Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997 19:44:11 EDT From: Words from the Monastery Subject: EXERCISE: Poetry coyote and the wild A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. -- Stanley Kunitz When I lived in Turlock, California, I felt trapped. Every inch of land for miles around was either paved or planted and fertilized and sprayed. Only when it rained did the air get the fresh, green smell I needed. I remember sitting in our backyard on Yosemite Street with my two toddlers while my mind flew over rows of back fences trying to find even one native grove of trees. I wanted to leave Turlock partly because I sensed there was no wildness--not a river or stream or lake or even a large park for miles and miles. I was totally caught up in the role of good wife and mother. It's stifling to be good all the time and it's ingrained in most of us. My mother used to end many of our conversations innocently with the words Be Good. Always being loving, gentle and good is deadly. I recently heard myself tell a friend, Don't be too good! I wish my mother could say that to me. In a way she has. She's always told me all the regrets is what she hasn't done, nothing she has done. And it's not my mother's fault that nothing in our middle-class Chicago Jewish background gave us a sense of the Native American trickster/antihero/animal delinquent coyote who, like poetry, is both naughty and heroic at the same time. To the American Indians, coyote is tricky, magical and often a hero in spite of himself. In one myth, coyote's tail is struck by lightning and as he runs frantically from place to place trying to put the fire out, he brings fire to the native tribes of the world. In a Navajo story, coyote scatters the stars as the elders arrange them on a blanket, fostering the new life that emerges from chaos and disorder. We all have a troublemaker inside ourselves. Whenever I'm watering flowers out front with the hose I want to spray anyone within range. I almost zapped my neighbor Thurza recently when she emerged from her yard to say hi, dressed for the office. I've learned I can use this impulse in poems. Stanley Kunitz writes, "Perhaps there's too much order in this world"; and like coyote, "the poets love to haul disorder in." Coyote wants us to be free, to run and howl and play and lope and roll and eat our fill, at least sometimes. There are many wild things to do that don't hurt anyone. Coyote often joins my friend Tanha and me when we're together. Once we draped scraggly grapevines over our heads and shoulders and loped through the park, oblivious to people's stares. Coyote also likes to tell dirty jokes, sneak up on people, shock them and disappear, laughing. We can live quiet, apparently sedate lives if we express our wildness by risking and leaping in our writing. Wallace Stevens lived an outwardly conventional businessperson's life and wrote poems filled with coyote spirit. "Rabbit light" and "fur light" appear in "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts." In his poem "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" Stevens met Berserk in the moonlight and asked him why he was "sun-colored, / As if awake / In the midst of sleep?" This quiet wildness in some of Steven's poems is like coyote who's there to shock us awake in the midst of our sleep. It's often the coyote in us gives our poems life. The strangest, most far-out renegade part of ourselves can be expressed in a poem while we sit quietly in our kitchen or bedroom. This can save our lives. There's nothing appropriate about coyote, nothing dutiful or responsible, and that's why he/she is so important in poems. If we're appropriate or dutiful in our poems, they'll have no spark. Our poems will become predictable, along with our lives, our dreams, our hearts. The coyote in us doesn't give a hoot what anybody thinks. In an early journal I copied down what Andre Malraux said about the artist Goya, "He discovered his genius the day he dared to give up pleasing others." For me that day hasn't quite come. But I'm inviting coyote into my life more often lately and we'll see what happens. In her poem "Back to Arcadia," my friend Casssandra Sagan Bell tells how, when she was a child, she blew dandelion seeds all over her neighbors' perfect suburban lawns. "I loved those weeds / with their proud yellow smiles," she writes, closing her poem, And me? I'm still spreading wild things with every breath. Practice Let your writing be inspired by the coyote in you. Find the nearest place you can with wildness in it. Drive if you must, even for an hour. Walk into a thicket or a hollow or a stretch of beach. Let yourself feel part of that wildness. Write words down. No sentences, no poems, just words. Let yourself make sounds as you write. Laugh at yourself. If you can, go out in the rain. Drink rainwater from leaves. Let rainwater fall into your face. Get your hair wet. Write about it. Let your writing leap. Take risks. In his poem "Father and Son," Kunitz wrote about "the night nailed like an orange to my brow." Coyote made him do it. The moon belongs with both poetry and coyote. Like coyote, the moon comes out at night and speaks to the wildness in us. Begin to notice and describe the moon--moonrise and moonset. Is the moon a soft ball or a sharp sliver? Is it a cat's eye between cloud lids? Let your writing surprise you. Begin your poem with one of these openers, Coyote and I or I am Coyote Coyote made me Include the moon. And, sure. Go outside and howl. From: poem crazy freeing your life with words Susan G. Wooldridge Clarkson Potter, ISBN 0-517-70370-X