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Back home, Cincinnati, which is my home now, for now, any entry I have thought to make here has been one I thought better of in the spirit of how I determined last February moving here that I would enjoy my time here. My time here being my life, after all. I mean that I had consciously and conscientiously avoided sharing here all the ways that Cincinnati “doesn’t meet my needs” and have wanted to stick to that. I mean, this is my life.
(I will not say Hey, what about John From Cincinnati? Cincinnati? When there’s a billion places in the world to say the “freak” hails from… That would be wrong, that would be cheap, and easy.)

Re-entry after a vacation, a trip away that one takes because she wants to, is always a challenge; sure, I know that. And few places compare to Big Sur.

“It is here in Big Sur that I first learned how to say Amen.” ~ Henry Miller

But the contrast between there — and Monterey and San Mateo counties and San Francisco — and Cincinnati is especially acute. Difficult.

It is very toxic and polluted and dirty here; the stats for the toxicity (air pollution, cancer, etc etc etc) are something you –I — don’t want to think about coming back from many places, let alone Big Sur.

And there’s nothing profound I could add to the more original voices than mine to describe that coast; majesty, magic — these words are cliches, corn; even to say that there I felt “home” is to echo what’s been said before. Yet, that’s what it was, is, for me.

I am sorry that in 2001 when last I was there that I didn’t then listen to myself and immediately move there. So there has been a lot of heartache and hardness to coming back, ninety-degree weather — you have to have AC here! which is disgusting! (We chose to move from the southern coast (Charleston) because we were so sick of living the AC life…) — into the dirty skies, everyone driving, driving everywhere.

Not long after I moved here, I met another woman who’d moved here within this past year who agreed with me, you just can’t spend your days, your dailyness, your life grim and bitter. She said: I met a few people when I first got here who were massively negative about Cincinnati, I don’t keep in touch with them since I think it’s crazy to hold on to a negative attitude. I think, unless you’re in jail or prison, if you hate where you live enough to get upset about it, move or change your attitude. Complain, laugh and find some joy seems to work better for me.
I return to this like a touchstone now. I’ve gone out to the front lawn and cut a big bouquet of lilies for the vase on the sideboard. Bought tickets for a show tomorrow night. See how we try.

I try not to despair, of making friends here; thinking about what Amy Hempel said makes this need feel so much sharper and pressing:

Q: Any advice to aspiring writers?

A: My own non-flippant advice is get better friends. I mean that I have often used things my wonderfully witty friends - people such as Mark Richard and Jim Shepard and Ben Taylor - have said in passing.

I mean, technology makes it so that I have and have kept good friends, but everywhere else but here, and really, I do not so much need their good words, as stated in the previous bit, as I need their presence. That makes all the difference. And seems to be an essential ingredient of the what brews up inspiration, if one is to imagine a recipe for what might make it possible. C.K. Williams has an essay in American Poetry Review that is excellent on many points including inspiration, a sort of a Writer’s Bill of Rights, a discussion about what kind of mind writers/poets need. (e.g. “Along with the right not to concentrate goes a corollary: the right to vacillate, to wobble, to shillyshally, be indecisive in one’s labors, and still not suffer from a sense of being irresponsible, indolent, or weak.”) Read what he says about the writer’s relationship to the moral. This is the part on inspiration:

Inspiration is essential to the production of significant art, but considered practically, as a method, a procedure, it’s all but impossible to characterize rationally. Inspiration in practice is either something that’s happened at some time in the past, even the past of a few moments ago, or that hasn’t yet happened: while it is happening, it’s not there, or you can’t be aware of it being there because the whole consciousness is taken by its activity—in a certain way you aren’t there yourself, there’s just the poem being enacted by you, and, even more mysteriously, seemingly for you. The hardest thing is that inspiration is neither something that can be willed, nor something you can wait around for. If you try too hard to bring it about, to force it, but don’t succeed, which is what usually happens, the outcome can be impatience and frustration, states of mind not conducive to creation. If on the other hand you sit back and wait too long, it may well never come to pass at all. This is what’s troubling, really painful about the whole business: you need inspiration, it’s absolutely essential, but you can’t schedule it, or count on it, or be sure it’s ever going to happen again, or happen at all. At the end, we can only prepare a space, a field, for inspiration to occur. This of course is contrary to the way we’re taught to believe we should accomplish anything: by deciding to do it, then figuring out how, then making it happen. Implied in this view is the notion that learning happens systematically, in increments; that we grope towards something, find it untenable, try something else which works, and along the way draw conclusions, so that the next time we can skip the inessential rest. We learn, in other words, that the proper way to accomplish anything, especially art, is by developing principles of procedure, which we call “craft,” and working from them rather than from trial and error.

In my experience, though, this isn’t an accurate description of the whole unlikely process: anything like a principle I might learn about composition immediately becomes something I no longer have to think about, so I always feel as though I’m working from trial and error, always doing what I don’t know how to do, with a sense of blundering towards where I’m trying to go, and I’m always a little surprised if or when I do get there. For a long time I suffered, and still can occasionally, from the feeling that I must be doing this all wrong, because if I have to explain, even to myself, what I’ve done when I’ve written something I find satisfactory, I often can’t.

Lately I’ve realized that one of the rewards of the labor of poetry is reading something I’ve written that pleases me and thinking, “How did that happen?” Young poets, or the young poet I was, tend not to know this, and can become discouraged waiting for it to happen again. Older poets, by whom again I mean me, can tend when facing the page to forget it, too, though if we’re lucky we learn that however inspiration happens, all prosaic signs of the self to the contrary, it may indeed take us once more, so we slog on. That “may” is the necessary faith of art, and our most essential right.

