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About 18 months ago I was invited to contribute a short story to an “edgy” YA compilation, tentatively titled I See Reality. It would ultimately include twelve short stories by a range of writers. I was interested, but did not exactly have one waiting in my file cabinet. So I said, “Give me a few days and let’s see if anything bubbles to the surface.” After some thought, I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I knew the format in which I wanted to it.
Wallace Stevens wrote a poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” that had always captivated me. I admired its fragmentary nature, the way the text moves from perspective to perspective to create an almost cubist mosaic. Of course my story, “The Mistake,” did not come close to achieving anything of the sort. But that was the starting point, the push. I decided to play around with that idea. The final story included twenty-two brief sections.
What I wanted to say, what I was moved to address: I wanted to write a story that touched upon teenage pregnancy and the important role that Planned Parenthood plays in the lives of so many young women and men. We live in a challenging time when women’s reproductive rights are under almost daily attack. When the very existence of Planned Parenthood is under political and violent assault. This is a health organization that supplies people — often young women from low income groups — with birth control, pap smears, and cancer screening. According to The New England Journal of Medicine: “The contraception services that Planned Parenthood delivers may be the single greatest effort to prevent the unwanted pregnancies that result in abortions.”
Most importantly for this story, Planned Parenthood provides abortions as part of its array of services, a procedure that is legal in the United States of America. Abortion has long been debated, discussed, argued, and decided in the Supreme Court. As divisive as it may be, abortion has been declared a legal right in this country. And it touches young lives in profound ways.
Anyway, yes, I know that I risk offending people. Maybe I should just shut up. But when my thoughts bend this way, when I start to worry what people might think, I remind myself of this quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
I stand with Planned Parenthood.
Here’s the first two brief sections from my story, plus another quick scene, followed by review quotes about the entire collection from the major journals:
THE MISTAKE
By James Preller
1
“What do you think we should we do?” Angela asked.
“I don’t know.” Malcolm shook his head. “What do you want?”
It was, he thought, the right thing to ask. A reasonable question. Her choice. Besides, the truth was, he didn’t want to say it out loud.
So he said the thing he said.
“What do I want?” Angela said, as if shocked, as if hearing the ridiculous words for the first time. She stared at her skinny, dark-haired boyfriend and spat out words like lightning bolts, like thunder. “What’s that got to do with anything, Mal? What I want? How can you even ask me that?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry, too,” she replied stiffly, but Angela’s “sorry” seemed different than his. Malcolm was sorry for the mistake they made. Their carelessness. And in all honesty, his “sorry” in this conversation was also a strategy to silence her, a word that acted like a spigot to turn off the anger. Angela’s “sorry” encompassed the whole wide world that now rested on her slender shoulders. Malcolm understood that she was sorry for all of it, all the world’s weary sorrows, and most especially for the baby that was growing inside her belly.
2
Angela on her cell, punching keys, scrolling, reading, clicking furiously.
At Planned Parenthood, there was a number she could text. She sent a question. Then another. And another.
She was trying to be brave.
Trying so hard.
It wasn’t working out so well.
<<snip>>
14
“Angela?” A nurse appeared holding a clipboard, looking expectantly into the waiting room.
Angela rose too quickly, as if yanked by a puppeteer’s string.
The nurse offered a tight smile, a nod, gestured with a hand. This way.
Her balance regained, Angela stepped forward. As an afterthought, she gave a quick, quizzical look back at Malcolm.
“Love you,” the words stumbled from his throat. But if she heard, Angela didn’t show it. She was on her own now. And so she walked through the door, down the hallway, and into another room. Simple as that.
Malcolm sat and stared at the empty space where, only moments before, his Angela had been.
———
Contributing authors include Jay Clark , Kristin Clark , Heather Demetrios , Stephen Emond , Patrick Flores-Scott , Faith Hicks , Trisha Leaver , Kekla Magoon , Marcella Pixley , James Preller , Jason Schmidt , and Jordan Sonnenblick .
