Lightness Essay

(N.B. I started writing this almost 18 months ago and never finished this. I don't plan on finishing it, so I'm posting it here. Probably part of an introductory thought on The Breakers)

If I may spend a moment wrapped inside of a cliché:

I really can’t seem to find what I’m looking for. And I’ve read the suggestions and the comments on my blog. But I, very seriously, still haven’t found what I’m looking for. And I wish it were something so simple as Bono’s vest and ponytail.

I’ve been on a poetic quest over the last few months and though I’ve received excellent directions from those electronically within my grasp, I still seem to be stumbling about in the dark with nothing but the glow of my Timex watch to guide me.

(end clichés, hopefully)

I’m looking for lightness in poems. I don’t mean lightness in the thematic sense, like poems about puppy dogs and ice cream, which I got enough of in undergraduate workshops. I don’t mean lightness as in the opposite of heaviness, in the sense of Italo Calvino’s lecture on lightness in Six Memos for the New Millennium. I mean the opposite of a heart attack crushing your chest. I want a poem (or more, if possible) that feels as though it could easily come off the page and leave no residue behind: no poems that need peeling from a page. Poems that desire to float away on their own.

This does not mean, however, that the poems need to be short or have a bunch of white space in the middle of letters or words or sentences. Length is fine and a lack of space is fine. I believe it is possible to have both a decently long poem and little or no space and to still not feeling constricted by the poem.

I’ve unfortunately tapped into a general definition of lightness when asking for others about it, and while all suggestions have been well-intentioned, I feel like I’m unable to reach the style I want and have ended up elsewhere. Unfortunately, too, I am unable to give a true definition for what it is I am seeking. I call it ‘lightness’ because it is the best adjective I can think of.

The suggestions have been interesting on this quest. Italo Calvino’s lecture (though it’s really an essay due to Calvino’s death) gives us lightness as a construct in which thematic issues create this sense. Calvino’s lightness seems to require taking on levity with respect to topics and issues, rather than style and form. Calvino gives us Dante, in that The Divine Comedy.

I recently finished reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the hope that the Czech writer could give me some idea of the direction I need to go in, I read it slowly and thoughtfully, hoping to capture the minutiae of events and language. In some way he has given me a direction: through his characters, Kundera gives the reader an example of lightness in terms of day to day existence. Sabina and Tereza are on opposite ends of the spectrum, with Sabina hoping to live and die in a state of lightness and Tereza being unable and perhaps unwilling to give into the lifestyle. Tomas is somewhere in between: at the beginning of the novel he is living his life in lightness, but is eventually caught in the struggle between his lover Sabina and his wife Tereza. I believe that by the end, his death with his wife signals the migration from lightness.

I believe that to Kundera, lightness can be exemplified by a lifestyle in which no issue is given any true significance. Sabina is not unfeeling, but through her avoidance of kitsch, she becomes Kundera’s character of the light. She seems to do her best to avoid assigning meaning and therefore structure to her existence. At the same time, Tereza assigns meaning to all things in her life: her dreams, her husband, her jobs, and her dog. As if to throw at us just how anti-lightness Tereza is, she is even superstitious, seeing it as a sign when Tomas tells her that he is in room six and that her shift at the small-town café also ends at 6pm.

Tomas, as I said, is caught in between. I believe he is shocked to find out that the things he considered meaningless, which allowed him to live in lightness, actually do have some meaning to him. I believe the first moment (upon which he dwells through out the novel) is when Tereza comes to Prague to basically move in with him. He has assigned meaning to his bachelorhood and to the life he had made for himself as a surgeon. After that point, however, he begins to discover that the only item with true meaning in his life is his wife. He is forced to stop being a surgeon, reunite with a son he had ignored, and move out to the country and live a life away from lightness.

But I’ve gotten off track: this isn’t an essay on Kundera- it’s an essay on lightness. What I feel Kundera and Calvino are going towards is the insignificance of issues presented under the practice of lightness. This, however, goes against what I’ve been trying to get at all this time: lightness should not exist in theme, but in style and form.

One can be serious and still write a light piece. Significance can “weigh down” the piece with its Calvino-esque “heaviness” and still exist as light. In correspondence, I have been referring to them as my “light poems”. I hope these poems exhibit the quality I am attempting to find amongst the essays, poems, and writings of others, because I know that deep down, I am not searching for anything truly new. It must exist somewhere for all of us to read, understand, and analyze.

I have found, I would like to admit, contemporary examples that should hopefully show what I am attempting to get at. The reason I’m not presenting my own poems is that I believe several poets have attained a light feeling to their poetry and I hope by holding them up as examples, what I have been talking about will become clear. These examples are not the only ones that exist, but are the ones I have read in preparation for writing my own light poems.

Reflections on Lightness, Light Poems, Kundera, Chicago, Genesis, My Brother, My Cousin Shruti, Her Family, and Baseball

Ending in the lightness it seems bent on discussing, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a book I have very mixed emotions about. Drawn to it Kundera's views on lightness, Nietzsche's Eternal Return, and of course by the idea of reading a 'Novel of Ideas', I felt incredibly underwhelmed by every piece that did not deal directly with Kundera's narrator and the ideas coming back.


