Posted by Atticus on August 1, 2004, at 22:28:56
In reply to Re: poem ... Three Brass Keys, 1998, posted by Jai Narayan on August 1, 2004, at 20:08:18
Thanks as always, Jai. I think it'll be okay to answer your questions at this site; they're all related to my writing, and to me, my writing has always been, now viewed in retrospect, tied to my mental illness. I say that because a confluence of events when I started the eighth grade, in 1984, really started me thinking about writing for a living. The first factor was the best English teacher I've ever had: Mr. Vetter. He exposed us to Steinbeck ("Of Mice and Men"), Bradbury ("Fahrenheit 451"), Hershey ("Hiroshima"), Orwell ("Animal Farm" and, of course, the year begged for "1984"), Poe ("The Telltale Heart"), and too many others for me to remember. We read a book a week, and had a composition or short story due every Monday. I loved this, and would spend all weekend doing longhand drafts of short stories. They started out as mostly "Twilight Zone" pastiches; dark and cynical tales with O'Henry-esque twist endings. Then Mr. Vetter took me aside and started impromptu tutorials on the value of characters, as opposed to the plot-driven pieces I was doing. The best and most lasting lesson I took away from him was that it was much better to demonstrate a character's inner life through his or her actions than by using the expositional crutch of inner monologues. I began to focus on building the stories around one telling visual moment, and jettisoned the supernatural stuff. I realized that real life and the complicated and often self-contradictory motivations of people made for much more interesting stories. Because I painted and was quite facile with pen and ink, I had developed a way of taking in the world that was primarily based on visual observation. Even now when I write, I still think in pictures and images first, then translate them into words. I began to experiment with visual and conceptual metaphors (which, like the "wasps" in my brain, allow me to express abstract concepts that I really don't know how to verbalize any other way). So a bit of blood spatter from my suicide attempt becomes the linchpin in "Spots." A yellowed newspaper with a wedding announcment lies at the heart of "Brittle." And a few tiny bits of metal become symbols of a life dreamt of but not lived in "Three Brass Keys." I need some kind of central visual hook to build the rest of the poem around. They all start in my head with one image that, to me, sums everything up. In any case, at the same time Mr. Vetter was teaching me to really approach writing seriously, my depression began to manifest itself at about age 13. The stories I wrote for him increasingly featured characters who were loners -- lost, dislocated souls who couldn't fit in -- or dark meditations on life's cruelties. Probably the best piece I wrote for him involved all the happy thoughts that were spinning through Lincoln's brain in his box at Ford's Theatre. The war was almost won, he'd been reelected, he was thinking ahead to a retirement filled with writing and public speaking. The last sound, the last sentence in the story, is the scuff of a shoe on the floor behind him. The implication I'd set up, of course, was that it was the sound of John Wilkes Booth sneaking into the presidential box. The whole story, as I saw it, took place in mental time, drawn out for a dozen pages, but really all occuring in the last millisecond before the assassin's bullet struck the president. Seen now, it's a pretty morbid thing for a freshly minted teenager to be writing about, but like everyone else, Mr. Vetter just saw it as teen angst. I, meanwhile, became increasingly withdrawn, until, as I think I mentioned in an earlier post, my mom put me in therapy for the first time at the age of 15. But I filled all that time alone by writing and writing, experimenting with various techniques I was picking up from the people whose work I was reading. I was particularly taken with the poesy of F. Scott Fitzgerald in "The Great Gatsby," and later, as a punker, I married that to the Beat sensibilities of Ginsberg ("Howl" struck me like a thunderbolt) and Kerouac. In high school, I eventually became editor of the student newsmagazine, and every issue included one short story by me filled with lacerating black humor and commentary about being in high school, about the school's administrators and bureaucrats in general, and about anything else that pissed me off. Boy, were they glad to see me graduate, though that was tempered by the lyrically cynical valedictory speech I gave (it even included a passage from "Howl" and "Dead Kennedys" lyrics). You could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium when I was done; it sure wasn't what they expected, but it had jolted 'em, and I think that was my main goal, anyway. That's kind of a long run for a short slide, as we used to say at the ad agency, in answer to your first question. Sorry. But it brings me to your second question: Am I any good at verbally telling stories? No. Too many lengthy tangential digressions that cause me to lose my story thread and stop and say, "I'm sorry. What was the question?" My speech patterns are frustratingly non-linear for most people. (This used to drive one particular pdoc I had up the wall.) For this reason, "talk" therapy doesn't always work for me very well, unless the pdoc is unusually patient and waits to see where I'm going with something. Poems work for me because there doesn't need to be as much transition as in prose; the form feels more stripped down to the bits of film in my head. No one else in my entire extended family on either side (which is huge -- remember, we're Irish) writes, paints, or draws, or has ever shown the slightest interest in it. My own immediate family are all lawyers -- my father, my sister, my brother-in-law, my brother -- and my mom was a legal secretary at a firm when she met my dad. There are a bunch of great verbal storytellers, most notably my favorite cousin, Kevin, who will have us laughing so hard that tears are streaming from our eyes and we can't breathe. But in terms of my love of and participation in the arts of writing, drawing and painting, I am entirely anomalous in the whole clan, and until recently, was widely regarded as a strange but harmless eccentric. I'm also the only ultra-liberal in an overwhelmingly conservative Catholic family, but my relatives have always seemed to feel that dovetailed with the art. Now that I've tried to kill myself and have the dubious distinction of being the only known member of the family to spend time in a psychiatric ward, they tend to all walk on eggshells around me, which I can understand, I guess. "Atomic Cafe" was about how this made me feel like I was now seen as a kind of unstabile nuclear weapon that had been planted in their midst, but I know their hearts are in the right places. I just need to give the situation more time. For most of them, I think, the suicide attempt came out of the blue, and there's still a bit of shock; for me, however, it's like a wave that's been slowing building for about 20 years finally reached tsunami proportions and broke. I think part of me has expected the suicide attempt for a long time. The incident described with the broken bottle in "Tyrannosaurus Meds" is only one of many, many times I held something sharp to my wrist but didn't go through with it, ending up only with what the my pdoc calls "hesitation marks." The good thing that came out of this year's long, strange sojourn to the bottom of the abyss and back is that with the help of the Effexor XR and a bunch of pdocs, I'm not only regaining my command of words again, but more significantly, I actually feel motivated to write poems for the first time in about a dozen years. It's like a painter who went blind, then got his vision back; it's pretty thrilling. At the same time, I've been expressing all these formerly bottled-up feelings about my life through the poetry at a pretty rapid rate. I think since my first post on July 19, I've put up about 9 or 10 poems and one short story (which I think, in retrospect, might have been more effective as a poem -- it doesn't have as much energy to it as I'd like). In the back of my mind, there's what I call the "Flowers for Algernon" effect. If you're unfamiliar with that novel, and the film, "Charley," that was made from it, it's about a mentally retarded man who is turned into a genius by a radical, experimental surgical technique. But it doesn't hold, and he feels his newfound intelligence slowly draining away again. There's a heart-rending speech he gives near the end of the book and the movie. I think one reason I'm putting out these new poems so fast is the underlying fear that for some reason, the Effexor XR will stop working, and I'll lose my words again. That does sometimes happen with ADs. In any case, that's probably way more than you bargained for, but there it is. Take care. :) Atticus
poster:Atticus
thread:372750
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040729/msgs/373008.html