Roots and Passions

or, Notes towards some kind of artist’s statement

“No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” growled Robert Frost, in his 1939 essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.” I just looked up the essay to be sure of the quote, and there I found two other sentences that resonate. “If it is a wild tune, it is a Poem,” Frost said. And then: “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” He didn’t mention that wisdom means sorrow, but that’s much of what wisdom means. I also savored Frost’s epitaph: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” I hadn’t intended to mention Frost in this post, but I find those lines speak (for today at least) to why I write and what I love to read.

I love the kind of writing that bursts out of a particular place, a particular time. I love it when writers make up a new language that comes up out of the ground to become part of your own language forever after. I love an unstudied balance of elegance and chaos. I love writing that emerges with fierce delight and imagination.

I get excited by writing that carries a quality of outrageousness. It’s like the striking at your soul when you glimpse a couple of lights in the dusky night hills, as you curve around a long mountain highway and weren’t expecting to find anything at all for hours and hours. Why does it matter? You aren’t going to stop the car to see who or what it is under the glare of those rare lights. But those lights in the smeared darkness mean everything.

My writing is inspired by William S. Burroughs, Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, Sappho, Bruno Schulz, Chinua Achebe, Ursula Le Guin, Anthony Burgess, Remedios Varo, Charles Simic, Amos Tutuola, Thomas Pynchon, Isaac Babel, Jerome Rothenberg, Tom Stoppard, New Scientist magazine, chaotic streets of New York City in the 1970s, punk rock, Krazy Kat, seventeenth century alchemy, abandoned warehouses and many thousands of miles on Greyhound busses across America.

Why do I write? No good reason. I am not aiming to fix the world. (“Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?” asks the Tao Te Ching. “I do not believe it can be done.”) There are too many books out there already; mine are just more colorful scrap paper. The world will go on spinning regardless. But each of us carries a vision of the world, a flavor of stories to tell, which nobody else in the world can bring.

I write because I can’t stop writing. A plum tree puts out ten thousand leaves and blossoms every spring and then gives them all away to decay every autumn. The tree isn’t worrying about whether its leaves are special or better. It takes and it gives and in the end it dies. That’s its work, and mine too.

So then why put my writing out into the world? Because someone, somewhere, might care to hear the voice I bring. And then I want to hear theirs, too.