how does it end?

The other day I wrote about the conundrum one faces when finishing a novel and about a conversation I'd had with my son.  Many of you took the time to comment and, as always, I am so appreciative of your thoughts.

For those of you who wondered (and for the record), I did indeed think I knew how I'd end the book (a novel for adults) before I spoke with my son.  But the language, as often happens, took me elsewhere.  The speed and rhythm of the words, the returning motifs, ultimately sent me back to Prague, where an early chapter of the novel takes place and where, it was clear, the book had to return. 

Fortunately, I had my photo albums to help me, old notes I'd made to myself, pictures like the one above. It was in Prague—so many years ago—that I met Jayne Anne Phillips, Gish Jen, Carolyn Forche.  It was in Prague that some of the images of this novel were born.  It takes that long, I find, to write a book.  It takes remembering, as much as imagination, to write fiction. 

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Carolyn Forche: a poet still vested

Years ago, outside of Prague, I spent an afternoon with Carolyn Forche—a train ride away from the city where she had read, the night before, from one of my favorite poems ever written, a haunt of a poem in honor of Terrence des Pres.  I think her often—of her and the stories she told to those who had gathered there, in a Czech backyard.  Grandmother stories.  Oven stories.  Stories of war.

A few weeks ago, I was stopped by these lines in a new Carolyn Forche poem called "The Lightkeeper," which appears in full in the May 3rd issue of The New Yorker.

Forche remains a poet vested with power:

... You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid.  Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes.  Go toward the light always, be without ships.

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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.

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A Poem

On Listening to Carolyn Forche Read Poetry
in a Bar in Prague, 1995
(Beth Kephart)

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 out the knots in my hair.
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.

Read more...