Evacuation of the Self

The poetry of Mark Strand, identified in this VQ article as self-annihilating. I love Strand; I suppose it's not odd to hear a writer who went to college in Iowa City say that, but I do. I found him early on, through a friend and poet named Kevin, and that first collection I read, Reasons for Moving, really made an impact on me. It formed a lot of ideas I would have about how to approach the Angel Book; in several of the poems, the narrator speaks to someone else, like in "The Suicide", where he's trying to jump off a building, but meets resistance, and more specifically for me, "The Man In The Mirror," where the narrator speaks to a lost loved one, of his grief and turmoil:

Buried in the darkness of your pockets,
your hands are motionless.
You do not seem awake.
Your skin sleeps

and your eyes lie in the deep
blue of their sockets,
impossible to reach.
How long will all this take?

These poems gave me the kernel of the idea of a narrator (the dead party in my novel), talking to a loved one still alive. It took my years to figure out how to do this - if I have - since my dead voice is able to speak, think, and yet observe and know the thoughts of others. She can flow through 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person in a single sentence, and it's like riding a wave; it's exhilirating, and then it crashes down on you.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mirror, Mirror

Image
Recently I bought a copy of a pretty well reviewed and promoted speculative fiction novel.  About two chapters in, the main character looks in a mirror and describes themself.  I literally closed the book and stopped reading.  The novel had other issues, but this put me right out of the story.  This technique - being generous here - occurs a lot in first person narratives, about as often as a story beginning with the main character waking up from a dream.  The mirror device is best avoided, but not necessarily because it's so overused - it's best avoided because simply put, it's so easy.  A character, especially a protagonist, should never be described; they should be imagined.
Read more

Conversations With: Dr. Daniel Dahlquist

Here's what I hope is the start of a new weekly (or so) feature on the blog: a mini-interview with writers about the craft. My good friend and teacher Dr. Daniel Dahlquist inaugurates the series. Dr. Dahlquist is a wonderful poet; his poetry has appeared in respected literary journals such as Prairie Schooner, New Virginia Review, River Styx, Kentucky Poetry Review, and the Louisville Review. He graduated from the University of Iowa's storied Writer's Workshop and holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Southern Illinois University. His first book, SPEECH TO THE DEAD PEOPLE, was published in 1997 by Cedar Creek Press. You can read an excerpt from the book (and my favorite of his poems) here . Without further adieu: Q: What poets or other writers do you consider influences? A: The apocalyptic poets appealed to me when I was very young. I started writing poems at age sixteen, on my grandfather's 1928 L.C. Smith typewriter, largely to impress my English teacher.
Read more

My Advice For Writers

More and more I get asked for advice from aspiring writers. Mostly this is because I have a book, not because I really know anything. I'm not good at giving advice. Actually, I'm pretty good at it, just not very good at following it myself. So take all of this with a grain of salt. Actually, you should probably just click away to some other website right now. If you're still here, or have just reached the end of the internet, seriously: I've given a lot of thought to what I say to a serious writer who is asking me for serious perspective, and in so much as I can give it, I usually speak to these things: Find your faults . You have them. We all do. One thing my day job has taught me is to actively seek out process improvement. Usually we wait for problems to come to us - it's how we know they're problems - but most often in business, this can get you in trouble. The same applies to your art. It is a process; you should actively seek to impro
Read more