Reading as a Writer: ONE SLEEVE by Richard Carr

An intriguing poetry surprise landed in my mailbox recently — Richard Carr’s latest collection of poems, One Sleeve, published by Evening Street Press.  Richard is a neighbor in my apartment building, and I see him occasionally in the neighborhood.  The last I’d heard any news about this collection, it was that publication would be later than originally scheduled, which had been fall 2010.  So, seeing the published collection pleased me.

The surprises continued.  Upon opening the package, the book’s cover startled with its stark black and white, and the photograph of Richard looking quite menacing.  I asked him about that — yes, he’d intended for the menace, and had even wanted a more “in your face” effect by filling the cover with the photo.  It’s a strange introduction to the poems inside, but the dark tone it sets proves all too relevant.

“One Sleeve” is one of two characters that the poems follow.  The other is “I.”  It’s worth noting again that Richard’s “I” narrators are not him.  In this case, the “I” creates an intimate connection with the reader.  If read aloud, “I” of the poems becomes the “I” of the reader.  “One Sleeve” conjures the images of an amputee, perhaps a war vet, or someone born without both arms, or a shirt missing one of its sleeves.  The missing arm or sleeve could mean a sense of incompleteness, or on a darker note, a deformity or crippling sense of inadequacy.

As I read through the poems, I realized that “I” and “One Sleeve” were one and the same — two facets of one personality.  One Sleeve seemed to be the rebel, defiant, unconventional; “I” was the opposite.  What astonished me about the poems concerned the focus on the mind, living in the mind vs. the body, and a preoccupation with death.  An undercurrent of powerlessness pervades many of the poems also – “I” complains that he doesn’t know his lines, he doesn’t know what to believe, about being a human chess piece in the park.

Gradually, conflict emerges: I vs. One Sleeve and death vs. life.  The language of the poems stays close to the vernacular even as Carr creates startling images with them.  For example, in “The Art Museum is a Tomb of Good Intentions,” he writes, “How easy for a madman with a razor//to approach a canvas,/ to slice across a wrist,/the man, blinking,/suddenly exquisite and precious//like a painted image of a man.”  In “One Sleeve is Looking for Something to Believe,” One Sleeve flips through books, inspects a sentence, then “sometimes/runs his finger down the cleavage between the pages.” 

As the skirmishes continue between “I” and One Sleeve, the action begins to coalesce into scenes, with more exterior description.  The narrator and his alter have ventured outside of the mind and into the world.  With frenetic energy, One Sleeve demolishes Time in “One Sleeve Trivializes Time” in contrast to “I” who is “A piece of lint on the carpet….”  I tried to see if these two personas switched places during the course of the collection, but I don’t think they do, at least not completely.  They become more of each other.

A line in “I Look Down the Subway Stair in the Rain” brought me to a complete stop in my reading.  The poem addresses Hades and the subway as “the underworld.”  “One Sleeve mocks the symbolism,/as though there were two realities,/one the shadow of the other.”  This echoes a famous Carl Jung quote about power and love: “Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.  The one is but the shadow of the other.”  While a sense of powerlessness exists in these poems, death is more dominant than anything else, and love isn’t really to be found, not even in some of the sexual and sensual references.  Carr refers, I think, to “I” and One Sleeve being shadows of each other, as the two realities, or the two worlds of life and the underworld.

This collection is dark, unhappy, gritty, suffused with violence at times, and always questioning.  I was surprised by the unrelenting focus on death.  As I read I was beginning to wonder if this collection would end as Mahler’s meditation on mortality, his Symphony No. 9, does with a quiet fade away, or if there would be a sunbeam that cuts through the darkness.  One Sleeve and his energy turn out to be the sun in the final poem, the force that keeps “I” alive, the energy and movement, the curiosity and drive for exploration: “I want to quit.  I want to go back to sleep.  He’s ready for a new day, even in the rain….He rolls up one sleeve, willing to reconsider everything./I button one down, unable to resist.”  Resist what?  Sleep?  Or One Sleeve’s energy?  The tone of this last poem suggests the latter.

Every time I read poetry, I’m struck by how different it is from prose.  Both use words, but they use them to build and tell stories in different ways.  Richard Carr uses them to appeal to the “One Sleeve” in all of us — that part of us that’s not quite complete and always searching for the answers.

Does Writer’s Block Exist?

In a word, yes. In it’s most extreme form, which I’ve experienced, everything the writer tries to write simply stops after the first few pages. If you foster your creativity, nurture it on a regular basis, however, writer’s block is less likely to be a problem. Ever.

Writer’s block can sneak up on a writer.  It arrives disguised as something else — a physical illness, a family crisis, a car accident — and makes it impossible to even think about writing words down to fill a blank page, much less narrative structure, story, developing characters.  Sometimes, life needs attending first.  Believe it or not, nurturing your life and your experiences will make you a better writer.  A humane writer. 

My experience with bad writer’s block occurred because of a trauma I’d survived.  The physical wounds had healed but not the emotional and psychological wounds.  My mind and heart let me know by not allowing me to write.  The problem was that I could not understand what was happening and was angry about the block.  It was two years — yes, years – before I figured it out.  During that time, I read voraciously.  I kept a journal, writing everyday in as much detail as I could to exercise my writing muscles and keep them limber.  Occasionally, I pulled out a writing project and tried to work on it, with no success.  I also learned patience with myself and my imagination during this time, something that was as difficult for me as feeling that I’d never write again.

