Writing poetry for catharsis was something like this for me..

Literature has played a dual and contradictory role in my life. The act of writing appeases one’s memories and eases the act of forgetting. When I write, I make my memories tangible, and in this way I can get rid of them. On the other hand, writing is but a ploy to convulse memory back into life. And the more I write, the more my memories return to inhabit me. - Jorge Semprún, in a Paris Review interview, Spring 2007

I remember being viscerally moved by Without, a book of poems* by the current Poet Laureate of the US, Donald Hall, which I had read in one sitting a few years back - reading the whole book non-stop deep into the night. The book includes poems written by Hall after the loss of his wife, the poet, Jane Kenyon. I cannot remember any book that I have read - and there have been many over the years - which had evoked such a powerful emotional response from me.

I have since read a few other poems by him as well as perused through the Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon and my admiration for Donald's poems has only grown since then.

So it is with great pleasure that I am enjoying an interview with Donald Hall in Bill Moyers' The language of life - a festival of poets - a collection of interviews with various noted poets - and a good companion book to Moyers' PBS series The Power of the Word.

I am only half-way through the Hall interview and already found so many quotable quotes...that I am tempted to transcribe some here right away. The introduction to the book Bill Moyers also is chock-full of quotable quotes about reading and writing poetry but I'll get to that some other time.

Here then are some great excerpts from DH's interview. I'll add to it as I finish reading the interview. (Too bad that I do not take the time to sit back and read 20 pages at a stretch!)

DH = Donald Hall
BM = Bill Moyers

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BM: "A successful poem is impulse validated by attention" -- your line. Is the attention at the desk there? Is that where you're sweating over it?

DH: It's twenty seconds of impulse and two years of attenion, but the impulse may be more important than the attention. # (wish Blogger had a way to do footnotes! Also subscripts/superscripts!)

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BM: Why did you choose poetry as a way of life?

DH: I loved it so much. What other reason would you have for choosing poetry?

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DH: When I make poems I'm consoling myself by making the poem out of loss, but I also have some notion that I'm talking to somebody else at any time now or in the future. The definition of a poem includes readers. I don't write a poem for myself.

BM: It's a very public experience.

DH: Young people feel as if they were writing for themselves, but that's only the beginning of the poem. When it's completed, the poem is a bridge from one to another.

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BM: You keep notebooks, you write words down, then you leave them for a while to bubble and twist and turn, right?

DH: I do everything to words. I'd be happy to send them to Florida or buy them hot dogs, anything, if they'll just come through. THe work is prosaic, sitting at the desk every day and saying, "How can I make this better?" Such work is not, in itself, inspired, but by looking regularly at the poem I get so familiar with it that I'm working on it when I'm asleep. I wake up in the morning, look at the poem I worked on the day before, and see something I had not seen. Something has happened in between, probably sleep work. For that matter, something inside you is always working even when you're awake.

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DH: ... Someone reminded me later of my advice to young writers, "Don't ever hold anything back. Put everything out that can possibly belong in that poem or story. Don't save anything for the next one." That's the only way to work. It's the only way to live, really.

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#: Found an excerpt from another interview where Donald Hall expostulates a little bit more about what he means by "impulse validated by attention"

Myers: You speak of The One Day as something of a happy accident, "impulse validated by attention," though we know an imposing talent was behind it. But The One Day does read as though it was written in the way the long modernists poems were written: by a piecemeal process of composition, and with no deliberate intention. It succeeds, for me, through allowance of subject matter: You've permitted what came into it to stay.

Hall: When I used that phrase, "impulse validated by attention," I was not talking about a happy accident. I'm talking about working over the texture of its language. Impulsively, I set down a word or a phrase or even a series of lines; "impulsively" means I do it rapidly, in excitement, without malice aforethought, intuitively—in a manic state. By inspiration. But I don't just leave it there on the scattery page; I attend to it. I look at it every morning for one thousand mornings. After the eight-hundred-and-second morning, I find that I don't like this word, take it out and impulsively put in another. After the nine-hundred-and-sixty-second morning, I remove the new word and restore the old one. On the one-thousandth, two-hundred-and-thirty-second morning, I realize that two words here and two words there link up with seven words eight pages later in the manuscript . . . and I am pleased with myself.

Impulse is creation; attention is critical intelligence.

I always knew that being a writer is a very "risky business"...and being someone who has no specific training in writing, I am always plagued with self-doubt when the tangential thought arises about writing something and trying to get it published.

Well... Amit Varma points us to an article in the NY Times today: The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller. Amit comments that 'writers are gambling chips', alluding to a statement from the article that says:

"People think publishing is a business, but it’s a casino."

The article discusses how there is not much data to support or help with this risk-taking - publishing has been and remains an exercise in educated (or actually, uneducated) guesswork. Like Professor of Marketing, Al Greco from Fordham University says in the article: the publishing business ..

