Typing up the poems of others, as I suggested yesterday, works a lot better with poets who wrote in the age of the typewriter. Typing either version of The Prelude won’t really give you the same sense of what Wordsworth must have felt to have had those words flow from his quill. Mark Twain has been said to have been the first creative writer to have used that Civil War-era phenomenon called the typewriter, Ezra Pound the first poet to have composed with it.
As history would have it, however, Pound produced what may well have been his finest writing in pencil on scraps of toilet paper in the wire cages of the prison camp at Pisa. Reading The Pisan Cantos, you don’t sense that. Or at least I don’t. After having worked for some 40 years on the typewriter, Pound had no problem writing “as if” the machine were still at hand.
I can testify to just how that works. Back in the 1960s, when I was a student at San Francisco State, I committed the worst of all writerly sins – I dropped my typewriter while moving it between desk and table. It instantly disassembled into a gazillion components, more than a few of which were now misshapen & a couple of which also conveniently rolled under the refrigerator never to be seen again. I had bought that typewriter with my very first paycheck on my very first job post-high school – that will give you some sense of its importance in my life – but by this time I was married & living on my own, so it took me a few weeks before I was able to cobble together enough cash from my job at the U.S. Post Office to take it to the typewriter shop that existed in those days on Bancroft Way directly across from the University of California campus in Berkeley & get a new machine.
Back in those days, I was in the full flower of my reading & rereading of Robert Duncan’s Roots and Branches, Pounds Cantos & whatever I could get my hands on of Olson’s. It was Olson that year whose work I thought my own writing most resembled & I needed – or so I felt – that typewriter to recreate the page as field I wanted my own writing to have. But I just didn’t have it, and I couldn’t imagine going to one of the rooms available at SF State, where I was then a student, to sit at a bank of typewriters with others in my situation, paying quarters by the hour in order to compose poetry. So I resorted to legal tablets, whose yellow paper & 14 inch page seemed attractive enough. My poems of that period are forgettable enough & I don’t think any ever really got published, but when I did finally purchase my new machine, I began to type up my legal pad poems only to discover that each was virtually exactly one typed page long. I had somehow internalized the form.
Robert Creeley says somewhere in an interview that switching the physical constraints of your writing practice is a great way to work oneself out of a writer’s block. If you type, write by hand. If you use notebooks, try free sheets of paper, or just change the size of the notebook, or go to the computer, whatever. Just change the instrument that makes the marks and the kind of paper on which these marks are made. And it’s true – altering these things even just as a test will show you all kinds of little things about what you think you are doing when you write a poem.
When I was at SF State a year or so before my typewriter died, I had a teacher who tried to make that point as well. Brother Antoninus, as William Everson was then calling himself, insisted that we write in a method different from whatever it was that our own poetry sought to do. I think ideally he wanted us to write like Robinson Jeffers, but really he just wanted us to think. I tried something in a declamatory mode &, in fact, had used legal tablets then also. I hated writing in some mode that I thought of as an exercise – I remember Antoninus telling us that these wouldn’t be “our” poems, so not to worry about that. But I just hated the idea of it. I was emotionally invested in the idea that my poems were my poems. The idea of producing something other than that at the direction of some crazy monk irritated me no end.
Yet the experience of it must have stuck with me. When I taught a weeklong summer workshop at Naropa in 1994, I had the students basically recreate that experiment. If they wrote in the morning, I wanted them to write at night. If they wrote with music on, I want it silent. If they wrote only in solitude, I wanted them to write at a bar or on a bus. If they used a computer, I wanted it in a notebook. Etc., etc. I wanted them to break down and look dispassionately at each of the elements of their writing as a physical act just to understand what it meant to them, not because I was hoping to change anything. It was a great workshop, tho, as is so often the case, a good part of that might have to do with the students, who included Mary Burger & Chris Vitiello. One student, a recovering heroin addict, really took it as a challenge to his ego & bit me. Remembering my class with Antoninus, I understood how he felt.
That second typewriter I bought in Berkeley back in the sixties lasted me for a dozen or so years, until I got my first fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979. With that money in hand, I went out & spent big on a “real” professional writing system, an IBM Selectric typewriter that cost something like $800. This, I was sure, would last me for the next twenty years. As it happened, I would begin to use computers in 1982 & have no idea any more what even became of that machine. You can’t buy them anymore, save as museum pieces. The old IBM typewriter company was spun off by Big Blue & now manufactures printers under the name of Lexmark. Lex stands for Lexington, Kentucky, the headquarters city (and site of the old typewriter manufacturing plant). Mark, well, I understand what that term mark means. Something about that sounds exactly right.
