Springtime brings on a poet's creativity anew

By alex lanz

The West Linn Tidings, Mar 18, 2010

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In the enormous pervading purgatory that is the latter half of winter, where we find spring so imminent on our calendars, we still find that the nights are long.

Like clockwork every year since eighth-grade the coming of azure patches in the Oregon gloom would come amid a tidal wave of feeling in which the longing to create takes such precedence; and in the moment of the sun peeling the clouds away, when school bags are kicked under desks to putrefy, the spirit to write prose for no one in particular rose to the highest pitch.

In July, youths of such minds were invited to two weeks at Marylhurst to study works together and compose their own. In those days, I was enamored with Joyce and Cormac McCarthy, Bradbury and Kenneth Koch.

In those days, I also wrote stories on both sides of a sheet of 11-by-17-inch paper, covering up its entire surface with no formatting to speak of. These sessions would go uninterrupted by fretting or pondering, and would be typed up and read for the workshops at the college.

This ordinary human side of Lanz was discouraged, hurt and dismayed for being particularly inhuman. “Why ever describe a room like that? What about: And the sunlight washed off the metal legs of their desks and blasted onto the posters on the walls” where I had felt “White walls; Gray ceiling; Pencils rubbing” sufficed.

Each time I would leave the sheets to collect dust on a draft board, after some months roll them up and stuff them away somewhere; more months later, I’d take them outside to set them on fire. The stranger side of Lanz carried on, paying no regard to anyone’s evaluations but his own.

To this day, I still feel an idea is in me that hasn’t come close to being worked out.

The most wonderful parts of the summers at Marylhurst were as usual at lunchtime. While the artists loved to convene together by the book shop that had a quaint wooden sign and a layout of benches, I laid back by the trees in the grass.

I didn’t feel like mingling with the crowd, for in those days I was burdened with a heart that loved too much, and had very nearly broken for no less than four girls during the school year. My introversion is a natural one, since my realist prose was outlandish and my personality and physiognomy were sallow with bitter features from my misanthropy to my puffy lips. So while munching on my Subway I turned away from the crowd to gaze at the expanse of green that made up the meadow behind the Old Building, standing in the rainbow from the fountain’s spray.

Later on, I would visit the Shoen Library, where an early edition of Ulysses was at my service. Back in the classes, it was a pleasure to discover new voices from the teachers there – Charles D’ambrosio, Dean Young – and certainly to embark on the canonical choices that I had put off – Chekov, Annie Proulx, Charles Dickens. All of these people we devoured and shared stimulating discussions on.

The five weeks I’ve invested thusly in the last three years I have cherished deeply, although I will not return this year. I’ve learned so much, however the lessons are beginning to repeat. What the then-fresh lessons have done for me though is a wonderful search for the lifestyle of an artisan.