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February 13, 2008

Timely Advice from Walt Whitman

Synchronicities are nice little cosmic boons that seem to happen all the time. For instance, I happen to be reading Silas Marner, which I haven't looked at in 30 years. Coincidentally, the movie I unwittingly chose to watch, after I put the book down last night, was “A Simple Twist of Fate.” As soon as Steve Martin pulled out that drawer to reveal his hidden hoard of gold I thought, “Aha! This may be a reinvention of Silas Marner.” And so it was.

In the same way, it’s a kick to chance upon some literary passage that supports one's dilemma-du-jour. This morning, for example, I’d been editing some freshman essays, all of which were thickly problematical. Good expository writing is clear, concise, and well-structured. These papers lacked all three qualities, but had mounds of malapropisms, rafts of redundancy, and oodles of gratuitous detail (the color of leather needn’t be reported as brown, unless it isn’t brown).

I needed a break, and went to our new Barnes & Noble, which serves the neighborhood not only as bookseller, but also study hall, day care center, and caffeine refueling station. I aimed for the latter plus a revitalizing browse.

I randomly selected a volume of Whitman’s prose to look at and sat down right under Walt’s portrait up at the ceiling (next to Melville's). Out the panoramic window, the hard rain was melting the snow, which, in small flattened humps, lined the bone-colored curb like molars on a lupine jaw. Through the shaggy pelting rain, the lit yellow windows of the school across the street shone like the black-slitted eyes of a wolf.

I thought of the writing difficulties of so many college students. That last-straw essay, a personal narrative, had been riddled with redundancies, clichés and hifalutinisms so dense, there was no chink for me to enter, no space for me to share in the matter. I’d advised the student to allow his readers to participate. And to resist over-explaining the obvious. And to desist from gratuitous editorializing. And to stop appending “unfortunately” to every catastrophe and event of unambiguous misfortune, as in this inspired bit: “Unfortunately, after the volcanic eruption, there were no survivors, and everyone in the city died.”

I opened the borrowed Whitman sampler. My eye fell on an entry from Specimen Days -- advice to a young writer. Walt explains that the business of a poem (or personal essay, I thought) is to put the reader “in rapport” so that his “brain, heart, evolution, must not only understand the matter, but largely support it.”

That’s what I had meant to say, but of course Walt said it better. I do take credit, thanking the fates and Barnes & Noble too, for finding it just then.

Posted by Jane on February 13, 2008 9:17 PM

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