Feb 6, 2005/Revised April 16, 2005

For students in “Writing as a Career”

Journalism 66W, De Anza College

(also posted at http://members.cruzio.com/~gyre/ken/)

 

I look forward to meeting you on the May 5th.  I had written the following excerpt two months ago for a similar class visit at UCSC; they requested a brief bio of my “writing life.”  It’s a sort of biographical reflection on becoming and living as a poet.  I can also provide you with copies of my book. At any rate, maybe this short essay can enhance our conversation to come on May 5th.

 

I think deep narratives drive my writing life (and the artist’s life in general).  1938: My parents, refugees from Hitlerism, arrived separately in America in their teens, my father’s family from northern Germany, my mother’s family from Vienna.  Because of forced exile, neither parent finished high school (although my mother went back to school in her late 30s). My older brothers and I absorb a message: education and truth are connected to justice, and nothing is more important than justice. All three of us end up with Ph D’s.

 

1966: Even in elementary school, I feel like a writer. Language and cleverness carry a lot of weight around my childhood  house in Oakland.  I write a novel under the kitchen table titled D AS IN DEAD.  The bad spies want to blow up the Capitol.  The good guy stops the “terrorists,” but Julie, the girl who helps him, dies. Then, in 1970, my father dies of a heart attack. I am 14, and that is the day I write my first poem.

 

1970s: Oberlin College.  Pre Med is too stressful.  I play French horn but not well enough to make a living.  I take a year off, travel through South America, return to college as an English Major specializing in Creative Writing.  Throughout the seventies, both at Oberlin and at the Iowa Writers Workshop, I meet incredible writers and teachers. It becomes the greatest thing in life. I look for people like this wherever I go—people who live for it (writing and music).

 

1980: I get my MFA at age 25. I decide to model a career after my mentor at Oberlin, David Young, editor of FIELD magazine.  Edit, teach, and write (including poetry, translation, criticism, reviews; David Young’s model says: you can do it all. Now I look back and wonder: how does he do it all?). I end up in Santa Cruz to create that career.  In 1981, my mother dies.  And before you can say PROSEMINAR, I’m a grad student with a wife (the pianist Kit Birskovich) and baby—and then right after I pass my UCSC Ph D exams, somehow—two babies.

 

1982-1992: UC Santa Cruz was an incredible place to be.  Outstanding teachers and freedom to pursue interdisciplinary studies. I could edit QUARRY WEST, get by off TA-ships and eventually lectureships with CORE and the Writing Program and other local colleges as well, and work on my dissertation on Gary Snyder.  I was in UCSC’s Porter d150, the QUARRY WEST office, when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. Since passing my exams at UCSC in 1986 (and finishing the dissertation on Gary Snyder in 1992— and only then truly leaving UCSC for good), I’ve held a writing life together in various ways:

 

—by scribbling at will including in the dark of dawn, into tape recorders in the car, on the backs of receipts and old pieces of cardboard.

 

—By finding and sticking with a writing group. Writing groups must be supportive but also tough-minded.

 

—Through marriage to someone who understands me as a writer.  She herself is a fine writer (whose attentions, however, are more to other art forms—piano, ceramics, singing, musical composition, painting…)—and  someone  who believes in the artist’s life. I met her in a poetry class I taught at Iowa. Even when I had two small children and no job, Kit (my wife) encouraged me to do a three-month residency at Villa Montalvo, an arts colony in Saratoga. This important time at Montalvo was when I started writing my music poems.

 

—At least once a year: I send stuff out—local, regional, on-line, and a few “reaches” too—high-class journals, chapbooks, contests.  Being in the Sentinel or the Porter Gulch Review, or Chinquapin, or City on a Hill: it all matters a whole lot, I think.

 

—Being a Poet in the Schools in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s meant a lot to me (mostly for Patrice Vecchione’s HEART OF THE WORD program).  There are few better ways to stay a poet than to BE one.  This was wonderful, exhausting work.  It was not always easy or even successful, but mostly it was great. Inspiring expression in children creates meaningful connections: children are seen in a new way by their classmates and teachers (shy students show talent, wild students are at last rewarded for their wildness); families are blown away by their children’s best writing and come to see them in new ways; children are given an opportunity to honor family members, mentors, and peers,  and to explore key moments in their lives in words; they are given freedom; they can connect art and writing; they can feel pride in the distinctive character of their own particular imaginations and voices; they can feel pride in being represented in print and in reading their work in a public event; they can learn about traditions of world poetry and grow up thinking of poetry as a valid and pervasive form of consciousness in the world; they can explore their ethnic heritages with pride; and they can understand themselves as “boys” or “girls” in new ways undercutting traditional gender stereotypes or expectations.  I think just being, for them, a “man” who was also a “poet” was significant. It is hard not be inspired as a writer if you can do this work—but it is work that takes a lot of energy and patience.  I did it part time for something like ten years.  *Another way to be a creative writer in the community: workshops in the prisons (maybe you will invite Claire Braz Valentine or Steve Wiesinger to talk about that). *I also taught poetry workshops through U.C. Extension as well as on my own.

