Career Night, Soul Shifts, Small Triumphs

I'll be speaking tonight at the Presbyterian Children's Village about the writer's life, and as I've been finalizing the talk this morning, I've been remembering a moment in Prague, 1995, when the poet Carolyn Forche shifted the tone and urgency of my writerly desires. I thought I'd share the opening paragraphs of the talk here today as well as the poem (previously published in the early days of this blog) that emerged in the wake of that experience.

Before I get to that, though, a few seemingly unrelated things. Last night's lectureship in honor of my mother was, in a word, extraordinary. As a family we had dinner with Dr. James McPherson; we learned and we laughed. Afterward we joined as many as 600 others to hear Dr. McPherson speak of Lincoln's emergence as a military strategist and leader. The night was rich; my father was happy. When we returned from the event, we caught the final moments of the Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea," that featured my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart—the touching, panning image of the 6,000-plus-foot Great Smoky Mountains peak named in his honor. I am amazed by and grateful to all those who have visited this blog in the aftermath of the segment's screening.

Finally, the image featured in this post today is of my classroom, for English 145 at Penn. I found the students' most recent work in my in-box last evening after all the other glories. They continue to make the teaching exhilarating.

I’ve been writing for most of my life at this point — something I seem not to be able to stop myself from doing (though I’ve tried, believe me, I have). I passionately believe in the promise of stories, I am endlessly seduced by the choreography of language, I don’t go a day without trying to discover or de-puzzle a metaphor. Writing is not just about making a record, or making a claim, or leaving a mark. It is, to begin with, about seeing. It is what forces me to stop and wait, to look and speculate, to inquire and to propose. Writing makes time liquid. It makes of the vague dream a pulsed-through what if?

In the mid-1990s, after I’d published three dozen or so short stories and essays, but before I’d ever published a book, I had the privilege of traveling to Prague and seeing the poet Carolyn Forche read from her work in the dim light of a smoky bar. She was reading, among other things, about Terrence Des Pres, the great essayist and holocaust scholar who had recently died quiet tragically. She was reading, above all else, with conviction, and looking back, I recognize that it was her reading that night that most firmly settled in me the desire to craft work of enduring strength and meaning. This poem captures that shift in my own soul:

On Listening to Carolyn Forche Read Poetry in a Bar in Prague, 1995

Because in Prague I was nothing but wanting

with words and still recovering from new sin,

and because the bar was also dark and lamped

by the yellow of your hair, you made me believe

in the running for the heart of a poem,

the superceded shush between memory and maw.

It was how you read, how you resurrected

Terrence, how the sand in the wind of your words

caught knots into my hair and chafed my skin.

It was how you riddled me almost

clean with possibility.

I was sitting with my son.

I was sitting beside my husband.

You were — may I use the word? — explicit.

In the same way that a stone wall falls

more sensationally than it stands,

in the same way that a rescued love

is made more tender by its damage,

in the same way that women understand beauty

only in its passing, you in the bar in Prague

blew smoke up through the crevices of language.

Smoke the color of angel wings.

Poetry as salvation.