The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft

Library of the Mind

Litt^LY OPrne M/MD My writing is plagiarized, but not from books. I hear speeches, conversations , and single sentences I want, and often in one pass they remain in my mind, to be transcribed at relative leisure. How does this come to me? When I first haunted the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada, I witnessed hours of recitations among the faithful. These were working ranch hands and families from all over the Westwho found pleasure in sharing poems they had memorized, often without knowing who had written what they knew by heart. After hearing an appealing piece, a listener might sayprivately to the reciter, "I want that." This did not mean "Where can I buy the book that poem is in?" It meant "I want that in mymind, in my body,where I can get it." Schooled by this urge, I have committed CurleyFletcher's "The StrawberryRoan" to memory: I was layin' around town, spendin' mytime, I was out of a job,wasn't makin' a dime, When up steps a feller and says, "I suppose You're a bronc rider by the looks of your clothes. . .." I came away from this tradition with a perverse trick. When in the company of the erudite—say, at a college or library program—I sometimes weave into mypresentation a fragment from Shakespeare, and when I lose myway,I appeal to the audience to help me with the next line: If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like . .. like . .. But when I ask for help, no one knows the following words. On one occasion, someone shouted from the back, "Macbeth!" No, not Macbeth . When they can't help me, when they can't stand it, I give them the rest from the opening lines of Twelfth Night: . ..like the sweet sound, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour! Enough, no more: 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. Then I speak mywitness about the custom of the cowboys: Among the faithful, if the reciter hangs up on a line, loses the thread of the poem, typically half a dozen listeners will quietly cue the next few words. This is a kind of literacy rare among my academic kindred. So buckaroos, actors, singers, and a few literary obsessives know how to memorize. What happened to the rest of us? Most of my students have a repertoire of texts from family lore, songs and stories, proverbs, names for place and person, recipes, rules never spoken but universally known within the familiar circle of home. From my own family, I could not help but memorize snatches of informal literature I heard often as a child: When we consider Providence, we must admit it's fair, That some are given brilliant minds, while some have curly hair. IO I THE MUSES AMONG US That from my mother, with whom I share the fate of curly hair. I had, and I believe we allhave in some way,earlypractice in memorizing such things. It's not about an effort of memorization, perhaps, but the benefit of frequent hearing. This along with the standard essential repertoire of playground poetry like "Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me." Such a repertoire seems to be a natural part of being what the English language in the ninth century called a reord berend, a "bearer of speech," that is, a human being. As an adult writer, I find my fascination with memorizing the language events around me to be unusual among my colleagues but essential in my own practice. Someone asked, during a panel at a literary conference, "Do you have a computer yet?" (Obviously, this was years ago, when computers were a novelty. Remember those days?) That word "yet" nettled me: "Do youhave a computer yet?" The implication was that every writer must have a computer, eventually.Among writers on that day's panel, the range of opinion wasinstructive. One argued strongly for a favorite electric typewriter, while another scoffed at that, repeating the old Mickey Spillane idea that you could only be sure your writing was sincere when your vigor popped every o out of the paper by your forceful strike on the platen—only...