A chickadee calls
outside my window
from the bare winter branches
of the crape myrtle.
Inside, your poems speak
to what already
I suspect.
Words sown through a lifetime,
telling us not to leave,
once what is needed
has been found.
The answers in each poem:
the wind, the seasons,
a hard and simple life.
Posted by sean on February 6, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/02/06/to-john-haines/
Straighten your papers, the ones you never look at. Never touch a paper twice, that’s what they say. Avoid information overload! Never touch a paper twice. Look at it and file it or throw it out. Don’t straighten your papers then, see if I care. Log in. Er, try to log in. Oops, forgot your password. How many are in your head. How many are the same. You fool! Don’t use the same one twice! You must use a combination of four numbers, three symbols, and no less than six letters. We will not accept anything less. Also we’ll need you to change it again as soon as you begin to remember it. Forget it the first time you try to log in. Request new password. Make up new one, but not the same as your email password. And don’t use your pet’s name. Your neighbor might hear you calling him outside and hack into your account. Throw a few papers out to make yourself feel better. It’s okay, I know you touched them already. Just throw them out so you won’t touch them again. There, isn’t that better? Now go outside and breathe in some car fumes. It might be better than recycled office air but honestly science hasn’t bothered to find out. No corporate funding would touch that kind of study. So it’s still up in the air. [Don’t laugh at that!] Walk around and pretend you’re not an insignificant speck, not just another cog in the machine (you are, even though you purport not to be by affecting a continuous broadcast of apathy and cynicism to the world, and to yourself– the worst and most damaging lies are always to yourself. We learn this over time.). Return to the office. Pick up another stack of paper from your mailbox. Leave it on your desk for weeks to gather the appropriate office patina. Then recycle it. Or think you’re recycling it. Everyone knows the cleaning staff just throws it all in the trash anyway. It’s common knowledge. It doesn’t matter. Recycling can’t save us, Derrick Jensen says. Only complete destruction of civilization will save us. Would you prefer that? Read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and check back with me. I’ll make tea and we can pontificate. Then we’ll pack our emergency preparedness kits. Leave work behind now. Go home and attend to the needs there, the ones behind the scenes of everyone’s public life. Nourish your body. Attempt to nourish your mind but mostly just numb it and then maybe squeeze in a little bit of nourishment before sleep. If you’re lucky when you’re out late walking you’ll look up and see Venus glowing above the rooftops. Or maybe a full moon. If you’re lucky a breeze will rustle the cottonwood leaves and leave you breathless. But you won’t be lucky tonight because it’s winter and the branches are bare. So go to sleep and dream of spring. Dream about the end of civilization. Dream of anything at all. Like Amy Hempel says, that’s where most of us get what we want.
Posted by sean on January 26, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/01/26/recycling-with-the-mayans/
Running on the treadmill today I started thinking about Amy Hempel’s writing again. Recently I read some vitriolic criticism of her work. It bothers me when critics slag a writer in such a way that suggests a near personal hatred. I sometimes think that reviewers shouldn’t even bother writing about work that they hate, unless they are able to muster up some degree of objectivity. I see no value in completely trashing someone’s creative work in a public forum. Above all, everyone’s definition and expectation of a particular genre differs, and so basing your critique solely on your own understanding or expectation is a flawed point of reference.
To follow that thread, much has been made of the blurring of genre boundaries in recent times. Flash fiction, mini nonfiction narratives, and prose poetics often entwine to the point where some have suggested that only the authors themselves are capable of declaring what genre a specific piece falls into, should they even care to label their work at all. Some don’t, although this can make it harder for them to find their audience.
Amy Hempel’s writing is a perfect case study when examining genre’s murky waters. She’s been described as a minimalist fiction writer, though that term has been loaded and discharged so many times over that it’s mostly shooting blanks now. Amy has said that most of her inspiration comes from poetry, and I would say that can definitely be seen in her work. Her stories are like frames, each sentence a neatly trimmed two-by-four, nailed together with precise punctuation. Sure, she could then cover this frame with thick boards of wordy prose, but why bother? Sometimes readers (and writers) want to sit on a bare floor and peer out at (or into) the world through the spaces between sentences. We don’t always (and sometimes never) want it all spelled out before us. Of course, there are those readers that do want a lot of action; they want a story to progress at a certain pace and get somewhere. But then there are those who aren’t interested in a destination, who enjoy an aimless walk, who love when a story ends leaving them breathless and unsettled, but not with perfect closure.
