Tag Archives: Words

January 21, 2013 · 4:42 pm

Writing: Getting to It

Inauguration day, as a moment of beginning and continuation, strikes me as a fine day to begin writing again.  So here we go.

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After a great Christmas in New York, where I got to hang out with my NYC gang—namely, Amy Berryman and Daniel and Grace Berryman (my amazing kids), not to mention my lovely wife Anjie—taking in all things Christmas (except Rockefeller Center, can you imagine?) and eating day after day like I might never get another meal, and after a solid week of teaching at Abilene Christian University, where 25 top of the class young people jousted with me about art, music, meaning, faith, pop culture, sex, aesthetics, poetry, and Les Miserables, I am now firmly seated at my desk, my computer yawning threats at me (or is that just boredom) if I don’t get to it with my 2013 agenda: I intend to complete two plays and a novel.

I’d better get to writing.

I’ve got my allies arrayed close by: Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, the Zanders’ The Art of Possibility, Bayles and Orland’s Art and Fear, Robert Genn’s ongoing letters from the Painters’ Keys, Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Stephen King’s On Writing, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Eric Maisel’s Deep Writing, and of course, Robert McKee’s Story.   Then there are the fiction writers to both inspire and terrify.  So far I’ve been listening to Walker Percy’s voice in The Moviegoer and John Updike’s in the brilliant and strangely upsetting novel Rabbit, Run.  (Did Updike know these people?)

Will books and writers help?   Do they help you?   They do me, especially when I open them, read them, listen to them, and make some kind of effort to let their words and wisdom work on me.

And then there are my good friends and colleagues who accompany me on this journey of writing by reading my tomes and offering varying kinds of feedback.  Of course, with plays you need actors and workshops and directors to help you find your way, and I’m grateful to have some skilled folks to help me sort things out.   The novel?   This is where the brave folks come out, willing to read all manner of craziness in hopes of coming across a solid storyline or two.  We’ll see what happens there.

And hopefully, I’ll get a couple of the children’s things out as well.   Sending queries to agents just now, and no bites yet.

Strange to be my age and still pitching as if I were a youngster just starting out.   Before long I’ll turn into one of those inspirational older folks young people point to in shaking-head wonder, thinking, why doesn’t he just give it up?   Can’t give it up, though…I feel as if I’m just getting underway.

So February 1st starts the New Year for me—January is far too connected to December to make for a clean break between eras, so I wait for February.   That’s the day the new grind begins and focus returns.    Oh, I know, it ought to start today, and truth is, with this bit of writing, it’s begun.   Pushing back the dark one more time, ordering the chaos, doing the best I can with this image of God thing.

How’s your year going?

Time waits for no one…

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December 11, 2012 · 6:43 pm

Poetry Tuesday: 100,000 Words

The most significant writing I did in 2012?  Hard to say yet, but here’s one contender: over one hundred thousand words in lines of free verse tetrameter.

100,000 words in sessions of 15-20 minutes a day 5-6 times a week.  Had no idea until I transferred all of it into Word files.

Is it any of any good?  Oh, I don’t know…but there are some pieces I like.  I’ve posted a few over on a poetry page, so you can go read if you’d like.   And I’d love to hear some feedback if you’ve got any.  If not, enjoy and slip silently into the night.

Why tetrameter?

I have no idea.

My first thought was to emulate Czeslaw Milosz (as if), whose poetry kept me going for about eighteen months in daily, early morning readings.   His ability to capture the fleeting moment, especially on behalf of some unknown person that he found captivating, spoke to me of the worth of each man and woman, every day of their lives, regardless of what they were doing, or what was happening to them.

After writing a bit of verse with Milosz in mind, I decided I needed a frame, a boundary that was a bit stricter.  So I looked at the ceiling and thought, “Pentameter.”  Then I thought, “No, too many syllables.”   Why?  Just an intuition, so I pulled it back to eight syllables, and wondered about rhyme, and thought, “Nope.”  So free verse tetrameter, it is.

And I began.

I’ve written about family, about love, about God, about religion, about coffee (lots about coffee), and all manner of art, beauty, and questions.  And sex.   (I often wondered if I was allowed to be writing about sex, but hey, there you go.  Curious now, aren’t you?)

Those lines are in the lock box for now.

Anyway, I learned one more time that boundaries and frames are good things, allowing for connections and ideas that you would otherwise never find, never see coming.

If you’re interested, here’s a piece to get you started:

 

STAMEN WET WITH POLLEN GLITTER

Stamen wet with pollen glitter
Thrust from red centers of soft yellow,
Inspiring the middle aged man
Wandering the hills looking for light.

White roots reach over sloping ground
Like arms sinewy and strong,
Gripping earth, holding place for good,
Come hell or tsunami or dark night.

Yellow-bright leaves, big with old life
Nestle against these arteries,
These tree branches skimming the earth,
Sighing a last time, thankful for wind.

They fill with morning light’s best glow,
And shine as best they can at Heaven,
Knowing God catches those who fall
In proper season, hearts effort-weary,
Done with trying, done with longing.

Stillness settles, and breath eases
Away, slows as if at ease, and closes
Out its long, long run of living.
Who knew leaves sometime fall in Spring?

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September 25, 2012 · 5:41 am

Poetry Tuesday: Make Me A Tower (Don’t Reduce Me)

What if we treated each other like poems?   Things of beauty to be broken apart and experienced instead of commodities to be judged?

Here’s a piece that I’ve performed a couple of times, down at the open mic of the Seattle Poetry Slam and then in a worship gathering at the Northwest Church.   (edited slightly for the church performance.)   There’s a series of these poems based on the notion of “Don’t Reduce Me.”   Reductionism is at the heart of stereotyping, and the fact that we often deal with each other as if a single fact (skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever) tells us everything we need to know.   Truth is, identity is mysterious and emergent, and we should all pause at the holy mystery that is the other person in front of us.   Needless to say, life goes too fast to allow such a thing.

