Great Mistakes

GREAT MISTAKES

            I am always amazed when I see how often writers tap into the same images, themes, motifs, episodes, etc., in several of their stories or poems.  I do it myself without realizing it at the time.  For example, I noticed yesterday that I had included a reference in two stories to a habit I had as a young child of reading inside a closed cabinet in our family room.  (One of these is  The Goat Story from yesterday’s blog.)  And this was after I had already written a failed poem about my cabinet obsession.  I guess when you do something everyday for a couple of years, it can’t help but impact your subconscious mind.  (Please note that while such behavior admittedly hints at OCD, I prefer to think of it as ritualism.)

            Perhaps we keep going back to the same moments in our life until we deal with them satisfactorily.  They become, in a sense, wormholes that can expand into an infinite number of directions.  I think this is why I tend to write stories and poems in series.  The story I posted yesterday is from a series of creative nonfiction pieces titled as a whole, Closet Dramas.  I chose this title because a closet drama is a play that is meant to be read and never performed.  Anyone who knows me at all knows that I am not a performer!  I don’t really even like to give readings.  The whole thing creates conflicting feelings in me, however, because I truly think that reading one’s work aloud to an audience is the absolute best way to revise a piece.  You get to hear it and see how an audience reacts to it.  But I have discovered from experience that I may read the piece differently from the way it is written. 

I have come to think that such “mistakes” are often subconscious revision in process.  Once I was reading a poem titled “Designated Readymade” aloud at a workshop.  It was the first time I had ever read it aloud.  The first line of the fourth stanza originally read, “I would like to give you that full feeling…” and I changed it to read, “I would lie to give you that full feeling.”  The first version is completely passive and is obviously a throw away line wherein I am not really saying what I want to say.  Not really saying anything at all.  The “mistake” is much more powerful and turns the poem in an entirely different direction, bordering on desperation.

 

DESIGATED READYMADE

(from the series titled Falling Bodies: A Pseudo-Scientific Approach to Love)

I would take the thickness of an eager kiss,

take my heart’s crankshaft clatter

and the narrow width of that brilliant flare

that flashes between day and night,

take the texture of a smooth bright

red pencil on a blue-lined yellow pad,

to make satisfaction,

pour it into a white foam cup

and drink it

just as cool.

 

I would measure your mouth,

define immeasurable quantities,

like enough and too much,

and paint that fascinating fullness

in between.

 

I would write of want,

and recognition of want,

of all the steps from touch to bend,

through each retreat,

to the surging delight

that repeatedly drifts to the side

like snow packed on the toe of a booted foot

slipping through and through and through

picking up frozen residue on the run.

And I would not run.

 

I would lie to give you that full feeling,

as heavy and sure as a pink hydrangea,

as insistent as a swinging noose,

but without distrust,

without aggression,

without that yellow pulling back.

 

These parted lips, this shallow breath,

this effortless dispersal toward the gullet—

beneath this wanting

lies the secret of desire

perfected by its lack of rules.

 

Sometimes fortuitous mistakes come about in the written form as well.  I once mistyped the title of the poem above as “Designated Ready Maid.”

It puts a completely different set of filters in place as the reader begins the poem and more honestly acknowledges where the poem is going to begin with.  Whereas a “readymade” is a work of art created from found objects (which most poems are…), a “ready maid” is an entirely different creature!

            (Since I usually give credit to a journal or magazine for publishing a poem or piece of fiction, I will say that this poem was rejected by Copper Nickel, Alimentum: The Literature of Food,  the delinquent, Umbrella and Best Poem, before being accepted by Literal Translations and Clockwise Cat in March 2008.  Sometimes it is just a long process to find a good home for a poem.  And sometimes they remain homeless…)