Every Artist Is a Cannibal: Thoughts on the Creative Process

It always begins with some agitation, like a grain of sand in the oyster belly of my brain. I have some idea of what I want to do, and the struggle is mainly to find the time. When I begin, there is always anxiety, especially with painting, because I am still insecure with the medium. With poetry and prose, it's like diving. I hurl myself into it, despite the critic on my back, always comparing, whispering, berating.

Inspiration is necessary for invention, the first part of the creative process. This is the temptation, the coaxing that makes everything possible. Yes, you must have faith. Yes, you must be courageous. Confident. Some people can't get past these  requirements. But what really fires the mind is work that's already been done, work that has some element you seek for your own. When I wrote A Portal to Vibrancy, I wanted a sense of immediacy in the voice and a banquet of images in the prose. I kept Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye always nearby and would read a few pages to get the rhythm, the style in my head. I suppose it's a kind of stealing (Every artist is a cannibal, Bono says); you're stealing someone else's fire to galvanize yourself.

Once I've put something down on the page, the canvas, I look for clues in the work itself of what it wants to be. This is sort of like seeing the sculpture in the stone. You've got to believe it's there. With the painting pictured here, I wanted the ethereal white of the table cloth to be prominent. This painting actually started out as a pastel I created from a photo in a gardening book. I agonized over how I was going to capture the flora in the backdrop--all of those damn leaves! I tried a more impressionistic approach, but that didn't look right. I had studied Matisse, his simplifying things with large blocks of color. I spray-fixed the drab pastel and then pulled out the paint. The white acrylic felt right. I colored the backdrop a haze of burgeoning green, the green of late spring, the green that says the Earth is alive again. This felt right too. I had abandoned my ideas of realism for the feel, the dreamlike style of something deeper. By refusing to embrace detail, I traded craft for simplicity, arduous work for flair.

What I have learned in being a creator is that I am less focused on product than I used to be. Ego likes to clutch at its own gifts to itself. I clutch less. I have faith that the statue in the stone will, step by step, be unveiled. It is an exploration, whether it be a poem, a novel, a painting, a stroke, a sentence. You just stay with it until you get it right, and when you get it right, it's a notch on your belt. Empowering. This is what keeps me coming back.

Eve, Reimagined: A Review of Megan Merchant’s In the Rooms of a Tiny House

Megan Merchant’s new chapbook In the Rooms of a Tiny House by ELJ Publications has language so rich and vibrant, it will leave you awestruck. Merchant expertly reimagines the Adam and Eve myth in this collection; in lieu of Eden, we have a tiny house, a dollhouse perhaps, a metaphorical fish bowl where we can observe Eve loom large as loving partner, shameless adulteress, and eager mother-to-be.

In the first and eponymous poem, we peer in and see objects: an oblong afghan, a holy book of poems, an uneaten apple, and “a drawing of the eight-armed sea/chewing fingernails off the dead.” Eve is a woman in love, an intuitive woman who is certain love will be fruitful: “she feels good news licking/the soft linen in her veins.” In “Every Day Is Spring,” and “Burning Barrels,” Eve is learning to be and do, a newlywed in every sense of the word, trying to find her place in the house, explore who she is as woman—an unfettered sorceress who “boils a tin of apple-white and ambrosia, soaks the seeds,/ paints constellations on the bedroom wall in alphabetical order.” And yet, she is childlike, a new being with a curiosity for the world around her, “dreaming of fireflies trapped…the wavelength of pale light/ glowing from their soft bodies.”

In “Pitted” and “Making Room,” she is morphing, expanding; “Her ribs are cracking wide against/ the walls of the tiny house.” The pregnant Eve no longer fits the tiny house, so she leaves, “takes a man with hairy legs and oaky/ breath home from the bar” in the poem “Open All Night.” Eve isn’t aware of what not to do; she is naïve and fallible, as her legend dictates, but unlike the dire repercussions in the original myth, this doesn’t matter, because “Adam forgives her.”

 The serpent appears in “Nesting” as the rope in a tire swing, but Eve pays it no mind and “snaps her fingers/ to a song/ she learned/ from the men/ who camp across/ the river.” Her motherly instincts take effect in “Passing Down Knowledge” as she surmises what she will teach her child (“[h]ow to hold the moon in a bucket of water/ [h]ow to speak to strangers in questions only/”); she plans what to do after the birth, how she will make the child clean and “wash as much sin from its skin—the curdled filth/ that smells like her.” At this point, we see that Eve is not so naïve; she has learned somewhere along the way that she is bad. Merchant expertly portrays here the primordial and fallible Eve that lives in every woman’s psyche.

