Writer in the Trees, by Alan Feltus © Alan Feltus. Courtesy Forum Gallery, New York City

A person once said to me, “You’re a writer. You must have a lot to say.” He was making an assumption. I’ve thought about his assumption many times. Is it that simple? Do I write because I have a lot to say? I do have a lot to say. No matter how much I have said, isn’t there always more to say? But then, I imagine everyone has a lot to say, writers and nonwriters alike. I can’t imagine anyone not having a lot to say—even if they keep their mouth closed.

Human beings with a lot to say like to make noise. So do crickets, dogs, mice, other insects, rabbits when frightened or being killed, moose, and many, many others. It is impressive to think of all the creatures on earth and all the different noises they make, for different reasons. Some of their noises are effective. Some fail to have an effect.

When John Ashbery was invited to deliver the six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, some ten years before the turn of the millennium, he surmised that he was being asked to explain his own poetry, which he knew was reputed to be hermetic. But, as he explained in his first Norton Lecture, he felt that his poetry was the explanation. “The explanation of what?” he asked. “Of my thought, whatever that is.” He chose not to try to explain his own poetry, and quoted John Barth, who said, “You shouldn’t pay very much attention to anything writers say. They don’t know why they do what they do.” (In fact, that could be my epigraph for this essay.) And instead, he devoted the six lectures to six “certifiably minor” poets who, though far from the only poets who had influenced him, were among the ones he habitually turned to “to get started; a poetic jump-start,” when his “batteries [had] run down.”

I had a stimulating and peaceful long afternoon riding a bus west from Boston to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with only a few stops along the way and only a few other, quiet passengers, reading the book that eventually resulted from Ashbery’s lectures: Other Traditions. It was thoughtful and clearly reasoned and judiciously illustrated with quoted lines from the poets—just enough from each poet—and Ashbery’s analysis of one poet after another was enlightening. It was the perfect book to read on a bus, a quiet one. Because the book demanded attention, it was suited to efforts of close, concentrated, but intermittent attention, and at the same time, if I paused in my reading and thinking, the steady forward motion of the bus included me in something that continued to happen even when I stopped reading. I would read a portion of a page and then look up to think about it, gazing out at a landscape that was fairly monotonous, just monotonous enough not to distract me—the woods and more woods and occasional fields and occasional houses and barns and one broad river and one steep climb to a mountaintop and one descent therefrom and along the way at some point the topiary sign spelling out FRIENDLY’S. This was the Massachusetts Turnpike, which was already familiar to me from previous trips.

“Moon rising, twilight at the meadow” © Barbara Bosworth

What a sensible idea of Ashbery’s, I thought, and modest—to direct attention away from himself. It also worked to his own benefit; he was more interested in exploring these other poets and articulating his exploration than he was in repeating his ideas about himself, if he would admit to any. It can also be dangerous to look too closely into the magic that produces something you write. Barth: Writers don’t know why they do what they do. . . .

After I have been asked why I write, and as I am attempting to answer that question, the word “bother” becomes relevant in a particular sense, though I was not conscious of it in just that sense one year ago, before I read what I read recently.

The word “bother” came into my life in a specific, positive sense when I read an interview given by John Ashbery in which he talked about how he encountered the source of his long poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and its title.

It is not that John Ashbery is always my highest or most useful example for things; it is more a matter of chance in this case. This essay that I am writing, or attempting to write, in answer to the question of why I write, gets written in real time, and things happen during that time. During that time, the book group I am part of chose to read Ashbery’s collection of poems Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. All of us had read it before, but when you reach your sixties and seventies, as we have, a book you can truthfully say you have read may actually have been read by you so long ago that it is as though not read. For this meeting, we planned to read the title poem together with whichever other poems interested each of us. In intervals between continuing to read the title poem, which I found dense and hard to understand, I was thinking about a title I associate with Ashbery, “Peter and Mother,” which I often think of, even though it may not be the title of any poem of his. Because I wasn’t sure it was the title of a poem of his, rather than, say, the title of an article about him, I searched the internet for it and instead found a 2015 interview with him by Adam Fitzgerald in the magazine Interview.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, c. 1524, by Parmigianino

What I found, in reading the interview, were some comments he made about titling his poems but also, along the way, two or even three possible answers to why he wrote. About the titles of his poems, he simply said, “They just come to me.”