How did I finally break the writer’s block?  I watched a movie.  I would also argue that I was ready to write again, and going to the movie, seeing a fine actor create and sustain a character through subtle gestures as well as costume and speech, proved to be the perfect messenger to tell me.  I saw Daniel Day-Lewis play Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans.  I had been doubtful Day-Lewis could truly pull it off.  I was as skeptical as a person can be and almost didn’t go, but a good friend persuaded me to give him a chance.

Hawkeye in action (photo: IMDb.com)

From the opening frames, it was clear that Day-Lewis had stepped aside to allow Hawkeye to animate him.  I was amazed.  I ended up seeing the movie five or six times in the theater — the first to get the story, and the following to study Day-Lewis and the other actors.  It was a lesson in creating and developing character.  The thing that still sticks in my mind years later is the way Day-Lewis used his body to convey Hawkeye’s personality — his walk, his hand gestures, his stance — this actor never relaxes. 

Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye (photo: Morgan Creek Productions)

Day-Lewis and the other actors sparked thoughts about the characters I had created — how had I defined them in the story?  How did they behave?  Did they have any idiosyncratic gestures?  How did they live in their bodies?  How did speech set each one apart?  I spent months on getting to know my characters, visualizing them, developing their backstories, listening to their voices as I interviewed them.  In the end, it was really this work that broke the writer’s block. 

Hindsight reveals truth.  Looking back much later, I realized the true cause of my bout of writer’s block.  It forced me to re-examine how I approach my life as well as my writing.  I certainly don’t need to be so hard on myself, just on the writing.

I’ve heard that a common cause of writer’s block is a writer’s unreasonably high expectations for himself and his writing, expecting to perform at an award-winning level even in a first draft.  The only cure for such a block is to lower expectations and write, write, write.  Perfection remains impossible to attain, no matter who you are.  Striving for excellence, however, is a noble goal as long as it’s done without taking oneself too seriously. 

So, just keep it human…..

What Does Title of Publication Mean?

Titles are tricky. An author may agonize over the title of his novel only to have the marketing department at a publishing house change it. The marketing department wants to insure that a title will grab the buying public, will entice them to spend their money on the book.  Which is all fine and dandy, but…is a marketing department title a true reflection of the novel’s contents or just words that have done well in focus groups?

Unless a first-time novelist can persuade the marketing department or marketing agrees with him from the onset, he’ll have little choice but to accept the title given his novel by someone else.  As a novelist’s books increase in sales and he gains power as a result, marketing starts to have less and less power and, therefore, say over the titles of his novels.  The thing is: the novelist wants his novels to sell also, so he wants what marketing wants.  But they want the same thing for different reasons.  Marketing wants to sell and make money.  The novelist (if he’s a True Writer) wants to sell and entertain the reading public with his stories.

One of my favorite titles is on a William Faulkner novel: The Sound and the Fury.  He borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare.  In MacBeth, toward the end of the play after the body count has really piled up, MacBeth has a moment of insight in which he’s contemplating death, life as a “walking shadow,” and how life is ”a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing.”  Faulkner’s choice of that phrase for his novel actually gives clues to the story contained in it.  There’s an idiot, there’s plenty of death, and tragedy as only Faulkner could write.  I would have loved to have been a fly on the office wall at Random House as Faulkner, his editor and the marketing guy talked about whether or not to keep the title, if such a meeting did take place. 

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje alludes to the novel’s central mystery, i.e. the identity of Hana’s patient and what his story is.  Because there is a question of identity, most of the story deals in one way or another about how people define identity or live an identity, how people can put borders around identity, how misunderstandings arise over identity and the pain those misunderstandings can cause.  Another example: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.  The title is the geographical name of a peak in the Blue Ridge Mountains near where the characters live.  It also represents an emotional place, a place of mind, the heart of their lives and a landmark and a destination.  The climax of the story occurs on the mountain and it changes their lives forever. 

I believe that the title of literary fiction tends to have more meaning to the novel’s story than a genre novel, but that’s not always the case.  Science fiction authors, in my experience, title their stories with care and attention to meaning.  An example: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.  No, Clarke’s novel is not about children or adolescents coming of age.  Instead, it’s about the interplay among three different creatures and their relative maturity in the game of survival, a coming of age story concerning adults and the loss of innocence concerning existence in the universe.

The five Perceval novels have titles that have meaning but I’ve also tried to make them intriguing to pique readers’ curiosity.  The first novel, Perceval, will undergo a title change when I begin work on its next revision to Perceval’s Secret.  This title more clearly says that Perceval is a person who has a secret which is a core element in the novel.  The other titles, Perceval’s Shadow, Perceval in Love, Perceval’s Game, and Perceval’s Choice, consistently follow this pattern.

What does the title of a publication mean?  That depends…first and foremost on the story the writer has written, followed by the author’s persuasive powers and influence, and finally the publisher’s marketing department’s power.  The next time a title catches your eye, wonder…and then buy and read it.