(The following
essay appeared in the Mar. -
April, 05 issue of the Lummox
Journal.)
THE FIRE AND VELOCITY OF THE
WORD by Todd Moore
The act of writing something,
novel, short story, or poem is a
physical act. It may look
like all anyone has to do is sit
there. Easy job, sitting down.
But that's a misleading
perception. Sitting down is one
approach. You can also write
while standing up.
Hemingway preferred to stand
while he was working on stories
and novels. I can write
standing up or sitting down. It
isn't so much the position of
the body as it is the angle
of the mind. I have gotten
poems while driving, walking,
working. I have gotten poems
in bed or while eating or
talking on the phone. The words
do not comfortably come to
you while you are ready but
uncomfortably come to you at
almost any hour of the day or
night. They surprise your body
with the urgency of their call.
My own personal example of how
this works happened around five
A. M. about ten
years ago when I got up to take
a piss. I already had some
words going around in my
head the way I do when something
is starting to shake itself
loose inside me, I get all
quivery, hot and cold, with the
words pushing at me, shaking me
into a burning chill
and on returning to the bedroom
in the dark I banged into a
doorframe and opened
an inch long gash right smack in
the middle of my right eyebrow.
By the time I
got back to the bathroom blood
was pouring down my right
cheek. It took me a little
while and several water soaked
wash clothes to stop the
bleeding and while I stood
before
the mirror with blood on my face
and hands I started to get the
lines to a book length poem
called WORKING ON MY DUENDE.
And, by the time I had squeezed
the gash
shut, maybe about fifteen
minutes, I had something like
twenty or thirty lines floating
around in my head. I went back
to bed for awhile, figuring I'd
just lie there and let the
lines come in and go out of me,
but after an hour or so of that
and the building excitement
of what this poem was
suggesting, I found myself
shaving as quickly as possible
so I could get at the computer.
I figured this was going to be a
twenty page poem but when I
finally quit writing later in
the afternoon I had something
like twenty five pages with no
end in sight. What I did
have was the skeleton form of a
poem that within the next couple
of years would swell
to sixty four pages typewritten.
I'm not exactly sure how I can
explain writing at white heat.
The process is a mystery
even to me. All I can say for
sure is that the words just seem
to tumble out of me and
across the page at a speed that
I can only describe as
velocity. Sure, there are
always
pauses here and there but I
almost always receive the lines
in a poem completely or
in a nearly completed form.
Sometimes I go back and add
something or sometimes I'll
take things out. But, the poem
is almost always eighty or
ninety percent finished as it
goes onto the page. The twenty
five page skeleton of WORKING ON
MY DUENDE
was my road map for what had to
get down, but I pretty much knew
how this poem was
going to go by the end of the
day. The only reason that it
grew to almost three times its
original length was that this
poem was a true struggle with
the spirit of where I lived,
New Mexico, the way that I was
living, and with myself.
I've always written poetry at
great velocity, high speed, a
long blood rush down the page.
But, with DUENDE I had to get at
the source of it all, the origin
and the struggle of the
word. I had to rediscover and
reinvent Lorca. I had to see
New Mexico from every angle
possible and I had to dig back
into whatever duende I believed
that I had. And, then
I had to try to see myself as
part of a world of poets not
only in New Mexico but all
across the United States, down
into Latin America, in Europe,
and especially in Spain.
What I wanted to do was nothing
less than try to reinvent
myself. This poem was my
struggle with the angel and also
with all of my demons.
The one thing that New Mexico
and the whole Spanish and Latin
tradition in New Mexico have
taught me is to see things
through an entirely different
set of images. To
see life in tableaus. To see
history and mythology as a
possible set of retablos.
Retablos
in the Spanish Catholic cultural
tradition are crude religious
paintings of saints on wooden
boards. The idea of religion
doesn't interest me but the
primitive paintings on
old boards does. And, the
Mexican and New Mexican murals
are also fascinating. The
the huge ambitious murals of the
Mexican painter Diego Rivera are
crammed full of
with all kinds of pulsing images
and people. Which, to me,
suggests history in the blink
of an eye.
So, as I went back to WORKING ON
MY DUENDE I began to see it as a
mural of words. One thing after
another after another, all at
the kind of velocity I have been
used
to for years. And, this process
also made me look at THE WASTE
LAND again. Here
is a poem that could work as a
movie or as a mural painted on
the wall of a building some
where in London. And, it also
forced me to see how the surreal
images were working in
Lorca's POET IN NEW YORK. In
both of these poems, it's the
speed of the image coupled with
the speed of the poem. And,
that's the way I wanted DUENDE
to work.
In fact, that's the way it had
to work, or it wasn't going to
work at all.
The contemporary urban poem,
whether it's written in New
York, Los Angeles, Chicago,
London, Paris, Prague, Mexico
City, Moscow, Beijing, Bogota,
Pueblo, or Albuquerque,
needs to work with the kind of
sudden ferocity of Picasso's
Guernica, fractured images,
the trauma of our safety blown
to smithereens, our lives torn
into our lives, through
a series of unrelated images and
events that rocket it toward a
charged and unrepeatably
renegade moment. This is the
kind of poem that comes out of
our deepest outlaw selves
and defines us as well as an
entire age.
I started with a story. I'll
end this with a story. When I
was a kid, somewhere in my
early teens, a building in
Freeport, Illinois, where I was
born and raised, caught fire and
blew up. It happened a couple
of blocks from the skidrow hotel
where I used to live.
Pretty soon a black cloud took
out the sun and the sky was
filled with hundreds of sheets
of burning paper from the
businesses in that building.
And, while this paper rained
down
on the surrounding streets, I
would reach up and grab a piece
and hold it while it was
still on fire. That's why I
believe the speed of the poem is
equal to the fire of our
burning.
Todd Moore is a regular
contributor to the LJ. He
is also a widely published poet.
His latest book is THE DEAD ZONE
TRILOGY.