It is early spring; the snow outside is beginning to melt into damp earth and just inside the basement window of my parent's modest house in Cedar Falls, Iowa I am about to have an experience that will forever change the direction of my life. A year earlier, plagued by wrist injuries and frustration, I had thrown in the towel on my career as a musician. I was lost. For twelve years I had done nothing but study music, play music, listen to music, write music, and live music. Now? I found myself starting all over again. I knew a lot about music, but not much else. I found myself sitting in classes with titles like "Eastern Humanities," "Phenomenology and Foucault," "Origins of Western Thought." I didn't know what I was looking for; I didn't really even know how to find it.
My window is slightly open and I can feel the chill of cold air sinking onto the rough blue carpet and moving through the room. The rich and earthy smell of decaying leaves left over from fall carried in off the outside breezes mixes with the stale air of a house closed up for the long Iowa winter. I am sitting on a wooden chair that creaks and moans when I shift my weight to prevent my leg from falling asleep. In front of me is the aggressive glare of a computer screen. Right here in this moment is where everything changed for me.
For reasons that have something to do with a woman with pale white freckled skin, nearly black curly hair, a waif-like figure, delicate pale lips, and the brightest green eyes I have ever seen, I am searching for "poetry" on the internet. The only thing I know of poetry is what little I remember from one literature class I took many years ago in high school. And somewhere, through the billions of miles of copper, fiber optical cables, and the unfathomable number of electrons moving from atom to atom in stops and starts, I find a link to a poem by Gary Snyder. Sitting there on the other side of a glowing phosphor-coated screen lit up by beams of electrons like a movie theater in reverse, I experience something familiar and yet, new; something I hadn't felt since my days as a performing musician. I begin to read "Riprap."
"Lay down these words / Before your mind like rocks. / Placed solid, by hands / in choice of place, set / Before the body of the mind / in space and time:" The feeling I get in my chest, in my gut, is like the feeling of a string on a cello as the bow is pulled slowly across it. It starts out weak, and as the cellist gently presses harder, pulls faster, the string begins to come alive, vibrating faster and wider as a sullen and somber note arises from the contact of horsehair, rosin, metal, wood, and skin.
"Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall / riprap of things: / Cobble of milky way, / straying planets, / These poems, people, / lost ponies with / Dragging saddles / and rocky sure-foot trails." I have forgotten why I have come to this poem, forgotten my reasons for searching. I am thinking of my own experiences, my own images of trails and rocks, boulders besides trees, granite next to grass.
"The worlds like an endless / four-dimensional / Game of Go. / ants and pebbles / In the thin loam, each rock a word / a creek-washed stone" There is an excitement in my reading, I'm sure my mouth is open. I read faster, wanting to get to the end, to take it all in as deeply as I can as though it were the smell of the first real rain of spring. I am greedy and gluttonous; I am impatient and indulging.
"Granite: ingrained / with torment of fire and weight / Crystal and sediment linked hot / all change, in thoughts, / as well as things." It is here at the end, beyond the last period, the last fleeting taste on my palette that I realize something has changed inside of me. All I can think is, "I want to do that." I want to place words so carefully, so perfectly, so confidently. I want to place ants and the galaxy together on paper. I want create this. I want to know how to do this. And then, I read it again.
~~~~~
This was the first moment when I truly understood what it meant to read as a writer. The transition I made at the end of reading his poem was a transition from simply reading to reading as a way to think about producing. I knew Snyder's poetry had done something to me, and now I wanted to know why and how. I wanted to know this because I wanted to write poetry myself. I wanted to demystify the magic. I wanted to understand why this word and not that word, why this idea and not that idea.
While I feel there are differences between how I read as a writer and how Toni Morrison claims to read as a writer (I see her reading more as an academic using critical methods who also happens to be a writer), there is one very important thing I feel we both have in common, and something that may be useful when thinking about the teaching of writing. This connection is a conception of voice.
For me, and I believe for Morrison as well, there is an underlying understanding of how things are created that is acquired through creating itself. This is the simple understanding that when writing, there are choices or decisions that are made, consciously or unconsciously. Why does a writer choose to use this word over that word? Why does a plot go in this direction rather than that direction? In every instance, reading from the mindset of a writer means reading while understanding that what is written is deliberative in some sense. Or, to put it more plainly, what is written is the final assembly of an infinite amount of choices.
Of course, what Morrison is concerned with is what unconscious, social conditions help form these choices. But even here, she still recognizes that when a writer writes something, it could be something else. This choice of one thing over another is part of what helps define style or voice. I think reading in this manner, knowing that everything that is written is somehow deliberative, is important in reading student writing. When reading as a fellow writer, it is easy to move away from thinking that students make "mistakes" that must be corrected. Instead, when reading as a fellow writer, the instructor engages the student as another thinking, acting human. Helping students to understand why they have written this word over a different word, why they have included certain devices and not others, helps to not only situate themselves as individuals who are in control of how they write, but to also foster a general awareness of the larger social sphere they are knowingly or unknowingly a part of.
