Brian Kindall's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-poetry"

I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part One – In which I Embrace a Splendid Squalor)

When a young person is starting out in the writerly arts, the first thing he or she must do is ask three soul-searching questions –

1 - Where do I fit into this wide, book-filled universe?
2 - What do I have to write about that will further humanity?
3 - How can I be cooler than Jack Kerouac?

Hemingway was big, too. But even old, uncool people liked him, so Kerouac, being more exclusively admired by the younger set, became my standard for literary coolness. He was syncopated Jazz Scat on paper. He was a resounding Beat in the big drum of the Cosmos. He was everything I longed to be – a spiritual seeker and life embracer, a marrow sucker and word experi-mentor.
Granted, I didn’t have Kerouac’s capacity for drugs and booze. I was more of a teetotaler in those days (although I had experimented with strong coffee). And I had yet to travel cross-country by the seat of my pants, as Jack had done in On The Road. So I had to take stock of my other virtues. Upon close inspection of my own limited journey so far, I decided the two greatest strengths I had going for me as a writer were –

1 – I was heartbroken.
2 – I was poor.

Admittedly, it wasn’t much to work with. In fact, anyone with any savvy would likely have sensed from the outset that it was a surefire recipe for sentimental, self-absorbed drivel. But as Emerson said – A man must suck the sucker he is given to suck. (Paraphrased) And so I started to carefully shape and craft my persona.

My first move was to find new housing. Since starting college, I had lived with four other guys in a rented house. They were great friends, but they had little interest in traveling the same dark pathways of the psyche that I needed to explore in order to become a literary giant. Besides that, our digs were just too lavish. It was undermining my angst. How could I plumb my mortal and forlorn depths if I was sitting around in brightly lit rooms with these good-natured comfort seekers in puffy chairs, watching music videos, while eating relatively well-rounded meals? No. It was obvious to me. If I was ever to succeed, I needed squalor of the variety enjoyed by George Orwell or Henry Miller. I needed misery. I needed solitary confinement in the drabbest cell I could find.
Now this wasn’t Paris or New York, but Moscow, Idaho, a town of no more than 18,000 inhabitants at the time, and drab cells – looked down upon by the general public – were not easy to come by. But at last I found just what I needed in a sagging, three story building right in the center of town. I took a corner room on the second floor for eighty-five dollars a month. It had high peeling ceilings and three tall windows looking out onto the main street on one side, while three more windows on another wall looked over the town square. A fountain geysered below me in the square – its spume sometimes wafting through my open windows on breezier days – and laughing children often floated sticks and paper boats in the fountain while their parents waited nearby. A clock on a pole told dubious time beside the fountain. A bar was just across the street, and oblivion-seeking college kids poured in and out of its doors most nights until the wee hours.
My room was furnished with a sink, a hotplate, and a shelf complete with a bowl a plate and a pot. It came with a half-size Frigidaire refrigerator that hummed the doleful, meditative tune of a Cistercian monk. The room had a large bed and a wide table made of boards. A spoke-backed chair sat before the table, and an armchair was placed in the corner where the windowed walls came together in a sort of cloistered nook. I also had a lamp on a flexible pole that I would move back and forth from the table to the armchair, depending upon where I was writing or reading. A steam radiator stood like a medieval sculpture under one window. The communal bathroom – la pièce de résistance – was down the hall. My room emanated an odor of rodents and lead paint and long-gone budding poets. Silverfish scurried into cracks whenever the lights were flipped on. Street noise was constant. The place was squalor incarnate.
My favorite touch was the ice cream shop on the ground floor directly beneath my room. This seemed profoundly fitting to me. While the masses were enjoying their sugary, double-scooped treats down below, I – the self-sacrificing wordsmith at the edge of society – would be laboring on high to create for them offerings of a more soulful worth.
I took two classes at the university that fall – Shakespeare and Modern American Poetry – since that was all I could afford. I eschewed student loans in those days because, I reasoned, that would only obligate me to the Machine, turning me into a slave as I struggled to pay them back. Poetry was a precarious occupation after all, sometimes not paying big money until a poet was well into his thirties. Besides, taking only two classes would afford me more time to pour out my heart into the beautifully cadenced sonnets and poignant villanelles I saw drifting before the open window of my mind’s eye.
Ensconced firmly in my splendid squalor, wearing my heart on my sleeve, with the ghost of Kerouac hovering over my shoulder, there was nothing left but for me to get to work.
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Published on July 13, 2015 09:17 Tags: jack-kerouac, moscow-idaho, sacrifice-for-art, squalor, writing-poetry

I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part Two – In Which I Venture onto the Treacherous Byways of Language)

You wouldn’t know it unless you’ve tried it, but writing poems can be difficult, dangerous work. Those who look down on poets as namby-pamby couch loungers in plush purple bathrobes are in for a surprise if they ever deign to take up pen and paper and give it a go for themselves. The mental stress alone is more than most mortals can endure. The hunt for metaphors is exhausting. Imagine your soul is a cabbage. Life is your vinegar. Now run it all through a mill churning on slow speed. The resulting slaw is your poem. May the gods grant you talent enough to make it palatable. And, Oh, Brother! May you survive the punishing process.

