-away language is necessary, the proto-distinction that makes a poem possible. No one intends, I hope, to write a “Have a good day” poem; even though most poems won’t survive, nevertheless a poem is an attempt, an intention, to speak words that will outlast their sounds lengthening into silence, to somehow demand that the words be remembered, re-spoken, revived.

Poetry, according to C. K. Williams, serves our best intentions but at the same time reminds us, in song no less, how feeble those intentions are. “The poem makes enormous demands: we are to be confronted with all our inattention, with how small mind we pay to what is offered us. We are to become aware of how little we have allowed experience actually to touch us, and at the same time we are to face the responsibilities implied in our awareness of that experience.” The struggle to arrest language’s entropic slide from its metaphoric origins into servile instrumentality is the labor of a poet’s job that is never done. Because the healing of the self involves a healing of language, a poem is not only a wish for the good but part of the good. And because the self is never wholly healed, the things on the list of things to do are never scratched out, these “obvious tasks” that Williams identifies as among poetry’s good intentions: “to confront, to cure or comfort, solace or succor, to change, correct, resolve, take into account, come to terms with, redeem, surmount, transfigure or transform.”

* * * * *

What if Americans read more poetry? We might be less deceived, might treat ourselves and others with more kindness. Except for frauds and hucksters, who we’d more easily identify, and ridicule. The holy fool would again achieve social status.  Would we use less plastic? Would sex be better? Would fewer people, or more, expose themselves on the internet? Maybe our political discourse would address human beings as other than economic or id-riddled creatures. We might appreciate the id for what it offers. We certainly wouldn’t diminish the link between language and action. Perhaps we’d be less embarrassed that we are what we long for, and thus maybe we’d long for a better beautiful. But as de Tocqueville found, meager taste and ambition has always afflicted us. “If it be your intention to confer a certain elevation upon the human mind...to cultivate the arts of a nation, and to promote the love of poetry, of beauty, and of renown...you must avoid the government of democracy.”  Some would qualify this incompatibility. Some would say reading levels are just fine.

* * * * *

In the title essay of his book Ambition and Survival, Christian Wiman describes two types of poets with two approaches to the relationship between life and art. One, like Dickinson or Auden, writes with a kind of logomaniacal obssessiveness. The other, like Hopkins or Crane, writes slowly (and re-writes) as if (in Hopkins’ phrase) in blood. Because neither is ultimately superior to the other—neither one seems to improve one’s chance of writing a poem that will endure—these examples interest him less as models of production than as models of suffering the silence between Real Poems. Does one keep “a steady skimming sort of hum” while awaiting the deeper heaves or, more painfully, does one tinker about and dwell in the absence of what one can only hope will return?  If left to my devices, I am among the first group. But I am suspicious of Real Poems.

* * * * *

The mystery of origins is a mystery that haunts all works of art. At the scene of any poem is a wonder that asks: Where did this come from? Other art forms are no less haunted, but because their grammars are more distant from the logical basis of everyday commerce, they are more immune from debasement and dismissal. This is evermore so in an age of endless text. As the species of art whose medium—not language only but rhythmic language—traps these original energies near their sources, gives them a guise (a term, an image, a tune) and a signal-to-noise ratio, poetry renders the mysteries accessible to not just thought, and not just emotion, but to the amalgam of felt-thinking by which we actually guide and inhabit our lives.   

Into the breach between Emerson’s meter-making argument and Arnold’s sweetness and light; into the gap that binds Bly’s three brains to the Duende at the soles of Lorca’s feet; into the fissure dividing Augustine’s music of the spheres from Rimbaud’s season in hell: a poem runs, or leaps, or dives. Art must, at least, dip into or accrue dust from that plutonic crevice; when there is sufficient courage, skill, and luck—a work is made.

* * * * *

There can be no absolutes because nothing shakes free from what it makes or what makes it; the whole of creation can be summoned with materials at hand. That’s what the whole of creation is.

