The Importance of Sitting Still, and Other Obvious Realizations about Literature and Life

I currently am in New Haven to conduct archival work for my senior honors thesis on Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), whose correspondence, manuscripts, drafts, and all other related, original material is stored at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript library. As I attempted to explain my thesis to Jane, the Boarding House owner, I felt a surge of excitement and another swell of responsibility. But I tainted this feeling when I picked up my phone from the counter top and began to text. I noticed Jane watching me and gave the knee-jerk response of “Oh, just being a typical millennial right now, on my phone….”

This comment launched Jane into a near tirade against cell phones. She lambasted the disrespect that younger colleagues show her at meetings as they scroll through their phones (“just scrolling, not even doing anything, just passing the time!”) as she tries to give tourism presentations. I make a point to never text during class. But I had never given much thought about how much my peers and I struggle with this same type of disengagement outside of school. Yes, when I find a spare moment during the day, I do check my phone. It can be hard to sit still, to look up, to not clutch that little device in my hand at all times. After my chat with Jane, I made a mental note to check my phone less.

The next day, I found the library and completed my registration. I was guided past the security guard and into the reading room and opened my first folder from my first box of material. I will spare you the pages that I could write about the feeling of holding something H.D. held, her handwriting, the markings and corrections she made, and the way that this has already gotten my head racing with thoughts and ideas. To summarize: I feel like I’ve been more productive and in many more ways than I expected.

I found this magic through focus. Researchers are permitted to use cell phones in the reading room, but after mine lit up a few times, distracting me, I wanted nothing to do with it. I realized early on that when I sat still and focused on the papers I went back in time. I thought I had felt mature as I completed normal adult tasks of navigating a big city, but the real feeling of maturity has hit me there, in the reading room, as I was humbled by the ancient documents in front of me, as I traced H.D.’s thoughts with my eyes and hands.

I want to take that sense of wonder stillness with me in my pocket wherever I go. I might have to start turning off my cell phone when I read outside of a high security room. I don’t wish to underwrite the huge, positive impact that technology has had on the world, including the literary world. But there’s so much room for beauty and connection and genuine feeling outside of my smartphone. And this odd combination of stillness and awakening and human connection is, after all, the same feeling that I get from a good poem. Is it possible that the more sucked into our phones we become, the less we will be able to understand and experience poetry? What, dear reader, do you think?

I can’t stop wondering about the relationships between words, sounds, and physical response. This broad interest evolved from recent, specific observations in my daily life. For instance: I have a friend who mumbles to herself when she reads. The man I sat next to in a coffee shop today drummed his fingers on the table incessantly as he read his New Yorker. Some people prefer hair twirling or beard stroking or a classic frown-and-fist-clench while reading, and one’s reaction clearly depends upon the topic he or she is absorbed in.

Personally, I’ve noticed that when I read, or write by hand, I often tilt my head dramatically to the right. Sometimes, I place my palm on the back of my neck. Most often, these physical responses are manifestations of intense concentration, which I deeply enjoy (which probably accounts for the fact that I rarely move my hand or un-tilt my head, preferring to bask in my oddness rather than fight it). I don’t think that my hand has ever cramped quite in the way it does when I’m taking a timed pop quiz on the night’s reading, frantically trying to prove that I have scraped off an A-worthy tip of the iceberg.

I’m far from the only one musing about how our brains work. I know that there are entire academic fields devoted solely to the relationship between reading and behavior. People write articles, dissertations, and even book-length studies detailing the connection between brains and bodies. And cognitive scientists have proved that reading stimulates certain areas of the brain that engage our emotional and intellectual abilities.

So who am I to try and figure out these relationships out in a mere blog post? I can certainly lay out how they play out in my own life—I’m thinking about poetry specifically. For example, while I am reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” words and rhythms combine to stimulate my mind in ways that I think are unique to poetry. For example, the “shantih shantih shantih” at the end of the poem almost appears like a gong in my brain. These words moved me before I even knew what they meant. Does this impact derive from the words themselves, or is there some deeper undercurrent in the poem that sweeps me up?

