Variations on a book.

A few days ago on The Face, a friend commented that she was about to write by clearing a space on the table, reading a few pages from her "Bible" (which for her, that day, was The English Patient), turning off the internet, and writing. I loved this idea. I brought with me to Idaho a bunch of books that could serve the "Bible" role--for me, for a few days, it was Larry Levis's Selected--and I used this method to jumpstart my writing.

It was amazing to me, though, how deeply some of those poems have penetrated my...what, my tropes? images? paradigms? For instance, this:

I know this isn't much.
But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had
To live my life, even in its late, florid style.

That's from "My Story in a Late Style of Fire," from Winter Stars. I bought that book before the first meeting of the first workshop I attended, taught by Larry Levis. Evidently, I have been reading this poem for all the years since. It was, actually, shocking to me. I not only love this poem--it, in some sense, has become me. Or I have become it. I guess this happens with every book that, in some way, forms us.

I remember thinking quite clearly at one point in my life that I no longer wanted to keep having the same arguments. In a sense, I wanted to stop reading the same book. This is, of course, not possible, or at least I have not found it to be so. We keep reading the same books that have read us. These books--the ones that form us--are us. We are them. In this sense, we never really leave our old books behind--our old lives, our old ideas and commitments--we are always in them, they are always in us.

Right now, I am wondering if there's even a point to saying, of this phenomenon, this is terrible or this is true or any such judgement. I am wondering, what, in fact, the Bible is--the rotating cast of sacred books, or beautiful books, or searing, or visionary, or transformative books. Can you choose your Bible? or does it in some way always choose you?

My family used to love to play a little game, where we'd name the top five records, or books, or movies, or whatever--the ones you'd take with you to a place where you'd have those and no other. My kids would always joke with me that I acted like it was real--like I'd never be able to revise my list. I always put Leaves of Grass on my list of books, and I did always put the King James Bible. To me, whatever else it was, it was a book of beautiful language, and parts of it mean a great deal to me--words that feed me. Even when I'm choosing, my old book follows me.

If you are of the book--sacred or secular-- then books that choose you--or the ones that you choose--give you the frame for thinking and feeling. I feel I might never stop being able to read through the original books--the original books speaking, always, through every new text. At this point in my life, I'm not sure why I should even try, aside from understanding that mine--my reading, my writing--isn't the only way.

I am asking myself: what is it that my own poems are doing? what news do they have to deliver? what beauty of their own? what voice or beauty that isn't somehow ventriloquizing, quarreling with, revising, contradicting, singing the old books?

Larry Levis again, speaking in a borrowed voice--the voice of Whitman:

Now that I'm required reading in your high schools,
Teenagers call me a fool.
Now what I sang stops breathing. 

And yet
It was only when everyone stopped believing in me
That I began to live again--

The Ten Commandments of Grading.

1. Upon commencing thy grading, thou shalt obtain a warm beverage, else thine energy shall flag.

2. Thou shalt not commence by multiplying the number of students by the number of minutes per assignment, lest thy will to live plunge precipitously; indeed, thou shalt not estimate nor "guesstimate" how long, how long O Lord! it shall all take before thy labors are complete. Rather shalt thou tell thyself lies, for thou cannot handle the truth, verily thou cannot.

3. Thou shalt have on hand an abundance of snacks. Healthy, salty, whichever thou likest best. Both healthy and salty are good in the eyes of the Lord.

4. Thou shalt sit by a window so that thou mayest have light, but thou shalt face away from the window lest the commotion in the street, or the least sparrow on thy maple's branches, distract thee from thy labors.

5. Thou shalt grade at least five assignments before the next snack.

the Commandmentinator.

6. Thou shalt not "take a break" and search the internet for cat tumblrs, for lo, searching for cat tumblrs is light-minded and is not pleasing in the eyes of the Lord when thou art grading. 

7. Thou shalt lower the bar of thine expectations, for verily thou art only a human being, and thou canst not do everything, not in a day, yea not even in two days: the Lord knoweth thou art not a robot!

8. Thou shalt not pray for an algorithm to perform thy grading in thy behalf: for such prayers are vain and light-minded and the Lord desireth that thou get cracking on thy labors, for it is thy JOB and thou shalt not shirk it!

9. Thou shalt not despair, though the grading wilt always be with us.

10. On the morrow, thou shalt arise early: the hour arriveth quickly in which thou must take up the grading thou didst not finish today.