Driving home at sundown this evening, coming west toward Venice Beach (where I live) from downtown Los Angeles, I was listening to the radio describe the growing devastation of the Santa Barbara fires, about an hour and a half to the north. The fires had begun yesterday and this afternoon exploded under the encouragement of the "sundowner" winds in excess of 50 miles per hour. As I neared the beach I could see the smoke that had blown down the coast and then, unexpectedly, I could begin to smell the acrid smoke itself. As I made my way through Santa Monica on my way home, it smelled as if the whole city was having a mesquite bar-b-que. It was funny and horrifying. It was amazing to me that even at this distance the smoke and ash were traveling down to remind us all of how close to disaster we constantly live. I know too from the experience of past fires in Southern California that, when I go out tomorrow morning, my car will be covered with white ash, the ash not only of trees and chapparal, but of houses also, and the tiny flakes of other people's lives.
I've lived in Southern California more than 20 years now, and fires, earthquakes, and mudslides have become part of the annual cycle of catastrophes offered up periodically by the news. Each region has its own particular menu of natural disasters, of course, and when I lived in the Mid-West it was the reliable tornadoes and twisters carving up the landscape that I found myself constantly awaiting. Yet today, after arriving home to flip on the news to watch the actual homes and hillsides in flames, I began to think about how routine it had begun to feel to me, how nearly prepared I have made myself over the years, for what would be the next catastrophe, the next death of a friend, the next collapse of some castle of personal hopes.
I often tell my students to trust their instincts when moving toward a new direction in their poems, to look with a combination of recklessness and discovery when searching out a new stylistic shift in their work. I tell them to "go where the heat is." In fact, I said it just today to one of my gifted undergraduates who had become restless in his recent work, and who had begun to look for a path away from his own habits and complacencies. "Go where the heat is," I told him a second time. He looked at me and nodded, then looked away. I could see he understood, but that he had a natural hesitance, a brief tremor of caution, as he began to consider what that actually might mean. He knew one shouldn't play with matches, with fire. He knew, once burned, twice shy. He knew, where there's smoke….
Well, I'm not sure what he knew, or what he thought, or if what I was imagining he was thinking was anything of the sort. But I sensed at that moment I might have been asking him to do something only he, in the end, could, should decide whether or not he wanted to do. Not everyone should be asked to step into the ring of fire, not everyone needs to believe that writing poetry is worth the price one sometimes pays. Not everyone needs to be a smoke jumper.
And, of course, a million poets find it possible to write poems without having to stand before those flames, and still to write beautifully, elegantly, and with conviction and power. So why would I sometimes ask my students to move toward their own interior flames, their own sweet and cosily stacked domestic logs, or full-out firestorms? Well, I suppose because I can only tell them the truths I feel I've found along the way, and that I've found that I believe, in my own experience, that writing poetry brings with it an undeniable expense. I know the bill arrives in different ways in different lives, of course; but the waiter (as in, The One Who Waits) shows up every time. And because I know that I believe poetry is an act of perpetual self-confrontation.
And because I believe to be tempered by fire is to be made stronger in time.