My wife is extremely artistic. However, if you asked her if she considered herself an artist, she’d categorically reject the notion. Of this I’m certain. Yet she has an artist’s eye, and, I think, an artist’s subtle and trained appreciation of the aesthetic. Goodness knows she’s got genetics on her side. Her mother was a brilliant watercolor artist, her grandmother the founder of the Women’s Painter’s of Washington, and her aunt the illustrator of Dick and Jane.
Susan loves to read. She reads more than I write (pound for pound). She likes mystery and detective, espionage, humor, romance and gothic. Sayers, Christie, Wodehouse, O’Henry, Austen, Bronte, etc. She doesn’t write, but she can edit like nobody’s business. Oh, can she edit! You don’t want to submit a piece of writing to my wife. If it’s any kind of prose, she’ll find a hole in it somewhere. Boom, a split infinitive, a dangling proposition (is there really such a thing?), a poorly used adverb. And we haven’t even got to the stinking plot.
I’m pretty well convinced this is why I gave up prose altogether. I can trace it back to a piece I submitted in a Gather contest (Amazon Shorts) entitled, The Putrefied Corpse. It was the first and only detective story I ever wrote. Bad decision for the husband of a voracious reader (and artiste). I actually ended up winning the contest, but that didn’t change her appraisal of the yarn. In fact, had she not been a sounding-board for my endless zany plots and inconsistent character profiles, it could have passed for the world’s worst detective thriller. At least drafts 1-37. I thought it was getting better after that.
Which brings us to the point of this essay. My dear wife, with all her artistic and literary acumen, cannot bear analyzing or critiquing poetry. Not one jot or tittle of poetry. She doesn’t mind reading it. She doesn’t mind hearing it (although she chuckles from upstairs when I’m down here recording my little podcasts). After hours of attempts on one poem, I must admit, I’m pretty fed up with the whole podcast schtick myself.
The thing is, Susan is my muse. She knows it, I know it, and the American people know it. So, she tries hard not to hurt the fragile poetic dynamic. Exercises at all cost, the gentle nuance of balance between level-headed encouragement and all out adulation. While I prefer the latter, I completely understand the necessity for the former.
However, and this is a big however, I think, as chief bard of the household, on occasion, and without warning, I’m entitled to the occasional, “ah, that’s a wild and wooly meter you got there, Ed,” or “you mean the white birch is to represent our most primordial urge toward ontological semiosis?” But, nooooo… I have to settle for the ubiquitous, “I think that’s good,” “that one seems good, but I really can’t tell,” “you know I can’t understand this stuff,” or the one that really gets me down, “I’ll tell you how I feel after you take out the trash.”
Well, she’s my muse, and that’s just the way it is. I love her just the same. And I think she’s on the upward swing of the learning curve, as are we all. I’m trying to get her to read Hopkins, Dickinson, or even a little Coleridge, but she’s a toughie. Finally, I googled poetry comma detective fiction and came up with a second-hand book of poems entitled The Blank Verse of Ten Infamous Bank Robbers which I ordered without hesitation. I stuck it under her pillow and caught her reading it by flashlight in the middle of the night. I think we’re getting somewhere.
What are you waiting for? Consult your muse. Write!
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Written by Edward Nudelman, who is also a Books Correspondent for Gather: POETRY CENTRAL
Keep up with Ed’s other posting and Gather activity by joining his Gather network-just click here and select the orange “Connect” button on the left-hand side of the page. If you are interested in my background or qualifications, I invite you to read my profile which has information concerning my published writings.
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Comments: 59
I have always written for one audience first - myself. If I am satisfied with a bit of prose, it's done and I'm on to the next. If anyone else likes it, cool. The same goes for my music. I have always been pleasantly surprised to obtain some local or virtual acclaim for my writing and to make a small profit off each album project and each book I publish.
A few of my short stories won some unremarkable awards and I've won some small sums with my essays over the years. Whenever there's a juried competition with a monitary prize that I think I can win, I will enter. It's paid a few phone bills and bought a few pizzas.
My muse? Really depends on the story or the song. Some of my best stories and songs are almost exact transcriptions of my dreams. I dream melodies and hear them long enough after I wake to write them into songs. Some songs are composed almost entirely in my dreams. Stories too.
Anger seems to have been my muse recently and I have spilled forth more political prose over the past year than before in my life.
By the way - be glad your wife does not critique your poetry. There must be some mystery and some space, especially since she is your muse.
My gal Donna reads my stuff, and she pretty much always says it's good. She's been the inspiration for many a piece, but mostly, My Sweet Donna Blue Eyes is the external Muse for my heart and soul. She bolsters me and motivates me to dance with my artistic muses (who only live inside me), and she is my dearly needed connection to reality. I Love Her.
Peace -
There are times Blondie needs my muscles, just as there are times my characters would be flat and lifeless without an injection of personality harvested straight from the bottomless well of her essence.
My biceps are hers to do with what she will, and she knows anything she says can and will be used against my deadline. We exploit each other without shame!
