Hey Ying, It’s a little unusual to criticise a poem that you wrote just for me — it feels like I’m getting a birthday present and then telling the giver that it’s not what I wanted. I’ll keep this note very abstract and general then, and, again, wherever it veers into direct criticism, it is only because I want to make the point crystal clear. Not at all because I think it is a bad poem. It isn’t. But we can learn things by picking it apart, piece by piece.
My best friend on on old Company ship was a dancer, and she had an attitude I liked. When you’re a serious dancer, she said, you can never be satisfied. You look at a tape of one of your own performances and, no matter how good it was, your only reaction is: I should have done that better, I should have done this instead.
It’s only in this spirit that I’m answering your question about the poem. I liked it and I’m happy with it. But if you wanted to nit-pick, then where would you start? Here are a few points that you might look at again: I personally have no interest in show-offy language, anywhere, unless it’s really superbly done. Very often these kinds of pretentious words have only one purpose: To disguise the fact that the writer is either saying something awfully sappy that he couldn’t otherwise get away with, or he doesn’t have any idea what he wants to say. You may be sure that any experienced reader is on guard against this tactic. Your poem skirted the edge of that abyss but pulled itself back just in time.
A friend of mine wrote his CV and cover letters like this, with language that he would never use in real life — and it showed, because he was actually using these fancy words incorrectly. I had to tell him over and over again that it was so easy to picture him sitting at his desk, agonizing about whether he ought to use simple words or complicated words … without it ever once occurring to him to just try to use the best words. Language is meant to be communication anyway, and so (of course) is art. If the focus ever strays away from communication, then it is probably straying towards masturbation. I would normally say something like this to a writer: Get the nuts and bolts right before you start painting the house. In your poem, the ‘house’ is centered around a metaphor. But it’s a house that’s only half-built. We’ve got a staircase and a lone figure drawn in silhouette, but why not develop it further? Is this staircase a straight path to the top, or are there other tempting ‘distractions’ along the way — distractions which we can give names to? Is it possible to lose your balance? While climbing, are you using muscles that you’ve never used before? How is the feeling? And is there an audience watching you climb the stairs? What is their role in all this — support, or distraction, or something else? We use metaphors like staircases because they help us give insight into situations. So what other insight can the staircase metaphor give? I think you could integrate the a more lifelike staircase into the body of text very easily without sacrificing the flow of the poem, or without making it overly long. Imagine a stanza like this: With each dizzy step my muscles cry out for relief / While just a few yards away my friends lounge / Sipping beers, agonizingly at ease / And an empty spot on the couch set aside for me. The word ‘couch’ here is a nice wink to the reader who knows you, and ‘agonizingly at ease’ is a pun that also adds some illumination to the civil war going on inside your head. What, in fact, will our narratress do when a moment like this comes? Do we have any right to assume that she’ll walk the straight & narrow path? To me, it seems like cheating to start playing the triumphant violins so soon in the story. It may just be my personal taste, but I tend to growl at happy endings, gift-wrapped morals and simple lessons. They tend to taste a little bit like a lollipop. Yes, sugar is good once in a while, but you can’t make a meal of it. Of course, you wanted to write a thank-you to me and it must have seemed the right thing to do to end on a high note. So it depends how we look at the poem. If it’s meant for the inside of a Hallmark card, then it does the job well. But as a stand-alone poem, it doesn’t quite ring true. In fact, you admit this yourself very clearly. You just wrote to me something like, “I don’t even know why you have faith in me anymore. Whenever I review my life, I feel like a fake.” If this is the truth, then why doesn’t it show up in the poem? Your poem’s ending would lead me to believe almost the opposite — that you are, at long last, at peace with yourself, that you have killed your inner demons and are finally and irreversibly on the path towards the light. I shouldn’t need to say that I’d rather read a clumsy email containing the truth than a polished poem containing a lie. So how did this happen? How can we account for the difference? Where did this poem actually come from?
I think it came from the same place my friend’s CV came from. He spent his time trying to decide what his audience wanted to hear, rather than spending his time trying to get at the truth. The latter is what an artist does; the former is what a hack does. Hollywood, lamentably, is filled with formula screenwriters and directors who see what’s trendy and safe, and try to mimic that. The technical word for this is ‘fluff’; in cases where the fluff isn’t even carried out competently, the word is ‘cheese’. For an example of the difference between cheese and art, I can think of nothing better than to take a long look at the lyrics of Eminem’s brilliant “Lose Yourself”, which is much too smart to fall into the Disney trap. It takes a subject that most people imagine to be glorious — being a superstar — and describes it as 95% misery. That, to me, does ring true, and that is why it is art. The extremely elaborate construction of the rhyme scheme is why it is great art … but that’s for another conversation. Going back to form and specifics, and what can be done with a poem about a staircase, look how the black author Langston Hughes puts some texture in his poem, “Mother to Son”, which is very similar in concept to yours:
* Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor — Bare. But all the time I’se been a-climbin’ on, And reachin’ landin’s, And turnin’ corners, And sometimes goin’ in the dark Where there ain’t been no light. So boy, don’t you turn back. Don’t you set down on the steps ‘Cause you finds it’s kinda hard. Don’t you fall now — For I’se still goin’, honey, I’se still climbin’, And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. *
I copy this one for you now because your poem reminded me of it. Other things – I didn’t notice any grammar mistakes in your note, not that it would really matter if I had. As long as there is no violence done to the meaning of the words, who cares? There are a couple of typos in your poem (you write ‘feet’ where you should write ‘foot’; I corrected this already when I re-sent it to you the other day) but I make this kind of mistake all the time anyway. It’s nice to get the details right, but it’s better by far to address the elephant in the room.
