One Sunday Morning

A couple years ago this blog put me in contact with Anne Whitehouse, a poet and novelist who had written a poem called "Van Gogh in Arles" detailing Van Gogh's heroic struggles to keep painting outdoors in the face of the infamous mistral of Provence.  Anyone who has ever visited that part of the world knows how real and ferocious a force a mistral can be.  (I keenly remember going running one morning in the middle of a mistral and finding myself barely able to move forward.  Thank heaven it was a sunny late spring day and not the middle of winter.)  I admired Anne's poem then and provided a link to it.  I'm happy to tell you now that the poem is included in Anne's  poetry collection, One Sunday Morning, available from Finishing Line Press.

Just as in her previous volume, Blessings and Cursings, Whitehouse is able to capture the dualistic nature of so many common experiences; the two-sided identity of what might seem to be singularly positive or negative developments; or, viewed through a different lens, the deeply unified nature of what appears on the surface to be a divided, battle-torn life.   With a voice of gorgeous understatement and placid wisdom, she pushes at several tiny but beautiful ironies, ironies that are subtle until she exposes them,  and then they seem perfectly obvious.  An example of this phenomenon is the poem "Meditations in June," a poem of lessons learned in a life honestly spent, a poem that admits--like almost all of Whitehouse's work--to being "ever more certain / Of my uncertainty."  In the poem's final stanza, Whitehouse invokes a visit to a hospital to see a terribly ill friend, and her summary of that experience could stand as the ethos of the entire collection:

                               The world is a terrible place.
                               There's no getting out alive,
                               Said my friend from his hospital bed,
                               Elation disguising his dread--
                               Or the other way around.

Is this life the locus of more elation or more dread, the book seems to ask; and, more to the point, is it possible that there's no difference?  Certainly, scattered through its pages are examples of both and either.  Several of the poems seem almost to be gathered out of variant pieces that when brought together resonate with a new, surer power.  They seem less like conscious riffs on a theme than an after-the-fact discovery of connections and oppositions where previously none were suspected.  For example, there is the poem "Consolations," the three parts of which describe, respectively, the poet lusting after fruit she spies at the highest reaches of a tree ("orange-yellow suns glowing / in green shade"), a WWII veterans attempt to escape lingering nightmares from that war through fierce, scientific concentration on nature, and the poet--her voice returned to the poem--describing a dive into the sea.  Each segment details a consolation but also suggest the ways in which the consolation is inescapably bound with an original torment.  The oppositional language of the last stanza brings this home: "the coolness seeped in my skin / and spread all through me / and I relaxed, and I was warm."  There may be no better example of the unity of torment and consolation than the title poem, which describes a wounded stag, "blood stream[ing] from the hole in its rump" after its tail has been ripped off by coyote, who stands nearby, eyeing the poet and worrying the tail "To and fro like a fish in its mouth."  As barbaric as the image is, it is underscored by the stag's unavoidable beauty: "Its antlers . . . fuzz-tipped and green, / Its large eyes liquid and brown." Also by the poet's rising sense of awe at the spectacle of nature at work.  The nature of nature, if you will.  When the stag limps away, "its left foreleg . . . lame / . . . its life helplessly slipping away," the image is of course a sad one, but not necessarily tragic.

While Whitehouse includes no haiku in the volume, every poem demonstrates the directness and elegantly austere language characteristic of that form, not surprising in a poet who, like so many eastern masters, attempts to show through nature what is behind nature and through the individual life what is behind that life, constructing it and maintaining it in a beautiful, tenuous balance of opposites.

Followup to last week: In response to my post last week about a photograph (unearthed only in the 1990s) that some believe to be a photograph of the thirty-something Van Gogh--and thus the only photograph that shows his adult face--reader Shannon sent me a link to a really interesting experiment.  A photographer tries to imitate a famous Van Gogh self-portait to the closest detail possible; as a way, I suppose, of showing us what the man who painted the self-portait "really" looked like while he was painting it.  Of course, self-portaits can be doctored just like any portaits and any paintings can be, but even so it sounded like a fun project.  Follow this link to view the results.  You'll see the familiar self-portait give way, bit by bit, to the photographer's copying rendition.  Cool stuff!  And I must say that the photograph this experiment creates does, in my mind, look much more like Vincent than the supposedly "real" photograph I discussed in last week's post.

Creating Van Gogh reaches 100

As of last Friday's post (5/14/10), Creating Van Gogh reached the 100 count. In almost exactly eight months, I've come to you with 100 thoughts about historical fiction generally and/or my historical novel Yellow in particular. Yes, I've taken a few detours on occasion--e.g., to express excitement over a new publication, or to thank someone who helped me with the blog, or to report on AWP, or to gripe about political/financing problems encountered by the National Writing Project--but for the most part I've tried to keep the discussion focused on the essential themes of the blog, the themes that followers and visitors are interested in reading and commenting about. I can't say exactly when I expected to reach 100 posts--or if I necessarily did expect to reach 100--but I'm relieved and gratified that I've made it. I know that a few--okay, several--of my posts are longer than average, but thanks for sticking with me through them. I hope that means you find my questions and/or commentary and/or anedotes relevant and interesting, especially if you're in the middle of developing or writing your own historical novel. I haven't been shy about detailing my research trip to France last summer--in fact, post 99 and post 100 did just that--and while some of those posts probably read like travelogues I hope I've made the point that I was there to see, hear, smell, read about, walk through, run through, drive through, draw and photograph specific places that Van Gogh either lived in or visited. No matter where I was, the man himself was never far from my thoughts. And these days the France trip is very much in mind, since it was this time last year that I was slogging, stomping, and wine drinking my way through that remarkable, beautiful country.