It might have been Sharon, or maybe Susan—from the Copy Room, or Communications, respectively—who first mentioned it on our floor, who said in passing, as if it were idle information, that Credible Threats had been made, that we are not as safe as we think. I didn’t actually hear the word “thief” for another week or so. A shrug, a chuckle, a mumbled bullshit—that was pretty much the collective response (except, now that I think about it, Christof—note name again—who nodded in agreement and said something about cosmic irony). He was one of those college interns who at first behaved as if he were doing us a favor by allowing us to exploit his unpaid labor in exchange for a reference, until his unemployed and underinsured father died of exposure on an ill-conceived mountain climbing adventure, a preventable tragedy which forced him to quit school and suddenly need full-time work. He probably did know more about the inner workings of the machine than the rest of us, since he spent most of his day at the shredder, a job Tony used to do in about an hour each morning, time now freed up to do “routine web searches” (as he calls them) on the company, the executive team, and a mix of industry keywords, which he compiles into a report circulated each morning. Anyway, who do you guess became all about how much he had yet to learn, how much he appreciated the opportunity, how hard a worker he was (his grandpa was a vet with a farm or something like that) when given real responsibility? We never doubted they’d hire him; he probably would have been our boss (or the equivalent elsewhere) in five years if events had been on his side or if his father had known not to eat the snow. Still, the middle managers took noticeable pleasure in stringing him along for a month or two, keeping him on ice (sorry) until after his father’s remains had been recovered (hat tip to taxpayers—don’t let anyone tell you Americans don’t value life and the living when, out of an abundance of respect, we’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars searching for a corpse to bury long after any hope of rescue is abandoned). This allowed them to squeeze him for an extra peck of dirt-in-mouth gratitude and a few thousand less per annum. He’ll probably start picking up a class or two and in ten years be section leader with a corner cubicle. He probably is better than the rest of us, all other things being equal.

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Once strangers feel free enough to address you, to accost you, to publicly impose a narrative upon you, to incarnate you into their wooly imaginaries with a word, with a touch on the shoulder, and once you give a standing-order yes to playing this role—nothing can be the same as it would otherwise be. The first time it happened she was twelve. Disney World, within earshot of Jungle Cruise: a distraught woman convinced that she is her daughter, abducted ten years earlier, runs up, accosts her parents, can they prove she’s theirs, etc., suggesting before accusing them of adopting her off the black market. Attempts at restraint were made, park police called. The raised birthmark by her ear, she said, vaguely clover-shaped, how could there be more than one? She has my nose. What are the odds? Fast forward, years later, top story: the governor of Michigan, the most prominent orphan in America, raised by hardscrabble

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It’s hard to resist reading Orpheus’ story as a fable of the lyric’s worldly fate. We are so accustomed to the poet’s estrangement, to feeling an antipathy between the lyrical virtues of beauty and the conventional values represented by this dionysian mob, we hardly shutter at the conflict. Thanks in part to Eliot’s version of the lyrical voice as the poet “talking to himself—or to nobody,” we are comfortable with lyric being alienated from common discourse. Coupled with the poet-artist-hero’s principled isolation, arrayed against the stultifying forces of mass society, no wonder that authority has traditionally accrued through this struggle. The figure of Orpheus embodies the mythic pattern of artistic passion—love and devotion unto suffering and death—that remains as alluring today as ever: sales of Rilke remain strong. Yet a poet is as likely to be found yawping on Twitter or Facebook as from the world’s lonely rooftops.

(still from Orpheus, Jean Cocteau dir., 1950)

We are, no doubt less and less alone. Once considered a necessary school (if not lifestyle) for any poet, solitude—considered by solitaries as coterminous with the mystery of being and thus the sources of lyric poetry—is increasingly difficult to achieve. Busyness, connectedness: these sap the person of any possibility of inwardness, much less stillness. Technology provides a steady river of ephemeral information and constant sociability, a virtual panopticon that threatens to critically distract us from, if not mortally enervate, the motive force to write a poem where a text message will do. If one is always in touch, from what wilderness will one call out? And who will hear over the din we already filter, if the poet’s voice is just one bit of a live feed refreshing into eternity?

