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For my 1992 book, The New Country Encyclopedia, I interviewed a number of country music figures, including singer Gene Watson, whose hobby, when he was off the road and out of the recording studio, was auto body work. He told me about a particularly satisfying job he had just finished. I got a car sittin’ in my shop right now—well, actually it’s two cars. One was burned in front and the other was totaled out behind. So what I did was, I cut ‘em in two and put ‘em together. And you’d never know it by lookin’ at this car. It’s probably stronger now than it was before it was wrecked. That’s because I’m a critical person, and I know what I’m doin’. If you stop and think about it, when a car gets hit, say it gets hit from behind, you don’t start working on the side of it. You start straightening it from behind. You try and recreate that accident in reverse. That’s how you fix a car. I asked Watson if he thought there was a lesson there, if the same thing could apply to music. No. Music’s just the opposite, or at least it should be. A lot of people have tried to stay on top by re-creatin’ the same effect, but I’m not interested in that. Once you hear a song, you’ve heard it. Once you see a movie, you’ve seen it. Sometimes when you’re interviewing, you get an answer you really don’t expect. I thought I was serving up a gift-wrapped question, a perfect metaphor for Watson to make into…something. After all, cars have been fodder for metaphor for as long as there has been an internal combustion engine, from the double entendres of the blues (Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” is a good example) to the metaphysical musings of Donald Finkel’s “Concerning the Transmission.” But Watson declined, and over the years his answer has stayed with me. Why didn’t he reach for the metaphor? Maybe because Watson is an interpretive artist—a singer, not a songwriter. He doesn’t have to think in terms of metaphor. He’s never had the experience of looking over old notebooks with scraps and fragments of unfinished poems, or song lyrics, and finding a phrase from here and image from there which didn’t work in their original contexts, or were pressed into the service of an idea that ultimately went nowhere, but which, when put together in a new context, might just provide the spark to jumpstart a new poem. If you’ll pardon the metaphor. And if you will, I’ll continue it. I’ve always called these fragments that can sometimes be found and scavenged for still-serviceable lines “parts poems.” Or it may be, on the other hand, that Watson was right. Just because you can make a metaphor out of something, that doesn’t make it true. Which is sort of the point Finkel was making in “Concerning the Transmission,” in which the edgy, high-maintenance physicality of words is compared to an old car that may be worthless, but "you've sunk too much in it / to quit now.” And maybe what appeals to me so much about Watson’s answer, and why it’s stayed in the back of my mind for as long as it has—besides the inspiring shock of getting an answer one totally didn’t expect—is that the whole exchange has become a metaphor in my mind, like Finkel’s transmission. Not everything is going to work, and not everything is worth pursuing. Donald Justice was thought of as a traditionalist in his poetry, but he was an admirer of experimental modern composers and particularly of John Cage, and at one point he adapted one of the techniques of these musical modernists, writing down words at random on separate note cards, and then shuffling and dealing out the note cards, making note of some of the clusters of words that appeared, and using those random phrases to jumpstart some of his best-known poems. This combination of “chance and choice” worked for him and inspired him. But when he tried the same thing again a few years later, the experiment fell flat. No inspiration, and no point trying to force it. Once you see a movie, you’ve seen it. I had much the same experience. For a while I tried taking passages from unlikely sources, such as the back cover copy of lurid paperback novels from the 50s (“the kind the drugstores sell,” in Gordon Lightfoot’s phrase) or articles in National Geographic, or even other poems, running them through BabelFish online translator into several different languages, then finally back into English, and gleaning from the process phrases and combinations of words that took me to places I wouldn’t have reached otherwise, corners of my consciousness that hadn’t been entirely conscious. It worked for a while, and I got some good poems out of it. Until it stopped working for me. I tried a few more times over a period of a few years, thinking I was maybe just using the wrong source material. But that wasn’t it. I’d just gone to that well too often. Keats was afraid that he would cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain, and sadly, he was quite likely right. For the rest of us, the reverse fear is all too common. Hemingway is said to have killed himself because he was afraid his brain had stopped teeming, and there was nothing left for his pen to glean. Richard Hugo offers a less final solution to the problem: “the moment you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain start talking about something else. In fact, it's a good idea to talk about something else before you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain.” And Hugo’s solution is a good one. Sometimes letting go is the best way to start something new. Of course, you never know for sure when it’s time to let go. “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” is a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, and unlike most quotes attributed to famous people, this one actually does seem to be Einstein’s. But on the other hand, you have the story once told to schoolchildren (perhaps no more?) of Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland, who, at a low ebb in his country’s struggle for independence from England, was forced to hide out in a cave. There he saw a spider try and fail seven times to connect a filament of web from one wall to another. On the eighth time, it succeeded, and that gave Bruce the resolve to go back and continue the fight. What does it say, that the quote about learning when to give up is from one of the great geniuses of our time is probably true, and the parable about never giving up is from an obscure long-dead monarch and probably a fabrication? Not necessarily. Important truths are much more likely to derive from fiction than from fact. But, to return once more to country music, that genre of “three chords and the truth,” you’ve to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em. CONCERNING THE TRANSMISSION You might say the same of poetry: If you let go now, the bearings Donald Finkel |