The Acolyte: Kitchen Solace

Today the poem "The Acolyte" by Denise Levertov is on my mind. In the piece she equates writing a poem to baking bread: the hard work, the love of the task, the expectation and wishes for greatness. I have been feeling down today with much on my mind and clouding my thoughts.  Maybe it is the weather, unseasonably warm with all day rain that seeps into the pores--almost eerily spring like. Maybe it is the silence of a good friend looming over me, the feeling of impending loss. (Of course, I am a bit melodramatic, so...) Perhaps it is simply end of the semester stress, my classes winding down to less than a handful now, the monumental stack of essays in my bag weighing on me in a more figurative way. My hopeful students, ready for exams, seem so eager to just be done with it all. I feel that way too: ready for a longer break, but there is something sad, too, in the ending of something so familiar and rhythmic, losing people you've grown to know, perhaps not exactly as friends, but as friendly faces--something intimidating about starting again with a new group.

When I am feeling low, sometimes I bake. Like Levertov at her table, I find something very soothing about the rhythm of the kitchen. I suppose some would say that I am addicted to food: I agree, actually. But there is something there, something about food. It is warmth and comfort, love--not just sustenance. It is (as Levertov writes) "more than bread." Cooking is like a carnival for the senses. Some of the most beautiful sights on Earth are found there. I am speaking not just of the cookies I baked--the deep, rich brown of the melting chocolate, white swirl of sweetened milk, the cookies themselves crevassed with secrets and promises to be shared--but of many foods: one of my favorite synesthetic images is the round plane of a bubbling cheese pizza as it is pulled from a stone oven--the cracked pattern in the brick, the scrape of wooden paddle against the brick, the earthy smell of hot oven and yeasty smell of baked crust, the smell and feel of the fire--as if it is something living, the breath of the oven. (This also explains my three year stint slinging pizza during college.) Smells, obviously--especially I love anything with cinnamon or chocolate, of course. Sounds: if I am silent and patient, the pot hisses and clinks, the liquid bubbles, the oven ticks, the ingredients shift in imperceptible whisper. This is not speech, but there is a pattern here. Perhaps not language, but a comforting and primitive type of song.

I want, as Leverov does, to write poems this way: to create, ingredient by carefully selected ingredient, something that pleases all the senses. Something that speaks of hope and happiness and home and comfort. But, today at least, my soul feels too heavy and dark. So tomorrow I will make it my ambition to write a kitchen poem, to build with my words something that can capture the peace and ease of standing at the barely warm eye stirring and stirring and stirring until chips and butter pieces yield and meld. I'll pay homage to the senses at play in the kitchen, thankful for the sugar rush that raised my spirits enough to make it through the night without being completely miserable, even if a bit melancholy. But for now I think it is time for laying in bed, a cup of tea balanced precariously on one knee while I grade a stack of ever increasing papers until sleep takes me to a place where the sun shines but the wind blows like fall again.

The Acolyte

The large kitchen is almost dark.

Across the plain of even, diffused light,

copper pans on the wall and the window geranium

tend separate campfires.

Herbs dangle their Spanish moss from rafters.

At the table, floury hands

kneading dough, feet planted

steady on flagstones,

a woman ponders the loaves-to-be.

Yeast and flour, water and salt,

have met in the huge bowl.

It’s not

the baked and cooled and cut

bread she’s thinking of,

but the way

the dough rises and has a life of its own,

not the oven she’s thinking of

but the way

the sour smell changes

to fragrance.

She wants to put

a silver rose or a bell of diamonds

into each loaf;

she wants

to bake a curse into one loaf;

into another, the words that break

evil spells and release

transformed heroes into their selves;

she wants to make

bread that is more than bread.

Denise Levertov

 

