The pen is mightier than the sword but equally blunt

I apologise for these
Words which I wield
With so little dexterity.
They have on them

 Some rights reserved by giltay

The fingermarks of
The women and men
Who came before -
Some more skilled,
Others less, but
Each blunting the
Blade in their
Frantic slashings
At the world.

How to find the
Whetting stone
To hone an edge
Sharp enough to
Cut to the bone?

ReVision

 Some rights reserved by artnoose

Time Knots.
Filtered through

The pores of vision,

Twisted through with the

Obscurity of reason,

The certainties

Give way.

Seen again,

Filtered through

The pores of time,

Combed through with the

Clarity of hindsight,

The knots

Give way.



I've been reading Bonnie Campbell Hill and Carrie Ekey's book on Enhancing Writing Instruction and came across this lovely paragraph:

My favorite part of the writing process is revision. I start with a section that feels as messy and tangled as my hair in the morning. By the time I've reread and rewritten a section over and over, all the knots have been untangled, the frizzies tamed, and my writing finally feels smooth. The key is rereading. I read sections over and over tweaking here and there until they feel right... (p29)

The second stanza of the poem found its form fairly quickly. Originally the first stanza was to have been itself a muddled version of the second but it didn't really work for me. Ironically, this was the part of the poem that I struggled with most as I drafted and redrafted looking for a form and meaning that I could balance with the ending.

Foxed by thought

Ms P and Mr R have got me thinking about my theory of good writing. My problem is, I don’t have one.

I understand the idea that there is bad writing and I certainly know the experience of reading writing which is good, but I’ve never really been comfortable with the idea of being able to define it. I am, in this instance, a relativist, which means that I don’t believe that there is any such thing as “perfect” writing nor that there is some way of making irrefutable judgements about the quality of writing.

I’m not sure if my students should be pleased by this declaration or not. On the one hand, I don’t claim to have the knowledge to make final judgements about their writing so they can feel more comfortable to explore and experiment without fear of too harsh a judgement. On the other hand, they don’t have a teacher who feels able to point them towards perfection with any degree of confidence.

Whilst I appreciate that writing is a discipline and that there are very definitely practices that help produce the final product effectively and efficiently, I’m not sure that the real poetry of writing can be achieved solely through discipline. There is something in the best writing which is beyond words: a paradoxical special ingredient that somehow evaporates if you try to take the lid off and define it in a classroom.  The best I think I’ve ever been able to do is put it in front of my students and hope for a little osmosis.

So, below, I offer a little bit of magic. This is Ted Hughes’ description of the act of writing poetry depicted, appropriately, through metaphor. My favourite line in this poem is the first line of the last stanza. A masterpiece of descriptive writing – but I can’t, exactly, tell you why.

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest: 
Something else is alive 
Beside the clock's loneliness 
And this blank page where my fingers move. 

Through the window I see no star: 
Something more near 
Though deeper within darkness 
Is entering the loneliness: 

Cold, delicately as the dark snow 
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; 
Two eyes serve a movement, that now 
And again now, and now, and now 

Sets neat prints into the snow 
Between trees, and warily a lame 
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow 
Of a body that is bold to come 

Across clearings, an eye, 
A widening deepening greenness, 
Brilliantly, concentratedly, 
Coming about its own business 

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox 
It enters the dark hole of the head. 
The window is starless still; the clock ticks, 
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

Ambiguity

Way back when I went to school we read novels. Big lumps of processed tree sandwiched around black dye and filled with moral goodness. We opened them and we read them and we didn’t stop until they were all gone: chewed, digested and circulating through our veins.

This was the wholesome diet that helped us face the world and our examiners. We trusted that the right ratios of Shakespeare and Dickens would give us the strength to face down the ambiguities of the world.

It didn’t work, of course. Or it didn’t work for long. Maybe at school we were prepared to kid ourselves that Shakespeare and Dickens provided some kind of certainty that might shelter us from the rain. At University it quickly became evident that there are no certainties to be found in any writer who is worth reading. Ambiguity is the essence of great writing and the masters revel in it.

Ambiguity isn’t easy to examine, however, and the mass education projects of the mid 20^th century struggled to know how to deal with Shakespeare. At school I remember being asked to memorise Polonius’s speech from Hamlet in which he advises Laertes on how to live a virtuous life. It strikes me now as a little sad that we sat in class holding tight to this one small, shaky reed of certainty while all around us raged a river of existential angst. While we read, “neither a borrower nor a lender be”, Hamlet grappled with the enormities of life and being right beside us and we never really noticed.

It’s the hardest of things to confront ambiguity in a classroom. You can’t really mark it; you can’t easily define it; it’s very difficult to push it into shape for a lesson plan.  “Language” as the poet Gwen Harwood reminds us “is not a perfect game/ and if it was, how could we play?” At the heart of what makes us human is an enigma and I’d like to think this enigma finds its way into my classroom from time to time as well.