MEATBAG DAN
Or "What's a Speaker, Anyway?": a LitCafeđ„ production
A year or two ago, or who knows when, since time is not one of my skills, my friend Dan Rosenberg1 and I started meeting at Ithacaâs premiere mediocre bakery to talk loudly, over the 90s rock ballads, about our poems.
Anyone listening would have thought we were escaped convicts, hallucinating landscapers, and/or aliens trying to breed small earth animals:
âI donât think you can get away with thisââ
âThe breakage here leaves me needing more tree-nessââ
âItâs what you want from the squirrel, but itâs not what you needâââŠ
The truth was that for two forty-somethings who had attended the same Big Deal institution for their graduate studies in poetry before the Obama era, I donât think either of us particularly felt much like a Big Deal, nor had either of us really sat down, just with poems and another person who wasnât a student, since well before we became fossils. For me, it had been at least a decade. By the halfway point of our first meet-up, we were both kind of looking at each other a little slack-jawed and jewel-eyed, like âwhy in the name of all that is holy did we not do this sooner? Have we really sat like cat turds in our box-homes, a few miles apart in the same goddamn town, all these unfathomable years?â
We didnât stay googly for long. There was the hard work of wolfing breakfast sandwiches, downing seltzer, surviving the pop soundtrack that blared out of a dedicated speaker somehow placed right over every single table at the bakery, and the hard and sometimes head-splittingly nuanced work of coaxing poems into their fullest forms. Some days we could âget it doneâ (âlooking atâ one or more poems from each of us to completion) in a mere 90 minutes; other days we looked up and it was already almost an emergency how late we were to the next thing, each of our families and jobs all but shouting for us to get home immediately before entropy won for good.
I canât overstate the importance of adult connection, specifically over/around/with/through art, for anyoneâ but especially for a couple of exhausted poet-parent-teachers. It felt like a little holiday each week, for a couple hours, for starters, and then there was the notable acceleration and thoroughness of my revisions. Instead of thinking âlakjdfhasjkdfa;knahfkasdj;kâ when I looked at my shit-stain drafts, I started thinking âHey, I get to go through Danâs comments and respond.â
I actually looked forward to attending to the poems in the ways he brought up. Revision didnât have to be a life sentence of duct-taping and burning sage over my own failing. It was a fun, eager conversation. I was looking over my shoulder for the bus that was almost certainly going to blow through the cafe seating section and mow us down, we who had hacked the system and found our way to a bit of joy.
In a matter of months I had a full manuscript thoroughly revised, thanks to the full trust I rapidly developed in Danâs discernment, his questions, his deft and generous naming of what I was doing. He was helping me see and comprehend myself even as I was creating her.
*
One of the conventions we tend to use in creative writing classes, as teachers, is the concept of âthe speaker.â We try not to assume an equivalency between the person who is writing the poem and the speaker we imagine saying or thinking the words on the page. This distinction is essential to the freedom of both the poet and the poem. If the poet sits down with the expectation that he will represent exactly who he is, no more and no less, he will end in an exhausted, confused, embarrassed heap within minutes, and go make pasta instead. (Which I donât not recommend, but still.) And likewise, if the poem Iâm writing is bound to whatâs on my CV, then weâre all in for a real yawner, one that works pitifully hard in a fluorescent ball cap to squeeze a little extra cred out of the bird walks I lead now and then.
See how a space must open up? There must be room to discover what might yet be, or could be, underneath, or already is, if we know how to let it. If the work of the poem is to transcribe what is already known and verifiable, then the work of the poem is foreclosed, and shall have to live in the Hallmark card section at Kinney Drugs. Iâd rather have the work of my poem shacking up with the groundhog under my shed. At least there, in the land of what I can only imagine is imminent sinkhole, there is yet mysteryâ earth, and what food?, and fur, and surely sharp rocks, and perhaps the scent of last yearâs pups, or a dream of a tomatoâamong her unseen tunnels.
So no, when Dan writes a poem, and I will share one of his with you shortly, I donât assume the âpersonâ âspeakingâ on the page is the same Meatbag Dan before me with his sandwich, his observable personhood tucked inside a driving cap and a somehow simultaneously ironic and sincere tee shirt. I donât assume the voice on the page is the exact same Dan whoâs just done three hours of grading and has to get his kid to the dentist in a hot sec. These two Dans are sort of technically housed in the same approximate area of concentration of Dan-molecules, if you go in for stuff like matter. Theyâre linked. They inform each other. But theyâre still distinct: for a creative interaction to take place between them, they have to be two.
I unhook the Meatbag version of my friend from the words I see on the page he gives me not because the words are not his, but because the words belong to a distinct version of his self which I wish to protect from the tyranny of expectation and foreknowledge. The Speaker Dan is a self that must do the work of both building and beholding itself inside the uttering of each word.
Some of this Speaker-self will eventually filter into the identity of the daily Meatbag Dan, who is, even as its conduit and helpmate, subject to its ephemeral process of becoming. Other parts of this Speaker-self are, and must be, reserved for the cosmos; Meatbag Dan and the rest of us can enter Cosmos Danâs full capacity only on the page, when weâre still, willing, and ready to allow our own responsiveness.
Regardless of which of its tributaries weâre talking about, the Speaker-self, the one who shows up on the page, cannot, and should not have to, tolerate the irritable demands of fact and reason. The Speaker must be free to be anything at allâ so long as it is true.