In regions of Mezoamerica, chocolate drinks date back as far as 600 BC. When Cortez returned to Spain from Central and South America in the late 16th Century, he brought chocolate back as plunder. It soon made its way to London where it was considered a sophisticated and powerful new food. Despite crossing cultures and centuries, chocolate’s association with wealth and influence alongside its euphoriant effects on the body was not lost. 

Henry Stubbe, Physician to the Governor of Jamaica and King Charles II, was a prominent chocolate specialist of the mid-1600s and promoted its efficacy as an aphrodisiac, claiming that ‘Chocolata […] becomes provocative to lust’ in his book The Indian Nectar (1662). In 1791, the British writer and critic Isaac D’Israeli attested to the fact the ‘immoderate use of chocolate in the seventeenth century was considered as so violent an inflamer of the passions, that Joan. Fran. Rauch published a treatise against it, and enforced the necessity of forbidding the monks to drink it.’ (from The Curiosities of Literature Vol. 3). These characterizations only heightened its status as a gateway to debauchery. And while these initial claims sound like the over-reactions of a prude and stern Christian, after 400 years of democratization and popular consumption, the temptations and desires we attach to chocolate endure.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens' relies on the wealth, power, and immorality associated with chocolate to offer a satirical view of lives of the French aristocracy. 

"Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning's chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook. [...] One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens."

In more contemporary works, we see the stuffiness further removed from chocolate. But even as a common snack, one can find passing delight in a piece of chocolate. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom hurriedly ‘cleaves the crowd and lurches towards the TRAMSIDING on the farther side under the railway bridge bloom appears, flushed, panting, ramming bread and chocolate into A sidepocket.’

The image Joyce gives us, of bread and chocolate in any man's pocket carries a larger metaphor for this new imperial and industrial world, where bread from the local bakery and a piece of chocolate from Central America exist equally, ordinarily, thoughtlessly.

In The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac channels some basic desires and grandiose life questions into his character’s pang of hunger for a cheap run-of-the-mill Hershey chocolate bar.

"A nice big Hershey bar or even a little one. For some reason or other, a Hershey bar would save my soul right now.”
“There’s your Buddhism, a Hershey bar. How about moonlight in an orange grove and a vanilla ice-cream cone?”
“Too cold. What I need, want, pray for, yearn for, dying for, right now, is a Hershey bar…with nuts.” I kept repeating and repeating about my good old Hershey bar.’

There’s nothing exquisite about this gesture. He rejects the idyllic moonlight in an orange grove, for chocolate from a factory. The dialogue here reveals a simplicity of chocolate. And perhaps it is all spoken a bit tongue-in-cheek. But chocolate, in Kerouac’s post-war consumer culture cannot avoid absorbing these values just as well.

Matthew Zapruder’s poem ‘The Prelude’ which pays direct homage to Wordworth’s poem of the same name, plays with this problem of the modernity, specifically the constant encroachment of industrialized material on the natural world. In sharp contrast to Wordsworth, who drew inspiration from his natural environments to embark on a personal philosophical journey, Zapruder is left to ruminate comically over a diet coke, a disappointing village, and can reach as far as ‘the idea of chocolate’ in the romance of his surroundings.

Oh this Diet Coke is really good,
though come to think of it it tastes
like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,
or an acquaintance of chocolate
speaking fondly of certain times
it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,
or nothing remembering a field
in which it once ate the most wondrous
sandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheese
yet still wished for a piece of chocolate
before the lone walk back through
the corn then the darkening forest
to the disappointing village and its super
creepy bed and breakfast.

-from 'The Prelude' by Matthew Zapruder

The desire, richness, sweetness, bittterness, delight in chocolate in all its forms (except of course, 'white chocolate' which is a SHAM) remains absurdly gratifying. 'Take this cup full of darkness' writes Zapruder 'and stay as long as you want and maybe a little longer.'

Happy Reading. Happy Writing.

Take Care,
Andrew
Write Night Host,  Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's

Regardless of the results, there will be change. I am thinking about nocturnes, aubades, and the wild discontented energy of grief in George Saunder’s 2017 experimental novel Lincoln in the Bardo.  

