Thinking about Writing
Denise Calvetti Michaels
Sometimes she hopes her writing will go easily in the way she imagines it is to take up the paintbrush she’ s dipped into colors with the names she would insert within the body of the text as though she’ s painting with their names, cerulean, verdure, carnelian and vermillion.
Lyrical. Words she’ d embroider by hand. On a broadsheet. The hand-made book. Another writing experiment.
Last night her daughter showed her the words her son had written by himself. Almost three years old, Clyde printed his name in capital letters with a red crayon. On another paper he wrote LUKE, his brother’ s name, in blue.
Per favor, le crayon, Pablo Picasso is purported to have said, at two years of age, to his artist father working in his studio.
She wonders if she’ s stuck back in the 1960s, era of her adolescence.
At least once a week her daughter will say, I don’ t think I’ m a good mother, I don’ t laugh enough. Yet laughing is what she hears when her daughter visits with her boys, but it makes the woman wonder if she has a playful imagination.
She questions if the flow of oozing paint on canvas is a way to reverse the sensation of feeling stuck, as when she puts the nib of her pen on unlined paper and does not censor herself.
She has no audience in mind when she writes. The blank page is the space she uses to rescue memory.
Long ago she attended a workshop with Seattle poet Pesha Gertler, who conveyed devotion and confidence for women’ s writing. Pesha shared the poem“ The Dragonfly Mother” by Denise Levertov, and discussed the muse who watches over.
Last week during her poetics class the notion that there’ s no turning back, the internet is here, social media a reality that is not going away.
So, how to respond? Listen more closely, someone said.
And the question: Is there a place in her writing she’ s trying to name?
Could she get to it through the mud, the girl, the motorcycle, the ride to the ocean, the induction letter and the gestures? The war and the M16s that jammed? The twentytwo Marines who died February 25, 1968, during the Battle of Khe Sahn?
What right does she have to write this story?
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