I must admit that it was the example of my wife's blog Wordamour and her simple love of blogging that encouraged me to start Creating Van Gogh in the first place. Let's give credit where credit is due. And when I did start, I began with the idea that I needed to post something--anything--everyday. Well, within a week or two I knew that would prove impossible. After all, I was working on my novel! But I've tried to maintain due diligence, and I'm proud to say that even as I came off my fall sabbatical and was thrust into the grind of 4 classes per semester teaching I've actually logged more posts from January to the present then I did from September through December. Who knew? I worried over Christmas break that I might not be able to keep posting at all! (How Erika Dreifus updates her terrific Practicing Writing blog every Monday to Friday is beyond me. I salute you, Erika.) And since I've started the blog I can report some gratifying progress on different fronts. My novel, which back in September had just started a significant and drastic new round of cutting, editing, revising, and reshaping, is almost done. (Really this time.) It's so much tighter now, so much surer, so much more of what it was trying to be all along, largely because I've had to confront and resolve so many of the issues that I've written about on this blog. Since September I've also made some great literary friends through this blog, including Anne Whitehouse, who after a series of communications about a Van Gogh poem she published, kindly asked me to review her book of poems, Blessings and Curses. (Click on the link to read about the book.) Thanks for the confidence, Anne. It's meeting people like her that is the true benefit of any blog, or any online life. I hope more posts, and more such people, are in my future. Thanks everybody.

The First Unveiling

I took my novel on the road this weekend when I attended, and read at, the annual conference of the Arkansas Philological Association. This group puts on a comfortable and very welcoming get together every year in some lovely regional locations. This year the gathering was held in the grand old Ozarks mountain town of Eureka Springs, and given that my novel is just begging to be heard, even if it's still in progress, I jumped on the invitation from Conference Director Chuck Bane to participate in a creative writing session. I did read a tiny bit of the novel to a class of mine about a year ago, but the APA conference was the very first time I'd revealed it in anything approximating a public forum. And it also happened to be the very first time my wife heard it--something I'm a little chagrined to admit, but only a little, because I'm about to dump the entire, and too long, manuscript on her.

As you can imagine, I was rather tense. I've talk about what I'm doing to many people--family, colleagues, students, friends, readers of this blog--but never actually exposed it. But, honestly, what really frazzled me was deciding which scenes to read. This, I've learned, is a whole other level of difficulty from deciding which of one's short stories to read. After all, the novel scenes must effectively represent an entire book. The story needs only be itself. And in my case, it was the first time "out of the house" for this book. Ahhhh! I figured I had time enough (20 mins.) to read two scenes. But which? Good gosh, there are scores of scenes in this book, at least in its current form. How would I decide which two are absolute right two? The day before I left I ran off about ten different scenes and started rehearsing them over and over, trying to figure which two would best strike an audience as well as best fit the time limit and best present the range of characters and perspectives that are in the book. I finally chose to read the scene about the party in Paris attended by Suzanne Valadon (see a previous post) and a scene in which Vincent paints the well known portrait of his Belgian friend Boch. I guess it was a fine enough choice, because I received many compliments afterwards, but what interested me most about the whole experience was realizing once again how much you learn about your own writing by reading it aloud. I know, I know, this is a very old and boring truth. It doesn't sound like a revelation. In fact, I tell it to my own students all the time, but this weekend I learned that I can afford to be reminded of it myself. After all, I thought these scenes were fairly polished already, and yet I found myself--as I practiced reading them--slashing through them with pen: cutting words, cutting more words, cutting more words, changing words, inserting other words, changing names, attacking whole paragraphs. Whew! I put those suckers through the wringer. How could I have not realized before how much additional editing they needed?

Garry Craig Powell, a great writer and a good friend of mine in the Writing Department at UCA, told me last spring that the most valuable thing he did when revising his own novel was to read a chapter of it aloud every night to his girlfriend. Not only because she is his best critic but because by reading aloud he learned so well what worked in the sentences and what simply didn't. At the time I told him that I understood what he meant--because I did--but now I really understand. And now my wife has not only a mammoth manuscript to wade through but will be forced to listen to it every night as I start a new phase of revision: reading the entire thing aloud. Thanks Garry, thanks APA, and thanks Chuck Bane. You've already made my book a lot better.

Quick note: I received a lovely note from the poet Anne Whitehouse, who has published a poem called "Van Gogh in Arles." Click on the title to get to the poem. As I told Anne, she's really captured well the physicality of Van Gogh's attraction to the landscape of the region. Anne's poem reminds us too how this once utterly unknown painter has so captivated the imaginations of myriad literary artists. I know he did mine. That's something of a miracle, as are his paintings.