The first thing he said was that he first encountered the painting by the young Parmigianino titled Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in the form of a reproduction in a Times book review and that he was “immediately grabbed and bothered” by the painting and thought he would like to “do something” with it. But he did nothing at the time. Many years later he happened to see the painting itself in a museum in Vienna. He said, “And that did it. I knew I had to do something about it then.” And he used the word “bother” in this way, in this interview or another, about at least one other thing that inspired a poem.

The formulation “do something about it” is a blunt and truthful way of expressing your response to material that “bothers” you—in a good way—when you encounter it.

I encountered the Ashbery interview when I was beginning to struggle to answer the question of why I write. Here is a very concise and truthful answer: the reason I write a particular story may be because something—which I call “material,” as in “raw material”—bothers me until I “do something” about it. In these cases, “bother” is wholly positive. The beauty of black cows across the road, the geometry of the positions they adopted, bothered me in that way, and the shadow of a grain of salt on a counter bothered me one late afternoon.

I think of the phrase “Peter and Mother” more often than anyone might imagine because I like the way it sounds, and yet it is awkward.

Some of the pieces of language that persist in my memory are ones that seem stylistically awkward or faulty. One is Ashbery’s (or not Ashbery’s) title “Peter and Mother.” Another is Shakespeare’s “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs. . . ,” which I can hear also as the first notes of the musical scale sung out of order: “mi, or do, or re.” Yet another, which I hear as redundant, I remember from Moby-Dick but is in fact quoted by Melville from the Book of Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” (The escape is only temporary.) In the first, British edition of the novel, the epilogue in which Ishmael speaks this sentence was mistakenly omitted. And so it appeared to readers that Ishmael had drowned along with the others—and if so, how could he be telling this story?

Three of the five in my talkative original family are gone, their voices and thoughts permanently silenced now, except on paper in various places in this house, and the other one besides me left alive is declining—as I am inevitably, too, though at a different rate and from different causes. Either he or I will be the only one left, eventually, who can bear witness to the life of that particular family, temporarily “escaped alone to tell thee.”

Another wrong order that is perfectly good, in the sentence where it sits, is Flaubert’s “She closed the door behind him, when he left, with a feeling of satisfaction that surprised even her”—speaking of Emma Bovary and her father, whose company during his visit had irritated her. I, when I was a teacher of writing, though I was not overly didactic or rule-bound, used to advise young writers to tell the actions in the order in which they happened. But in this case, Flaubert is achieving a sly emphasis, whether he meant to or not: Emma closes the door on her father even before he is out the door!

The second helpful thing Ashbery said is in answer to Fitzgerald’s question about how he reacts to his own work when he rereads it:

I frequently like it very much when I do read it. When I come across it, maybe it’s in a desk drawer or somewhere, and it’s some poem that you wrote and have completely forgotten about. When you read it, you’re thinking it was written by someone else. It’s this sort of feeling of ecstasy that can be supplied by nothing else. Maybe that’s why one writes.

This divorce from oneself—this feeling of distance or estrangement from one’s own writing—is in concrete and permanent form described in an account that I was told or that I read about George Oppen as he was suffering from the early stages of dementia. He was walking around a room in his house reading his own poems, which had been framed and hung on the wall (I may have this somewhat inaccurate, but the gist, I believe, is correct), walking from one to another, reading them, in a room at home, and observing to whoever was there witnessing this that he found them to be quite good, not knowing the poems were his own. Although he did not know they were his, he clearly felt a compatibility with them. They were poems he liked and would have been glad to have written.

The process of writing, or this kind of process of writing, anyway, that I’m considering here, includes something outside oneself. It is something outside myself that comes to take hold of me and in a sense use me as an instrument to come into being; I am instrumental. I am not making something up myself, out of myself. Something outside me is being given or offered to me, by chance. I then concentrate on it, give it shape, and in the process open myself to developments in the material that seem to come of their own volition. This openness to involuntary developments is what is most endangered by a knock on my study door at the wrong time, though strangely less endangered by the ongoing hubbub that may surround me on a crowded train or in a bar or café, because no one knows me there and even a momentary intrusion is likely to be impersonal and undisturbing. (“Can you please move your coat?”)