No doubt you are feeling a certain pull?... An urge? To go? Somewhere? More comfortable? 
– the ghosts ask Willie in Lincoln in the Bardo

The Bardo, in Tibetan schools of Buddhism, is a transitional space between death and the next rebirth. Saunders' novel takes place over a single night and begins with the death of Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son, Willie, in the backdrop of the Civil War. True to historical accounts, in his grief, Lincoln visited his son’s crypt for several nights and often held his son’s body.  In the novel, this unusual act sets off a frenzy in the Bardo because the touching is seen as rare and special. Saunders writes about our tethers to reality. It is about someone who dies traumatically and does not realize it. It is about a person who leaves life with something unresolved and will continue to worry about it.  It is about a soul that keeps trying to build back its identity. In this state, young Willie Lincoln is guided through these struggles by a trio of narrators and some hundred other voices of the dead in a comic, grotesque, agonizing and quieting exploration of being and grieving. It ends with an acceptance and a way to proceed into the afterworld.

Where are you now,
when I need you most?
It’s late. I’m old.
Come soon, you feral cats
among the dahlias.
-from Nocturne by W.S. Di Piero

Lincoln in the Bardo is a nocturnal novel and interrogates our night-mind. The time, as poet Ed Hirsch describes it, when the mind is loosened for reverie and illumination. John Donne is credited as the first to employ nocturnes as a term in English language poetry. His poem “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” written in 1633, is set at midnight on the shortest day of the year. It is a rumination on “absence, darkness, death: things that are not” and gives the witching hour both voice and purpose: “Study me then, you who shall lovers be/At the next world, that is, at the next spring;/For I am every dead thing,/In whom Love wrought new alchemy.”

Tonight, something bows
that should not bend. Something stiffens that should   
slide. Something, loose and not right,   
rakes or forges itself all night.
- from Nocturne by Li-Young Lee

Happy Reading. Happy Writing.

Take Care,
Andrew
Write Night Host,  Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's

In a recent interview, Smith describes John Keats’ ode To Autumn as a stepping off point for inspirations of the first book in the quartet and speaks to the radical statement Keats makes. She writes: “[I]t basically changed everything in poetry. I mean, it came from a different place, from a different class in English. And it came with a different form, a lyrical form which allowed poetry to do something else. It was very misunderstood in its time. But we know it now as a great great poem. And there was Keats, died so young…” It is a great poem in part because it rises out of a sense of change and upheaval and Keats’ death soon after multiplies the sense of brevity that the poem conveys. Seasonal changes are convenient markers of this brevity, but Autumn has always carried this elegiac, somber tone. Rereading it now, I realize To Autumn pushes back against this assumption.

I am not going to get into how the poem works, because there are so many strong readings on it. For one, Helen Vendler’s take in The Odes of John Keats is where I wish I had started my thinking on the poem. But I am drawn again to the way Keats does not shy from the paradox of the natural world. He does not extract that simple familiar beauty of autumn as a sign of death. The poem takes stock of nature’s transitions and cycles and with this eye on naturalism Keats connects us intimately to a sensuous moment of replenishment and re-growth as things are simultaneously slowing down. 

It is not hard to recognize this paradox playing out now today. While we have been in various stages of lockdown and regulations are in place to try and control a virus, the natural world has not only continued but thrived in places once uninhabitable. To Autumn is a reminder of this constant trade-off. The poem calls for a kind of humbling of the self to these wins and losses. Keats reminds us of some visceral reclamations of life that take place despite this necessary stoppage and eventual hibernation.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
- from To Autumn, John Keats

In the context of writer’s block, Toni Morrison described the necessity to wait things out when we are stuck in our work. “It’s blocked,” Morrison argues “because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.” Something about that basic acceptance of reality makes her statement feel true to me. In a way, Morrison asks us to face our fragility and our own contingency to life. Even when it feels uncomfortable or unproductive, waiting it out is a way for Morrison to keep her writing life in relation to this natural process of producing and waiting.

In his long autobiographical work Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice offers a similar praise for the natural cycle of continuation that life presents. Written in the late 1930s, the long poem mirrors and mediates through the conflict and incoherence of the self but also more broadly the recent upheavals throughout Europe. MacNeice ends one stanza in this section of the poem in praise of ‘the human animal’s endless courage.’ Leading up to this moment he muses briefly on the image of a spider spinning its web as a rebuke of death and a triumph of preservation. MacNeice asks, as if rethinking an impulse to swat the spider web away, "Who am I — or I — to demand oblivion." Autumn Journal is more than an ‘autumnal’ piece of writing, per-say but MacNeice does use this language of continuation and naturalism as dominant lens in the poem.