Review by Booklist Review
“The hottest trend in YA literature is the renaissance of realistic fiction. Here, as further evidence, is a collection of 12 stories rooted in realism. Well, one of the stories, Stephen Emond’s illustrated tale The Night of the Living Creeper is narrated by a cat, but, otherwise, here are some examples: Jason Schmidt’s visceral story of a school shooting; Kekla Magoon’s tale of a mixed-race girl trying to find a place she belongs; Marcella Pixley’s operatic entry of a mother’s mental illness; and Patrick Flores-Scott’s haunting take on a brother’s life-changing sacrifice. Happily, not all of the stories portray reality as grim. Some, like Kristin Elizabeth Clark’s gay-themed coming-out story, Jordan Sonnenblick’s older-but-wiser romance, and Faith Erin Hicks’ graphic-novel offering about gay teens, are refreshingly lighthearted and sweet spirited. Many of the authors in this fine collection are emerging talents and their stories are, for the most part, successful. One of their characters laments how some don’t want to know about what goes on in the real world. This collection shows them.”
Review by School Library Journal Review
“Gr 10 Up-Tackling feelings-from grief to joy, from sorrow to hope, and from loss to love-this short story collection portrays real emotions of teenagers in real-life situations. Included in this volume are the conversation a girl has with herself while preparing to break up with an emotionally manipulative boyfriend, the story of a survivor of a high school shooting, an illustrated vignette told from the perspective of a family’s cat about a creeper at a Halloween party, and a short work in comic book format about the surprising secret of a high school’s golden couple. . . . With authors as diverse as Heather Demetrios, Trisha Leaver, Kekla Magoon, and Jordan Sonnenblick, this collection unflinchingly addresses subjects such as sexuality, abortion, addiction, school shootings, and abuse. VERDICT From beginning to end, this is a compelling work that looks at the reality teens are faced with today.”
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My thanks to editors Grace Kendall and Joy Peskin of Farrar Straus Giroux/Macmillan for inviting me to take part in this refreshing collection of stories. My editor at Feiwel & Friends, Liz Szabla, helped make the connection possible.
My two books that might have the most appeal to YA readers would be Before You Go and The Fall.
"I wish that I might be a thinking stone."
That's what it says on the back of this
Whatever could it mean? Let's look at the line in context:
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle
by
Wallace Stevens"Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,
O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
Like the clashed edges of two words that kill."
And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.
Or was it that I mocked myself alone?
I wish that I might be a thinking stone.
The sea of spuming thought foists up again
The radiant bubble that she was. And then
A deep up-pouring from some saltier well
Within me, bursts its watery syllable.
Is he crying over lost love, his tears welling as salty syllables? Or is he railing against Mother Nature herself? What are the "two words that kill"?
Hmmm.
I give him points for lines like these:
Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain
That not one curl in nature has survived?
and these:
...I pursued,
And still pursue, the origin and course
Of love, but until now I never knew
That fluttering things have so distinct a shade
The entire poem seems a lament to encroaching age. Really, not my favorite subject. If we are to end up like this...
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Two golden gourds distended on our vines,
Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,
Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.
We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,
The laughing sky will see the two of us
Washed into rinds by rotting winter winds.
. . . then perhaps I should just order the t-shirt and hope to be a thinking stone instead of a warty squash.
I love Wallace Stevens;
believe me, I do. This poem of his challenges me, though.
Should we always post poems we love on Poetry Friday? Or go a little mad and share something confounding every once in a while? You know my answer.
P.S. I couldn't end this without sharing a marvelous comment by
Karen Edmisten, who responded to my
initial post analyzing Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":
Billy Collins is like the pal you love and go out with for coffee ... the friend with whom you never have a conflict, because you always know exactly what he means. And he gets you, too, and you love him for that. And then you order more coffee and sigh and think, "If only everything could be this easy."
Wallace Stevens is like your inscrutable uncle, who isn't always kind, and sometimes doesn't seem to want you around, but who's so complex and interesting that you keep having him over. And when you pin him down on something, and whisper to your mother, who's sitting next to you, that now you know why he's like this, he smiles cryptically, and looks away.
Your coffee friend would, of course, be insulted at being analyzed, but your uncle practically begs for it. :-)
Poetry is a method of thinking, unlike any other. After reading a poem, we are asked: How does it make you feel? A legitimate, but not the only, question. There is also: How does it make you think? A great poet persuades you, as deftly as a courtroom lawyer, of her argument.