Hope and promise is greatest when the child is born in “The Promise of a New Day”; Eve knows that this day will “be the only perfect one.” It is the demise of her ripened body (“Purple-streaked skin droops over her belly,/ a plum wilting) that sets the tone of disillusionment; life will be tainted from here on out for her, her child, and Adam. But she faces it like a seasoned woman, the intuitive sorceress who knows what she must do, what she will do to reclaim herself: paint “her body with clay” and “stand under the ripe moon.”

By reinventing myth, we can better understand it, make it our own. I believe Megan Merchant wholly succeeds in doing this with her new chapbook.

Circe’s Cabin (from Totem Beasts)

Circe’s Cabin

The duke and I stumbled upon her cottage in the woods with the front door open. We went in, delighted by the cozy living quarters decorated with colorful textiles and marble statues, Buddha stones, shrines of goddesses, stained glass, and damask curtains. We settled on a duvet on the floor and the duke, with his multi-colored eyes and ebony hair, read from Sappho's lost book of poems. The poems were printed on papyrus and turned to dust in his hands, but with every new page we marveled at the secret words until the sun set and the lights began to flicker across the bay.

Afterward, we went out to the deck; half of it was falling into the water, its wood curved like a cascading wave. There were others now, figured on neighboring decks, gossiping, raising their glasses, seemingly content as the water lapped at the banks. Inside, more people had arrived and sat on the couch with drinks in their hands. Dogs were chasing each other around the fireplace. Lovers were eating muffins in the breakfast nook dropping crumbs on the floor. Then she arrived. She was not ageless. She was not beautiful. She was surprised to see us all there, taking advantage of her lair. I told her I would make it right. I frantically went about collecting the dust, hair, and shards of glass in my hands. What was she to do now? The place was a sty and the lord and his mistress were renting it for a getaway. I looked after the duke but he had disappeared. I told the others to get out. A man fell from the roof and broke his neck. Another was eating an orchid on the front porch.

When I last saw the duke, he was arm in arm with the crone as she lead him into her bedroom and then locked the door. Not an hour later, she released him to the paddock where he rummaged for scraps, squealing and snorting his way through the sounder of swine.

They arrived and I had the place spotless and vacant, save the crone who hummed softly as she braided her hair in her chamber. The man with the broken neck had been airlifted to the nearest hospital. The lights across the bay had gone out. The pigs had stuffed themselves silly. I opened the door and they were young and dark: the lord wore an oversized baseball cap and a medallion, the mistress, sweatpants with LOVE printed across her ass. They talked to each other as if I didn’t matter, commenting on the place, delighted to be there, and alone.

Totem Beasts

Happy to say my book Totem Beasts will be published by Big Table in 2017. Here's the eponymous poem, appropriate for this time of year (collage at right is the book cover).

      

           There are no ghosts in this house.

                        No hem of a muslin dress

            draped over a riser.

                        No Emily Dickinson archetype

            figured prominently at the banister.

                        No face in the naked glass.

            The boreal firs, always a regiment,

                        are noble, melancholic as the

            tide bathes the sedge. 

           

            We listen for what the hayfield says.

                                                We wait

            for totem beasts, but no coyote parts these

                        fallow fields.  No moose.  No

            osprey in wake of wind.

                        Quotidian, these crows, those gulls.

            I am filled with pale green air.

                        My sister's child thumps in Utero.

            Clouds snuff the sun, the sacrament, the

                        fiery heart.

           

            Night comes.

            I sit quietly inside myself.

                        My father bows his head here,

            the lines echoing around his eyes.

Promise, A Poem for Loretta (1997)

I bought three bunches of fresh asparagus

the other day

stored them away in the drawer of the fridge

when they spoiled a day later

I told myself it had nothing to do

with God hating my guts.

I've got a long line of misfortune, asparagus

is only the beginning

loveless, penniless, obsessive, wandering wanderer

I can't help but wonder;

sometimes you view everyone around you

and then scold yourself for not being them.

I remember her bad perms, her rosary beads

and her bumper sticker

Virginia is for Lovers

her Yugo and her Jane Fonda aerobics tapes

her futile attempts at love.

Who can explain her lessons unlearned? 

Her pity and pain

like a torch they burned, burned.

Years later

after she married and had a son

I watched her bones

I watched her shrink away

among kerchiefs and black wigs

when I finally want to live, she said, I die.

On the anniversary of her death

I wanted to go to church and say a prayer

for her and I wanted to tell God that I hoped

she was a little luckier in Heaven,

but when I got to the chapel, the doors were locked.