The elephant that I can see most clearly is that I believe you bring to each conversation a lot of intellectual baggage and preconceptions which actively prevent you from listening to other points of view. I believe that you are wrong about a great many things, but that is no sin; we are all wrong from time to time, especially when we are young and just starting out. The sin is in reaching conclusions without hearing all the evidence, without even allowing yourself to acknowledge that you haven’t heard all the evidence. It struck me a long time ago that wherever logic is in conflict with wishful thinking, wishful thinking will tend to win the battle in your mind. And moreover, once the wishful thinking does win, it will quickly solidify into an unshakeable certainty, and all notions to the contrary will become literally unthinkable. This is a shame. When I hear someone make a claim that I believe is incorrect, the first thing I do is to ask what led them to that conclusion. If they’ve made some insight that I never thought of, I’ll see if this new insight is strong enough to change my opinion. If they cite information that I don’t know to be true, then I’ll ask where they got the information, and check it out for myself the first chance I get. If they turn out to be correct, I am always quick to thank them. It’s not every day, after all, that I am lucky enough to have my mind changed about something. If on the other hand their argument doesn’t seem to hold water, I’ll challenge it with my own argument, citing my own evidence. (I already have evidence to cite, of course, because otherwise, by definition, I wouldn’t have had the right to suspect something mistaken about the other person’s claim.) Again, if they are able to answer my argument, then I am in their debt because they have removed one mistake that had embedded itself in my view of the world. Only if my argument trumps theirs does it live to see another day. The previous two paragraphs are nothing original. They are the exact definition of science. They are the one and only way that knowledge can grow. They are the sole reason why airplanes built with respect to the principles of science tend to work, while airplanes built on principles of faith or wishful thinking always fail. One path leads to progress; the other path goes only to delusion and self-indulgence. One of the things I love most about you is that you are fresh and spontaneous and exciting and enthusiastic. (Okay, so that’s four things.) I wouldn’t want you to lose all that. I wouldn’t want you to become so careful about every word you say that you become too pensive like I am, or that you get too bogged down in what is proper and correct that you forget to let loose and be crazy and have fun. It’s a balance, and the balance is much too difficult for me to keep. I often wish I were much more easygoing and carefree than I am. I wouldn’t want you to think that I am disappointed when I see you make a mistake, or that I wish you were more like me.
Certainly not! But on the other hand I do see a lot of trouble on the horizon if you keep going the way that you are going. A writer who is scared of criticism is no writer at all. A woman who wants to be independent in the world cannot afford to fool herself about what the world is. Someone who voices her views often had better be able to defend them when other people hold them up to the light. She cannot run away forever, because she is only running herself into a corner. She creates a situation for herself where the people she most needs to run away from are the very people she is closest to, because they are the ones who know best that she is indeed an intellectual fake. As this situation develops, her stress levels will go through the roof because, as an independent woman who has forsaken the protection of home, she has no one else to lean on, and nowhere else to go.
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Except back to the staircase, which is where we are now anyway. Climb if you’re ready, but know what you are climbing. The first step is will. This is where you’re standing, but just barely. Hopefully by the end of this note, you’ll be able to decide whether you deserve to be on that step. The next is humility. Understand that you know nothing, and that you have to learn everything again if you are going to get anywhere. This then becomes the third step: Learning. I’m talking about serious nonfiction books. You haven’t read them, and you need to. Learn your crafts also. Practice your teaching by sitting in on other people’s classes, xeroxing more and more materials, asking questions about how to deal with these situations. Practice reading and then, much later, practice real writing. Make some money in the meantime at these jobs so you can support yourself, but whenever you have free time, you ought to be taking apart the houses that other writers have built, and seeing how the nuts and bolts fit into place. Somewhere in the future, you have a fourth step to look forward to, which is hard work. No getting around it. By now you know what good writing is, but knowing is not the same as doing. This is, I think, the step that has thus far defeated me. I have gone out very much on my own path, started everything fresh, revised every single one of my old views, and since then I have learned very much indeed. But I still haven’t produced anything at all that I would be proud to publish. That ought to bring about a moment’s pause for you, if you are still dreaming of a swift climb to the mountaintop. I have several years’ more experience out in the world than you do, and in terms of high-quality books, I’ve certainly read at least 250 more than you have. And still I have produced nothing. It’s not because I’ve been following the wrong path; it’s because I let myself become intimidated by the ‘hard work’ step, to the point where I dragged out the ‘learning’ step longer than was necessary. Your personality might put you in danger of making the opposite mistake, and trying to skip a step. Try it though, and you will certainly fall to the ground. But you have at least one advantage over me. You have a guy who will most definitely continue to kick you in the butt to keep you moving forward. I never had that, and I desperately need it. That is precisely why I suggested we write each other stories 6 months ago. The plan fizzled out, and I wish it hadn’t, because I really need something like this.
You asked why I still had faith in you. Maybe it’s because you need me to have faith in you. Or maybe because I need some company on this staircase, and for reasons of my own, I like your company more than anyone else’s. Maybe because I know that what you’ve got inside of your messed-up head is so interesting that I am willing to spend however long it takes to help you bring it out. So: Care to climb this staircase with me? Have you got the will at least?
Are you shit-scared? If so, then that fact had better be in your next poem. =)
Pierrick juggling in Mai Chau Village
Pip’s apartment
