Not much creative writing this week, but some some creative reading via Garielle Lutz, Gordon Lish, and Osip Mandelstam.
I am getting over a sinus infection, which does not make a clear (or creative) head to writ. So this week I sought creative clarity mostly through reading. I had taken a private poetry workshop where I was rightfully told parts of a specific poem were too abstract and not enough clear. And though it was very sound advice, as I removed the abstract lines and attempted to clarify the others, I reached a banality and felt something float away. I lost all summoning feeling, all language that made the intangible visceral. I realized what I wanted from my own poetry was language not perfectly understood nor even deeply felt but rather profoundly sensed, visually and aurally.
To be clear, I think I mis-followed good advice. In the process of seeking intellectual clarity I lost my guttural sense. I believe one can write with both. So I went back to reading. One of my favorite writers to read for both pleasure and study is Garielle Lutz. She writes sentences poetic, arresting, and unhinged—by which I mean literally unfastened to any obsessive narrative. Hers is writing that doesn’t hold linear narrative as its center, though there is a loose, circling one present. Instead, each sentence announces language over story, is meant to invade and summon, deepen and build. Each sentence is a world built upon itself.
You can’t begin to grasp Lutz without understanding her teacher. Lutz studied under renowned editor Gordon Lish, whose writing philosophy is based on something he calls “consecution.” I found this description, by Christine Schutt, helpful:
Each sentence is extruded from the previous sentence; look behind when you are writing, not ahead. Your obligation is to know your objects and to steadily, inexorably darken and deepen them…Query the preceding sentence for what might most profitably be used in composing the next sentence…The sentence that follows is always in response to the sentence that came before.1
Writer George Carver wrote about the experience of attending Lish’s workshops in the ‘90s, which sounded absurd and transmuting, akin to a kind of hazing:
If you came to be coddled, if you came for support, if you wanted a parent, you were headed for disappointment. If you wanted to have your say but could not say it well, you would not be heard. If you had weak boundaries, you were in trouble: a woman passed out cold in one class, an editor from Esquire threw up in another. If you considered yourself politically correct or any category of citizen ending in ist, you’d likely leave by the end of the first class. If you thought you could top Lish, you were in for a surprise. If you did, if you could, he would be the first person to jump to his feet and sing your praises uptown and down.2
Carver took notes. I found some of them shifting:
With your language, you are looking for a new heart.
And,
When the voice isn’t your voice, it’s the voice of death.
Or,
I’m not telling. I’m not teaching. I’m not hiding. I’m using words to reveal.
One note in particular marks Lish’s philosophy clearly:
Put yourself in a state of mind, positing a blank frame. Into the blank frame, cleared of everything—expectation, ideas, teachers, whatever—introduce an object (in the case of a novel—several) which can be anything seen, heard, touched, perceivable, sensual—to the exclusion of all other objects. Be open, truly open, in the presence of what truly fascinates you. The more powerful your ability to exclude, the more successful you will be.
Lutz’s writing most fully embodies this philosophy; each sentence justly conjures.
I mean, there was something physical about the way I kept ringing her up—a finger maybe in the ribs.3
…a finger maybe in the ribs.
I thus had an inherited house all to myself. But if I came around to learning that places can have consequences too, I hardly mean only the easy contagions of furniture, or any room’s inevitable, irreversible digestion of its contents. What I wish to insist is that anything you look at can have a way of holding itself against everything else.4
It did not surprise me to discover Lutz was a late bloomer; “I came to language only late and only peculiarly,” she wrote in a lecture given to students at Columbia called “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.” She found a language she yearned to access within writings by Lish’s proteges—Schutt, Dan DeLillo, Barry Hannah. She wrote:
…virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.5
I, too, seek a sentence that …when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality… which is why I once constructed a writing series called In Praise of a Line, where I took sentences out of context just to revel in them. I see many of Toni Morrison’s sentences able to stand in similar omnitude, having strength within or without context.
As I was reading through Lutz’s short stories (many only a page or two’s length)— I thought of Osip Mandelstam, and lines like these:
There are women of budding blood, aboriginal earth.6
Or,
I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear.7
Also,
The bread is blight and the air’s acetylene, Wounds impossible to doctor.
And,
Unslaked sky. Sleetlight of stars. And the stallioned Bedouins, avatars Of the day’s vagueness, and the pain Of vagueness, close their eyes and improvise
Unslaked sky. Sleetlight of stars.8 I thought of a poem in particular in which Mandelstam seems to precede Lish in philosophy. Bearing in mind his own oppressive existence—imprisonment, torture, and exile beneath the Stalin regime—language and his right to use it consumed Mandelstam’s poetry. A poem was not just an idea but the language itself, and what language might create, sonically, visually, aesthetically, emotionally.
Not One Word
Not one word.
Purge the mind of what the eye has seen:
Woman, prison, bird.
Everything.
Otherwise some wrong dawn
Your mouth moves
And a sudden pine
Needles through your nerves,
A trapped wasp crazes
In your brain,
And in the old desk’s ink stain
A forest mazes
Inward and inward
To the unpicked
And sun-perfected
Blueberries
Where you now and now always
Must stand,
An infinite inch
Between that sweetness
And your hand.
Inward and inward9, as deep and as much consecution as Lutz’s narratives of steep verbal topography. Rereading Mandelstam and Lutz (and thus, Lish) invigorated my own writing and creative impulse. I was directed back to writing’s most basic and contained element: the depth of sentence. And the way I desire to write and read a good one, one by one, again and again, alone and consecutive.
Schutt’s description found within this essay: “The Consecution of Gordon Lish: An Essay on Form and Influence,” by Jason Lucarelli. https://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/02/04/the-consecution-of-gordon-lish-an-essay-on-form-and-influence-jason-lucarelli/
“Lish, Gordon: Notes And Reflections Of A Former Student,” by George Carver. https://www.pifmagazine.com/2000/11/lish-gordonnotes-and-reflections-of-a-former-student/
A line from “All Told,” by Garielle Lutz, The Complete Gary Lutz. p. 233.
Another line from “All Told,” by Garielle Lutz, The Complete Gary Lutz. p. 233.
I highly suggest reading the entire lecture, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.” https://www.thebeliever.net/the-sentence-is-a-lonely-place/
“There Are Women,” by Osip Mandelstam. From Stolen Air, translated by Christian Wiman. p. 70.
“And I Was Alive,” by Osip Mandelstam. From Stolen Air, translated by Christian Wiman. p. 71.
“Night Song,” by Osip Mandelstam. From Stolen Air, translated by Christian Wiman. p. 6.
“Not One Word,” by Osip Mandelstam. From Stolen Air, translated by Christian Wiman. p. 22.