To read each other like poems, we’d have to slow down.    Way down…

—–

MAKE ME A TOWER

Don’t reduce me.
Make me a tower.
Shower my mind with reasons
Why days all of grime
Can turn into fine
Seasons of nothing but better.
Better yet, can you cut through the clutter
And just sputter me out some hope here?
I’m trying to cope here, and I don’t want to shutter down,
So please—just utter me some good.
Give me some kind of beauty
I’m looking for my heart; I lost it, in part, to duty
And fear of hell, and fell notions of holy.
Now only oceans of you can open the fist.
I missed this,
Missed the gist of this.
Don’t dismiss the potential for bliss here, people.
What I need are open faces,
Designs of production making praises that function
Like light on the leaves of opening trees.
I need to receive the sun’s gift, that spark
That runs down the dark, runs down the miles
Arriving to open the sad into smiles, through all of life.
A kingdom of good I would make if I could.
Now, that attention you pay,
The fine notice you take,
It starts turning the pages,
It rattles the cages inside this man, and
This dead heart starts to shake, starts to quake, and maybe it has to break,
But it can, in time, start to wake up, and by God,
It’s sublime to find in the fine detail what really might be a human face.
I’m more than a race, some type and some chatter,
Be in my now, right here has to matter
We all got some color, some black, white, and brown,
We’re deeper than that once the bias breaks down
Let’s get past it, let’s ask it, whether all that typing and crap
Is what’s wrapping our spirits up so damn tight,
That we fear it, we won’t come near it, our own spirit, we steer it into hiding,
Riding straight into the abyss,
Missing what “could have been” in our time.
Put your mind to better use, and try to deduce the me,
The whole me—I been standing here the whole frickin’ time,
Man—the mission is the recognition
Of the emergent, towering woman and man,
That powerful I am that stands in every common
Image carrier of God.
I’m not a body, I’m not a soul-
I’m a human, I’m whole
An entire being, tired of being abused.
Of being used so poorly.
I sorely hope in the future, we can just refuse to do that,
And choose to see each other—
Don’t reduce me.

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January 26, 2012 · 8:24 am

There’s A Lot To Deal With

Infographics and wordmapping have caught my eye lately.   So when I found Inkscape, I decided to start fiddling around with it.   Here’s a first attempt at beginning to think visually about things running around in my head.

The biggest objection will probably be the “I” being in the middle, but I put it there simply because it’s our perceptual center, and we can’t escape that position.  We can imagine and rethink and reposition ourselves in our mind’s eye so that we know that we are not the center of things…and we do that from the place of our own centeredness, looking out.   All the information, images, and ideas that come through our processes of thinking have to pass through that center we call the self, so I leave that I-ness in the center of things.

There are a world of things to think about when it comes to the way we are ordered in mind, body, spirit, and soul–and who knows if there is an ontologically correct way of referring to them or ordering them.   But how we map it out is part of the (largely unseen and unnoticed) daily task.

So if you happen by and have a look at this thing, I’m wondering what you think I left out or misplaced.   It’s an interesting tool to talk about the way we see our lives.

Obviously, it’s a Christian viewpoint, though I’ll bet many of my Christian friends will have a thing to say about how all things Christian enter the picture.

Another note:  at this point, I’m not trying to really make things clear, nor am I trying to simplify.  At least not yet.

I will keep tweaking this, I’m sure, but at least you can’t say you didn’t have anything to think about today.

How do you map things…?    

 

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January 4, 2012 · 7:46 am

Breakthrough

This morning, I wish I was a poet.

I’m sitting in the middle of an experience that’s hard to describe, and yet, it couldn’t be simpler.  To put it into words seems ridiculous.

It reminds me of the day my first child was born.

It’s trying to turn a key in a lock in a door for over 30 years, and suddenly there’s a click, and the doorknob is freed.

It’s realizing the full weight of your own foolishness, and shaking it off like an old, well-loved, but too long worn shirt.

It’s realizing that God knew exactly what He was up to when He made a human being.

It’s mystery begetting mystery, and being overwhelmed with gratitude that you don’t control much of anything.

It’s realizing that all the stuff you thought you were…you’re not.

It’s free-fall into freedom.

It’s realizing that like the Apostle John explained about the Christ (John’s Gospel, Chapter 13)…you come from God, and you’re on your way back.  What else in the world is there to do but serve?

It’s realizing that when God created humans “in his image”, he didn’t leave out the “I am” part.

It’s detachment, like I’ve read about for years, but in experience, is nothing like what I thought those writings meant.

It’s a future opening like a heretofore unseen flower, petals in colors and textures I’d didn’t know were possible.

It’s gut-laughter in the middle of the night, connected to the long ache that’s always been there, but that is just now eased into friendly hope.

It’s wondering if you’ve lost your mind, but the coherence is too clear and sharp, like bright stars in dark, cold, midnight country sky.

It’s just an idea, a collision of thoughts, and an understanding that gives up all pretense of understanding.

It’s finding that faith, indeed, is what justifies life, and that the faith you thought you were on your way to losing has been powering up deep in the hidden places to await it’s  appointed emergence.

It’s realizing that indeed, “All is well.”

It’s weeping for love unrecognized and unknown.

It’s running toward home, where love and welcome waits, but it’s new, it’s surprising, and it’s enough.

It’s now, it’s here, it’s presence.

It’s also beyond words.   So enough.

A glimpse into Pascal’s fire?   

 

 

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