Susan, she (my Susan) is wonderful and very treasured!
My own husband still seems shocked that I'm writing at all...it doesn't fit his 30+ year image of me:)
This was a rib tickler, but also insightful about how rewriting is very, very important, but still too much of a good thing, in this case overconscientious editing, can end up acting almost like a censor for the imagination. The person who does this to me is my Mom, who also taught me to diagram sentences when I was a boy. I won´t even let her near chapters of my novel until it´s published, because I am fully confident I will be reduced to tears and back to that little boy by the time she finished thwacking me with complaints of excessive modifiers a a Thomas Wolfe or ¨What´s with the runon sentence here? Do you honestly think you´re in the same league with Willie Styron?¨ And my own lovely chiquetilla of a wife, English is her second language, so I´ll never have that problem!
Maya Angelo and Marge Piercy are my poets. Real simple, right out there.
I save my deep for other things.
But thank you for letting me see a bit into the thought processes of creating poetry.
(You might want to look up the spelling of Emily D.'s last name.....)
*snort* ...now that's a Muse who has learned how to be truly effective! I like her a lot!
I don't think I have a muse yet. Or else she is around and I am just not listening. I'd rather read than write, anyway. Having learned to read and write in English is accomplishment enough I think...
LOL
AND, please bear in mind that when I write anything, it is because it was tortured out of me. :-)
My muse.....must be the kitchen and living room windows.
My wife is Japanese and maybe three steps above me in an academic sense. She'll read my stories, but won't even look at my poems. After 25 years of a wonderful marriage, my thoughts towards her are of appreciation and deep abiding love.
Some of us never find suc a muse, such a partner; though we have search in every valley...... (please see my article "Will I Find Her in Alaska")
Congratulations Edward & you too Mrs. Muse.
We all need a muse like your lady wife. I think mine got lost somewhere.
BTW - this is a nice tribute to Susan. You must get her to post to Gather - if so, please let me know.
My muse is a fiesty wench who works at her whim not mine. Very ill-behaved she is.
U wishing you laughter
I cannot critque poems. Well, I could; but I only did once and got made fun of. How ever! I am a mystery fool. And I love critiquing mysterys. And I do a good job at that actually. Not so much the grammer, but the holes, which we all know are deadly to a good mystery, along with pitifully fleshed out charactors, (even with flesh not on) and so on and so on.
Now for muse. I actually wrote a response to something Carol Roach was asking: Are we what we write? As I got into my answer, the whole experience of muses came to light. Any time I have performed theatre, or have written a deeply moving piece, I have recieved an on slaught of experiences...Dreams, Visions, Physical Sensations etc. that have brought me to a deeper understanding of who the charactor I am portraying is and why I am protraying her...Or a deeper understanding for the key person or persons in a prose. In fact, I stopped acting first, around '92 and have only scribbled since also, due to being blindsided by muses. Not to say it wasn't rewarding. But explain to someone that you are being visited by someone you don't know, but you have come to believe that she is counting on me to get it right? Visions? Oh, my friends loved that one. 'Oh...yeah...' Yawn, "it's getting late, see ya later." I had the lead in a surreal court case about a woman who had lived and was killed after she took several men to court for rape. Fortunately there was no reinactiment of the rape scene, but still, I began to experience rape trauma to the point my legs ached horribly and then, no kidding...part of the play resorted back to witch burning and blaming the woman for what men feel. Tho there was no reinactment of being burned, for which I am most truly grateful, I began to have the sensation of burning from my feet to my crotch. It was horrible. Day after day. At the same time, I had the intense feeling of the rape victim who I was portraying, being with me 24/7. Her energy was a blessing. But I became so strange that it was suggested I see the school psychiatrist. This was at Smith College, where we were putting on a play writtin by a woman in New York City, that would eventually go to the city. For me, it was a wonderful opportunity, but not wonderful enough to qualify for agony. The psychiatrist said, "Yes you are experiencing rape trauma, and the play is inspiring that (should I get paid so much for being so insightful) and he agreed with me that my past traumas were coming thru (I didn't tell him about the burning sensation which I'd never had) But anyway, it came down to, quit now, and the pain would leave. Do the play and afterwards the pain would leave. Something inside me became resolute. I was there for a reason, playing that part for a reason, and this woman's story needed to be told thru me. I also believed that the pain might go away if I quit, but how I felt about myself would haunt me. So I stayed with it. The first night I got up in front of a packed house, and faced the prosecutor who is blaming me for causing men to feel lust and thus was to blame for what they did, I said NO. And did I feel powerful. I became clear that many of the people in that room came to this play for healing, as was the soul of the woman who was killed needed to be heard. And each night I said NO, the pain became less and less til it was gone. Phew.
sorry I went on and on, but that is the tip of the iceburg of my experiences with muses. They never make sense, they never critique our work, but what a pain in the ....Literally. Sorry, I shoulda saved this for my own site. I got carried away. Your fault Ed. You have encouraged me and helped me and the floodgates are open.
Don't be so hard on Rossetti and company.