Perhaps the poem, at its best a concentrate of attention, will evolve to survive in an age bereft of attention and concentration. Perhaps the lifestyle once thought to be most conducive to writing—a room of one’s own, space for contemplation—will be revised. But there is a reason that scientists studying the phenomenon of attention frequent Buddhist monasteries. We fight distraction even as we encourage it, and many of us hold (if not fetishize) simplicity as an ideal of sanity; in principle if not practice we concur with Kierkegaard that purity of heart is to will one thing. As Elizabeth Bishop suggestively said to Robert Lowell, “Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs—no regular hours—so many temptations!”

Although distraction was once a synonym for insanity, we should probably be skeptical of eradicating our hard-won complexity. Inspiration was once considered a form of divine madness, and we might want to preserve room for that experience. Already we treat melancholy, an artist’s natural humor by medieval reckoning, as a psychiatric illness. In pastoral myths, the Muses chose as their vessels shepherds who were, while good shepherds, inefficient workers: prone to sleep, song, and restlessness. To-Do-List-oriented poets are the exception; our work depends upon not Getting Things Done™. What poet or writer doesn’t depend upon the serendipitous word, the random association, the sudden revelation, events nowadays often seeded by hyperlinks and tabbed browsers? Imaginative catalysis occurs when the executive function is relaxed, when multiple pathways of the mind are open to non-obvious connections and unlooked-for suggestions: attentive distraction, distracted attention. 

If any organism can prove adaptive to this environment, it might just be the chameleon poet. Maybe. Is it possible to think, much less pluck a lyre, much less preserve authentic personhood in such an ever-humming hive? As technologies move from novelties to embedded use-objects, we’ll see whether loafing and soul-inviting can occur within a data stream, amid the raft of friends, followers, and inboxes ever-updating and clamoring for updates. Cue neuroplasticity. The lyric is poetic precisely because it makes dynamic what is prone to becoming static, and if the poet succumbs, becomes too much a part of the herd, then artistic doom is probably at hand. My complete assimilation, despite undue attachment to my iPhone, is mitigated against by pre-existing analog conditions and a recurrent desire to own a bee farm. I am relieved not to be the forerunner. So while I may be divvied up into so many pieces by the demon scourge of my social network when I cancel the internet subscription, my faith in the orphic impulse assures me that a surviving remnant, gifted to sing while multitasking, will stay the wolves despite their sheep suits.

The foster parents, who became the adoptive parents, were excruciatingly kind, and every neglect and cruelty visited upon Byrn and his sister Melba they counteracted with the spells of patience, care, and love. Thanks to years of therapy, rehab, and a string of churches she chewed through before settling down a Unitarian, Melba ended up well-adjusted enough, a bit OCD with doors and windows and a rule for perfect symmetries, but capable of sustaining relationships well enough and a day-to-day life, sufficiently stable. Her bar-bet trivia answer is that she makes a tiny residual on “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” for which she was hired as a script consultant after a blog post went viral.

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There’s a reason the feral cat population isn’t what it used to be.

When the wolf is needed, the wolf will appear.

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Human effort and ingenuity—if one had to distill them to one thing—are variations on the need to solve a conjuring problem.

It’s easy enough to start a thing. Given over to the pleasure of a dream, a desire, a lust, anticipation alone seems to build a supply line stocked with extant and ready materials, and what comes is carried forward on a momentum that, like a promise, full of hopeful conviction, tricks us into believing that God is on our side.

But vision is only visionary in its practice, and the secret to magical thinking is in constructing, or discovering (uncovering?) a flywheel for the image that taps an endlessly regenerative source of [whatever it takes] that, to use Hegel’s phrase, delivers “the manifestation of truth in sensuous form,” where truth is but a metonymy for [whatever works].

“Do not feed the wolf,” the therapist says. “Let it die.”

“In bocca al lupo”—Into the wolf’s mouth—we say to the one taking the stage.

“Crepi il lupo!”—Let it die!—says the actor in response.

Two choices, pick one.

