This is an except from something I wrote a few years ago. Below it is a Spotify link to the song “Chicago.”
It’s possible to encounter O’Connnor’s stories (you never really just read them) without explicitly discerning her deep, abiding belief in literary art as Christian vocation or her mission to show, as she said, “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” Clear about these motives in her essays and letters, she’s almost never so obvious in her fiction. Perhaps because she uses the evangelical cosmologies of her neighbors as Tolkienesque proxies for her own traditional Catholic systems it’s easy to infer a sort of distance between O’Connor’s art and faith where she in fact saw none. In the same way, it’s possible to listen to Stevens’ biggest hit, “Chicago,” without immediately sensing the plaintive Christian hymn at its core, but “Casimir Pulaski Day,” “Oh God Where Are You Now?,” “The Lord God Bird,” “To Be Alone With You,””God’ll Ne’er Let You Down”… well, these and others comprise a body of work that, like O’Connor’s, raises and answers questions about what makes art “Christian.” Like O’Connor, Stevens operates outside of expectation: his confessional work is among his best, but you’d never call him a Christian artist the way, say, Amy Grant is a Christian artist.
In the context of the class I’m teaching, it’s important to present the modern formal structures of essay clearly, and for students to be able to execute these schema even as they learn to hear, develop, and deliver their unique, respective voices. It’s also important that they (and that all of us) read widely and across foreign and familiar cultural and linguistic settings.
Braithwaite, of course, is not saying that iambic pentameter is a more formal, academic, or polished form of expression than are the cadences of his experience. The old English forms, unlike the basic structures of essay taught at the undergraduate level, are not conventions to be mastered and then moved on from. They are simply different from other expressions, and just as valid. But the insight he gives about the ways in which experience, geography, and culture influence our voices and our framing devices is brilliantly stated: the hurricane does not roar in pentameters.
In writing, the old sports adage also holds true: you have to get good before you can get fancy. Braithwaite or Ferlinghetti aren’t “fancy” in this sense, nor are the old English conventions necessarily “good.” But we do, all of us, carry points of reference, and for better or for worse, the discipline, practice, and art of writing in English or in the West in general requires a certain level of engagement with things like pentameter and people like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and, later, Whitman, Emerson, Twain, Conrad, Hemingway, etc. In writing and in physics, we’re dealing with relative values and definitions: neither our experience nor our execution manifest in vacuo, neither are they hatched like Athena, fully formed, fully armed, out of Zeus’s head. Motion is always relative, and so too is the spectrum from “good” to “fancy.”
But developing our voice as writers or as people requires the mastery of certain modes of expression. We might even say that without the narrative frames afforded to us by the convention of language, we’d be a very different species arranged in very different communities. Even if we can’t read or write, language has given us the ability to think of ourselves as objects with stories moving through time. Self-reflection is in most cases a function of narrative, ours or someone else’s. Mastering the elements of basic structure (getting “good” with the basic tools of the written trade) brings deeper possibilities of expression closer to our reach. I may understand, conceptually, a great many things about black holes, but I’ll likely make no significant contribution to the study of them if I’m not conversant in the language of higher mathematics, even if I say, with Einstein, that all motion and velocity are relative (save the velocity of C). “Good” and “fancy” may be relative terms, but they occur within a written and spoken frame of reference alongside our experiences and efforts toward understanding and expressing them.
The Physician’s Palette, Pablo Picasso.
It’s been said by Malcolm Gladwell (and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis) that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master any given discipline. I like for students to keep this general idea in mind: you have to get good (proficient, comfortable, familiar, conversant) before you can get fancy. Visually, I’ve used the work of Picasso to drive this point home. Before he did his groundbreaking work, he become very proficient at using the language of the art world around him. Before he was a cubist or surreaist, he plied his craft in the artistic realm of realism. He became conversant at this formal aspect of the craft and, of course, transcended it. But without The Physician’s Palette, we wouldn’t have The Old Guitarist or Guernica.
We’ve been talking about all of these ideas over the first few weeks of class. While preparing for our most recent session, I decided I wanted to revisit the Brathwaite quote in particular and did a google search for “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” The second result was for a tumblr blog called Poets of Color using the quote as a tag line. The most recent post on that blog?
Even my hat mocks me laughing on the inside of my grief –
My twisted mouth and gnashing teeth, my fingers fat and clumsy as if they were still wearing those gloves – the bloodstained ones you keep.
What has happened to the pupils of my eyes, Picasso?
Why do I deserve such deformity?
What am I now if not a cross between a clown and a broken piece of crockery?
3
But I am famous. People recognise me despite my fractures.
I’m no Mona Lisa (how I’d like to wipe the smugness from her face that still captivates.)
Doesn’t she know that art, great art, needn’t be an oil-painting?
I am a magnet not devoid of beauty.
I am an icon of twentieth-century grief.
A symbol of compositional possibilities
My tears are tears of happiness – big rolling diamonds.
14
Picasso, I want my face back the unbroken photography of it
Once I lived to be stroked by the fingers of your brushes
Now I see I was more an accomplice to my own unrooting
Watching the pundits gaze open-mouthed at your masterpieces
While I hovered like a battered muse my private grief made public.
15
Dora, Theodora, be reasonable, if it weren’t for Picasso you’d hardly be remembered at all. He’s given you an unbelievable shelf-life. Yes, but who will remember the fruits of my own life?
