writing books

For some reason I thought I was could just assemble a motley crew of poems into a book and send it out. I'm a little lazy. That's not how you write books. I'm almost certain of it. And besides, the bushel of poems are struggling to figure out how they know each other.

"Were you written by the same person who wrote me?"
"Maybe, is she the same one who was obsessed with Sartre two years ago?"
"I'm not sure about all that, my author was on a big squirrel kick."

This is to say, most of these poems lack cohesion. A certain over-arching theme to bring them together. And then there's that whole statement of purpose you send a prospective editor. I don't have one of those either. I have no statement that clearly says what this gaggle of poems represents or who the lunatic who wrote them is.

My husband came up with a terrifying idea. "Why don't you fill in this collection with new poems? That should tie them together somehow."

You want me to write more?? You want me to actually work at this? And that's when I got down to the root of the problem. I was stuck in a corner and I wasn't prepared to write my way out. I thought it would be easier than this.

This is what happens when you haven't created in months. You feel bloated with medieval humors; lackluster, dull and frustrated. I've been suffering from the malaise of "not creating." Let's mix more medical metaphors: Assembling a chapbook was supposed to be the band-aid covering a gushing head wound!

When it didn't work, when I became light-headed from the blood lost, I had to return to the drawing board. I read three books. Four chapters of a terrible paperback romance, two essays out of a sexual identity book, and about six poems from an anthology.

Reading. Who knew that was the trick? I'm being ironic, of course. I know that to become a decent writer, you must get out of your own head and into a book.

The very act of reading produced two poems today. This effort must be done, much to my chagrin. My husband reminded me that there are no short cuts in creating. I have to remind myself that although I am the deity over my own work, I'm not necessarily God. I cannot create a chapbook in seven days.

Ringing in the New Year to the Tune of Existential Blues: A Review of Cornel West's "Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir"

            In his review of the 2009 memoir Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir, Scott McLemee derides Dr. Cornel West’s reflective work, calling the text “the most disappointing thing I have read in at least a year.” The focus of McLemee’s critique centers on the reviewer’s belief that Brother West did not make good on a late-1990’s promise Dr. West made to compose “an intellectual autobiography ‘modeled on black musical forms.’” In short, McLemee felt let down by the memoir, arguing that it did not meet the intellectual and scholarly standards put in place by Dr. West’s earlier writings (most notably, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism). Compared to McLemee’s favorite conceptually dense and stimulating Dr. West texts, Brother West is only, at its core, about “how Cornel West feels about Cornel West.”

            To be honest, I can see where Mr. McLemee is coming from. There were several moments during my reading of Brother West where I stopped, looked up from the book, and thought, “My goodness, this man wants us to know a lot about how many people he knows and how important his scholarship is to the American racial-political-economic discourse.” The following selection from the memoir, which McLemee also cites in his review, nicely demonstrates an example of West’s “West-centeredness”:

“I like seeing Race Matters translated into Japanese, Italian, and Portuguese. I like seeing The American Evasion of Philosophy translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Italian. I like that there are hundreds of thousands of copies of my book Democracy Matters translated into Spanish. There’s also an edition that’s selling in the French-speaking world. I like the fact that all nineteen of my books are still in print with the exception of the two that won the American Book Award in 1993” (248).

            It is difficult to read a couple hundred pages about Dr. West’s intense emotional and spiritual connection to those whom he refers to as “the least of these,” only to be confronted with an unabridged “Gratitude” (i.e. “Acknowledgements”) section that serves as an inflated who’s-who list of Ivy League faculty and internationally-acclaimed intellectuals. In fact, I don’t remember West individually naming any of “the least of these” whom he has encountered in his ample bluesman wanderings—although I do remember him, on many occasions, engaging in some heavily-seasoned academic name-dropping.

            But for all of Mr. McLemee’s gripes (many of which are justified), and for all of Dr. West’s unabashed mantra recitation and self-promotion (“I’m a bluesman in the life of the mind, and a jazzman in the world of ideas,” ad infinitum), Brother West floored me with its heart and message; a heart and message I needed in my life right now. While I agree that the memoir could have done more theoretically and substantially, what it did do was enough for me to love it and need it. 

