I went back to di Prima’s declaration in her famous “Rant.” Further down, the poem continues:
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
The voice that came out of me when I spoke in social settings and often even to a single friend wore a thousand pounds of armor and was incapable of saying anything direct about emotions, which I was barely feeling or feeling through so many filters I hardly knew what was spinning me around. But the voice: it was the voice I’d grown up around and learned to emulate and then to promulgate, a voice that strove to be clever, cool, sharp, and amused, to shoot arrows with precision and duck the arrows that came back or pretend they hadn’t stung. It relied on jokes and quips that were often cruel in a game where anyone who was hurt or offended by those jabs was supposed to be lacking in humor or strength or other admirable qualities. I didn’t understand what I was doing, because I didn’t understand that there were other ways to do it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t mean-spirited at times. (Later, I discovered that scathing and mocking reviews were the easiest and most fun kind to write, but I tried to write them only about much-lauded successes.)
There was another kind of humor, or rather a ponderous wit, that was convoluted, full of citations and puns and plays on existing phrases, of circling around, far around, what was happening and what you were feeling. It was as though the more indirect and referential your statement, the further away from your immediate and authentic reaction, the better. It would take me a long time to understand what a limitation cleverness can be, and to understand how much unkindness damaged not just the other person but the possibilities for you yourself, the speaker, and what courage it took to speak from the heart. What I had then was a voice that leaned hard on irony, on saying the opposite of what I meant, a voice in which I often said things to one person to impress other people, a voice in which I didn’t really know much about what I thought and felt because the logic of the game determined the moves. It was a hard voice on a short leash.
That voice isn’t just in your conversations, it’s inside your head: you don’t say that hurt, or I feel sad; you run angry tirades about why the other party is a terrible person over and over, and you layer on anger to avoid whatever’s hurt or frightened underneath, until it’s certain that you don’t know yourself or your weather, or that it’s you who’s telling the story that’s feeding the fire. You generally don’t know other people either, except as they impinge on you; it’s a failure of imagination going in and reaching out.
But that was just the stories within. The stories I wanted to write and the person who would write them were not yet born. I knew who I admired, but not who I was. You cannot write a single line without a cosmology. I had so much work ahead of me, and I did it slowly, in stages. I was many different writers along a road on which my various books and essays are milestones or shed snakeskins. In journalism school I learned to write straightforward reports, though my first teacher there resented my inability to write the flat prose that was often taken for journalistic objectivity, which even then I saw as a masculine voice. I could keep opinions at bay if I tried hard, but not adjectives.
The television show Dragnet, which was old even then, opened every episode with a hard-boiled man’s voice flatly declaiming, “The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” It was like the prose of Ernest Hemingway, which my first college English professor had insisted was the pinnacle of good writing, that stripped-back, clipped, terse language that was also about masculinity and its parsimonious words packed in silences. It was a voice policing many things, and leaving a lot unsaid in the same way that the ironic poses favored by my family did. The tone that we were supposed to deploy as journalists sounded to me like that tone, though at least we were allowed to quote people who might be more expressive and emotional.
I wanted language that could be simple and clear when the subject required it, but sometimes clarity requires complexity. I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths, with the occasional scenic detour or pause to take in the view, since a footpath can traverse steep and twisting terrain that a paved road cannot. I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat. I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world was broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.
Some Uses of Edges
1
It’s written in pencil on a large sheet of now-yellowed newsprint whose bottom half has the wide-ruled lines for beginning writers, and I’m pretty sure it’s my first essay, from first grade. In its entirety, it reads, “When I grow up I will never get married.” The illustration on the top half shows a man in a red shirt whose black hair wraps like a nimbus around his circular head and a yellow-haired woman in a flounced purple skirt. “Get married with me,” he says in a cartoon balloon, and she says, “No, no.”
It’s comic and horrible, a sign that I was looking at my mother’s life and thinking that whatever I did, I would try to not do what she did, because she so clearly felt trapped and powerless in a violently miserable marriage. I am the offspring of a victim and her victimizer, of a story that couldn’t be told at the time. Most conventional stories for girls and young women ended in marriage. Women vanished into it. The end. And then what happened and who were they? The fairy tale “Bluebeard” is about a woman who finds out, by disobeying his orders and using the forbidden key to unlock the torture chamber full of her predecessors’ corpses, that she’s married a serial killer, whose intent to kill her is whetted by her knowledge. It’s an unusual fairy tale in that she survives and he does not.
I’d just rejected the principal story for women, and I’d soon elect to try to put myself in charge of stories. That is, the same first year of literacy, after a brief period when I wanted to be a librarian because they spent their days with books, I realized someone actually wrote each book, and decided that that’s what I wanted to do. Such an unwavering goal from early on simplified my path, though the task of writing is never simple. Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value.