Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
Subvert the dominant paradigm!
That’s a phrase I read once and haven’t forgotten. Was it written somewhere across a chalkboard? Graffiti-ed on a boxcar? Painted on one of those homemade banners people sometimes drape along an overpass? I’m not sure. I don’t remember the where, but I can’t forget the words.
Probably the reason I remember them is because they feel like my own M.O. when it comes to writing. For one thing, I think paradigms are camped out on the boring side. For another, the phrase reminds me that my writing ought to have a purpose, that being decorative or entertaining isn’t enough. And third, it’s a way to avoid redundancy. Writing takes work. It isn’t easy. So writing about what’s already been written, supporting the established and cemented—well, to me, that seems like a waste of effort and time.
Take origin stories, for instance. Whether the go-to is Genesis or Greek mythology, starring Eve or starring Pandora, the plot is the same. And, worse, the point of these two stories is to blame all our problems on women, to base our values and set up our social systems on this original, questionable premise: Women are at fault, they’re all suspect, and they can’t be trusted with decision-making.
If you’re someone who’s served by such a premise, if you’d rather have men be exclusively in charge, then that’s a neat trick, and it’s awfully self-serving.
But it isn’t a very good origin story, not if you want stories to be interesting. So instead, one time, when I decided to write my own, I started with two simple changes: Instead of Eden, I set mine in Washington state; instead of Adam coming first, I flipped things around and made that the story’s title:
In the Beginning Was a Girl
In the Old Songs about Washington, a girl woke up
with feathers instead of hair, woke up with silver eyes
and saw behind the moon, which was where the Future
tried to hide Himself ’til it was time.
The Future liked His secrets, lifting each one up like an oyster,
sometimes breaking one open to put in a pearl,
sometimes to swallow it whole, and in the Old Songs
this meant the girl possessed a power, and that she’d be tempted:
offered necklaces of moonstones, dresses of spun moonlight,
the wild permission of wolf packs to run with them and hunt,
anything the Future could think of to trade,
to get back His secrecy. But she refused.
What she wanted was a moment, a single piece of Him
to press against her skin, to hold and grow in her body,
and that was all. The Future agreed to this bargain.
Which is how, according to the Old Songs, we were born.
Or take Langston Hughes’s poem, “Theme for English B.” The speaker is so much braver and smarter than the essay topic assigned to him. He’s so reflective about differences and samenesses that I want this poem to be “true”; as in, factual. I want it to be what the collegiate Hughes turned in to his professor. It’s got a voice that’s the opposite of boring. It’s both well-written and purposeful. And it isn’t ever redundant, no matter how often I read it, and think, and feel. I would’ve said “Wow” out loud and given his poem an A.
What about the state of Florida, though—what grade would it slap down?
Not even an F, just a make-believe “Missing”; and, therefore, a score of zero.
Florida has enacted laws against the existence of poems like this one. Like it can legislate everyone’s eyes closed, and order that they un-eat apples, and lock understanding of others in a box, and then feel dominant and smug. Like it wants to pull question marks out by the roots and chuck them all in a landfill: “Oh, brave new world [exactly like the one that I’d prefer].”
Me, I prefer Wallace Stevens. I prefer what he wrote in the final section of his poem “Six Significant Landscapes”:
VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
Of course, those lines don’t match exactly. To be exact, they’d need to be irrationalists because banning books, and criminalizing curriculum, and requiring that teachers teach the upsides of slavery… none of that is rational at all. There’s no human reasoning there. Dominance, yes. A faulty paradigm, yes. But something we can say Amen to?
Absolutely no.
Rob Carney’s first collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens, is out now from Stormbird Press, and his new book of poems, Call and Response, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include Facts and Figures, The Last Tiger is Somewhere, The Book of Sharks, and 88 Maps.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by matmoe, courtesy Pixabay.