• Swerve from danger as if your life depends on it.

• Charge at danger as if your life depends on it.

The poet Allen Grossman saw poetry as the artistic means of last resort but, to modify one of his famous definitions, many activities are enjoined for their potential to be a “principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing.”

The question, of course, is one of efficacy.

You find variations on this poetic principle, that a work of art is conceived under the directive of its materials. Louis Kahn: you say to the brick, what do you want? Anne Lamott: Listen to your broccoli and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.

Like any good voyeur, an artist gets in the way of what is happening—the basic drive to influence and be exposed to influence, to be privy to the flow of what is essentially none of our business and make of it what one can.

We crave to live a life that is a worthy story, yet habitually retreat from danger. We want to minimize all drama. In our therapeutic culture, is there any more tireless word doing yeoman’s duty than Safety?

What happens when one suspects one’s own motives, one’s own authority, one’s own knowledge—pedagogy becomes impossible. Punditry, criticism. Even comedy. Poetry: forget it. The outlines of myth, a more extractive form, possibly, remains, but the force necessary for its transmission withers into inconsequence. Why bother? If Bartleby the Scrivener did not exist we would yet need to invent him.

“What is really lacking in man today?” (Frank Lloyd Wright is asking)

“He lacks the certainty that comes with the creative life. He plays no creative role in life but by way of art, religion, and science. Lacking that inner certainty of life, he feels insecure. We all walk and talk in insecurity. Only a creative life can make a man really free. He is absolutely an apostle for life because he sees nature for life.

An excerpt from “The Wolfs Eyelash,” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, which appears at the end of her seminal work:

If you listen closely, the wolf in its howling is always asking the most important question—not where is the next food, not where is the next fight, not where is the next dance?—”

but the most important question
in order to see into and behind,
to weigh the value of all that lives,
wooooooooor
“aieeeee th’
soooooooool?
wooooooooor
aieeeee
th’soooooooool?
Where is the soul?
Where is the soul?

Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods, nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.

When the wolf is needed, the wolf will appear.

You know how to whistle, don’t you?

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2. An elegant solution to shopping for oneself does not exist.

3. In search of a trigger to short-circuit the trigger.

4. “It’s an individual matter—the affair of a good building, I mean.” —Frank Lloyd Wright

5. Where is the flaw in the rule: consider others better than yourself?

6. Boring some is the cost of a commitment to not boring others.

7. That said, there are worse principles than “Don’t be boring.”

8. “There is something—I don’t know what it is.” Jane Goodall, on the existence of Bigfoot

9. A dystopian novel in which aggression and aggrandizement are removed from the species.

10. Any effort not in service to being of service is suspect.

11. Gleaned from Orson Welles—whose birthday was yesterday—desperate to find the story for his first film: When in doubt of what to tell, find the way of telling it.

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For the completist, finding this in the future as the first post of this collection, it will serve as a way point, where for me, to be honest, I’m trying to get the f*cking custom domain to work and seeing what difference the presence of a post might make. But then variations on being honest and making a difference—or some alchemy of the two—is pretty much all a writer wants to do (cue paywall).

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Earlier today I published the second newsletter for The Long Schoolroom, my public project, so what is this impulse to start a whole other one? But if I have to guess, it’s just that: a move against the public, toward the private. The shout that elicits a whisper. When one has 1000 things that should be done, the one imperative, history may prove, is to start a substack. Or, at least, to write something.

But, platform-specificity aside, this is not a newsletter, but a zone. A territory, a space, a scene, a site, a dream: things that cannot happen one place will happen here.

Within the impulse to build there is the equal (or stronger) one to dwell, and even more particularly, to dwell with style. In Geoff Dyer’s Zona, his “Book about about a Film about a Journey to a Room”—a meditation on Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”— he cites Flaubert’s image of a book that would be “held together by the internal strength of its style” and rhymes it with an entry from the filmmaker’s diary:

From the standpoint of pure Art one might establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject—style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “zone of indiscernability” defines a loci of transformation, a region of mutability, anywhere things might go either way.

