Dear Reader,
I've noticed that almost all of these entries are a little heavy on stories from the timespan of around 2006-2008. I had the idea this morning of diving instead into an even stranger period of my life in my master's days of 2009-2011, to tell you about my teacher, Robert Carnevale.
At the end of 2008 I had had a mental breakdown and needed to get the heck out of New York City, which was conducive to it. I looked into MFA programs in Brooklyn, but decided to go to Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, not for the least attractive reason of not needing to take more standardized tests to have an application possibly accepted there, so as to try for an M.Litt, which is sort of a hybrid of a Master's in Arts and a Master's in Fine Arts, since our university systems make these distinctions.
I pretty soon met some folks who would have outsized effects on my future: Robert Ready (Dean of the Graduate School who just in 2021 released a novel), Cassandra Laity, Frank Occhiogrosso, and Robert Carnevale, who taught the creative writing workshops.
But first I did something kind of odd which was audition for a play being produced via the theater department. It was called Dreams of Peach Blossoms, a play about Tibet's past by a Tibetan playwright. The audition called for any sort of monologue. I never told you this, but a lot of my time spent in lecture halls during my undergrad career, especially in the halls with like 100-150 students and one far away professor, was spent in copying down by hand and eventually writing down from memory, "The Burial of the Dead" from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, to the point that I can, to this day, recite it by rote.
So I stood up in front of the producers and director at Drew, knowing nothing about any Peach Blossoms, and started yapping Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch, and Madame Sosostris, and all that. Then they said, "Can you add some volume?", so I started shouting "APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH" and they raised their hands and said "Good."
I got the part, which unbeknownst to me until later was that of the "Poet". It was fun, and I made some friends, and more importantly, while learning to speak up a bit, I felt like the universe was perhaps not so indirectly trying to communicate that I should take the prospect of the creative writing life seriously.
So, I enrolled in some workshops with Robert Carnevale. I had a great deal of influential encounters with his thoughts and teaching in his classroom. It was important for me and interesting to witness that the poems that did best in the workshop were ones that sparked the most conversation among my classmates (Carnevale practiced the be-quiet-while-we-talk-about-your-work-in-front-of-you method). I remember watching and trying to understand what all the fuss was about a poem I wrote called "Film" which I thought was just a clever way of describing a couple splitting up, framed in the idea that they were acting-actors-or-were-they on a film-set-or-was-it-their-apartment and so forth. Robert handed me his notes at the end and said, "Thanks, that was a chewy one." I didn't know at the time it was the greatest compliment I've ever gotten.
But I mainly wanted to share the really fascinating incite he made in a workshop session that I never even told Bob about. I wrote a poem that ended being titled "Farming" for his workshop that I'm still fond of. I wrote it using a lot of Google-sculpting a la the Flarf poets, as I was doing with most of my stuff for his workshop then (except for "Film" come to think of it). I had gotten good at Google-sculpting, that is, collaging from found language on the net/in Google searches for strange phrases. But the strange, fascinating thing that happened was this.
In the process of sculpting/arranging the poem, I had thought that the tone and feeling of it was reminding me, not referencing mind you, just vibe-wise reminiscent, of a Bob Dylan song I loved and still love, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" particularly the near-ending lines, "And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice." Again, mind you, there are no words from the song in the poem, which is about trying to grow crops in a deserted, lonely farm (sort of).
But, I brought printed copies of "Farming" to workshop that day, handed them to my classmates and Bob Carnevale, and I sat in my seat and shut my mouth and waited to see if this would be a successful poem or not. Bob read it with my classmates, him and they all mulled it over for maybe ten minutes, and my teacher looked right at me and said, "You know, this kind of reminds me of that Bob Dylan line, what is it, "And I here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice"? And then he just kind of chuckled to himself and went back to his other points while I sat there poker-faced though my mind had just been kind of destroyed.
I'll post the poem, "Farming" here (again this poem is abut 95% found internet-language). I hope if he were to read this he’d accept my apology for being just only 15 years late in telling this story.
Sallying forth with you into the dark cold and the empty desolation through the twilight interstices and all that,
Lee
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