Ashbery experienced, he said, “ecstasy” at reading a poem of his own that he liked.

When I began trying in all honesty to answer the question of why I write, one of the first answers I came to was for the pleasure of it. There is, for me at least, pleasure at each stage of the writing. There is the initial impulse, the recognition of the potential richness of the material—got to “do something” about that. And then the forming of that original provocative material into something that, it seems to me at the moment, couldn’t have any other or better form, working at the form until it seems to fit perfectly what the material asks for. And then, later, the tension past—eventually, no hurry—the sharing of the finished piece, seeing it printed, or, still later, going back and reading it again, usually for some practical reason, or else just because I opened to that page. Or reading it aloud and enjoying someone else’s enjoyment—we relish together what that original material turned into.

But it may be more accurate to say that at the beginning of the process is emotion—though often that emotion is pleasure.

Something that was not a reason I started writing in the first place was for fame or money.

But I may have thought, as a twenty-year-old, that one wrote to convey a message, as in a serious poem. But I soon stopped thinking I needed to convey a message, or even have a message. I had some messages inside me then, and I still have plenty of messages inside me, but not to convey explicitly or even implicitly in writing, except involuntarily—maybe only in rants or harangues out loud to people. People who would rather I quieted down.

I don’t write to convey a message, and I don’t write stories to achieve any particular purpose. I don’t write stories to persuade a reader of something I believe, though I have many, many beliefs.

I don’t write a story for any particular audience. I don’t think of a reader as I am writing it, though after I’ve finished writing it, I am glad, or touched, if a person enjoys it or is moved by it.

I don’t write a story to move someone, though someone may be moved. It is not that direct. It is more indirect: I encounter something that moves me, I let a story evolve from it, or I guide the material into the form of a story that fits it, that suits the power or beauty of that original material. Then a reader reads the story, and if that reader is of a certain temperament not too unlike mine in one or several respects—for instance, having a similar sense of humor, or any sense of humor at all—he or she may be moved by the story. But moved, I could say, only, in a sense, by my story as intermediary, as conveying what was inherent, for me, as I saw it, or possible, in the original material.

When I think about that twenty-year-old searching for a serious topic—where was it?—for her to-be-serious poem, I believe she actually admired good poems she had read and wanted to write a poem as good. Later, when I was no longer trying to write good poems, but trying to write good stories, I probably wanted to write prose as eccentric and distinct and clear and insistent as Samuel Beckett’s. I would copy out sentences from Beckett and study them.

John Clare said, in a poem, that he found his poems “in the fields” and “only wrote them down.” This is not exactly what happens for me—and it probably did not for him—but my experience is that a piece of writing starts with something outside coming in. I write something because it occurs to me to write it—it occurs to me, rather than I go out in search of it. Going out in search of a suitable topic is something I did early on, when I thought, as a twenty-year-old wanting to write “poetry,” that a poem should be serious and have a serious subject, so I should search my mind and experience for a serious subject and then write about it.

I think it is all right, in the beginning, to want to write “poetry” and to think a poem should be serious. It is a starting point. Later, things will reverse direction, and it will be the poem, or at least the raw material for the poem, that comes to you wanting to be written.

I don’t really see a poem as an animated creature asking to come to me, but Russell Edson, whose stories I found crucially liberating when I first encountered them in my twenties and whose imagination was wild, and domestic, and uninhibited, and open to considering the cruelty of family relations, and open to impossible situations, and open to inanimate things being demanding, and who tended to anthropomorphize things, including structural parts of a house, turned a poem into an animated creature in one of his stories, “New Prose About an Old Poem.” (I say he wrote stories, but he said he wrote poems.) This little story is about a poem that is too good to throw away but not good enough to publish. The poem is carried away by the wind, and the poet is relieved because he won’t have to continue reconsidering it every now and then. But then the wind returns it to his desk. “The poem is glad to be home, and wants to be read again.” The poet thinks he might send it out in the mail—submit it for publication—but knows he won’t and says he will “have to go on being nice to it for the rest of his life.” He is dramatizing the situation of a writer’s having a folder or drawer full of drafts that are not hopeless but not finished or really good, either—a locked or paralyzed situation. Most writers have these folders or drawers.