The poem that convinced me of the logic of beauty was Wallace Stevens' iconic Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Recently, I stumbled across a stunning visual twist on the original poem. (Be sure to read the creator's notes, because he explains why he modified the last line slightly, plus other interesting tidbits.)
Several years ago, I also wrote an essay about the poem for a (failed) attempt to enter an MFA program. It's posted below.
Look at the images, wade through my essay (if you don't mind a bit of poetic analysis---Billy Collins, look away!) and of course, absorb the poem itself. Which convinces you most?
My money (all of it) is on the poem.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
And only if you would like more, here's a mini-essay I wrote about this poem. I'm no Kelly Fineman, but this is how I would analyze Stevens' argument:
The Logic of Beauty
“I do not know which to prefer/the beauty of inflections/or the beauty of innuendos,/the blackbird whistling/or just after.”
Likewise, I do not know which to prefer, the spare arguments of Stevens’ words, or the emotional reverberations of the empty spaces just after. The moving thing or the still? The beating black feathers or the enveloping white snow? The refraction of light by glass or the absorption of it in shadow? The poem as a whole or the poems within it?
Such are the questions posed by the logic of beauty, which leads us to an “indecipherable cause,” rather than a singular conclusion. In this realm, there's no positing of A, inferring of B, or proving of C. There's never a single blackbird, only thirteen ways of looking at it.
Thirteen, a prime number, can't be reduced to anything other than the one poem and the thirteen stanzas that compose it. Beauty, by this logic, cannot be divided, and so it reminds us of our own “involvement” in the “lucid, inescapable rhythms” of life.
The logic of beauty can clearly be seen in Stevens’ twelfth stanza:
“The river is moving./The blackbird must be flying.”
Two simple sentences, as clear as if Stevens had written “Theory A is true. Therefore, Theory B must also be true.” And yet, of course, a blackbird flying has nothing whatsoever to do with the movement of a river. Unless one argues with the logic of beauty.
By its rules, the river is indivisible from the blackbird. The movement of one draws up from the imagination the thought of the other. In the silence “just after” the stanza, the reader pictures the blackbird flying steadily, pulling---by the beat of his wings---the river into rhythmic motion, and she is convinced beyond doubt of the soundness of this argument.
The dark feathers and the glittering water, the bright sky and the muddy earth, the freedom of flight and the channeled path of water flow, every evidence points to the separateness of bird and water, and yet we believe in their connection. Stevens has used our own rational patterns of reasoning against us, and we find ourselves, not single-minded, but of “three minds:” considering not just the separate beauties of the river and the blackbird, but the unique, third beauty of what is created between them.
Over and over in his poem, in a series of crisp stanzas laid out like a set of new commandments, Stevens reminds us with such logic that we, even as we whirl in confused isolation, are part of an overreaching “pantomime.” He states it clearly in the fourth stanza:
“A man and a woman/are one./A man and a woman and a blackbird/are one.”
He implies it in the ninth:
“When the blackbird flew out of sight,/it marked the edge/of one of many circles.”
Even his choice of Haddam as the setting for his seventh stanza can be seen as more than just an elite town in Connecticut, for this Aramaic word means “piece, limb, member of the body.”
By the time the reader reaches the end of the thirteenth stanza, with the snow falling–a snow composed of unique crystals that nevertheless renders the landscape a swath of indivisible whiteness–she has begun to think in the logic of beauty herself.
There is no longer a barrier between her and the blackbird in the cedar-limbs. All around her is a lucid green light, and glass coaches with fearsome shadows travel the land. The bawds of euphony cry out to her, and everywhere, is it evening, all afternoon.
And she does not know which to prefer: herself, the poem, or what moves between them.
Poetry Friday is hosted today by Tricia, at The Miss Rumphius Effect.
My two books that might have the most appeal to YA readers would be Before You Go and The Fall.
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what a brilliant comment by Karen!! I always liked Wallace Stevens even though I haven't a clue what he is talking about. He is just that fascinating and sounds so crunchy-delicious.
I don't get this poem at all but I wouldn't mind sometimes being a thinking stone. No one expects anything from one, and it sounds peaceful. *sigh* I guess it's the end of the school year and I am tired.
Hee. Crunchy-delicious. Yes.