...has run since 1640,” he says. That is when 1,700 copies of the Bay Psalm Book were published in the colonies. “It was a gamble, and they guessed right because it sold out of the print run. And ever since then, it has been a crap shoot.”

This "risky" business continues unabated - with thousands of books being published* every year on a myriad number of topics, some more popular than others - because it is indeed like gambling! The lure of hitting that jackpot - albeit a 1 in a million chance - and landing a surprise bestseller is too much to resist. Little wonder then that Oprah, with her book-club, was hailed as the Queen/King-maker to the world of publishing!

In my opinion, while some people undoubtedly have innate (or developed) talents for writing and perhaps are people who could not live if they did not write (a quote by Asimov - see below - comes to mind), I fear that a large percentage of books one sees flooding bookstores everywhere should never have seen the light of day! And so we see books being written by actors, sports-persons, celebrities and so-deemed celebrities who have attained their 15 minutes of fame through some act of notoriety or achievement and in collusion with the publishing industry looking for that big hit, are now writing books! And then there are people like me with a wannabe writer lurking within! Writing workshops and these days blogs and online forums have given everyone an opportunity to write, share opinions, express the 'breathings of our heart' and shamelessly show off our talents (or lack thereof) to millions ...and yet publishing a book and being an "author" still has that unfettered charm and sense of accomplishment attached to it.

(Thankfully, there are some people like me who do not really write anything but flirt with the idea simply because they love the idea of being 'writers' :) After talking about this topic with a fellow blogger recently, I have come to realize that while I do love to read books of all types, and love and appreciate good writing, it does not necessarily mean that I can be a good writer. I am perhaps only in love with the idea of being a writer... such are our delusions, our dreams.)

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* Another interesting factoid gleaned from the article is:

In the case of hardcovers, a few books that the publishers think have best-seller potential are promoted with generous marketing and publicity campaigns. Others are considered long shots, with anticipated sales of maybe a few thousand copies. Most are considered midlist, with respectable sales of 15,000 to 20,000 copies, Mr. Greco says, but not breakout sales.

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Some quotes about writing from those who did it really well!

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. - Albert Camus

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them. - Blaise Pascal

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. - Flannery O'Connor

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. - Willa Cather

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. - T. S. Eliot

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. - Isaac Asimov

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart... - William Wordsworth

The Face2Face Project displays portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. (- via.)

So, do you really think varied cultures really read faces differently? (- via.)

The humanity of it all is all too palpable.... So, why do human's hate each other as often as they do? Are we the victims of our own narrow-mindedness, who find it too easy to succumb to the stereotypes fed to us from all kinds of biased sources, letting misinformation frame our perceptions - the so-called devil-effect at work (speaking of which, read an interesting op-ed piece by Amit Varma on the effects of the halo-effect) or is there more than cognitive / attributional bias that blinds us to our commonalities and highlights our differences? Sometimes, in the throes of cynicism and despair, I do wonder if we are hard-wired to hate rather than to love...though it would seem it should be the reverse - i.e. compassion and love should be the norm and hate the exception. A look around the world certainly does not always give one that feeling.

Anyways, research (pdf of an illustrative journal paper) into the psychology of the source of our biases may go on... but all I know is that the color of blood is red everywhere... a smile is a smile is a smile... laughter sounds the same everywhere... and so does a sob in the depths of despair. The Face2Face project is a great reflection of the common humanity that binds us all.

Enuf said... it's Sunday morning and I am now rambling..

I am reading QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman and am absolutely wonder-struck by his explanations of such complex (and yet simple) topics like light reflection from a quantum electrodynamics (QED) perspective. I got lost about by the time I got to Chapter 3 (It was like drinking from a firehose and I was overwhelmed), but what I learned in Chapters 1 and 2 was a treat in itself and some day I plan to re-read Chapters 1 and 2 and then proceed to chapters 3 and 4.

In the past, I have read his Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters of Feynman, and more recently The Meaning of it all - Thoughts of Citizen-Scientist. However, this is my first book on physics by him and I am bowled over enough to consider gifting myself the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics ($123 at amazon.com seems like a great price for a classic, especially if you consider how expensive mediocre regular text books are these days!)

A good friend gifted me Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun more than a year ago but unfortunately I have not read it yet. However, you can be sure it is next on my reading list; although I think the motion of planets is something I understand better than such esoteric topics such as quantum mechanics, particle physics, and the worst of all - Einstein's relativity theories. I have a really good book on the subject - Newton's Clock: Chaos in the Solar System - that I bought in 1995 and have read at least twice in the last decade.