Shake off sleep like a dog and hurry to desk or engine
  And the fear of life goes out as they clock in
And history is reasserted. 
  Spider, spider, your irony is true; 
Who am I — or I — to demand oblivion?
  I must go out to-morrow as the others do
And build the falling castle; 
  Which has never fallen, thanks 
Not to any formula, red tape or institution, 
  Not to any creeds or banks, 
But to the human animal’s endless courage.
-from Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice

I am starting to notice this celebratory language in a lot of literature that writes about or through Autumn. At the root of autumn is the Latin augere - to increase. When I see the trees stripped bare, the scattered leaves, and grey skies I easily forget this is a season of abundance and vitality. But these works give us comforting and complex reminders that while signs of Autumn are signs of decay, and they are just as well, the natural signs of life.

Happy Reading. Happy Writing.

Take Care,
Andrew
Write Night Host,  Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's

There are deeply held opinions by sticklers and rule-breaks alike, writers who have emboldened and interfered with my own views on punctuation. Just google Kurt Vonnegut and the semi-colon for his distasteful rant on the mark. (Heads up: It does not age well. But neither did he!) His less offensive quip that “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” is often taken literally and in isolation but Vonnegut does reveal legitimate contemporary complaints about the semi-colon.

Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else -- yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks.
- from Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss

As self-identified punctuation stickler Lynn Truss observes in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2009), the semi-colon has fallen out of favor in modern writing because it is a sign of ambivalence; it is old fashioned and middle class; it creates a mystery pause; however, most importantly, the use of the semi-colon in place of a comma, colon or period is just negligible.

Vonnegut seems to agree with these sentiments; but, later in the same essay in which he snidely equates the semi-colon to some kind of artifice of the educated class, it all goes tongue-in-cheek. He writes: “Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face is just a face. And there, I've just used a semicolon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules.”

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
- from For a Coming Extinction by W.S. Merwin

In his introduction to the collection The Second Four Books of Poems, W.S. Merwin talks about his conscious decision to abandon punctuation when he writes, “I had come to feel that it stapled the poems to the page[…] Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in.” While Merwin’s affectation may seem novel and radical, it has ancient historical roots. Scriptio continua, the traditional form of ancient Greek and Latin texts which used no capitalization, spaces between words, and no punctuation was not challenged until Aristophanes, the head librarian at Alexandria in Egypt (3^rd century BCE) began annotating texts with dots to represent simple pauses between units of speech. Shots fired. 

Happy Reading. Happy Writing.

Take Care,
Andrew
Write Night Host,  Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's

When I find unnecessary repetitions in my work, the word is just what’s poking at the surface, the problem area is always deeper. 

The operative word here for me is unnecessary. Because repetition is one of the most efficient ways to make patterns in writing. We are naturally attracted to patterns. They create rhythm and perspective, a guided energy that climbs to a new place (see Dr. Seuss), anaphora (see Charles Dickens and Matthew Baker) and volta (see Wendy Molyneux). They build resonances between seemingly disparate elements and can spin a thought into a wildly different direction. So, when these repetitions present themselves in a singular piece of writing, the experience can be exhilarating (and quite addictive).

And you don’t have to stop. You can think about SCHLOPP. Schlopp. Schlopp. Beautiful Schlopp. Beautiful Schlopp with a cherry on top. 
- From Oh, the THINKS you can Think! by Dr. Seuss

No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. 
- From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

And then you write a tweet about how Donald Trump is making you a loon because you’ve had to deal with him over and over again in your life, and someone from The Atlantic asks you to write a personal essay about it. You don’t write essays, you write fart jokes, but you give it a try. You write it in second person, which is a kind of writing that you are pretty sure people look down on, but screw it, you’re old now, and you’ve got money in the bank and kids and you are too tired to care what anybody thinks about your second-person narrative voice. “Who cares what readers of The Atlanticthink about my second-person narrative voice?” you whisper to your cats, while secretly deeply caring.
– From "The Four Donald Trumps You Meet on Earth" by Wendy Molyneux

One of the most visible strengths across Matthew Baker’s short story collection Why Visit America (August 2020, Bloomsbury) is his use of anaphora. In this scene below from his title story, I love how he captures the perspectives of “some fifty” characters in one single moment through the repetition of the full name + who. The excessive pile-up of names is clever and funny. It carries a forward motion and builds anticipation of ‘the invasion.’ All of this relies on a simple three-sentence set up.