I’m not sure I want to know why I write. But I don’t mind talking about how I have written certain of my stories.

How I Wrote Certain of My Books is a title that has always lingered in my mind, not because I have read the book and know it well but because of the word Certain, which sounds a little uncomfortable to me in English, at least as it appears in a title, though it’s more natural there in the original French. The book could be considered a counterpart to George Steiner’s about how he did not write certain of his books.

It is the title of a collection of works by and about Raymond Roussel and also of the book’s lead essay. I have looked it up just now, and only now do I see that via Roussel John Ashbery enters this essay again—because Roussel’s book includes two essays by Ashbery. I don’t have the book here in the house, but Roussel, I now see when I look at Other Traditions again, is one of the six writers Ashbery talks about in his Norton Lectures.

In exploring how I have written certain of my stories, I have advanced as far as understanding that a story begins with something outside coming in and involving emotion, often pleasure. I write something because it occurs to me to write it. It is in some sense found in a field. And the first pleasure is this encounter with something coming in, or wanting to come in. Something that demands, in an impersonal way, to be formed into something else.

It may be an idea of my own that seems to come to me from myself, or it may be material that is actually outside of me: a companionable bug, or a slow-moving cow, or the strangeness of the word “organized” when used for a tropical storm, or an emphatic old woman saying something unexpected that I overhear on a train as she stands over me in the aisle. This material presents itself and makes me want to see it be expressed in a form, a formal form, that is just right. I then go forward writing it without thinking too much, guided by a part of my mind not quite under my control. I do not stop to look ahead toward the end of the story. I do not think about what it means unless I look at it much later, from the outside, and then wonder—though I usually do not—what it means.

Part of the pleasure, then, is handling the language, moving the words around. I place the punctuation so that it does just what I want it to do to my meaning. I see the story evolve. I change this and that to make the parts of a story or a sentence better. I hear, silently, in my head, the way it sounds. Then I see what the story looks like when it’s done. I see a story exist that did not exist before. It has come into being from the collaboration between the more conscious, controlling action of my mind and the more intuitive, impulsive, and associative action of my mind.

But the pleasure of writing is a demanding one because of its unrelenting demands—for just the right syntax, the right balance, the right sounds, the right words, the right spellings of our often strange English words. But then the strictness of the demands is part of the pleasure.

Other emotions may come in along with the pleasure of encountering the material. I often relish human behavior, though I am also, often, horrified by it. But I can relish the language, and the handling of language, even when writing about behavior that horrifies me. I almost always revel in the behavior of animals and insects and even minerals and the phenomena of physics.

I am bemused and a little in awe when I see how long a shadow is, cast by the near-horizontal afternoon sunlight, from a single grain of salt on the kitchen counter. In another story, which takes place on the same kitchen counter, I am sympathetic to a little bug that runs away from my sponge and feel affection as I imagine, or don’t imagine but know, that the bug has business elsewhere. He may simply have forgotten it for a moment until my sponge shoved him suddenly, inadvertently, and off he went. The first pleasure comes from amusement at the sight of the hurrying bug, but a further pleasure comes from choosing to write the word “business” in relation to the bug. But because I have respect for bugs and their well-organized lives, I hope the story does not seem condescending.

In another story, I feel less alone when I am visited by a bug, a bug that stays up late to walk down the page of my book when I am also up late, reading.

Nabokov, too, respected the anatomy and behavior of insects enough—and language enough—to object to Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s translation of a particular moment early in Madame Bovary in which she describes flies as “crawling.” No, he says, full of Nabokovian indignation, flies don’t crawl, they walk. I never tire of enjoying his concern for accuracy here and elsewhere. But though I know what it means, can I actually define “crawl”? A translator’s habit is to look up a word even when she thinks she knows it perfectly well. He is right, of course: flies do not crawl; only the little feet of the flies would have touched the inner surface of those glasses, with their attractive dregs of cider.