As a young hopeful settled into my sanctum sanctorum – or rented room – I began my apprenticeship in the disciplines of poesy. I studied the old masters – Milton, Chaucer, Donne, and Byron – and I studied the masters closer to my own time as well – Eliot, Stevens, Cummings, Pound, and Plath. I blithely fell to the wiles of both free verse and rhyme. I heroically galloped into heroic couplets, and fearlessly ambled into iambic pentameter. I scribbled haiku until I was punch-drunk with nuance.
For the first time in my life, I began to really probe the gutworks of language. Sure, I had been speaking and writing in more or less comprehensible English for quite a while, but like most people, I had been blind to its sparkle, deaf to its musicality. Now, suddenly, words became amazing to me. How could these little gasps of breath, blown as they are over our tongues and teeth and lips, carry so much meaning and magic? How could a string of words send our spirits soaring with happiness in one moment, but then, when rearranged, crush us with their gloomy weight in the next? That these spoken words could then be transposed into abstract written symbols, and then strung together into lyrical epics of lasting worth to the passing generations – well, that was almost incomprehensible to me. And yet, struggle to comprehend it I did. For long hours. Day into night into day. Week after week.
I didn’t recognize it when it first started happening to me, but writing poetry was slowly becoming a sickness. I began sleeping at odd hours. I kept to myself. I broke into sweats. I mumbled and giggled in my empty room, as if I were channeling whatever depraved or moonstruck personality I imagined speaking and giggling the lines of my current poem. The most distracting symptom of my malady was when a single word would lodge in my brain, vibrating in my head like a pop song, or the buzz of a mosquito, refusing to leave me be until I found a place for it in a poem. I couldn’t shake it loose. The word owned me like a slave. These were sometimes only benign words like toaster or happy or lark, but could sometimes be weirder words like ennui or hobbledehoy or floccinaucinihilipilification. Some of these words were so persnickety and tenacious that I would have to go for a walk – get them out in the open – just so I could see more clearly what I was battling.
These walks were like something from the realm of zombies. On one plane I was a young man aimlessly strolling the quaint suburban lanes of my little college town, while on another plane I was a desperado seeking escape in my turbid brain from the twisting, hazardous pathways of language. This other wordy way was full of pitfalls and terrors. It was full of shadows and dead ends. I remember one night following down an obscure path that lead me tumbling headlong into the dumbstruck conclusion –
“There is no suitable rhyme for foible!”
After the shock and disappointment had passed, and after the fear of being lost had subsided, I began to fantasize about starting a movement based on my new discovery. Surely it would revolutionize poetry. No one would ever read literature in the same way again. I would call it Foibleism. I would be its chief practitioner and founding member. It would be a poetry based on hopelessly rhymeless words strung together in nonsensical patterns. Years hence, when students cracked open their books on the history of verse, they would find a portrait of me with a little blurb underneath that read – “Brian Kindall – daring… brilliant… radical … said to be the first Foibleist.”

Looking back on that time, I can see that poetry might well have killed me. I was obviously too young and untried to ever truly meet its challenges. I was travelling on nothing but enthusiasm and the desperate need to shape my recent heartbreaking experiences into something I could clutch and cherish and then throw out to the world so it could see how I’d suffered. All very romantic. But my skills were next to nonexistent. My naiveté laughable. Still, the sickness had me pretty bad. Nothing, it seemed, could save me.