Procrastination...and other sovereign countries

The problem with finding reasons for putting off writing is that there really are ALWAYS other things to be doing. Other valid tasks that need accomplished...stacks of papers to be graded, children to be snuggled (as my daughter announces "I looooove hugs and kisses," grinning expectantly), compelling movies to watch, time to be spent with a significant other, dishes to be washed...naps to be taken...on and on. It's never that I don't plan to write; I just plan to write "later": a "later" that never seems to happen unless I (feeling selfish for doing so) make it. Some afternoons after my class day is done, I head to the local library, upstairs to the left and aaaaaaalllll the way tucked in the far back corner where there is a comfortable chair with a table right beside, surrounded by windows on three sides and stacks on the fourth. This has become my favorite place to write. It is like a private tree house with the huge live oaks draped in Spanish moss peeking in at eye level: it is a beautiful place where my childlike inner mind can play with writing again. I love those afternoons, selfishly ferreted away from my loving family, my poor wife dealing with both kids, my daughter aggravating her every second about where I am (she is, at three, in a stage where I, as the “opposite gendered” parent, am very much her favorite…unless of course the dads are around J ). Today, though, there is no time for a library day. And today there is a poem rattling around in my head. So I know that there will be time spent today, head bend over notebook, pen in hand, doing what I am meant to be doing. Poetry has always been that for me, more insistent. Like an itch. It will bug me until I pull myself away from other tasks and take out my notebook. My fiction takes more work...which, incidentally, is why it is always on the back burner...a hundred story ideas always battling for attention like orphaned children. Pages and pages of unfinished fiction march along like army ants in my tight lines of penmanship through the white pages of my notebook. Intimidating blocks of pages filled with ink that call to me, beg for just one minute more...the truth is, I really want to finish them. But they scare me. I'm afraid of them. Literally. I don't really know what I am so afraid of. Will the characters come out of the stories and accuse me for not creating them well. (It makes me think of that Phyllis Wheatley poem about sending her poem "children" half-clothed ragamuffins into a world clearly unprepared to care for them...she wrote that after a volume of her poems was published by some well meaning man in her life without her permission.) Will the ending fall flat? I wouldn't know, would I, since I never seem to get there. I know that I have both in me: the fiction and the poetry. But I never seem able to shut up and produce. I feel unable, not strong enough, to get the task accomplished. Am I hoping that maybe someone else will come along and do it for me? Not possible. And even if it were, I doubt I would be so pleased with the result. So I guess my point is that there are other things in my life besides my writing. And that is, on the one hand, very frustrating. But if these other things didn’t exist…how would I ever get any thinking done?! Growing up, I always imagined that the writer’s life was a lonely place, that to be a writer was to stand apart, isolated from all others—the suffering and aloof observer. But in my adult life I have learned that the idea is only a half truth: I am constantly balancing the razor edge between observing my life and living it. Some days (today), I guess, are for the living.

One of my inspirations...well, two, I guess...

My son, Rio, born at the end of September is my latest inspiration. Of course, he's also my latest distraction. But sometimes...I just can't help sitting in awe and staring at his precious little toes for hours. And he's recently added the new trick of smiling! He lights up the room. My extremely precocious and awesome almost four year old (!) daughter inspires me too.

There is so much I want to share with them, capture for them. My life, the good and the bad. The world as it is now, the world as it could be. Injustice. Inequality. But also beauty and love and magic. Tonight as we were putting up our family Christmas tree Jayna was a whirling dervish of activity and "helpfulness". I have been extremely ill, and both Nef and I were complaining of headaches before we even started the arduous process. But somehow, watching her dance around the tree, watching his fascinated face as he stared into the lights for the first time amazed with wonderment...it all seems worth it. This frantic beautiful dance of life, the wonder and newness of childhood. I think, yeah, there's inspiration here.

Who are you?

I am a writer. I have known this for a very long time, known it down in the very core of my soul where my most secret desires lie, but I think I am just starting to understand what it means to live my life as a writer. It doesn't just mean carrying my writing notebook with me everywhere I go, a practice I started as a teenager and have continued with varying degrees of success throughout my adult life. It doesn't just mean identifying myself as a writer either, wearing the title like a jacket that could be shed at my convenience. It means a myriad of things that inspire both fear and exitement--but, hey, isn't fear always a part of exitement anyway? Fear because I loathe rejection, which is an inevitable part of any writer's life. Also, there's fear that I will fail, but, honestly, that's not a true fear--just a leftover remnant of adolescent insecurities. The excitement comes from finally realizing that I can do something that I really have always wanted to do: I can stop hiding behind the excuse instilled in me by parents who were just trying to help...that old falsehood "I can do anything and still be a writer." No. No, I can't...because I am a writer. And there are certain things that writers, like all professionals I imagine, do day in and day out that make it impossible for me to entertain the notion of being anything else. I finally came to this realization when I took up, somewhat reluctantly, another title that I thought I could never embrace: teacher. Teaching in middle school for several years did not allow me time to reflect on my status as a writer...or to contribute to my own wrtiting much at all. But I can't say that the years were unproductive for the writer in me: I gained practice at facilitating writing in a classroom setting; I met some amazing people who appreciated and nurtured my writing; and I got to work with talented young writers who reminded me how I felt as a teenage writer--so full of potential, flailing to find my own voice, wondering if the gift was just a phase that I would outgrow. Teaching in the college setting, however, has brought me back to center on the fact that I am, in fact and above all else, a writer. And, as such, a writer does one key and important thing: a writer writes. So...I am beginning this blog to keep me honest. I can't promise that I will post every day(although I intend to make myself write everyday), but I am hoping that by creating this blog I will be inspired to post fairly often--projects I am working on, things that inspire me, progress as I being the application process to graduate school. I'm thinking of it as an extension of my writing notebook: the public face of my private thoughts. And I hope that you, my readers, (if I can be so arrogant as to think people will read it) will interact, tell me what you are working on, what is inspiring you...who are you at this point in your journey?