I had to learn to write differently. Shorter lines, shorter subjects, stronger words. Like arrows, or darts, aimed straight to the heart. Paying more attention to how words look on the printed page, and to how they sound to the ear (whether read aloud or, as we say, “silently.”) So I stepped along the path of poetry.
The sound does matter. Really, it is a good idea to read poems aloud, twice. And also, when you are doing the writing, to try to pay attention to each of the sounds with your “inner ear.”
In a way, this new discipline of poetry was a throwback to the first writing I did professionally, when I was very young, and completely untrained, totally.
I had lots of tasks on the Jefferson Parish Times of Metairie, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans. I went there, by a southbound train, to escape from my junior year in college (1964), and lived in a cheap apartment in what I imagined to have once been the slave quarters of a lovely larger home. The street car went down the center of a broad boulevard, St. Charles Avenue, and it still runs there now--the oldest continuously operating streetcar in the world. My fellow housemates were all Cubans, I think, and we ate beans and rice for every meal, and I found out that there were quite a few different kinds of beans and a number of ways of preparing them. I suppose it is largely a matter of the seasoning.
On the train, we had eaten fried chicken from a white paper bag. You order it at one stop, and get your dinner down the line at the next.
It was an adventure! I considered it exotic, very “romantic,” and thought often of Ernest Hemingway’s days in Key West, between the two Great Wars. I did have a little grey portable typewriter with me for typing out notes and letters (all of which are by now lost, I guess). Across the hallway was a man who was often quite drunk. He would yell out curses at random intervals in the night. Sometimes there would be the crash of glass. We didn’t talk much.
The first real writing tasks (at least that I recall) were obituaries.
That seems to me a good chore for a neophyte writer. You want to help pay adequate tribute to the deceased; to please the relatives, the friends, to whom the deceased was beloved--hopefully (although of course sometimes not). And you want to offer an accurate, meaningful summary of a life (long or short) spent well (or perhaps badly). But really, after someone has died you do tend to give them a break: to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Anyhow, composing obituaries was a real writing job, since I got paid, but it also was a significant responsibility, which I took seriously. Pretty different from writing a term paper at school, where the only person you are trying to please is the teacher, who after all is required to read your work. Obituaries, in contrast, involve real people, real blood, real tears. There is an audience that is involved personally.
Obituary-writing wasn’t the only craft I began to learn at the JPT. Those were the old-time days, and stories written by us on the staff were typed into some kind of a machine (never knew the name of it, or have else forgotten). And then they were spit out onto long skinny ribbons of paper, quite narrow--exactly the width of a newspaper column, as that is what they were to become.
Now, in our modern era, there are computers of a kind that hadn’t been invented back then, which can move and reformat pages automatically. And you can insert photos or ads or whatnot and they get wrapped around by the type just perfectly. It is easy, and a pretty slick trick. We have done it for Christmas letters, for example.
But at that time, a relatively primitive era in the document-preparation business, the type was printed onto strips of paper and then the strips of paper had to be laid out in the form of a newspaper page, with all the headings and so forth in their type of various sizes, and then actually cut by scissors to fit. And this was the trick: you had to write in such a way that the story could be ended, and the paper clipped off, at any point, depending upon available space, and it had to make sense wherever it ended. So there was no way to build up to a grand conclusion, because you the writer never knew for sure if the “conclusion” you had planned on would even make it into the story at all, or simply end up as scrap on the floor.
Then a photographic metal plate was made from which the actual pages were printed, and the newspapers produced, and everyone would work together to bundle them up and prepare big stacks for delivery. We had a mixed-race operation, whites and blacks, and everyone did work together, but they didn’t eat together. Ever, I think.
Again, we usually had fried chicken.
It was good discipline. These early habits did, I think, stand me well as a developing writer. Later I went on to more substantial jobs: longer articles and thick reports, sometimes several volumes--mostly for the government, or in any case about the government. Those more substantial products had a foreword, chapters, subheads, footnotes, frequent charts and graphs, and sometimes a separate appendix or two. Often, a slim executive summary was also prepared, recognizing that busy legislators and executives wouldn’t necessarily dwell on every word, though perhaps their staff might.
That is how I made a living for 20-odd years. And I did fine. I got promoted. I was recognized in various ways, honored with some awards, got criticized by political or intellectual rivals. Regardless, though, I was usually quite proud of my work, and still am during the process of dispersing the remnants of a long career. And--I was paid well enough to support a family, have a wife, and have a child (who is now grown, and this week now has a child of his own).
But that all fell apart in January 2003. It was my worst year--2003--just like 1967 was in many ways my best year. Right at the start, on January 9th, my wife, Barbara, passed away. T-cell lymphoma they called it. Just 60 years old, with no bad habits, and a truly warm heart. Still makes me angry. They took forever to diagnose her. She was barely treated at all.
We didn’t enjoy Christmas that year. And it is hard for me to do so still.
I had serious health setbacks, too. And I had to resign from work, which is hard to give up when it is the chief source (as for many men, and some women) of a sense of accomplishment and the nexus for close friendships.
But, those enormously sad, totally spiritually-draining events, brought me back to short-form writing again. I prepared an obituary; a summary of her life, and the story of our life together.
And, also at that time I turned to poems, to writing poetry, which I hadn’t done much of before. Mostly for personal relief. I learned the other day that Abraham Lincoln did that too, I believe when his mother passed away. It is a healing form of expression.
Poems can of course be long, but they can be short, too. Some of mine were short. Indeed, I’ve tried to write some very very brief poems, for example in the form of Japanese Haiku: 5-7-5, dum-te-dum-tee dum. Seventeen beats in total, with a reference to the season of the year.
And, I have even challenged the participants in our “personal poetry sharing circle” to be briefer than that--to write a poem of only one word in length, if you can imagine that:
Just one
1
Nobody has done so yet, but I do think I will keep on trying.
Ohhmmmm
I guess that, in the end, I didn’t turn out to be very much like Hemingway. But I do like writing poems, though.
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