The idea of writing a novel and telling the reader that you're only telling a story because it fits your ideas is a fascinating one, but if felt like nothing new to me. It felt incredibly post modern to me in that its gaze is back upon its self. Not really a mirror, but watching a video or seeing a photograph of yourself. I also did enjoy that Kundera doesn't mind telling the reader these things. The novel feels like it could easily include the phrase, "Let me give you an example..." before going off about Tomas and Tereza, et. al.


I am still thinking about (and will write about further) how it seems that while nothing can ever happen again, in the world of a reader and in the world of the book, there are multiple repetitions of events. Right now, I feel that the idea that nothing can happen again is moot because it can always happen again to the person who lived it, watched it, read it, etc. Sure the Braves 1991 season occurred only once, but in video and memory, we can live it again. Granted, it can't be the exact moment of time again, but it never really goes away, not even necessarily when we do.


So I took a notebook with me to Chicago, not intending to fill it with new poems by any means, but at least to write something down over the course of three days away from Iowa City. I wrote one poem, and to me, it doesn't necessarily exhibit what I have been wanting to do, but I felt like I'd taken something away from my quest for light poems. I think perhaps I'm done with the tiny/light poem phase, but hope that I've learned something from it.

The lightness of Kundera, Calvino, etc. is not my lightness. It is the lightness of wit and manner, not necessarily of style. I wanted lightness of form, not lightness of context. I want a lightness of words and not humor.

****

In Chicago, I saw my brother who has recently moved from Atlanta to Cincinnati. He seems do be doing well, but with more flecks of gray in his hair. We saw Genesis on Thursday night, which was an amazing show. The crowd was really into it and the band was too. The thing I loved the most was that there were only a few songs between us that we could think of that they didn't play. Other than that, Genesis played all of their hits, early 70s through early 90s.

****

We went to my cousin's house and saw her new baby. We went to dinner with her and her husband as well as my aunt and uncle. We spent a little while at my Uncle's condo in Skokie also. He seemed to be very happy to have us to talk with.

****

Chicago was quiet on the baseball front while I was around. They were excited Thursday evening at the possibility of winning. Alas, it was not to be.

Poetry and Other Notes

Been pretty "blah" lately. Reread Jesus' Son, which Rob made fun of by saying it's the "creative writing Bible!". He's probably not too far off. The reason I was reading it again was because the last time I read it, I was not living in Iowa City, but hoped that Denis Johnson's IC would be reality.

It isn't, of course, and I read it curious to see the connections to Iowa City in his pages. Not to say it's not an interesting read.

I've been working on my light poems, which I think are getting better with each one. Perhaps I'm the only one to think so, though it will be some time before they are ready to be seen. With recent rejections in tow, I'm thinking as previously about taking a little break from submissions and working on writing and getting ready for the Warren Wilson application.

Speaking of which, I've pretty much decided I don't want to do it if I have to pay for it. I'll be willing to pay for a full-time program down the road, but not for this. My back up plan: quitting work and applying the Western Illinois' English masters program. It's in Moline, about an hour away. However, they offer teaching (!) and tuition remission, which is more than Iowa does, certainly. Iowa schools offer "help" with tuition, but will not waive that fee if they are paying you to teach.

So let's say you make $16K/year teaching, $7K goes to tuition! No good.

This is in preperation for getting out of Iowa City in a few years when Jennifer is ready to do her year of field work and year of dissertation writing. The field work is in Mississippi, so I'm hoping I can get *something* done and teach at a community college or something down there. Who knows...

Back to the light poems:

I've been reading Japanese death poetry and poems by Sakutarō Hagiwara. Francois suggests I read Tanikawa Shuntaro and Nakahara Chuuya, but I haven't made it upstairs to check for them yet. I will though. Obviously I'm not in a huge rush.

*In the Japanese death poetry collection I found a card for a local psychologist.*


I, at present, have no definition of "light" that I can explain. "Light" doesn't mean short, or funny, or lots of space. "Light" is a general sense in poems, to me. Graham Foust has lighter poems. "At Last, India" from a year or so ago was a lighter poem to me. I think I'm closer to Calvino's definition than I suspected.


In other news, if you watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? today (Tuesday June 19), my neighbor and Fiction MFA grad Kecia Lynn won $8000. The question she declined to answer in order to go home with $8000 could have been answered by this six year student of Latin. If only I'd been a lifeline...

Notes 6/4/07

1. News up on JC Project

2. Went to Chicago this weekend for a whole 6 hours. Ate pizza, bought chocolate. Much fun was had in seeing Jennifer's sister Margaret and meeting her boyfriend Jerel. He's a good guy.

We would have spent longer in Chicago except that I had to be at work on Sunday...or so I thought.

Showed up Sunday at noon and found the doors still locked to the library and found out we were supposed to be closed. Would have been nice if someone had last me know, say, before noon on Sunday.

Jennifer's pictures of our Chicago trip are here.

3. I want to write "light" poems, I told Johannes in an email this weekend. He recommended Italo Calvino's lecture titled "Lightness" in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. He also recommended I pick up Calvino's book Invisible Cities.

I want to write poems that desire to float away, the words held together with twine, but tied well enough to stay down, and you're amazed by this ability because you expected to see them in the the air.