The Silken Tent
      My Letter to the World
      October 2000
      October 27, 2000
      Friday


      This course that I'm taking is a standard undergraduate English course awarding three credit hours for successful completion. Since it's called "Creative Writing," uninformed people can harbor the idea that such an enterprise is unstructured. I've taken such courses, and taught some where I had to battle -- unsuccessfully -- a "structure negates creativity" mindset. The ones that have been most enriching for me have been those which have at least a few requirements, good bones to dress with your own ideas. (I am indebted to poet and teacher Tess Gallagher for that image.)

      One advantage of taking such a course at this point in my life is that most of the requirements are things I would do anyway. We have to turn in some new production each week, either something fresh or a revision of a critiqued work. I've slacked a little here, turning in some stuff that has been languishing in folders for years.

      Another required bit is to write a short report on some author's comments on his or her own creative process. Some of my classmates are uncertain about where to look for such material. I could invite them to my house to go through my files and my bookshelves -- tons of stuff from Annie Dillard and Maxine Kumin and Tess Gallagher and many others on craft and process. (Fans of Stephen King might be happy to learn that he, too, has recently published a book on his own process. He once said that he could type out his grocery lists and people would buy them. I think he's right. I probably would -- see my June 2 piece, Lists.)

      Finally, we must attend a reading, a requirement I fulfilled last night. And forgive me Mr. Wallace -- I know you're in the hospital and all, and I don't want to upset you, but, (get ready), I took my notebook and scribbled information while the poet was reading. I know you said you hate to see that, students who wouldn't otherwise be there, taking notes to prove to their instructors that they showed up and paid some attention. You want people to attend readings for the pure joy of hearing deep emotions crafted into strings of beautiful words, and I love you for that. But I think with a pen in my hand, and Donald Hall last night at Elizabethtown College gave me much to think about.

      Donald Hall is, at least in appearance, the successor to Robert Frost  as the "good gray poet of New England." He's 72, and he was a presence on the stage even before he emerged from behind the curtain -- a battered brown leather satchel, obviously his, occupied the lectern beside the requisite tumbler of water.

      Hall begins all his readings now with several selections from the work of his late wife, Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995 after about a year's confrontation with leukemia. She was born the same year I was (1947). They'd been together since 1972, and he said they almost hadn't gotten married because they thought she'd have to be a widow for so long. He'd had a long university teaching career in addition to his writing, and their twenty-odd years together were spent as full time poets at Eagle Pond in New Hampshire, property that had been in his family for generations.

      Jane was as much a presence on the stage as the brown satchel. He spoke of her and read her lines in a voice spilling with love yet devoid of the sentimental and the maudlin. God does not leave us comfortless, he read,  so let evening come, and if you were listening carefully, as I was, you could hear the faintest skip in those last three syllables.

      Of his own work, the first portion was devoted to poems he has written to and about Jane since her death. He worked out his grief in letters to her, a practice he's heard is not uncommon. He tried to fashion these pieces into works of art instead of just lines of pain. Most have been published as the collection Without, a copy of which I had brought along for him to sign.

      Then he read representative poems from each of the decades of his long production. He's been writing for more than fifty years, and with each poem he'd give a little of the life circumstances he'd been in at its writing -- young professor, new father, recent divorcé, gentleman farmer. Some new work is from a series of poems about a woman he recently broke up with, and I wondered what it would be like to be that woman, to have poems written about you by a 72-year-old man who has moved on from you. Most were unfamiliar to me, and all left me wanting to hear more.

      He ended the reading with a few more poems about Jane, these still in typescript. He read what he thinks is the last of his grief poems for Jane. It ends with her saying to him as she recedes, recedes, Oh let me go.

      I bought Without in Pittsburgh, weeks before I knew that I would have the opportunity to hear Donald Hall read from it. My teacher Mr. Wallace had recommended it after he helped me with a poem I've written in response to reading Tess Gallagher's Moon Crossing Bridge, which chronicles her process in recovering from the death of her husband, the fiction writer Raymond Carver. The theme of my poem is an effort to learn from her "how to ride this lonely river...through its white scream of loss."

      I now have two teachers for a lesson I don't want to learn.
       
       

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      Margaret DeAngelis.

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