Summer passed and autumn took hold. The nights grew frosty without me even noticing. I grew sicker. The true stuff of poetry – all that life passing beyond my window – was lost to me. I was too immersed in the detail of craft, too bound to my own blinkered tragedies, to ever notice my need for new lifeblood. And then one day, thankfully, something happened.
The fountain in the square outside my window had been running nonstop since I had moved into my room. It had become a sort of white noise, always burbling and splashing in the background. But one afternoon someone decided fall was far enough along that it was time to turn off the fountain before it froze up the works. A switch was thrown; the fountain stopped.
The sudden change in the air was enough to cause me to look up, something I hadn’t done in weeks. And when I did, my eyes, as if guided by some divine force, lifted to the apartment above the jewelry store directly across the square. There, behind another window like mine – only less shabby – sat a girl at a table. She was working hard at something, using what appeared to be drawing tools under a low lamp. I watched, transfixed, as if viewing a distant dream. Finally, the girl paused to assess her work, and then, tucking her blond hair behind an ear, she turned and looked out her window, her blue eyes falling directly on mine.
For a little eternity, we just stared at one another across the misty space. A flock of sparrows passed between us. Then she smiled and waved. I lifted my own hand. I was surprised to find my gesture to be less of someone saying hello and more of someone reaching out for help.
“Not waving,” I muttered, “but drowning.”
The girl didn’t know it at the time, but she was to become my salvation, curing me of my sickness just before I slipped away once and for all into the verbose and moribund depths of my own paradise lost.
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Published on July 13, 2015 09:23 Tags: sanctum-sanctorum, writing-poetry

I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part Four – In Which I am Bumped From my Existential Rut)

I had resolved that I would never again – not in a million *%^#~´¡ years! – fall in love. That regrettable opportunity, I bewailed, had come and gone with the bitter winds. Instead, my destiny would be one of a brokenhearted solitude expressed in gloomy poems penned as I aimlessly roamed the indifferent world.
Alas! And woe!
Sure, I might stoop to take a lover now and then, might make a hapless friend or two along the way, but these affairs would only leave me evermore hollow and glum as I recalled the betrayed love of my bittersweet youth. (I can smile now, but at the time, I truly was pathetic human wreckage.) But as with so many foolproof outlines for life, things sometimes go awry. For me it happened on a chill afternoon in the early December of my twenty-first year unto heaven.

The day was gray. I sat on a cold bench reading next to the empty fountain in the square below my rented room. Dry leaves scuttled over the sidewalk on the breeze. An occasional snowflake glanced off the open pages of my book. My collar was turned up in existential seafarer fashion. I was shivering. Everything, that is to say, was as it should be, as I had come so forlornly and quixotically to expect it.
And then I heard a voice – “Hello.”
The word was so pleasantly put that I didn’t bother to respond. There was no way it could be directed at me.
“Good book?”
I looked up. And there she was, right before me, all sunny and sweet and incongruent.
I think I only stared.
She smiled. “I’m Sara.” She pointed with her thumb to the building over her shoulder. “I have the apartment up there, across the street from yours.”
I knew who she was, all right. Hadn’t I seen her a thousand times through her window? But she had always been so far away, behind glass, in a parallel realm of dreams.
“O’m Blhom,” I said. Or at least that’s how it sounded in my head. My mouth and heart and brain were not collaborating. But she seemed to understand. We shook hands – which I think struck us both as kind of funny and too formal considering we had been waving back and forth to one another for weeks – and then Sara sat beside me on the bench.
She told me about herself. I learned that she was studying graphic art, and that she was working to get her portfolio together before she went off to New York for some sort of an apprenticeship. Her voice was even more pleasing than I had imagined. Her eyes were blue, the only points of color, it seemed to me, in the whole wide and otherwise colorless world.
I tried not to get too personal, tried not to mention that I sometimes watched her from my room late at night with the lights turned out – that I knew she was left-handed, and tucked her hair behind her ears when she worked. I didn’t want to creep her out. Instead, I told her about writing poetry, alluding only vaguely to my wretched, angst-ridden persona.
The moment had that teetering feel to it – the kind where you’re not sure if you’re real, or just some character being born from the pages of a really great novel. The gods seemed to be grinning down on us. An odd sensation. Doubtless a symptom of my spending too much time removed from reality and immersed in books. Sara was an idyll. She was so pretty and smart and nice. How could she be part of this cold world in which I dwelled and suffered?
Holy Cow! I thought. Maybe I could fall in love again!
“Well,” she finally said, “I kind of have to go. But why don’t you come up some time for a glass of wine or something?”
“Schwurr,” I said. “Glaphe!”
We set a time for Friday evening, and then she went off down the street.
For a long time, I watched the corner around which she had disappeared. The snow was starting to fall for real. Lights were coming on in windows. Had any of that magical moment really occurred? I could have convinced myself that it hadn’t, if not for the echo of Sara’s lovely voice still sounding in my head, and the warm fragrance of her lemon-scented soap lingering beside me on the empty bench.
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Published on July 17, 2015 10:49 Tags: existential-angst, falling-in-love, writing-poetry