 

— Publishing collectives can make good sense for some writers. Through good fortune, I was called upon to be the maiden Hummingbird:  a first-book publishing collective that began in 2002 with my book, The Sacred Geometry of Pedestrians. 

 

—Getting an MFA, which I did before UCSC, was an awesome experience.  My friends who’ve gone on to masters degrees in journalism or creative writing or English or teaching composition—not one has regretted it.

 

—Synergy with teaching: I’ve avoided career burnout through variety. I’ve taught at least a dozen different classes at De Anza alone (where I now work full time), including lit, intro to poetry, poetry writing, critical thinking, mass media, low and intermediate developmental classes, team-taught classes—all of these courses inspire and enrich my writing life. I think if you play it right, you can stay in the field and keep writing without burning out. There are only about 200 creative writing authors living in this country on the money they make from their writing alone!

 

—The writing life is the reading life. I read most before 1993 and regret that I don’t read more.

 

—Editing has been energizing: Quarry West (especially the symposia, the special issues, and the local anthology), the two issues of Sifrut (a gig I got out of a newspaper classified!), and now Red Wheelbarrow.  I’ve worked these past twenty years with wonderful co-editors (like Tim Fitzmaurice, Alfred Arteaga, Marilyn Chin, Francisco X. Alarcon, Paul Skenazy, Kathy Chetkovich, etc.), organized readings, interviewed terrific people (like Dave Eggers, W.S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich), and had fun correspondences.  Again, I find it synergistic with writing.  There is NO MONEY IN ANY OF IT.  It is A HOBBY. The problem?  It can also be an energy-DRAIN.  You can end up editing (etc.) INSTEAD of writing.  Len Anderson of Poetry Santa Cruz is in the thick of this now.   He spends two days just on a grant application.  When you go this direction, and you publish other people’s stuff, are you running away from yourself?

 

—I think it is hardest to find balance: a balance that does not erase the time needed  to create—a balance that is sane but also steadfastly partakes in the wild, the creative, and the subversive.

 

—I set aside time for writing, including  occasional workshops— everything from Patrice Vecchione’s Saturday workshops  at the Santa Cruz Main Library, to 2-3 day retreats for writers at a local Monastery south of Big Sur led by Amber Coverdale Sumrall.  Or just mornings, or just Fridays: but anyway, just something.

 

--In the psychological sense, I use writing to address tensions, to create integrated voicings.  I need language to feel settled; it cauterizes as well as amplifies—or it elaborately conceals, which is certainly just as interesting!  With writing, if I’m not lazy, I can dig into myself and search for new colors and tones.  I can perform my authentic strangeness and then decide what in the world it might be good for.

 

—Staying integrated:  for me, teaching = values = justice = activism = truth = writing = love; so although I’ve lived a life full of mammoth bullshit and no small bit of agony, the poetry is often at the center of the whole system of understanding. Writing doesn’t create integration; rather, it offers a process and a glimpse—and then at best becomes a metaphor for a way of being. And maybe something gets said.

 

Writing is one of my most indispensable friends.  But it is no more than a vehicle.  For me, The Writing Life is one of critical thinking and self-confrontation.  There are the many monsters of laziness, narcissism and decadence, of concealment, of bathos, of vanity. I am mostly aware of my shortcomings, and not without reason.

 

When Hamlet says “The Readiness is all,” he is talking about the readiness for death.  But I would take it a step further: be ready to write a good poem.  You don’t know if and when.  But you can be ready, and then, in a lifetime, maybe you can be lucky too.

 

REGULAR BIO:

Ken Weisner of Santa Cruz, CA, teaches poetry writing, literature, composition, and critical thinking at De Anza Community College in Cupertino. He has published poetry widely in journals such as The Antioch Review, Seneca Review, The Brooklyn Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Blue Moon Review, Black Zinnias, Porter Gulch Review, Oyez, Eye Prayers, New Honolulu Review,  Icarus, and The Bathyspheric Review.  Hummingbird Press published his poetry collection, The Sacred Geometry of Pedestrians, in 2002. Also an editor, musician, and father, Weisner is a graduate of both U.C. Santa Cruz and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  For more info or poems, see http://members.cruzio.com/~gyre/ken/.