Soapbox Where I Can Shout It Podcast

Welcome back everybody. We begin, as I did, with Billy Collins.

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This semester I am teaching Introduction to Creative Writing, and as the semester winds down into Spring Break, I wanted to get all the writers together to record a piece each student has written so far. What follows is a generous and beautiful exploration of creative writing from creative writers doing what they do best: explore, imagine, and interpret the world through their unique vantage points. Enjoy!

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This week I am attending the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Cleveland, Ohio. I was honored to be included on a sponsored panel by the Creative Writing Standing Group called Making Creative Writing Visible Through Our Work, Artist Statements, and Our Conversations, which, according to our abstract:

celebrates the dynamic life of creative writing within our field. Speakers will share artist statements and excerpts of their creative writing through what Felicia Rose Chavez describes as writing anyway. We make creative work visible, and create a space to talk about creative writing in our practices as writers, teachers, scholars, advocates, community members, and global citizens.

I thought it might be fun to share what I shared on this panel in the podcast feed. I’ll include the text below. Hope you enjoy!

Fifteen years ago, my favorite band broke up. It was during the semester of my first ever creative writing class as a student. This semester I am teaching Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town in my own introduction to creative writing class. Let me get sentimental: revisiting this text has been surprisingly emotional as I recall the formative wisdom of my poetry professor, Terry Hermsen, who assigned this book. “If you are not risking sentimentality,” Hugo tells us, “you are not close to your inner self.” The central conceit of the book is that in order to effectively write poetry, one must seek inspiration, not wait for it, which he illustrates using the metaphor of a “triggering town.” For me, that town is my inner self.

“The road has a memory and creases its perfections,” Hermsen writes in his poem “Credo.” One imagines traveling down the roads of their inner self to the triggering towns of their own writing lives.

Fifteen years ago, I would have been halted by another line from “Credo”: “the pen is a substitute / the page a conspirator.” I might have read Hermsen to be commenting on the recursive relationship between inspiration and craft, that we fight the blank page, waiting for our muses to guide our pens to write, like Hugo’s idea that “all truth must conform to music.” The tension comes from that triggering spark and bending reality to sound it out. The problem is, I’m not sure I agree with Hugo. I like the truth, to a fault, sometimes. In my M.F.A. program in California, I was two “bad” things proudly: a Midwesterner and a “confessional poet.” This doesn’t mean I make all music conform to truth; there’s a way to capture the music and the truth. To write honestly, or to write sentimentally, while letting the sonics of the poem take precedent over its reporting. Let me show you what I mean in a poem I wrote in 2021:

Assembling the stroller while listening to The White Stripes’

Get Behind Me Satan – an album that came out when I was a baby,

barely walking, brushing sweaty hair from my anxious forehead

now – marred with lines of worry and furrowed, glistening still

underneath a hat with an old logo for a new university, “this is it,”

I say to the dog, maybe to my wife in the other room, the glass

of bourbon shimmering in rhythm with the spinning fan, the record

spinning thirty-three and one third rotations. It rolls like a wheel,

I think, affixing four of them into the base of the bassinet praying

the “satisfying click” these frustrating instructions promise me

will keep my son secure while we are outside. My god, out

side is everything. I can paint and dust and wet-Swiffer

your room, little man, but I can do none of those things out there.

“Get behind me, Satan,” I might yell at some demon lurking

behind a shrub in the cul-de-sac you’ll inherit when you’re finally

born. “Get behind me, Dad,” you might murmur in the songs

you sing in coos and cries, while I push the two of us circling

the sun until something new, thrilling, really music to your ears

becomes old to you, building something of your own like I am now.

What changed? The shift from a wide-eyed creative writing major to tired-eyed creative writing professor? There are the practical matters of my continued training as a poet, the discipline that comes with having to write on the side of teaching. I started to realize writing isn’t the thing I do around the work, but rather, the work itself. Of the work, Hugo teaches: “think small. If you have a big mind, that will show itself … if the triggering subject is big (love, death, faith) rather than localized and finite, the mind tends to shrink.” “Assembling the stroller while listening to The White Stripes” is nakedly about what it is about and fixated on the smallness of the task and not the terror of becoming a parent, big minded in its smallness.

That’s the rule I write by: honesty in smallness. Of course, that’s not true at all, I don’t write by any rules. Hermsen emphasized this in class, pointing out Hugo by his own omission called his rules “arbitrary,” that the mission of Triggering Town is not “to teach you how to write but how to teach yourself how to write.” A constant and necessary reminder: “you have to be silly to write poems at all.”

The inherent silliness of rules and limitations appears in the creative ethos of The White Stripes, as described by guitar and frontman Jack White:

I would just work in the same box and think ‘god you know,’ one part of my brain says ‘I’m tired of trying to come up with things in this box,’ but I force myself to do it because I know something that can come out of it if I really work inside of it. Inspiration and work ethic. They ride right next to each other.

… Not every day in your life you’re gonna wake up and the clouds are going to part and the rays from heaven are gonna come down and you’re gonna write a song from it. Sometimes you just get in there and just force yourself to work and maybe something good will come out.

He goes on to describe the old equipment the band uses, the lack of rehearsal and set lists for their live performances, the distance between guitars and Meg White’s peppermint drum kit; Jack says “I always push it a little bit farther away so that I have to work harder … I’m constantly fighting all these tiny little things because all of those things build tension … to force ourselves to create.”

