HARDLY AUSPICIOUS by Katherine Stingley
In the weeks that I’ve become a first-time teacher, I’ve found myself with nothing to say in my own poetry. In the time that I don’t spend planning, grading, or otherwise brooding indecisively about the next day’s lessons, I find myself too impatient to continue the long streak of sitting at a desk. My writing life has stalled or paused or whatever the polite word for “driven me up a wall” may be.
What writing that does follow is at meager pace of pushing a stalled car off the road and towards a service station, or home if that’s closer. What writing that does follow is celebrated with the frustration of a single line written and later scratched out.
When staring at a blank page becomes too much for me, I turn my attention to the writings that are in arm’s reach. Weeks ago, I returned to a novel that I’d first read as a child: Empress Orchid, the following of a royal concubine in Imperial China struggling to find some kind of standing in a world of tradition and order. There’s much to be had in such a rich character and an all-encompassing period, but nothing stuck except the word Orchid hears when her son’s fortune is read: auspicious. It didn’t occur to me as a child that perhaps the fortune teller said this purely to please a royal concubine and stave off punishment. What other motivation is there to keep the use of one’s hands? I know this use. No real poetic truths came from this realization, but it sat with me for the early hour that I’d forced myself to wake up and devote to focused writing, and that was kindness enough.
The next day, the book nearest me was the textbook I use to teach, filled with articles meant to catch the attention of poorly disciplined students and prove that writing really can be fun. In his essay “Ways of Seeing” on the history of nude paintings in European art, John Berger writes, “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity.” This realization was a new one—one that I probably should have made on my own, but never did, and consequently led me to think about mirrors. I had the misguided idea to hold up this quote to the mirror in my apartment to see if any other truths would present themselves backwards or diagonally, but I abandoned the idea to look up if vanity was a seven deadly sin—it’s not, for what little it’s worth.
Today’s early hour was spent with Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in which Maggie the Cat cries out to her husband “Well now, I’m dressed. I’m all dressed and there’s nothing else for me to do.” Nothing feels more ironic than reading this in the southern accent that Williams generally encourages and feeling overdressed myself. I’ve dressed for a party that isn’t guaranteed to happen at any time. It’s a party I don’t remember leaving, and in my time waiting to return to it, I inspect the grey-faced buttons on my shirt collar. I undress and redress into a different outfit. I decide I don’t care about the party at all, then realize I’m not fooling anyone.
There’s something here nonetheless. If I can’t find anything to say, my time is best spent reading from people that do have something to say. I can collect their images, their voices, and their hard-won truths. I can fold those findings into neat stacks to return to if something strikes—when something strikes.