I think of Amy as more of a poet than a fiction writer. Poetry does not have to rely on the ease of line breaks and stanzas. Poetry can reside within a paragraph, with word choice and punctuation hammering out a steady rhythm on their own. But maybe even these terms, poetry and fiction, are not needed. For all writers draw from life, and life is real and true, but when we commit it to the page it takes on a different form altogether. Sometimes we determine what that form will be, merely with how we organize the words on a page. We can then try to bend it to fit a genre’s flimsy label. But perhaps that is unfair. Maybe we should not be corralling these words within fences. Maybe as readers and as writers, we should just let them flow through us, without the burden of our demands, without the limits of our expectations.
Posted by sean on February 11, 2011
https://sd-stewart.com/2011/02/11/hempel-redux-the-murkiness-of-genre/
“Dreams: the place most of us get what we need”—Amy Hempel
Posted by sean on September 16, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/09/16/in-the-wilderness/
So I just discovered Amy Hempel’s writing. I guess I am behind the times, but whatever…at least I found her! I looked up an interview and her answer to this question below struck me. In particular, this statement of hers rang like a bell in my head: “I’m still drawn to MOMENTS, moments when power shifts between two people, or moments when something small but encompassing happens.”
YES. Yes, Amy.
I also really like the quote from that Jane Hirshfield poem…I’m going to have to look that poem up. In her answer to the next question, Amy talks about poetry and how important it is in helping her craft stories, how you learn about rhythm and conserving words, among other valuable lessons.
RH: Your longest written work, Tumble Home, is a novella. Have you ever considered or attempted a full-length novel? And what attracts you to the short story form?
AH: I have never wanted to write a novel, though I might write another novella someday. I never get tired of what stories can do. I’m working very short again, and will continue this way (short-shorts, prose poems) until that gets old. I’m still drawn to MOMENTS, moments when power shifts between two people, or moments when something small but encompassing happens. There is a poem by Jane Hirshfield titled “Changing Everything” that best describes what I mean by that last– a person walking in the woods who picks up a stick and moves it to the other side of the path and says, “There, that’s done now.”
Posted by sean on August 23, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/08/23/amy-hempel/
Foment angst so there is a thing to describe, not straight nor flat nor dull nor the same as before, but colored instead with the red of madness. Like Dillard says, stalk the gaps. But sometimes there’s waiting to be done. Blank days, empty months, they shape themselves into forms you will recognize in time. I can’t even pretend to care anymore about the empty words flaking down around me, stuffing my mouth with cotton ideas, my head so ready to explode its vitriol across the table, spreading over your useless papers, seeping through the fabric of your dress pants. My internal voice so hoarse from screaming the vilest curses I can barely think just a word when I finally throw my leg up over the handlebars in defeat and make it all a shrinking dot behind me. I’m hollowed out from the inside, your words carved out whatever mattered and replaced it with a frothy foam devoid of substance. I sit and wait, sit and wait. There may be nothing out there, nothing at all, but I still sense the madness, up in the corners, in the late night hours, triggers ablaze in the dark circles around your eyes. I seize upon it and bite down to suck it dry. I will fill myself back up, every time, no matter how many times you empty me.
Posted by sean on March 24, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/03/24/this-slate-can-never-be-erased/
Posted by sean on January 28, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/28/r-i-p-j-d/
Nicest day we’ve had in weeks and I’m stuck inside waiting for a tardy contractor. As I wait, someone intermittently uses a loud drill next door. Sometimes homeownership sucks. Muggings and robberies are up, in both the neighborhood and the city at large. This depresses me on an epic scale. Drilling next door probably indicates installation of new deadbolts. Bars on windows, steel doors, quadruple locks, where does it end? How safe can you be? Muggers lie in wait looking for opportunities. We really have no control over it. The problem is systemic: the haves and the have nots forever divided. No reconciliation possible. Only solution is to take to the woods. The cities are doomed.