Sam had chosen the timing of the invasion for maximum impact. It was a weekend. Saturday in the summertime. Some fifty of us happened to be downtown, observing the invasion from some fifty different perspectives. Pam Cone, who was leaning against the hitching post over at the saloon, stared at the soldiers while playing a song on the harmonica. Ward Hernandez stepped up to the doors of the saloon with a dishrag, gazing out at the soldiers with a frown, as Bob Tupper and Pete Christie, who had been playing a game of cards at the table next to the windows, turned to look at the soldiers through the dusty glass. Antonio Vega watched the soldiers from where he was pumping gasoline into a sedan, while Becky Coots, who had gone into the gas station to buy a portable phone charger just in case of emergencies, stared at the scene in the street with the cashier on duty, Rick Pinkney. Tim Kelly watched the soldiers from where he was pulling a sack of ice from a commercial freezer, while Cameron Ramirez, who had gone into the general store to hang a flyer about glee club, stared at the scene in the street with the manager on duty, Hannah Petrovich. The Fankhausers, who had just walked out of the bank with some complimentary lollipops and a receipt for a deposit, froze in the door of the bank. The Bergquists, who had just walked out of the pharmacy with a package of disposable razors and some prescription ritalin, froze in the door of the pharmacy. Across the street, the Garzas and the Dylans, who had just left the library together, stood stock-still in the parking lot with tote bags full of books, staring at the soldiers with expressions of uncertainty, confusion, fear, and dread. 
[And so it goes on..]
- From "Why Visit America" by Matthew Baker

This week I will be thinking twice about the different and numerous ways repetition can keep language fresh and inventive, constantly moving, evolving, beginning in one place and ending in another. This week I will be looking at the ways I drill an idea down in a sentence or a stanza and how I manipulate it. In my drafts and revisions, I hope to catch the unnecessary, superfluous, and redundant language that slips through the writing.

Happy Reading. Happy Writing.

Take Care,
Andrew
Write Night Host,  Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's

TK is handy for dealing with multiple choice questions, minor problems, confusing lines, and narrative gaps. The deeper issues need to dwell. 

I do not sleep well so often I lie awake turning over central ideas, phrases, concepts, or images in my head. Being in that semi-awake state creates a headspace where the scales – learning and thinking/plotting and discovering— are constantly outweighing each other and I am subconsciously winnowing out the big problems. Now whether I actually remember the marvellous and difficult revisions I made at 3am is another question all together, but the practice of self-analysis seems key to making progress on any piece of writing. So much of the process seems to be realizing things, as if for the first time.

Lately, I have been thinking about perfectionism, how mining for the perfect language or the perfect image can create a sense of rigor and sincerity to the writing process, but it can sometimes take the oxygen out of the writing itself.

In her stunning collection, “The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life,” Ann Patchett describes with clarity, honesty, and brilliance the writer’s inability to capture the great ideas and images that occupy her mind as she translates them to the page. She captures sense of loss and the peculiar fall from grace that writing exhibits.

This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.

And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing — all the color, the light and movement — is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.
- From "The Getaway Car" by Ann Patchett

The passage itself is a gorgeous performance in descriptive writing but she uses the metaphor of pinning down a butterfly and killing it as a consequence of rendering its beauty to express that familiar, half-realized sense of satisfaction. Creative writing is perhaps something crueler than skilled butterfly taxidermy. The 'book' becomes a dead trace of the idea, the desecration ‘of everything that is beautiful’ about the imagination.

Patchett taps into that feeling of sadness in the face of gross imperfection which reinforces, in a way, my current interest in quieting that perfectionist voice in my head. Patchett reminds me that by putting this great idea into words, I’ve already taken the preciousness out of the work and that is a loss in and of itself, but it is okay. It reminds me that there is workmanship involved. In the end, any text is a product of the imagination, not the imagination itself.

That said, Patchett’s view on the creativity is by no means negative  Essentially, she gives her writing permission to abandon the ideal, to find that creative satisfaction, to work away and just get something on the page – a sentence, an image, or concept, or description.  This week I will be thinking about these small wins and celebrating them.

Happy Reading. Happy Writing.

Take Care,
Andrew
Write Night Host,  Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's