A Walker in the Suburbs

Yesterday I learned that Kentuckian Cassius Clay had a specially reinforced door and cannons mounted on the top of the building from which he printed his abolitionist newspaper. He was willing to step out and call for an end to slavery, but he was going to protect himself, too.

As it turned out, his office was ransacked — and his printing press sent packing to Cincinnati — while Clay was out of commission with typhoid fever.

Journalists who speak truth to power have never been safe. Neither now nor then. Sometimes the power of the press is best measured in the lengths people will take to silence it.

Yesterday I spent some time revising an essay. It’s been a while since I’ve written one I wanted to revise, so I was a bit rusty.

It’s a halting process, full of stops and starts. If it was a walk it would be an interrupted one. Halfway down the block, I stop to tie my shoe. At the corner, I run into a neighbor, admire her lettuce, chat about our kids. 

At the next stop sign, I change playlists on the iPod, turning my back on the sun so I can see the tiny screen. A block later it’s the same thing. Another playlist, another pause. As I warm up I take off my jacket, tie it around my waist. Only 15 minutes in do I start to move freely, do I limber up enough to flow.

The steps of revision. I’d forgotten how painfully slow they can be.

There were six people crammed into a booth in the darkest corner of a brightly lit pizza place off a busy street. There were two novels and an essay.

“Welcome to the writer’s group,” the waitress said. She’s served these folks for five years and has a feel for their rhythm. Maybe she has a manuscript in the basement, too.

It didn’t take long to feel at home. These are men and women who talk about transitions and character motivations and commas; who admit their dread of starting the next chapter; who spend much of their time with people who don’t exist.

Except that they do exist. They live on the page, and they lived for us last night.

It was good to be in the company of writers.

I began this blog three years ago, not sure how often I would post or for how long. It would be an exercise, I told myself, “a slow, patient accumulation of words,” a daily discipline. Maybe people would read it, maybe they wouldn’t. But if I kept at it long enough, I told myself, I would have a body of work.

Don’t know if there’s quite a body yet. Maybe the beginnings of one.

What I do know is that somehow, every day but Sunday (or Saturday!), the blank screen is filled. Even on the hardest days, the words come. Some days they rush in as quickly as I can get them down. Other days I spend way more time than I’d like with fingers poised above the keys.

But eventually the muse speaks — and I listen.

Today I pause to thank that muse — and to thank all of you who visit, read and cheer me on. Your encouragement means more than you know.

This morning’s Washington Post tipped me off to a literary kerfuffle that has recently been playing out in its pages and online. An op-ed by Alexandra Petri, “Is Poetry Dead?,” has 375 comments and counting. I didn’t read all of them — only enough to convince me that no, it is not!

Petri’s piece seems to have been inspired by Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem and the fact that Blanco “has overcome numerous obstacles, struggled against opposition both
internal and external — in order to excel in poetry, a field that may
very well be obsolete.”

Petri raises valid points, criticizing not just poetry and poets, but a culture that has turned poetry from a romantic, individual act to a heavily workshopped, grant-driven endeavor.

But she certainly touched a nerve.

With rants and reasoning, 375 people took the time to defend the art form, many of them in posts that used the art form itself.

“Poetry turns darkness into light,” wrote one.

Another quoted William Carlos Williams, from “Asphodel”:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

“People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can
teach you how to write a
better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a
plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say,” says writer Ann Patchett, quoted in yesterday’s “Writer’s Almanac.”

Ahh, the ever elusive something to say. Seems self-evident, but of course is not.

Maybe the something to say is buried and must be excavated, shovel by shovel, until you hit pay dirt. Or hiding and must be tamed like a shy bird. Or blocked by a gate to which there is no key.

How many times have I sat with  fingers poised above a keyboard — or even with fingers flying only to realize 500 words later that these words are going nowhere.

“What do you want to say?” is the question.

Too often, I don’t have an answer.