No.36 - December 2024
Bio Note: Almost finished with my second nonfiction book on jazz, after which I'll go back to my novel and hopefully write some poetry. I do seem to still be able to write about poetry. And I'd like to use this space to say farewell to one of my inspirations in thinking about, and writing about, poetry: My friend, Lew Turco. RIP.
Whaddya Know
For many years, “Write what you know” was the most familiar truism imparted to young would-be writers. Lately, it’s gone out of favor, replaced by a new article of wisdom, which I’ve often used myself – if you already know it, why write it? That’s not getting you anywhere. Writing should be a process of discovery. Write what you don’t quite know.
Now, although that’s a good and worthwhile piece of advice, it’s getting to be a truism of its own. So maybe it’s time to retire it to the old adage’s home. I’ve now written it down in this column, so surely I don’t need to say it any more.
But what to replace it with?
Perhaps, if everything old is new again, it’s time to resurrect “Write what you know”?
Well, maybe not.
Most of what we know is what everyone else knows, and that’s the problem with that.
But not always.
A young seaman named Don Street was crewing on a charter boat in Cancel Bay, St. John, US Virgin Islands. The boat had been chartered by John Fearnley, casting director for Rogers and Hammerstein, and his partner Burt Shevelove, who wrote Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Forum. Street had been invited to share cocktails with the two Broadwayites and their friend John Steinbeck.
After dinner they started arguing about writing and talent. Finally Steinbeck said, “Talent? Bullshit. To become a writer it is a case of putting your ass on a hard wooden chair and banging away on a typewriter six hours a day six days a week.” Then to me, he said, “Kid, you tell a good story. Why don’t you try writing?”
To which I replied, “I cannot spell or do punctuation.”
To which Steinbeck replied, “What the hell do you think secretaries and editors are for? Try writing!
Donald M. Street died just a few months ago at age 94, a legend among the boating community in the Caribbean and his native Ireland, leaving behind a legacy of several books and countless magazine articles on seamanship and sailing in the Caribbean. Stuff that he knew better than anyone else.
So…write what you know? It depends on what you know.
What you know may be enough to make you a writer, but it’s not necessarily enough to make you a poet, as Don Street would have been the first to tell you. But John Masefield also went to sea as a teenager, but partly to get away from home and partly because he thought it would help him break a dangerous addiction…to reading. He wasn’t completely successful there, and his predilection for writing poetry may have been egged on by that reading addiction (turns out there’s a lot of time to read on shipboard), but what he knew made a difference in what he was able to communicate.
Robert Service wouldn’t have gotten a lot to write out of what he knew from being a bank clerk, but when his bank sent him to the Yukon, he garnered a whole new trove of knowledge.
There’s more to it than that, of course. Take Rodin’s famous advice to Rilke to go to the zoo and stare at one animal until he really saw it. That was about starting with what you think you know, then going past what you know, to what you don’t quite know and never realized you could know.
Still, what you know matters, and it can matter a lot.
Pat and I recently visited a friend named Jeff Leon, who has turned a 120-acre piece of farmland near Amsterdam, New York, into a nature preserve which allows people to visit. He didn’t want us to come until mid-September, when he could show us his favorite flower, a late bloomer.
Jeff’s nature preserve is called Strawberry Fields, partially in tribute to the Beatles (the song’s lyric is posted on successive signs, Burma Shave style, along the entrance road). and partly because his fields are the home to, among other flora, wild strawberries. Jeff has let some of the land grow wooded, kept some as meadow, some halfway in between, each home to different varieties of flora and fauna. The meadows are home to a plethora of wildflowers, of different colors, shapes and sizes, some of them varying shades of purple, and among the purple ones, not immediately noticeable until pointed out, were the flowers that he wanted to show us: the fringed gentians.
The fringed gentian is a small, delicate beauty, with gracefully extended petals, which only open in the late summer and fall, and then only in bright sunlight. In the early morning, before the sun strikes it, it’s closed tightly – Jeff demonstrated with his hand raised skyward, thumb and fingers pressed together at the tips. Then it opens to let in the sun – wrist traveling counterclockwise, fingers spreading open. When the sky clouds over, it closes again – wrist reversing directions, fingers coming together again at the tips – to protect against raindrops battering the frail stamen.
Then he read us a poem from a small volume kept in the battered ATV he provided for guests who aren’t up to walking the full two miles of the trail. The poem was by William Cullen Bryant, poet, essayist and naturalist, writing about what he knew.
To the Fringed Gentian
Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,
And colored with the heaven’s own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night.
Thou comest not when violets lean
O’er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o’er the ground-bird’s hidden nest.
Thou waitest late and com’st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.
Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.
I would that thus, when I shall see
The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.
And finally, this. There’s a recording by jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie, of a composition of his called “Jazz Death.” It begins with a pompous interviewer asking, “Is jazz … as we know it…dead?”
Bowie proceeds to blow a mini-history of jazz from ragtime to free, rich and mind-blowing. As he finishes, he puts down his horn and says,
“Well…that depends on what you know.”
©2024 Tad Richards
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