I wrote quite a long story that started with a question about how companionable a few ants might be, for me, in the kitchen, as they hauled away, with difficulty, some small crumbs of Parmesan cheese to wherever their hidden home was, down a tiny hole in the tiled counter. The story went on, almost of its own accord, one part naturally inviting the next, to remember friends of mine, since deceased, who, being lonely, I suppose, once fell into the habit, where they used to live, in Germany, during World War II, of putting out food for a housefly who would join them at mealtimes, and then mourned the fly when it died on Christmas Day.

Other things in our world may anger and frustrate me or make me despair. Those emotions rarely come out directly in a story. They simply continue to abide inside me, having matured deep into my bones over time. They may come out indirectly in a story, or not at all, but if I read it later, I can see that they lie somewhere beneath or behind the story, or in its very fabric. How could they not, since they are part of what I am, and the story is coming from me?

I wrote a story called “The Cows.” I did not write it with any intention. I did not even write it all at once—it took three years to accumulate. The way it originated was as simple as looking out the window, or standing by the road looking across the road, and observing the cows, who, over the years, started by being three heifers, then grew up, two of them bearing one calf each. After the two calves were adults, they were taken away. I occasionally wrote down what I saw. After three years, I had more than eighty observations. I made a little book of it, with accompanying photos. Only later did I realize that the emotions involved in this story were not only my various forms of pleasure and sometimes amusement or sympathy as I watched the positions and behaviors of the cows and their calves, as well as the demanding pleasure of setting down my observations of them, but also my pain and sorrow over the treatment of most cows in the world. I could see what these particular cows, my neighbor cows, preferred when given the almost complete freedom they had—to go in and out of the open door of their barn, to drink from a bathtub by the fence, to walk to a particular spot in their large field, in winter to stand in the snow, broadside to the warm sun. Even when they were larger than their mothers, the calves went on nursing now and then, coming over for a few tugs at the teat, and their mothers stood still and waited for them to be done. All I wanted to do, for my own satisfaction in writing down my observations, was to portray exactly the way these cows looked and what they did, black on green or white or tan, in the field. But maybe I was also relishing their freedom to make their choices.

My story “The Cows” is almost purely descriptions of an undramatic reality—loving descriptions. Though my objective portrayals may not appear overtly loving, there is love in the motivation behind them. And sometimes another emotion shows through—quite a strong feeling on my part, not suppressed, determining the choice of what I describe.

My emotion was for the plight of cows, and animals in general, subjected to human manipulation or intrusion or territorial takeover. But did I also love these particular cows? Probably, even though one of them charged me when I got too close to her calf (though there was a fence between us). She did not recognize with any gratitude that I was the one who, on a particularly hot day, had filled their dry bathtub with buckets of water carried across the road from my own well after they had been lowing for an hour or more while the three of us stay-at-home older neighbor women—one up the hill, one a couple hundred yards down the road, and myself in the house opposite—were growing increasingly concerned about them.

The lowing of the cows was purely their expression of discomfort, but did it then become communication, to us? Does voiced expression involuntarily become communication when someone responds? Or in this case was it already meant as communication?

I don’t believe I put down on paper precise descriptions of the cows in order to transport anyone to the place where I stood as I was looking at them. What I was after was more abstract, almost clinical, despite my loving motivation—an exact match between what I saw, what pleased and interested me at that moment, and the words that would describe it so exactly that there could be no other way to describe it. I had no overall plan for these observations, which were entered in a notebook among other material. There was simply the impulse, each time, to write just that one depiction. Then weeks would go by, or maybe just a day or two, or months, before I was moved to write another description or observation. This matters to the outcome, because if I had conceived the plan for eighty-three observations of the cows in the beginning, I might have been tempted to force the observations to come to me—I mean, I would have gone searching for them. And so the set of eighty-three observations was written by accumulation over several years. I simply looked out the window with a natural, recurring, reflexive interest at the field where the cows liked to stand and occasionally walk, very rarely run, and when something I saw struck me, I made a note of it. Was it communication before it was published?