In 1960, John Steinbeck traveled the United States with his dog and wrote a book about his trip. At one point he notes, “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.” Since then, we have happily continued to destroy all the natural places, with the exception of a select few that are so overrun they project a carnivalesque atmosphere. We have built a society so spread apart that most people see the automobile as the only way to traverse the uncomfortable distances between point A and point B. To not own a car is anathema. You are branded a freak and possibly un-American; at the very least, you are suspect. Similarly, to eschew the consumerist lifestyle that is so red-bloodedly American is also viewed with suspicion. Why wouldn’t you want to buy all the latest greatest stuff? You saw it on TV, after all, and it looked totally awesome. And everyone who had that stuff looked really happy. So why wouldn’t you want to be happy? Get out there and shop, sucker.
Often I think I was born in the wrong century, perhaps in the wrong country, possibly of the wrong race, and maybe even on the wrong planet altogether.
I just got back from a work retreat that I had been dreading for quite some time. During said retreat, I spent some late night hours carousing with a few coworkers who I hadn’t really gotten to know beforehand. I found them to be decent and fun to hang out with, at least in my inebriated state. I’m sure they were surprised by my sudden bout of gregariousness. I’m not a mean drunk, but I can be a saucy one. During the work sessions, I was surprised to sense a tiny flame of enthusiasm ignite somewhere deep below the layers of cynicism within me. But I know better. We can talk grand and eloquent away from the office, but reality is grim. Knowing how long it’s taken to get this far (still a sad state of affairs) makes it impossible to expect that even a quarter of our lofty ideas will ever come to fruition within the next three and a half years. And that is not cynicism talking; that’s just pragmatism.
The place where we stayed was a Bavarian-styled inn that was the type of place where the Griswold family would’ve roomed during one of their epically disastrous vacations. My bathroom had a disused-looking bidet in it and a space heater mounted in the wall that smelled like burning dust when turned on. Still, the king-sized four-poster bed was comfortable and the vaguely shabby past-its-heyday look to the entire place was preferable to the sterility of modern hotels. Not a good place to be a vegan, but I got by (barely). I wish I had photos to share, but the camera was left behind.
Posted by sean on January 15, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/15/random/
The holidaze has come and gone, a blur of mostly family and some friends, a lot of eating, a touch of music with an old compatriot, some reading and sleeping, and a long, luxurious respite from work. I traveled by train and car, but have been off the bike for far too long now. Worked out at the gym, tried my hand at pedal steel guitar, cooked and ate with some of my favorite people. I received an unexpected gift intended to enhance my birding, which I haven’t done in about a month now, besides car birding, and some very meager backyard birding. Christmas Day did unexpectedly bring to the yard jays, cardinals, doves, sparrows, and even a junco or two. We’ve seen glimpses of a hawk (probable Cooper’s) in the trees across the street. Meanwhile, with the close of the old year and the dawn of the new comes the inevitable reflection. I don’t make resolutions, but it’s hard not to stare ahead at a blank slate of 365 days before you and not scratch around in your head for some ideas of what you want to see rise up from that expanse of time. Personally I know I need to stop treading water and start making headway on the changes I yearn to see in my future. No more averting the eyes. My passivity knows no bounds and the time to corral it is way past due. I need to spend the afternoon, as Annie Dillard says, because I can’t take it with me. There is a path that I am supposed to be on and I will claw my way through the brambles to get to it.
Posted by sean on January 3, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/03/halting-the-aversion/
Spring migration has been keeping me pretty busy. Up early before work for an hour of birding here and there, then back out in the evening if I’m not too worn out. On the weekends, trying for more extended trips, like last Sunday’s all-day adventure at Blackwater NWR. So many Bald Eagles!! Yesterday had a banner day at a new local spot I’d heard such great things about. It did not disappoint. And the rain could not dampen my jubilant spirits. A definite highlight was the Summer Tanager. A stunning bird, for certain. When not birding, I’ve been probing current disillusionment with my day job. Also reading Proust. And Joseph Campbell. They complement each other nicely, actually. Listening to a lot of Bill Callahan, aka Smog. Generally enjoying the spring weather and spending as little time inside as is required by my unfortunate need to exchange time for paper that has value and can be traded for things such as shelter and food…I think you’ve heard this all before.
Posted by sean on May 3, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/05/03/migration/
s. d. stewart 