Control

Or: Why I Write the Way I Write

Part One: My Wasted Youth

When I was twenty years old, I got things exactly backward.

I wanted to be a famous novelist (because that’s the sort of thing you want when you’re as bad at sports as me), and I wrote hundreds—hundreds!—of pages of notes about what my books would be. But when it came to writing the book itself, I never got more than three pages in¹.

I blame the twin pillars, the fucking Scylla and Charybdis, really, of Literary Analysis and Literary Theory. It was my junior year of college and I had finally given in and become an English major. I took both courses at once and they had my head swimming.

I remember dissecting “The Sick Rose” by William Blake in Literary Analysis. It turns out everything in that poem means something else! (The rose is vagina! The worm is a penis!) Afterward, I asked the professor if all great writing worked this way. I loved 1984. Did 1984 do this stuff? “Oh, yes! The things Orwell does with the number three…” I was entranced.

Literary Theory was worse. Our first homework assignment was to read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald² and an essay on “différance” by Jacques Derrida³. So I holed up in the library and read The Great Gatsby. It was great. The next time we met, we received our first “-ism” PDF. You know the “isms”: New Formalism, Marxism, Postcolonialism; queer theory doesn’t have an “ism” attached to the name, but it’s an “ism.” And that was the whole semester: read The Great Gatsby through a psychoanalytic lens, read The Great Gatsby read through a feminist lens, read The Great Gatsby through a critical race lens, and so on and so on.

Before the semester was over, I knew what I had to do to be a famous novelist:

1. My novel would have to include every possible literary device. Cue hundreds of pages of notes on symbolism and metonymy and hidden structural numbers. (Four. My hidden structural number was four.) And,

2. My novel would have to cover every possible literary theory. (I didn’t know they were still making up new ones at the time, so no critical disability theory. How sad.) Cue hundreds of pages of notes on Foucault and Kristeva and Benjamin and all the rest.

The problem was that it all felt very arbitrary.

Because it was.

I might not have thought it, but I felt it, and the feeling led to a strange obsession: my novel couldn’t merely include every possible literary device and every possible literary theory; it also had to have a sort of meta-level meaning behind that fact. I’m not being clear. What I mean is that, for example, my novel couldn’t just be structured around the number four (four characters in four acts having four conflicts): the number four had to mean something. There had to be a reason it wasn’t three or five or seventeen. If I could just do those three things—

• Use every possible literary device,

• Cover every possible literary theory, and

• Create some meta-level meaning behind every possible literary device and every possible literary theory—

Then I would have a brilliant, towering, unimpeachable work of genius.

Of course, the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. That’s why the notes were so easy and the novel was so hard. You just can’t write a book that way.

It wasn’t all worthless. I spent my twenties reading: one or two novels a week, one poem a day, one chapter from a long novel a day⁴, newspapers, magazines, random nonfiction, philosophy, cereal boxes, shampoo bottles.

And I spent my twenties writing. Christ, did I write. A million words in college alone. I wrote about everything: dreams I had (both literal and figurative), movie reviews, philosophical treatises, political ideas, screeds, theories about art, rants about art, ruminations on art, bad poems, those fucking notes for that fucking novel, other notes for other novels, other notes for short stories, other notes for film scripts. The summer after I graduated I wrote down every memory from college I could dredge up. I still have the Word Doc. It’s two hundred pages long.

The reading and the writing weren’t for anything. It was just a compulsion. Honestly, it was just for fun.

Part Two: My Not-so-Wasted Early Middle Age

When I was thirty years old, I got things right.

This time around it wasn’t a novel, it was poetry⁵, and I wasn’t writing because I wanted to be famous. I was writing because the poems were killing me. I was writing because I had to. It was either get them down on paper or explode in flames.

And instead of trying to reverse-engineer my novel out of the stilted, artificial, phony-prestigious strictures of Literary Analysis and Literary Theory, my poems were shaped by rules that formed naturally as I wrote. (Some people say art has no rules. Those people are wrong. It’s not that art has no rules; it’s that, when making art, you get to create your own. Even Jackson Pollack had a process.)

There were three goals:

1. Write formal poetry: meter, rhyme, and alliteration are the big three. Also: slant rhymes are gross and must be used purposefully rather than to get out of a fix.

2. Use an everyday vocabulary and conversational tone of voice. There is some elevated diction—I use the word “thus” a lot⁶—but the sound of the writing should be elevated by the poetic devices above. This is why I swear so much in my poems. It’s how people talk.

3. Cover specific aspects of modern life. Great art should touch on abstract, universal themes, sure. And my poems do that! There’s depression and love and disappointment and happiness and regret and addiction and sorrow and more. But the way to explore these things is through tangible objects: rollercoasters and Facebook and Madonna and cats and strip malls and Christmas and porn and everything else.

But this is a difficult way to write! It’s why I write so slowly! “Alcoholism” is a villanelle in which the first and third lines are part of the same sentence. That’s really fucking hard! Dylan Thomas never did that! The rhyme scheme for “Monotonic” is ABABCDDCEEDBC. Do you know how hard it is to say what you want to say, in a clear, conversational voice, when the rhyme scheme is ABABCDDCEEDBC?! The fucking joy I felt as I said everything I wanted to say, no more, no less, just…as the poem…came…to an end. The fucking joy I felt as that poem descended into the final lines and I realized it was all going to fit together.

