Photograph of basalt by Marek Novotňák. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The first big influence on my writing was Nathaniel Hawthorne. My teacher in senior year of high school had written her doctoral thesis on The Marble Faun, if you can imagine that—and she was a nun! I went to one of the bookstores on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and bought a complete Riverside Editions set of Hawthorne’s writing. Later I added a volume, Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life, two volumes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, and Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny. I had become addicted to his long, elegant prose sentences, which I studied and even diagrammed; a habit as old-fashioned as nuns. If you read the introductory essay to The Scarlet Letter, “The Customs House,” you will see what I mean. In it Hawthorne says that Hester Prynne became a social worker. As far as I know, Hawthorne did not write poetry, but he was an excellent candle-waster, in more ways than one. His writing made it clear that words have a magical quality to take you to another sphere but then you see that it’s only a book you are holding. I already had synesthesia in the form of seeing letters as different colors, so in many ways I was grateful to the author of The Scarlet Letter. Perhaps it was Hawthorne who inspired me to see prose as poetic.
Next come the Steins: Gertrude, Albert, and Wittgenstein. I’ll begin with Ludwig Wittgenstein. If there is a book by a philosopher about language, you’d better read his. You might discover you are writing in a private language: or that the color red means something to you and something else to others. Here’s a little poem by Wittgenstein:
Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations
[. . .]
I turn to stone and my pain goes on
Wittgenstein points out, or seems to, that one can know what somebody else is thinking but not what we ourselves are thinking. But all philosophy is written or spoken in words or thought in words. Of course, the idea of whether we think in words has not been answered. Deer don’t talk to themselves, but they might think in words and not know it. Around this time, Wittgenstein says, in parentheses: “(A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.)” Sounds that no one understands might be called a private language. Talking and thinking are not the same. But what of writing? Carl Safina, a writer on animal communication, says that if a lion came up to Wittgenstein and said something, it would be hard not to know what it meant.
Was the telephone book a book that had meaning? Is there a telephone book now? What if I changed my name to Bernadette Telephone Mayer? Or Bernadette Book Mayer? Would you be more or less likely to have a grilled cheese with me? Did Wittgenstein really rewash all the dishes at somebody else’s house? An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it. Woman learns the concept of the past by remembering, but how will she know again in the future what remembering feels like? Maybe the stone is not as red as this day.
Gertrude Stein talked about roses a lot but they were only red. All tomatoes aren’t red either. Even blood isn’t red except in the air of the earth.
The writing of John McPhee, who works as a journalist, is startling in many ways. He has written books about Bill Bradley, geology, the Swiss Army, canoes, the Pine Barrens, oranges, art, and nuclear energy, reveling in the vocabularies of every subject and in words like “Berriasian” or “oolitic.” He has a great method of writing, using index cards. He publishes much in The New Yorker magazine.
Another great writer, someone not everyone knows, is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who lived in a convent in that age when, if a woman wasn’t getting married, she carried on her life safely and knowledgeably, and, rather interestingly, behind closed doors, where she could study and write.
Catullus, of course, has been an inspiration for his way of communicating, using slang language, and insulting politicians. In fact, for insulting anyone in verse, even your best friend, Catullus is the best person to consult if you want to learn how to level insults well, not like how it’s done by certain past presidents of this country.
Everything I read will have an influence on me, so I’ll just mention a few of my more overwhelming influences as a writer of poetry: Louis Zukofsky, whose love of syllables and Latin and Anglo-Saxon words appears in poetic usage. Larry McMurtry, whose manipulation of emotion is both surprising and masterful, and Sappho, without whom I doubt we’d know what love might be. Let’s all have dinner together.
I was taking a class with Bill Berkson at the New School when he told me I wrote too much like Gertrude Stein. This was quite prescient of him since I had never read Gertrude Stein, so I hurried to. Here’s a description of “Cold Climate” from Tender Buttons:
A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places [so you can see the resemblances].
Tender Buttons is a hoot in many ways.
Stanzas in Meditation is another great book of poetry by this Stein. It’s like reading Shakespeare and for some it needs a translation. Maybe it’s a private language. Gertrude Stein taught us that the meaning is/isn’t a physiognomy (from Wittgenstein). If you want to include Hawthorne too, you could say phrenology. This Stein studied with William James and learned about stream of consciousness, that meaning is not the cat’s pajamas. Write a list of all the things meaning is not. You could begin with the bee’s knees. Many people think of poetry as words with rhyme and meter. But the battle to use everyday speech in poetry began with William Carlos Williams. Along with rhyme and meter seems to go meaning. So you can only have meaning in poetry if it’s metrical and rhyming, except when it’s like a Cubist painting or Kandinsky maybe.
In Einstein’s autobiography there is a section beginning “What, precisely, is ‘thinking’?” This is Einstein’s contribution to us as writers. The quote was republished in The New Yorker, in which it existed as narrow columns, giving me the idea that the beginning and end words of each line would make an interesting poem, which they do. We are grateful to Einstein for saying in his clear way what thinking is for all of us, and Gertrude Stein would be happy to know that thinking is not exactly remembering. I can’t think of anyone better to follow the expectations of life hanging together both in terms of living and writing. Another surprising illustrator of the very same thing is Emma Goldman, whose autobiography in two volumes is called Living My Life. No matter your political orientation, Goldman’s erudite prose and explication of her daily doings are urgent to keep in mind.
Reading the New York Times Science section on Tuesday and Science News provides you as a writer with ready-made poems, plus this is all stuff you need to know which exists besides your daily doings. For instance, if you walk in Central Park, it’s useful to know the glacial history of that neighborhood and that there once was an African American village there in the swamp on the Upper East Side. It would be useful to the world to write poems about science, if they’ve got to be about anything.
From Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone, to be published by MIT Press next month.