I’ve had a similar hypnotic experience at poetry readings. A few weeks ago, I went to a public reading where Isabella Martin, a fellow Shenandoah intern, read a few of her poems. This reading was the first time I had encountered Isabella’s poems, but in the few minutes that she read, some combination of her voice and the words caught my attention and held it. While she read, rather than manifesting my brain’s frantic attempt to understand her poem in some bizarre pose, I was stilled completely. I think that the mark of a good poem is its ability to still someone in this way—like Eliot’s shantihs, Isabella’s poem, while I hadn’t had the time to sit down, read, and digest it, had a natural impact.

Around the same time as Isabella’s reading, Professor John Melillo from the University of Arizona came to visit my modern American poetry class. He presented us with a recording of the final section of “The Waste Land” without spoken words. Melillo removed Eliot’s rumbling growl and left solely the intonations of Eliot’s voice. Straight sound. There was a decent bit of static overlay, but the whistling whisper pendulum for each “shantih” was enough to make me widen my eyes and grin. I felt the static shantih move through me.

I don’t know why I froze during Isabella’s reading or why I smiled during Eliot’s sound waves. But I guess that’s the point of this post. There is some instinct inside us that seeks out the purity of these words and sounds and latches onto them. Despite metaphorical and literal static, there is a deep, powerful current beneath poetic words that might be just as important as the words themselves. And that’s a power that I don’t need to fully understand to appreciate. For now, I’m just glad that it exists.

The submission period for this year’s GRAYBEAL-GOWEN PRIZE has arrived and runs till November 15.

Click the following link to view the flyer for more information: Graybeal-Gowen Flyer

The most recent Nobel Prize for Literature was just awarded to Alice Munro, a Canadian author of several collections of short stories – 15 total since her first was published in 1968. Interestingly, unlike most other fiction writers who have won a Nobel Prize for Literature, Munro has never released a novel. In an interview with the New York Times, Munro discusses the importance of receiving the Nobel despite this fact. 

“I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel,” she told the Times.

Munro is the first author to win the prize for a lifetime of work that revolves entirely around short stories. Other recipients often had short stories in their portfolios, but their bodies of work revolved instead around their novels or, for some, their poems. For whatever reason, short stories have long been regarded as the novel’s less-sophisticated younger cousin. Getting a collection of short stories published does not often carry the same kind of prestige as doing the same with a full-length novel.

Of course, here at Shenandoah, we pride ourselves on the publication of several high-quality short stories every year. They are an integral part of the magazine’s content, and we typically publish upwards of four in every issue, as well as quite a few pieces of flash fiction. There is obviously something about a great short piece that makes it just as relevant in the literary world as any novel.

Short stories are, as the name implies, shorter than novel-length works. This brevity can result in a hyper-concentration of the most desirable attributes of any story, whether it be novel-length or shorter. When an author sets out with the intention to write a short story, they are tasked with making the reader care about his or her characters and the outcome of the story in much less than a quarter of the length novelists have to work with. Because of this, excellent dialogue, description, characterization, and plot all unfold rapidly before the reader’s eyes. Too often longer works can get bogged down with unnecessary padding that adds little to the plot or character development. Short stories with the same problem are easily identified as weak and quickly passed over for something better.

I agree with Munro: people should stand up and take notice of short stories and their authors. It’s time we stopped overlooking this integral piece of literature and begin to accord it the respect it deserves as a form. After all, if poems can be highly literary pieces of work in fewer than ten lines, then why write off the short story? –Sam O’Dell

Some poets from the modernist movement seem determined to make me feel as uneducated as possible while reading their work. Of course, this was hardly their intent when they sat down ninety-some-odd years ago to write the poems that I’ve been reading lately. H.D. did not intend to slight me while casually dropping “goddess” into a poem, assuming that I, her reader, could easily infer what goddess she was talking about in the third section of “Fragment 68”. (Most likely Aphrodite, according to my anthology’s footnote.)