Part Three: Control

But of course, things didn’t really fit together, not in “Alcoholism,” not in “Monotonic,” not in any of the poems.

Sure, I pull off a villenelle in “Alcoholism,” but look at the meter. It’s disgusting.

What bullshit, to have to exist
Without getting drunk for even a day,
Going sober, with nothing to help resist

The dull, dragging pain of the usual list
Of responsible things to do and say.

Is it iambic? Is it anapestic? Who can fucking tell? It’s definitely metered; the lines are fun to say; but it’s a long way away from “Whose woods these are I think I know. / His house is in the village though.” The only way I can pull off a villenelle while hitting my goals is to have a ridiculously loose meter.

Or consider “Monotonic”. The line breaks are all random.

Each day exists by other days
So similar each one’s potential
Passes in a stifling haze,
While consciousness becomes more chronic.
And if there is A Grand
Creator, then His brand
Is cruel, ironic:
“You wanted life? Well here you go!
Suck it down all in a row!
Take more than you could ever stand!”

It’s iambic…something. Iambic tetrameter, very often, but also iambic dimeter or hexameter or monometer or trimeter or pentameter. The only way to keep that insane rhyme scheme while following my rules is to let the line breaks go off the rails.

What about a different poem, like “Better Homes & Gardens”? Not only do the line lengths vary, but every six-line stanza has a different, random rhyme scheme: ABABCC followed by ABBACC followed by ABCBAC. How about “Sour Grapes”? The rhyme scheme stays the same every stanza, ABACDCDB, but they’re all disgusting slant rhymes.

Well, my three rules were all well and good. But as the poems came into being over the course of a decade, I ended up with three other, stranger, anti-rules:

1. The meter can be loose. Very loose.

2. The line lengths can vary wildly.

3. Rhyme patterns can change stanza to stanza.

This brings us, at last, to the title of this essay.

Every human being needs some level of control in their lives if they are going to be happy. Learned helplessness and clinical depression go hand in hand. But when you read the poems, you see a man who is out of control. Among other things:

• I’m severely depressed: I can’t control my feelings, my thoughts, my own brain.

• I’m an underemployed adjunct English instructor / homemaker: I spend all day grocery shopping and running errands and cleaning the house; every day I make the beds and repeat the motions I have repeated a thousand times before, controlled at the fucking skin.

• I’m an alcoholic: Even when I’m not drinking, I can’t control the endless, ever present urge to get drunk.

The only place I have total control is in my poems.

Except, of course, I don’t.

In the poems I’m trying to keep all these balls in the air—perfect meter, perfect rhymes, alliteration, an everyday vocabulary, a conversational tone of voice, repeated line lengths, repeated stanza forms—but every time I focus on one ball, the others come crashing down. Want to avoid slant rhymes? The line lengths go wonky! Want to have a conversational tone of voice? The meter gets loose! Want to keep the same line lengths? The rhyme scheme goes haywire or the slant rhymes seep in or the tone of voice gets fouled up! Over and over. Again and again. Control. No control. Control. No control.

Part Four: Why I Write the Way Write

In the first part of this essay I wrote that my novel “had to have a sort of meta-level meaning.” It “couldn’t just be structured around the number four…the number four had to mean something. There had to be a reason it wasn’t three or five or seventeen.”

When I was writing for fame, for prestige, for veneration, I couldn’t reach that level of meaning. It was too much.

But once I started writing because I had to write, because the ideas inside my head were tormenting me, because I had to get the feelings out or die, I accomplished by accident what I never could on purpose.

Those six rules—the three formal ones and the three anti-formal ones—are meaningful on a higher meta-level. It is a style of poetry that desperately wants to set order to the world but constantly fails to do so, and that style perfectly reflects my life. The sound and the sense are one and the same. I wasn’t even trying, but I finally pulled it off.

Addendum

I was supposed to finish my book before my last birthday. How perfect: getting everything wrong in my twenties, getting everything right in my thirties, publishing at forty. Forty poems, ten years, one poem every three months. But the book wasn’t done in time, and anyway, no one would publish it. I’m forty-one now.⁷

When I was in college I took a class on modern American poetry. We had two books: one was the poems, the other was manifesto after manifesto about How We Must Write Poetry Today. I fucking hated those essays⁸. So consider this an anti-manifesto. You shouldn’t write the way I do; it took me twenty-one years to find my style, and that style is for me and me alone; I hope you find your own way of writing.

And hell, you just might, if the need to do so is killing you.

1. It was a satire of academia, by the way. One wonders how the world continues to turn without it…

2. Classic.

3. Kill me.

4. I got through almost all of Don Quixote sitting on the can after work.

5. Why poetry is an essay for another time.

6. Because I love it.

7. I wonder what my Literary Analysis professor would do with that ugly, odd number.

8. You can find the relevant rants moldering away on my hard drive.