There is another kind of inspiration, inspiration in another sense that’s important. As in sort of more pragmatic, concrete signposts marking the way that matter. I’m thinking of Pegi Young (wife to Neil) putting out her debut album.

Most singer-songwriters don’t wait a lifetime to release their debut album. But for Pegi Young, whose self-titled collection of country-rockin’ heartache tunes comes out June 12th on Warner Bros. Records, life kept getting in the way. “I’ve been writing songs and poetry since high school,” she says. “It was something I’d always wanted to do but could never make time for. There were other things that took priority.”

She and her band, which did/does include Neil, performed at the Henry Miller Memorial Library but before we were there, unfortunately. (The website has photos of Pegi’s performance.)

I admire her spirit for creating this album, what would take all kinds of special qualities (bravery) to put herself out there, and with songs that express, for example, It’s only that I’m feeling, used up/It’s only that I’m feeling used.

A ritual, or a habit, C and I have had for some time now is keeping a, I’ll call it, dialogue notebook, what evolved out of some years ago our leaving notes for one another as we went about our daily lives of work and all those things that kept us going in and out of the house at different times. Enough episodes of wishing for a past note that said this or that — exactly how was that put? — and enough collecting of the various notes that one or the other of us couldn’t, or didn’t, part with, and well, the idea to keep a notebook around for writing back and forth in was a no-brainer. Add to that the fact that as a teacher (me), as writers, we were well-gifted with more blank journals than we knew what to do with. On a more practical note, these notebooks have been quite helpful in locating dates and general time periods past; that is, for example, how I knew that it was six years when last we were in San Francisco, and that that was when we went to a Cowboy Junkies show in Mountain View.

It so happens that the blank page book we have been most recently using is entitled “A Traveler’s Journey: A personal notebook for travels real and imaginery” and contains inside, on its pages, quotes from writers on travel — as well as little watermarked drawings we like to personalize at times of objects like binoculars, cacti and cars toting fully loaded luggage racks, planes in the clouds, glasses resting upside down (the weary traveler, unseen, wiping her eyes not so much out of exhaustion but out of disbelief of the wonderment of all that’s crossed her vision that day…), though the drawings may be beside the point; you decide. We rarely remark on these quotes, focused as we are on our own things to say and the medium just happening to be a handy way of not wasting and adding to the landfill this surely what must be about ten years old by now notebook. (Imagine the hyphens.) It so happens, however, that in a note just before we left, I referenced the quote on the page. Of course it wasn’t, as it never is, a case of just-so-happen-ing. (You don’t have to imagine the hyphens that time.) But to stay focused, here’s the quote: “Keep things on your trip in perspective, and you’ll be amazed at the perspective you’ll gain on things back home while you’re away…One’s little world is put into perspective by the bigger world out there.” — Gail Rubin Bereny, American Writer.

Look, this is more a pedestrian sort of remark, really, not one, by far, that anyone would pull out of a book of quotes on traveling for its profundity. In some ways, I was just being lazy with my note-writing that day. I’d underlined “Keep things on your trip in perspective” and then riffed off on that. I was, for starters, referring to how disappointed we were with that passport thing, to not be making our trip to Wales and Paris and London — again! But I was always referring to how I knew, just knew, that though I think we are doing a great job of making our home here, making the best of it, and, in fact, trying to go beyond “making the best of” — to be open to what might be possible — I just knew that it was going to be all that harder to land back here when our weeks out there were over.

After we got back home, C’s first entry before going back to work began: “So what perspective did I gain… mostly that we need to change our home’s location…”

In the past, when I haven’t been happy about what was available, I made it available. When I moved to Charleston (which is a place I had chosen, incidentally, for what I thought was its beauty, being coastal — I once had the strict notion that living where there is beauty meant either by the sea or in the mountains, which I haven’t entirely dismissed) I was supremely disappointed by the lack of artistic, particularly, literary life. I mean life: Living, with a capital L. So even then, though I was stretched a million ways in all directions — getting my MFA, teaching, working to name the obvious consuming activities — I was still of the mindset that I ought not to complain if I didn’t want to actively work to change the situation. We started with having workshops in our home, mainly students from the college adult writing courses I, and then C, later also taught. When I gave readings (then there were still a few independent book stores, Cady & Daughter comes to mind) there was usually another working writer or two to add. I created a writers’ residency program at the Family Y, with readings and workshops, and a city-wide Charleston Celebrates National Poetry Month; and as can be predicted, my own work and writing got pushed into the background more and more and more. I learned a lot from those sort of activist activities, how possible it is to lose one’s own momentum, and how it is not always a reciprocal relationship between doing and receiving.

In the best of circumstances, it is hard to keep at preparing the space, the field, for inspiration to occur, as C.K. Williams put it, though, I know he is talking about the more internal aspects. I am just saying that it is all the harder when the middle ground, the external circumstances of the space, the field, require so much, as it does, for me here, now, here.

But now, it is happy hour here in this house, wine and cheese, please.

The photo serves to demonstrate that no, I have not had my hair cut while away as I have been prone to doing, as N pointed out to me recently via her email question asking that, and reminding me that it was just about a year ago that I had all of my hair shorn down to a quarter-inch after last year’s early summer trip; though a much more interesting experience, in my opinion, now that you have brought it to my attention, dear N, was my haircut — waist-length to above the shoulders — in Montreal the year before by the woman who spoke only French, while I speak, really, no French. (And consider this an O.P.A., dear N.)