A few weeks ago, I was looking over a new manuscript I’m working on (a literary murder mystery mashup of the Victorian novel Vanity Fair, which I’m co-writing with John Nee), and I felt the writing seemed a bit flat. A bit workmanlike. Less interesting, less nuanced, less sparkly than I wanted.
But on my desk, always, is a stack of half-read New Yorkers. I never make it all the way through one before the next one lands in my mailbox (yes, I still get the paper copies) and yet I can’t bear to pitch them in the recycle bin, thinking that at some point I’ll get through that juicy looking article toward the back.
Anyway … I flipped through it, looking for a particular article I wanted to read and paused at a poem, “An Ocean of Clouds,” by Garrett Hongo. It’s short, so I’ve reprinted it here:
I sing for clouds, constant rains, a fern chorus
of things forgotten, ginger flowers
of sadness my mother bore, enormous
hollows of the family’s past, my father
the dutiful son come to run the store
by the volcano, called by his father
promising a new life, its open door
that swung shut after barely a year.
They left, me still a newborn in their arms,
wailing in complaint for the swift travel,
headed to Kahuku, the new truck farms,
old plantation, and its steel sugar castle.
I grew to six there, a boy barefoot
on dirt and gravel roads, green temple moss
by the graveyard. There were shorebirds in suits
of slanting rain, a gray-brown surf pebble-tossed,
not fit for swimming, a tired sandspit’s drift
that marked the margin of all our dreaming.
And what was that? The green folds of cliffs
chanted our imagined names, caught winds heaving
an ocean of clouds that piled like seawrack
muffling hte mill’s whistle, windrows of rain
gathered upon the mountain’s emerald stacks,
the black crown of the day’s celebration.
Hidden within the sighing sugarcane, here
I first raised my voice in harmless praise.
I lifted my eyes to the moon’s white sphere
And sang a song I hoped would bless all my days.
I read it and reread it. It was allusive, with the unexpected word usages and wordplay poetry often has. It had neologisms and personification; a rhetorical question; and alliteration and comma breaks that linked or unlinked words unexpectedly — and I felt something unlock, loosen, flex in my brain. So I have begun reading poetry for a few minutes (really, just a few) every day before I start writing. Poetry — highly distilled, with words used differently than we do in daily life, is my new pre-game. You might give it a try for a few days. See what you think, and let me know.