            And, to be fair, it is important to note that Dr. West did not intend for the memoir to reach for original or unique theoretical heights. Nor did he intend for the text to serve as a model for how others should think or live their own lives. In a 2009 interview on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Dr. West said he hoped his text could work “maybe to provide an insight, here or there, to help somebody come to terms with the dark corners of their own soul, to come to terms with the undecided, their own sense of self, and maybe help develop a capacity to love - to love wisdom, love justice.” And, in reaching towards these hopes, I think Brother West was successful.  

            In the chaotic midst of academic paper deadlines, graduate-level reading assignments, other graduate school application submissions, and planning lessons and grading student papers, I had forgotten, from the fall of 2010 to the early winter of 2012, about death. Not forgotten about death’s existence as a concept—the human tragedies plaguing the covers of international news periodicals have made it so that death is in my line of vision, in plain black and white, every day (whether I want to look at it or not is another matter.) People who were once now aren’t, because of a bomb or a bullet or a disease. But death as an end did not feel real, that is, it did not feel like a personal reality (i.e., something that could happen to me, as a twenty-something-year-old taxpaying white man living in Middle America) in the face of such dynamic and multi-faceted life (viewed both through my eyes and the eyes of computer and television screens) until I read the following words in Brother West:

“To be human is to call for help. We [West and his friend, scholar James Melvin Washington] saw birth itself as a catastrophe: you’re thrown in space and time to die. The flesh fails. Then the question becomes simple—how you gonna cope? Life is shot through with contradictions and incongruities. But that doesn’t mean that any ol’ life is acceptable” (101).

            Dr. West’s call to be present in the understanding of our mortality is, of course, nothing new. The well-known theologian Thomas à Kempis, in his seminal early-fifteenth Christian treatise On the Imitation of Christ, writes:

“Very quickly there will be an end of thee here: look what will become of thee in another state. To-day we are here, to-morrow we disappear, and when we are gone, quickly also we are out of mind…Thou oughtest so to order thyself in all they thoughts and actions, as if thou wert about to die” (43).

            What West and his Medieval Catholic forebear are calling for is not to be confused with any Tim McGraw song-styled pop philosophy. Their advice is not for the faint of heart, not to be painted into an alliterated aphorism like “Live, Laugh, Love” and placed above one’s kitchen sink. What Dr. West calls “the death shudder” is the understanding of a cold-blooded reality: We’re here. We’re not always going to be here. And in the moment between here and not-here, we’re going to have a chance to decide if being here was worth it. That moment will be lonely, painful, and potentially terrifying. But it will no doubt come. So what do we do while we’re here to make that inevitable moment less awful?

            Dr. West spends the entirety of Brother West answering that final question with a resounding and unequivocal “Love each other!” And I say, in the funky words of one of West’s poetic idols, Marvin Gaye, “right on.” Mr. McLemee is spot-on with his critique that Brother West did not bring many new philosophical or sociological ideas to the table. But what it did offer was a re-presentation of a handful of very old ideas, maybe the oldest ideas: We’re here. We need each other. So let’s be good to each other.

            Sometimes a slim, readable reiteration of old ideas proves more valuable to an audience than an esoteric jargon-heavy doorstop, especially if said audience is likely marinated in 24/7 messages (visual, tactile, and sound-based) that promise it it’ll never die (or, perhaps more dangerously, that dying won’t sting too much) if it buys this or that thing (while slyly omitting the wicked and unappetizing death-shudder fact that the thing will likely outlive its buyers, regardless of the buyer’s best efforts). I appreciate Dr. West’s blues-based effort to tap readers on the nose and say, kindly and with gapped-tooth mouthfuls of tragi-humor, “The results are in. You’re not going to make it. But try to do some good before you go.” It was a nose-tapping I needed and will continue to need until that final not-here moment.