Maybe we "thinking stones" could sit in a circle somewhere together, like a campfire ring....
Monocle has puzzled me for years, and like you, parts of it resonate -- sometimes for the sheer "crunchiness" of those words alone. But I always go back to it, and try again, to wrestle and solve parts of the puzzle as I can. He's turned all of us into thinking stones :).
Oh fine crunchy thinking uncle...
Seems to me that if you're a thinking stone, you have all the dry pleasures of the mind, and none of the moist obligations or agonies of the heart. And that Stevens understands he is now writing his poems (mocking Mother Nature "in magnificent measure") as an intellectual exercise, minus the deep feeling (the up-pouring from "the saltier well.") He senses that his own true engagement with emotion is past - he's the "introspective exile" who has grown bald. He's a little angel riding a mule, tinkling bell attached - what a great line that is - while the "bravura" is left to poets under forty.
Of course, poems about growing older seem a little banal, but the fact is, Stevens was right - he grew old & died, the poem outlives him - he has been "washed into rinds," literally. Maybe because I'm a bit older, too, and feeling the intellectual impulse beginning to outweigh the emotional impulse, the poem strikes a chord.
I love that uncle. As long as he kept producing deep, complex things to make me think, he could be as cryptic as he liked, since he really does practically beg you to unpeel his meanings, by being difficult.
This might be a serious character flaw, but if I have to work that hard to understand a poem, I don't enjoy it... accessibility is so important or you lose readers!
Here's my take on the thinking stone -- that's what I feel like when I let slip words I didn't think through or that unintentionally hurt someone ("Like the clashed edges of two words that kill"). I want to just curl up into a stone and give myself a time out to think about being more careful or thoughtful with my words.
Happened this week. I was very stupid. Every time I think about it, I go back into thinking stone mode. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Think before you speak, self.
("The sea of spuming thought foists up again
The radiant bubble that she was. And then
A deep up-pouring from some saltier well
Within me, bursts its watery syllable.")
Oh, Sara, so many funny dovetails and delicious ironies here -- I posted about Billy Collins yesterday, after confessing that I had *thought* about being penetrating and insightful, but, alas, I was NOT up to it. :) So, I turned to beloved Billy.
This is the first time I have read Monocle in its entirety (or maybe the first time in a long time -- I don't remember it well, at any rate.) My first impression is that it's about doubt and loss of faith, and a kind of mourning over that loss -- The opening lines are such strong allusions to lines about Mary in the Book of Revelation, and it sounds almost like a lament at the loss of a love, lamenting that he no longer accepts what once seemed to him a glorious vision, even if only in his childhood. I think what he's mocking in magnificent measure is his former beliefs about the Virgin Mary (as representative of his faith) and perhaps the two words that kill are his perceived conflict between "faith" and "reason."
And, wishing he were a thinking stone says to me that he wishes he could accept his rational worldview without the feelings of loss that accompany it. It's all shrouded in very sensual imagery, too, but I think it's about more than sex, though Atticus just skimmed over a Harold Bloom commentary, and for Bloom, it's completely about sex. No, wait, that's not fair -- for Bloom, it also appears to be about the lamenting the loss of the creative, fertile muse, and I can certainly see that, too.
But, I keep going back to the fact that the piece is dripping with religious imagery. The last two stanzas seem to me to be about the always ongoing search for "the origin and course of love" -- does it originate in a purely material world, or is there something to the worldview he abandoned? He doubts, and he is steadfast in his doubt, but the doubt brings him no peace. If man proved a gobbet in the world he was studying "like a dark rabbi", then he seems to have had trouble reconciling the earthly with the spiritual.
And the fact that he's looking through a monacle says to me that he feels he has to see the world through one lens, either the faith lens or the reason lens, and though he desires a more clearcut final answer, the answer is a fluttering, shaded thing for him. He cannot be a mere thinking stone, for there is also the anguish and the "unconscionable treachery of fate,
That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout
Doleful heroics"
So it seems to me that he's still trying to reconcile the stone and the weeping.
Or maybe it's about sex. :)
Anyway, I do love spending time with this inscrutable uncle, since I just had coffee with Billy yesterday.
All of you left such great responses. I've decided all of YOU are my thinking stones....