It’s all in the word
I’ve had the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man sitting on top of the piano, holding up the Netflix queue for a week now—and while I should have been wrapping presents to box up and mail to Mom, I was beat last night and wanted nothing more than to escape into inspiration.
What a pick! Even Lila sat mesmerized by the singing, especially whenever Rufus and/or Martha Wainwright stepped in front of the microphone. And when Antony came out with his strange internal beat playing across his body, opened his mouth and released the sound of I don’t even know what, an angel? Is that too corny? Well, we all fell into such a hush and my eyes burned hot and teary, Lila leaned back into her daddy’s chest and smiled and didn’t move her gaze from the screen.
The artwork and poetry made me long for an analog artisitc expression again. I went to sleep thinking about this one poem I wrote about 6 years ago. How I worked at it for a very long time, a total of maybe 50 words, crossed out and reapplied on other lines until I reached the destination, how it had 50 incarnations. I was satisfied with that poem in the end, satisfied and even proud of the work I had put in to write something that had no unnecessary words. But I lost the final version with the edits, only have my first electronic draft left. It only has one phrase that rings solid and true—the one phrase that I recall stayed in the final.
I wonder if I worked with it again this year if it would be an entirely different poem because I’m mostly gone from the place of loss I was in when I wrote it the first time. Would it become a piece about gain?
Listening to Leonard speak about why he writes, and the many layers of reasons he’s travelled through over his life, I felt compassion for myself as a writer for the first time in such a long time. Not sure what that means for me, but for now I’m just going to enjoy the warm glow. I have to think my little prayer yesterday, my nod to the beat up Buddha in the garden, brought me to the place where I could hear last night. So good to notice when I’m flowing in the circle, when I’ve stepped out of the fight and just let the current carry me to the right place.
I’m thinking now of my lovely friend Kate, who is living with the loss of a very dear member of her family. I’m wishing this kind of softness for Kate, for her family. I’m sending you love my friend.
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
December 19th, 2006 at 8:19 am
Oh, I LOVE Leonard and the film. One of my girlfriends and I saw him coming out of a bar on Mountain Street in Montreal when we were seventeen. I wish we hadn’t squealed like idiots!
But how lovely you feel compassion for yourself as a writer. It’s such a brave thing to be. It takes so much time and faith. And it’s such a wild blessing. Seeing Leonard in the film made me feel what a beautiful spiritual practice the whole things is.
Let’s keep the words and love flowing….especially the words of love!
December 19th, 2006 at 10:49 am
Another movie to add to the Netflix queue!! Last week I watched WordPlay, and Sketches by Frank Gehry in one sitting… what a treat.
I’m sure you poem would be different today because you are different. Wouldn’t it be interesting, though, if you could start near the same beginning and work it again? Then place the two side by side?
December 19th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Probably the reason why I will never be a great poet is that I lose the feeling within a day. I have to sit down and intensively work on a peice until I have it, or don’t have it. If I don’t get it then, I never will.
But this is something I keep working on. Because as a professional writer, you should be able to sit down and conjur up the place where you were when you originally wrote something because that’s what a good poem does. But I guess if it can conjur up where you were, maybe it doesn’t need help?
I love Leonard Cohen. I haven’t seen that documentary and now I think I really need to.
I like reading your blog for quite a few reasons, but one of them is hearing what processes you’re going through with your writing. I need to know what different writers go through, I need to know more about the craft, about the people practicing it. I need to know how families fit into a writer’s life. I guess I had better start reading some books and watching some documentaries.
December 20th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Interesting to see you lose the poem about loss and ponder regaining one that would now tell a story about gain.