Literary Matters 5.3 - Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and ...

writing to listen to visiting poet Matthea Harvey give a talk to the resident writers. One of the poemsabout which she spoke was Wallace Stevens’ “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” I’d encountered itbefore, but coming across it again amid the current set of questions orbiting my work made thepiece crackle with an urgent new electricity. The poem details the experience of a man namedHoon as he discovers and expresses the extent to which his reality is fully his own creation. Whatgripped me most was the notion conveyed in the last line. Describing the self-defined world inwhich he moves, Hoon says, “…there I found myself more truly and more strange.”Back at my desk after Harvey’s talk, it occurred to me that what I wanted was not to break awayfrom some previous version of my writing self, but to become that self “more truly and morestrange.” Stevens’ words helped me clarify what I’d sensed about my current project but had notyet fully articulated to myself: my hope was to challenge my tendencies as a writer, not to abandonor replace them, but ultimately to strengthen them, to make them more nuanced and dexterous,more resolutely themselves. In an attemptto write with greater freedom, I had forgottenthat limitation, for me, is often themost freeing force of all. The thought hadnot occurred to me that going deeper intolimitation rather than farther from it, likeHoon in Stevens’ poem going deeper intohimself, might in the end bring my processthe increased expansiveness I craved.“The Bucket Men and The Apple Tree,”painted by Jui-Pin ChangIt struck me that the way to move forwardin my work might be to move back, divingagain into my fascination with the sonicand emotional tension that comes fromself-imposed limitations in a poem, butincreasing the stakes, subtleties, and surprisesof those limits. In attempting to writewith no tensions of restraint checking myexpressive urges, it was as if I’d tossed offtoo thoroughly an intrinsic aspect of myprocess, thus failing to enact in languagethe kind of dynamism that Odita ascribedto color in visual art. I realized that I hadbeen trying to achieve what Chang experienced in her dream, that sense of liberated and expandedperception, without the modulation of vision provided by the bucket.I remember reading in Richard Ellman’s biography of James Joyce that Joyce felt as though, wheneverhe was stuck on a problem with his writing, he would go walking down the street and tripover the answer. He had an unshakeable sense that the universe would send him signs and allhe had to do was stay open to receiving them. Like most people who do creative work, I’ve experiencedthis sensation in my own life at times, those fortunate instances when you’re casting18 LITERARY MATTERS | VOLUME 5.3 | FaLL/WINTER 2012