I got in the car, I drove
I saw storm clouds

asphyxiating the sun

your life, my thoughts, just a little further

and I'll find rain

but your rays pierced through

with the wavering sign of promise.

He told me you live in my heart this way

don't fade.

Mr. Baseball

 My father predicted David Ortiz’s success long before he was the homer-hitting Big Papi known to Red Sox Nation today. “I like this kid,” he’d say every time Ortiz was up at bat. “He’s got some swing.”

Now with Ortiz’s retirement, I can’t help but feel an extra pang of sorrow: Ortiz was the last of the great players my father followed before he died in 2003, just short of the memorable Red Sox World Series win, and it’s just another indication that the game is moving on without him, just like my life has moved on without him.

My father was Mr. Baseball if ever there was one. He read Ted Williams’ book The Science of Hitting like it was the Bible. I remember how he’d take his swings down in the basement at night after dinner, muttering his mantra to himself, “Think wrists” (this was also written on the concrete wall in chalk). Rumor has it that back in his heyday, the Cubs minor league team was interested in Dad. But his career as a baseball player would never pan out; he eventually retired his field of dreams and opted for a more practical career in engineering and a family. Later, he downgraded to softball, still needing his fix, and his marriage to my mother suffered for it.

Once he came home in his uniform after telling my mother he had to work late, and she locked him out of the house. After a long day with two toddlers, she had had enough. “Sleep with that,” she yelled and threw a baseball bat onto the front lawn. Years later when my mother went into labor with my sister, he was late and in uniform again. One of my earliest memories is of my parents zooming away to the hospital in my father’s Buick, my mother holding her big belly, my father in his pinstriped uniform.

Needless to say, Dad enrolled the three of us kids in baseball and softball and coached us all in the science of hitting until we were bored to the point of tears. There was that look in his eye, that focus; it was almost creepy. My brother had it the worst; as fathers are known to do, Dad began to live vicariously through his son and started grooming him for the majors when he was in grade school. He moved my brother all over the country in search of the right college team that could properly appreciate his son’s talents. To my father’s credit, however, when my brother finally told him he wanted to play professional beach volleyball instead, Dad eventually got used to the idea. His son came first. And although it nearly killed him, he started attending my brother’s volleyball matches and cheered him on despite having to let go of the dream once again.

My father’s passion for baseball wasn’t always a point of contention. I remember being comforted by the fact that while I was in bed, he was up watching baseball; the muted sounds of the crowd cheering, the crack of the bat, were soothing to me. He was a sentinel in the night, so to speak, and I felt safe.

When he stopped playing softball, he started to live vicariously again, this time through the players who had potential, like Ortiz. Now, I see that my father’s obsession for baseball added a flare to his life, a something that always kept him curious and engaged, and there’s something to be said for that when all the delusions of grandeur wane away.

What did my father’s passion for baseball teach me? Follow your bliss, but be practical. Live and play. Play and work. Hone your skills. Be a team player. Work harder. Play harder. I’ll remember this as Ortiz takes his final tour around the country and have to mourn my father all over again.

Time Machine (Upon Waking)

The genesis of the time machine was vague. I only know this: it was a mechanism of the mind. I wanted to use it to travel back to the day my young grandmother, who wore pants and had fine auburn hair, got up on the stage to join the Dewey-Truman debate. It was famous for being the first televised debate; people could see the expressions on the candidates' faces, their body language, who was asking the questions. My grandmother had something pressing on her mind so she raised her hand. She said smart and respectable things and stumped the candidates. A woman! They invited her on stage and the audience cheered. By that intricate contraption I saw it all, and then someone changed the channel.

I told myself I wanted to meet the musical genius Prince. I wanted to see a concert of his, because I didn't when he was alive. But it wasn’t a concert this thing took me to; it was Prince himself. We had a conversation about aching bones, aging, and high-heeled shoes. He was small, like a child, and had tender things to say; he knew what worked for his body and what didn’t. At one point we were in Macy’s fingering finely made textiles, stitched with sequins. He held up a dress to my body, and then vanished.

I reappeared behind my old Honda, its hatch wide open. My brother was debating me about how the art would be transported for our journey across country. He told me his photographs should be placed atop my paintings. He gave me a long, drawn out explanation why, but I was still pissed. Why was his art more important than mine? Is there a hierarchy to art at all? My paintings could be damaged. Crushed. I started to yell, pull out my hair. He was just so insufferable sometimes. Then his wife’s anachronistic voice boomed across the sky, reprimanding him. My mother beckoned from the back seat to get in and stop squabbling. We arranged the paintings and photographs vertically and shut the hatch. The last thing I remember is the pink pigment of rock of the Painted Desert, how it spun slowly in the dust.