It isn’t magic. It is work. I try to teach my students this. I try to remind myself this on days I’m not so inspired that I have to go find it. Hugo recalls an anecdote about a professional golfer being lauded for landing a lucky shot out of the sand trap. The golfer replies, “I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get.” Hugo expands:

If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck … Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

I’ve come now to better understand that couplet of Hermsen’s: “The pen is a substitute / the page a conspirator.” We are co-conspirators with our blank pages, the pens are a substitute for the tension created in the life of living and writing and noticing and risking, maybe even plunging into sentimentality. Maybe, like Hugo, I make my own binary for writing: his is that truth must conform to music and never the other way around. Mine is this: it isn’t the magic that makes the work. It is the work that makes the magic.

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After a short ad parodying the Budweiser Clydesdales (the horses are Tauntauns!) during the Super Bowl, Star Wars fans wondered when a new story trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu would materialize. After all, May 22 is closer than ever! Well, that trailer materialized mid-morning on a weekday - instead of during the most viewed media event of the year, every year, since the beginning of the statcast era - and I only had to wait a day for my big brother came back on the podcast to talk about it. Back in September, Steve joined me for the super-sized teaser trailer and it didn’t take much arm-twisting to get him back to do it all over again. We liked it.

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Sigh. They got me class. Some ragebait infiltrated my facebook news feed and it got me. Listen along while I live-react to what I’m sure will make me furious, its Louder Sound’s “Nine Jack White albums you should listen to and one to avoid.” A non-Jack White newsletter coming soon.

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To commemorate The White Stripes’ retirement on this day in 2011, please enjoy the sounds of a blog post I wrote for a now-defunct blog in 2023 with an addendum for this year. Read that post here, and remember: The White Stripes Forever.

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I wrote a monster essay about spending the year with Bruce Springsteen, you can (and should!) read that here. If you don’t want to feast your eyes upon what the Substack app calls a 23 minute read, no worries, I turned it into a nearly hour-long podcast. Full text of the essay, plus audio!

Top tracks playlist: https://tidal.com/playlist/a0d71a95-81bb-4008-9fb0-cb43e6cc4757

I spent two thirds of this year listening to and thinking about Bruce Springsteen. This pod was a labor of love, I hope you enjoy it and subscribe to the newsletter and pod feed.

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It would be inaccurate to call today’s snow “the first snow” of the year - we had a small dusting early in November (the 10th, to be exact, which I know because my ongoing compulsion to post album art of what I’m listening to on my Instagram story reports that I last played Give Up on November 10th).

This was more of a “first snow” in the all too familiar Midwesterner sense of the phrase: snow emergency declarations early the previous evening, the school closing ticker broadcasting A Very Good Day for school aged children across all of Central Ohio, and (at least in our house) a debate about the drive in the mess headache vs. the switch to remote work headache. As Rachel weighed her pros and cons the morning news reported like two dozen car accidents. Decision made. Off to work in Ben’s room she went, and off to snooze on the couch to The Snowy Day went me and Ben.

I had planned to grade papers and clean the house today, but I found myself spending it instead with Ben (a far better proposal than “work” this being the actual work that requires me, my actual life’s work). A nap and virtual office hours notwithstanding it was dude and all I day, and the culmination our little snowy day was a trip to the sledding hill in Marysville.

This year Ben’s interest was in sending the slide down the hill without either of us and then walking down to get it. Something to that I should probably write about, but while we were enjoying the beautiful crisp snow and “enjoying” the freezing air, wandering aimlessly around on the nearby trail that follows a now-frozen creek I couldn’t stop myself from thinking “oh I should write a poem about this.”

Imagine my surprise then, a few hours and hot chocolate later, to discover I (1) don’t have a poem in me tonight or (2) don’t have a consolation poem about “The Winter” without going as far back as my “Fall 13” folder from my M.F.A. program days. That’s 2013 for folks joining me in the challenge of simple math. Twelve years between this moment and my last explicitly wintery poem? Seems like an oversight. Stay tuned for that remedy.

Since I had the unshakable urge to write something and share it (task avoiding: still have grading to do) you’ve heard winter poems by Wallace Stevens (“The Snow Man”) and by William Carlos Williams (“Blizzard”). I’ll leave you with something inarguably Midwestern: a poem I wrote 12 years ago while living in San Francisco. It is called “Midwestern”:

Ohio calls my name in snow

ice the roads crawling home

ice the veins run above my bones

by spring the grasses wed my toes

feet to follicle my body owns it

lungs and guts and it all

belonging to more than my body,

harvest flesh like grain or barley.

Drink and dine the stuff

which ever comes

by limb and root and route

home in blood by my heart.

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At this point, lists on The Rolling Stone are cliches. They’re engagement fodder, rage-bait. I’m compulsive and love any excuse to talk about the music I love, the music I love to hate, so I get list culture in media coverage. But I also get why list making is weird and off-putting. I’m sure the latest Rolling Stone list, The 250 Greatest Songs of the Century So Far, will have some lightening rods, but I haven’t read it yet. I had the top ten spoiled and I’m pleased with the placement of the most popular White Stripes song, but songs 249 - 10 are a mystery to me. Let’s give Rolling Stone the en-rage-ment they want!

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In my newsletter recap of the excellent and sublime Shining Other, by Ellicott Hooligan, I promised I’d recite the Robert Frost poem, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” soundtracked by the e.c.’s “Shining Other.” It’s been steady raining all day and the leaves are starting to turn (if you’re in the Midwest) so the mood was right, join me in a quick break from your evening labors to enjoy a poem and a great song.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

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