Now, whether or not Ezra Pound intended to make others feel less intelligent while pulling obscure outside references into his poems and essays is up for debate. The guy seems the type who may have enjoyed making sure others knew he was smarter than they were. Still, he probably expected at least some of his references to be understood by his readers, and, well…let’s just say I at least got the “winged shoe” one.

As I read these poems, reference after reference flies past me. You can only read so many footnotes before you begin to wonder, “is it me?” I think most of my peers are in the same boat, though. Most of us have not studied a classical language, like Latin or Greek. Most of us can probably count the number of gods, goddesses, and other mythological beings we’re deeply familiar with on both hands. And all that ancient and medieval geography? We’re not experts, to say the least. Certainly there are some people my age with all the knowledge I just listed and more but it’s not as common as it once was.

There are positives and negatives to this sort of reading experience. While I may leave these poems feeling as if they were meant for someone with more background information than I possess, I also learn things. Sure, I may not retain the information of every footnote I read, but some of it has stayed with me. No matter how many footnotes I read, though, I know I am never likely to achieve a level of knowledge that would allow me to ignore those footnotes in the first place.

I think that’s okay, though. No one can know everything, after all. Even when I don’t completely understand a reference a poem is making, I can go on to enjoy the rest of what the author is saying and then come back to the reference I don’t understand and try to make sense of it. In some ways the allusions an author makes are little windows into the past, allowing me a glimpse into the mindsets of people long gone. That brief little transportation into the past is definitely worth reading a few footnotes.

– Sam O’Dell

Last year I took several classes focused on Southern literature and struggled the most to keep up with the books we read by Faulkner.  His use of run-on sentences and lengthy descriptions kept me scrambling to remember what the subject of the sentence had been.  These sentences were additionally made difficult by the stream of consciousness method he is perhaps most famous for using in The Sound and the Fury (1929).  Faulkner was the first author I had read who had used the stream of consciousness method, also referred to as interior monologue, in which the thoughts and thought processes of a character are extensively detailed and written to give the reader perspective into of character’s mind. Having finished last year feeling comfortable with the most difficult literature I had ever experienced, I was not prepared to face the difficulty of an author preceding Faulkner who had also used stream of consciousness in a novel.

This term, I am taking a class called Studies in British Fiction Since 1900.  With two books under my belt, Elizabeth Bowen’s Heat of the Day (1948) and Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907), I came into my third week of school ready to tackle Virginia Woolf’s acclaimed novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925).  I had been forewarned that Woolf used the stream of consciousness technique but I wasn’t worried.  After all, hadn’t I just spent an entire year studying Faulkner, a frequent employer of the method?  I’ve got to say, Virginia, I didn’t see you coming.

Upon opening Mrs. Dalloway, I immediately realized that it is brimming with interior monologue.  Woolf deftly jumps from the mind of character to character, some of which never even cross paths in the novel.  In a scene describing an airplane writing an advertisement for toffee in the sky, Woolf gives the reader insight into the minds of at least three different people witnessing the same event from various places around the Westminster area of London.  I was prepared for this.  Reading Faulkner had taught me to pay close attention to the subject of every sentence, and I found myself able to track these mind-jumps rather well, although I did occasionally have to look back to the beginning of some sentences to reestablish whose perspective I was currently in.

What makes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway so difficult to read is not this constant changing of character perspectives, but rather the lack of definitive breaks.  Within the book, which is around 190 pages depending on the edition and formatting, Woolf never breaks up the plot with chapters.  While Faulkner is difficult, he at least adheres to some sort of structure, often creating different sections for each individual character.  Woolf is not so kind.  The book reads from beginning to end with no obvious breaking point, as if the entire novel is abiding by the stream of consciousness technique and continuing on without stopping.  In a way, it is almost as if Mrs. Dalloway has a mind of its own. 

Regardless of the challenge involved, Mrs. Dalloway is a wonderful example of how an author can utilize stream of consciousness to give the reader an intimate look into the lives of the characters involved.  While I never thought I would pick up a book that would stylistically challenge me more than a book by William Faulkner, I’ve got to hand it to Virginia Woolf, she has Faulkner beat.

– Katie Toomb