Despite reading many books on the subject (and whatever nonsense they "taught" in school in India), I have never really understood the fundamentals of physics well - let alone the complex topic of quantum mechanics ... but maybe what I have been missing is a dose of Feynman....though, one could ask what do I have to gain by understanding physics at this age and I have no answer for that except to say I waste/invest my time doing a lot of things which are not really result-or-goal oriented but somehow fulfill something within me and keep me entertained... like this blog! :)

Note:
1) Feynman's Nobel lecture can be read here.
2) A set of four priceless archival recordings from lectures Feynman gave at the University of Auckland can be seen here. The titles of the first three lectures are the same as the title chapters in the QED book I am just finishing up.

Continuing with Best American Essays 2006, I finished reading the essay, Grammar Lessons: The Subjunctive Mood by Michele Morano, which first appeared in the Crab Orchard Review. It is written with a very creative structure interweaving a grammar lesson about the subjunctive mood with a poignant story of a failed relationship with a suicidal boyfriend! You can read an excerpt at the author's page but the last few sentences of the essay are lovely and reproduced here..

The subjunctive is the mood of mystery. Of luck. Of faither interwoven with doubt. It's a held breath, a hand reaching out, carefully touching wood. It's humility, deference, the opposite of hubris. And it's going to take a long time to master.

But at least the final rule of usage is simple, self-contained, one you can commit to memory: Certain independent clauses exist only in the subjunctive mood, lacing optimism with resignation, hope with heartache. Be that as it may, for example. Or the phrase one says at parting, eyes closed as if in prayer: May all go well with you.

Also, earlier in the essay:

In language, as in life, moods are complicated, but at least in language there are only two. The indicative mood is for knowledge, facts, absolutes, for describing what’s real or definite. .....

.... The indicative helps you tell what happened or is happening or will happen in the future (when you believe you know for sure what the future will bring).The subjunctive mood, on the other hand, is uncertain. It helps you tell what you could have been or might be or what you want but may not get.

I have previously read and blogged about Aubrey de Grey (see this compilation post) but I just ran into a talk by Aubrey at TED.

Listen to him discuss his postulate that..

...the process of aging is merely a disease -- and a curable one at that. De Grey, a computer scientist and biogerontologist, believes humans could live for centuries, if only we approach the aging process as "an engineering problem." He outlines the seven basic ways people age, and how to "solve" each one. And if we get to work now, he says, humans alive today could live to be 1,000.

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life by Hugh Brogon......

.........“illuminates the life of Alexis de Toqueville, the French writer whose exploration of liberty and democracy in "Democracy in America" remains the premiere analysis of the early American political system and its guiding political philosophies.” - via metacritic.com, where the book has a high rating of 85, the second highest score for recent non-fiction books behind Claire Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy (metacritic score of 86.)

I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or hope from its progress. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

I am continuing with reading the Best American Essays 2006 and find some essays simply not really worthy of being in a Best of the year collection (eg: Susan Orlean's essay, Lost Dog, from the New Yorker.)

However, that cannot be said of the poet Alan Shapiro's essay, Why write?, first published in The Cincinnati Review. The essay should be read in its entirety but I'll quote one particular paragraph that gives as good an explanation as any for the question asked in the essays title. It quotes from something another great poet, Elizabeth Bishop, wrote in a letter to Anne Stevenson.

"Bishop writes that what we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. We write, Bishop implies, for the same reason we read or look at paintings or listen to music: for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration. It is self-forgetful even if you are writing about the self, because you yourself have disappeared into the pleasure of making; your identity — the incessant, transient, noisy New York Stock Exchange of desires and commitments, ambitions, hopes, hates, appetites, and interests — has been obliterated by the rapture of complete attentiveness. In that extended moment, opposites cohere: the mind feels and the heart thinks, and receptivity’s a form of fierce activity. Quotidian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, space and time, dissolve. Athletes know all about this nearly hallucinatory state. They call it being in the zone. They feel simultaneously out of body and at one with body."

Ok - I am tempted to quote one more paragraph from the essay, where Shapiro writes about spending time with his friend, Tim Dekin, during the last few days of the latter's life, sorting through some of the latter's poems to put a manuscript together.

"Though fly-fishing is the occasion of the poem, the subject is really acceptance of mortality, failure, and loss, and the value of joy in all its elusiveness.

The poem is also about writing, the moment of creation, when we forget all else but the task at hand, when preparation and luck coincide, when the burden of the past and the future lifts and exhilration comes, what Tim calls "Delight being. Joy being... my childhood's earliest familiar." The poem itself, he implies, the writing of it, is both the crumbs that lead us as adults back to that childhood paradise and the measure of how far we've traveled from it. When the moment passes and the poem's written, when we rise from the desk to return to the world awaiting us - our tangled loves and commitments - the exhilaration is nearly indistinguishable from "unfathomable loss.""

Funny how though I have not written enough to feel the exhilaration, I often feel unfathomable loss, huh? :)