Road Trip, Valdosta to New Haven (New York City)

Was a distant voice
Made me make a choice
That I had to get the fuck out of this town
I got a lot of things to do
A lot of places to go
I've got a lot of good things coming my way
And I'm afraid to say that you're not one of them.

-- "Box Elder," Pavement

I had to head north for a conference, for some peace on a long drive, distance from and distance to heartbreak and a night at the home of the best poet writing today in America along the way. Wine (thanks Uncle Gene) and a fine dinner with Bob and Eve and much laughter, a few honest tears. Tears, because, honestly, no matter how much you do, it's not enough if you care, whether Blacksburg or Fresno or Valdosta, anyplace where people can't stop what's in their heads.

The road is a sweet hum otherwise, a veer and a slope, movement and purpose even in a dubious rented Aveo, but it had a CD player and I drove and listened and drove and made good time through all the states 75, 85, 77, 81, 78, 287, and 95 touch. I went the back way up and down, felt the mountains behind me, drank bad coffee and gripped the cold steel of the pump at gas stations, thanked all the fine people who sold me water and m&ms and who let me pee in the employee restrooms. I made it to New Haven in good time on day two, had Pizza from famous Pepe's with my beautiful daughter and James, her beau, and then headed into the city for AWP, which will be another entry. This is about the road and the way the mountains fur with trees in winter, about every white line saying I miss you all the way, north and south, Tim's voice singing it whisper soft, SM explaining why the hard way through Georgia rain and construction zones and Shenandoah Valley and where New Jersey is pretty, trochaic tire thump miss yous, slow miss yous in the wind and the miss miss of wipers whipping only the rain off the glass, and it's ok, this hard work, this forty hours of missing you. Coming home, south, it was all I could do to keep myself from hitting 87 North, north and north to where you are, but I couldn't do that because I wanted to too much. Too much.

Writer's Block

I'm sitting in my office at VSU, listening to Tom Waits, thinking about my friend Bob Hicok at Virginia Tech. I was teaching his poems to my students yesterday, distracted with worry, so I read them badly. Sorry, Bob. Such tragedy hits us all, wakes us to the fact that, every day, we deal with trouble, with stress, with human beings, some of whom are broken or breaking. Sometimes, the crush of school puts them out, and they wander off to find work or solace elsewhere, some bar, some other city. To hear that the shooter was an English major, frankly, surprised me at first, and then it didn't. Young writers are given to violence as a way to end things in their stories. It's something I have to caution against because it's almost always too easy an ending, like the dream--wake up, everything's ok!-- and yet dwelling on violence is supposed to be a sign of creativity, so some experts say. It never surprises me when I read it in the work of beginners. But I do worry about my students when I read their writing and I know it's too real. I only hope that getting it out helps get it outside so they can look at it. So they can shape it and feel a kind of control over it once it's outside. Craft compels this. Craft is control, is self-control, after the creative/destructive blurting that most art begins as.

The media are another kind of control. Instant blame. Instant expertise. Instant mythology. Fear, fear, fear. I watched some of it, the endless what-they-should've-done-ing that pretends we don't live in a country that loves guns more than we love civility. All I can do is push for civility, keep my door open anyway, and know that hiding in my office or asking the University President to hire more people with guns isn't going to make a difference. You put 10,000 people together in our gun-addled culture, someone's gonna go off. Once when I was visiting Fresno about ten years ago, a car full of young men, teenagers, pulled away from my parents' neighbor's house. Kid riding shotgun pointed his finger at me as they rode past, said, "pop, pop, pop." Laughed. This is a sad, simple, awful story, one that will be told again, I'm afraid, soon enough. Pop, pop, pop. But my door is still open.