I am no moth flitting around his wick. He might be a genius but he’s also a prick – Medusa, Cleopatra, help me find my inner bitch, wasn’t I christened Henriette Theodora Markovitch?
Picasso, I want my face back the unbroken geography of it.
– Grace Nichols
Dora Maar (nee Markovitch) was Picasso’s long-time partner and the muse/model for much of his best-known work. She was also an up-and-coming artist in her own right in the 30s and 40s and photographed the creative process of Guernica. The diamond tears Nichols speaks of refer to Maar’s role as the face of The Weeping Woman, a sort of Guernica writ large. She also wrote poetry, and so we’re able to move from seeing Maar through Picasso’s lens to hearing Maar in Nichols’ voice to finally arriving at a place all writers want to be: seen as we see ourselves, heard in our very own voice:
Pure as a lake boredom I hear its harmony In the vast cold room The nuance of light seems eternal All is simple I admire the full totality of objects.
The soul that still yesterday wept is quiet — it’s exile suspended a country without art only nature Memory magnolia pure so far off I am blind and made from a bit of earth But your gaze never leaves me And your angel keeps me.
The hurricane does not roar in pentameters. Dora Maar does not speak in the voice of Picasso or Nichols but is still, for them, an indelible symbol, a cypher for their own struggles (theirs and their peoples’). Behind that is a person with a point of view and a voice, a photographer-poet wrestling with the ecstatic anxieties of having both and of using them. That’s what we’re talking about here.
This may sound counter-intuitive, especially given what’s happening in my backyard: I don’t hate the suburbs and I don’t have a hip, a priori antipathy toward life there. After all, as John Updike and Nick Andopolis remind us, suburban basements are where rock stars come from.
That said, I believe that walkable, green cities are the way forward and that the growth of the suburbs over the last 50 years had little to do with free market choices and everything to do with government subsidy. I believe in living in and working in the City, because I believe in what the City was and what the City can be. I believe these things are important because I believe the systemic poverty and educational challenges our urban cores face can be overcome if enough people give a damn.
But I don’t share Atlantic writer Emily Badger’s coming-of-age urban experience. I grew up mostly in a suburb of small brick houses that were built on a cornfield in the 50s. Not exactly John Cheever’s or Don Draper’s Ossining. But I do happen to love these paragraphs from Badger this week, especially the second one:
My map – “a map of the British and French dominions in North America, with the roads, distances, limits, and extent of the settlements” – is inscribed in the lower right-hand corner, inside an elaborate inset of palm fronds, plump angels and supplicating natives, by the Earl of Halifax’s most obliged and very humble servant, John Mitchell. His world dates to 1755.
The United States doesn’t yet exist. We haven’t yet decided what we’re going to call the Great Lakes, or whether we want to honor the Indians who named them first. Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia all theoretically extend inland more than a thousand miles in hand-colored stripes of fading pink, green, and yellow. To the north, the pink patch that is New York expands greedily all the way to Nova Scotia. Opposite the Atlantic Ocean, the map ends abruptly at the 107th meridian west, beyond which Mitchell runs out of things to say.
I love this map for one miniscule reference that speaks to a modern geographic rift John Mitchell never saw coming in the 18th century. Just below the Great Falls on the Virginia shore of the “Potowmack” River, in something like 4-point type, he notes the existence of a port town sizable enough in 1755 to warrant mentioning to the Earl of Halifax: “Alexandria.”
Across the river, the District of Columbia does not yet exist. There is nothing there worth mentioning. And this is Exhibit A, the place where I begin my argument. See, Alexandria was here first, in the pre-Revolutionary age of the Iroquois and the unknown West. Clearly, it can’t be a suburb.
From 2012. Still true. In the intervening time, I’ve done some of things Grammy did. I understand more. I understand better.
I got this in my inbox today.
Of all the social media services I use, Goodreads is the one I clearly use least.
I finished those last 46 pages in 2009. In August of that year, I started my first fiction workshop at The New School, taught by Kitting Circle author Ann Hood.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact Ann had on our class. She’s an amazing teacher, graceful and assertive in the kind of measures that let you know you have work to do, and that she believes you can do it. The cadre of writers I met in that setting will say the same thing. Those peers became friends in the course of Ann’s workshop, and those friendships were strengthened over the course of the next two years.
In the last 1020 days, I have, indeed, finished reading The Knitting Circle. I’ve studied under Ben Taylor, James Lasdun, Robert Antoni, and Jeff Allen. I’ve worked alongside amazing emerging talent and have been blessed to call these people friends. I can’t say enough about what each of these people have given me or what their influence means to me. I know I can finish what I’ve started because of the experiences I’ve had which each of them.
In May, I’ll celebrate the one-year anniversary of my MFA. By then, I will have completed a draft of the novel I started halfway trough that program. My grandmother, a key inspiration for that work, passed away this week. One of many great things you learn from Bob Antoni and Ben Taylor is that grandmothers are the keepers of our stories. Theirs is the language of home. Through Grammy, I’m connected to worlds I’d never begin to understand otherwise. Grandmothers are emissaries from history, bridges between eras, nurturers of the present, caretakers of the future.
Whatever Ann and James and Bob and James and Jeff taught me, Grammy taught me first. She bought me books and encyclopedias, told me stories from her family on the farm. She read us Laura Ingalls Wilder. She gave us a vernacular. She helped run a business and she raised a family. An extended family. So much of who we are is simply her. So much of who I am.
Chris Cocca 