Preterition

Still stuck with Casey. I know the first half is telegraphed, a few plot points strung together, and that’s what’s stopping me from doing the second half: I wanted to throw down the bones of the story, but it needs more than just the bones. (Semi-spoiler: Chekhov’s advice re hanging a rifle on the wall in the first act applies. You’ll see those nipples again. And, of course, it gets more grim.) John, in his joking suggestion for a title, points out that the bones without the flesh are dull. I’d tried to convince myself that the distanced, too-swift bullet-point style was somehow mythic, fairy-tale-ish, but, well, not quite, Mike. So the first half need revision and fleshing-out, and that means that — despite a couple abortive attempts — the second half ain’t going anywhere anytime soon, or at least not until we get some character details. Until we we find out that Casey asks Dad to take him to a Slayer show. Until we find out that Mom drinks mimosas when she thinks she’s catching a cold.

Longer perspective: in 1997, I made the mistake many English MFAs make, thinking that since, more than anything else, I loved to read fiction, I ought to write it. Not so. I see a lot of creative writing MFAs here at Big State U who think the same thing.

You’ve got to have a big ego to go after a graduate degree in creative writing. In my case, the talent certainly wasn’t of a corresponding magnitude. And the funny thing is this: lately, I’ve come to enjoy reading poetry far more than fiction.

I’ve been wanting to buy myself the Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry, but I checked out The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry from the library, and it only makes me want to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on books by Elizabeth Lowell, Rita Dove, Richard Wilbur, Edward Hirsch, Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, and –

He Held Radical Light

A. R. Ammons

He held radical light

as music in his skull: music

turned, as

over ridges immanences of evening light

rise, turned

back over the furrows of his brain

into the dark, shuddered,

shot out again

in long swaying swirls of sound:

reality had little weight in his transcendence

so he

had trouble keeping

his feet on the ground, was

terrified by that

and liked himself, and others, mostly

under roofs:

nevertheless, when the

light churned and changed

his head to music, nothing could keep him

off the mountains, his

head back, mouth working,

wrestling to say, to cut loose

from the high, unimaginable hook:

released, hidden from stars, he ate,

burped, said he was like any one

of us: demanded he

was like any one of us.

(McClatchy, J. D., ed. The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Vintage, 1990.)

I think one of my happiest recent moments was when my godfather’s wife shared the story of finding him — a Marine gunnery sergeant, Korean War veteran, and professor emeritus of entomology 40 years older than me — reading poetry out loud to himself, thinking he was alone, in his booming baritone. She told that story, and I smiled to myself and thought: He does it, too.