May this be thus. I turned 54 this year, which is the same year that Marvin Bell wrote his first Dead Man poem, and began a project that lasted him the rest of his life. Over at the Museum of Conceptual Art, you can look and see what others have accomplished at your age, and here is what comes up for me:

• Annie Jump Cannon, the dean of women astronomers, became the first person to systematically classify the stars according to spectral type.

• Henry Jay Heimlich developed his emergency maneuver.

• Napoleon abdicated the throne.

• John Locke began to publish the results of a lifetime of study and thought, including his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding."

• Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. learned to ride a new-fangled contraption called a "bicycle."

But no matter. We write at the horizon of our understanding, an old phrase, maybe Gadamer (gets interesting when horizons start fusing), and whatever age one is the real zone with which we contend is the one with the unknown boundary of our impending extinction (cue Tim Urban’s Your Life in Weeks).

Everything remains to be done. Agony columnist, novelist, eroticist, pundit, personist, showrunner, mogul, visionary world-whathaveyou… Yet, here we are.

Speaking of formal deviance, I will end with the “The Zone of Interest,” loosely based on Martin Amis’ novel, from which but one bit of actual text survives the adaptation.

From the novel: “I spent the whole 2½ hours intently estimating how long it would take (given the high ceiling as against the humid conditions) to gas the audience, and wondering which of their clothes would be salvageable, and calculating how much their hair and gold fillings might fetch . . .”

From the film: “I was too busy thinking how I’d gas everyone in the room. Very difficult, logistically, because of its high ceiling.”.

The soundscape stars in this horror show.

It is a film of borders, and walls, and constraints, of emotionally- and psychologial-suffocating tolerances. But its the flywheel of another genre—the workplace drama—that drives its most insistent theme, the bureacratic 9-5 mundanity of tasks that accrue to Evil. The narrative break that occurs at the end, corresponding with Rudolph Höss’ Robert-Durst-like wretches, cuts from one job site to another, and neatly encapsulates cause and effect, professional competence and human tragedy.

Within his context, his sense of vocation and duty, Höss and Eichmann and others said variations on, “What choice did I have, I was doing my job?” We could multiply examples of times when people report their greatest happiness and purpose came when the felt part of something larger themselves, whether in school, the military, a start-up, or any other kind of cult-like collective from which one derived a role and clear directives.

But what, about heresy, does any of this amount to? The weight of conscience and the burden of ambition? The hæresis is choice. Confined within the straight lines of any orthodoxy, the default belief is: you are here, and here is right. (A.A. Dowd in Vulture suggests Höss’ vision is a vision of his ultimate irrelevance). We do as we’ve been told, taught, and know.

But it takes poetry (or, at least, acts of poesis), in which nothing famously happens, to teach us how to choose to make nothing happen. How does one become sufficiently distinct, sufficiently unique, to embody the spirit of our intentions? To have intentions strong enough and worthy of embodying? This is what Hannah Arendt saw lacking at Nuremburg.

Sometimes, from the correct angle: Nothing remains to be done.

From Sofistikashun, by Tony Hoagland:

The artistic life begins in instinct and moves toward calculation; or maybe, it begins in blind obsession and ends in self-possession. Or does it begin in play and end in ambition? Or, some say, it begins in inspiration and moves toward repetition. Whichever version you subscribe to, the loss of innocence is inevitable, and it is indeed a loss—but one that has compensations. Some of the names for that compensation are skill, perspective, and choice.

A more expansive way of stating what Rick Rubin calls “hard-earned abilities [to] transcend rules.” Only in continuous practice do we learn necessary faiths. When art functions as art it does not rest on having followed rules. Extrapolate.

It may be glib, in this light, to speak of poetry alongside morality, but wherever one may find the inner light and source of self to resist prevailing powers—which travel in words and images—then so be it. Practice the practices that work.

So that, first and finally, is the demarcation of this zone, a space for a writer and a space for a reader (the line between need not be defined). Who can know where writing will take us? “Be neat and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your work,” Flaubert said. That is one job.