Putting It All Together
Each morning, on my way to work as a medical editor in Washington, D.C., I pass the Hirschhorn Museum of Art and Sculpture Garden on the national Mall. Outside the art museum, I have been struck by a poster advertising a tour of the exhibition by modern artist John Baldessari, which includes a quote from him: “As soon as you put two things together, you have a story.”
What impresses me about the artist’s remark is how apt it is to the art of writing poetry or any piece of writing—that in order to write creatively one has to put elements together to create “a story.” I am of course not talking about writing fiction. Rather, I mean that to compose a poem or a piece of creative prose, the writer has to work to put together the images and ideas to create the piece.
The same poster with the quote from Mr. Baldessari inspired Washington D.C. poet Sandra Beasley to write an unpublished poem, “The Story” which I read on her blog. Her poem reads, in part:
In the story I am the nightingale,
and you
are usually the hotplate; though occasionally
you are the subway token, and I am the Queen
of Norway. . . . Now I am strung on a rosary.
Now you are ripening on a tree. . . .
Here we see how Ms. Beasley has taken seemingly disparate ideas and images and made a poem out of them. Normally such elements would not be strung together to form a logical sequence. By bringing them together and “marrying” them in her poem, Ms. Beasley has created an interesting, thought-provoking piece.
Recently, I wrote a poem in which I was inspired by an op-ed article, “Fooled by the Winds of Reform,” by Iranian-born writer Camelia Entekhabifard I read in the August 24 Washington Post. Ms. Entekhabifard begins her article by describing how her uncle would knock on her family’s Tehran door in the morning to bring them mushrooms from the mountain of Shemiran. She likens the sudden appearance of the mushrooms amid the mountain’s stones to the optimism that was felt in Iran with the ascent to power of reform-minded president Mohammad Khatami.
His rise led many progressive people in the nation to begin to challenge the strict Islamic dress codes and the execution of women by stoning. I thought: “What a wonderful but awful parallel that was: mushrooms and stones!” This led me to write the final tercet for my poem, “Mushrooms from Shemiran”:
Who will knock on my door at dawn
— my uncle bringing me succulent
mushrooms.
Or angry men with stones.
If I might do so, let me cite one last example of “putting it all together” that occurred to me in my creative writing. I have just received a copy of the book Longing, an anthology of writing about my native city of Liverpool. The book is part of a series called “Mersey Minis” that has included impressions of the city by writers as various as Henry James, Beryl Bainbridge, Paul McCartney, Herman Melville, and Yoko Ono Lennon, collected in honor of the city’s 800th birthday.
I was delighted that my short essay, “Beatles St. Nicholas Sonata,” submitted to a competition of new writing to appear in Longing, was accepted for publication in the volume. The impression mentions a private tour of Beatles sites in Liverpool that my wife Donna and I made this past May conducted by my friend, Gerard (aka Ged) Fleming. I had met Mr. Fleming on line through a Liverpool web forum Yo! Liverpool where I am a moderator.
Donna was tired after the tour and was unable accompany us for a planned evening get-together with some other people from the Yo! forum. We were to meet them at the Alma de Santiago pub in Penny Lane (yes, the same street that is mentioned in the Beatles song of the same name). We thus drove Donna back to the Crowne Plaza Hotel by the Pier Head. The hotel is just by the famed Liver Building, with its two fabulous green copper “Liver Birds” on twin cupolas and across the road from St. Nicholas’s Church, the oldest location in Liverpool in continuous use, dating back to around 1230.
After we dropped off Donna, Ged wanted me to swing by his house in the Scotland Road neighborhood of the city, to freshen up and change his shirt. Ged offered me the opportunity to have a quick wash. He also suggested that I change out of my polo shirt and borrow one of his crisp, fresh Ralph Lauren shirts. We then set off to meet our friends from Yo! The crux of my little impression of the day concerns our driving back into the city center after the evening meeting. I offer it as yet another example of “putting together” a series of disparate ideas to create a new piece of writing. Enjoy!
Beatles St. Nicholas Sonata
To Gerard Fleming
It was a cool May stormy-weather Mersey night following the tour I’d taken with Ged: his first guided tour of Beatles sites: John Lennon’s secret wooded Woolton footpath, the sunlit field where the Quarrymen played fifty summers ago.
I brake the hired silver VW Passat on the road near Ged’s Scottie Road housing estate, strip off the beige Ralph Lauren shirt he’d lent me. Aye! I am an exhibitionist on a midnight Scouse road. “Ta ra, Ged mate, you done good, lad.”
I park outside my Pier Head hotel. A sudden screeching of seagulls peals out of the breezy night above St. Nicholas’s church steeple: a cloud of white wings against black sky above the illuminated lantern of sculpted Gothic arches, gold sailing ship shining at the pinnacle.
by Christopher T. George