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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