Streams

Sandra Hochman

Description

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Turner Publishing is proud to present a new edition of Sandra Hochman's treatise on poetry and songwriting, Streams.

First published by Prentice-Hall in 1978, Hochman's approach to teaching is just as unconventional and revelatory today as it was forty years ago.

From the Introduction by Hochman: This is a personal book that I hope will be like a friend. In a simple way I want to tell you some thoughts that I have about writing poetry and songs, and share with you some warm-up exercises for writing that can be used to limber up the mind the same way that dancers limber before a performance. Writing has always been for me a necessary experience— something that I feel compelled to do. If that feeling of wanting to write is inside of you—what I call the Necessary Angel wanting to speak—that writing can be a part of your life experience the way it is part of mine.

Sujets

• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Sandra Hochman

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 02 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683365334
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

STREAMS
STREAMS
L IFE -S ECRETS FOR W RITING P OEMS AND S ONGS
by
Sandra Hochman
Foreword by
Galt MacDermot
composer of Hair
TURNER
Poetry by Sandra Hochman from the following sources:
TheVaudeville Marriage by Sandra Hochman. Copyright 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966 by Sandra Hochman. The Couple originally appeared in The NewYorker . Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press.
Love Letters From Asia by Sandra Hochman. Copyright 1967, 1968 by Sandra Hochman.
The Inheritance and The Central Market originally appeared in The NewYorker . Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press.
Futures by Sandra Hochman. Copyright 1972,1973,1974 by Sandra Hochman. Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press.
Earthworks by Sandra Hochman. Copyright 1960, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 by Sandra Hochman. Copyright 1963 by Yale University. This Summer I Am Naked in California originally appeared in The NewYorker , The Spy originally appeared in Poetry. Reprinted by permission of The Viking Press.
Manhattan Pastures by Sandra Hochman. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
Turner Publishing Company
Nashville, Tennessee
New York, New York
www.turnerpublishing.com
Streams: Life Secrets for Writing Poems and Songs
Copyright 2017, 1978 by Sandra Hochman. All rights reserved.
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design:
Book design: Glen M. Edelstein
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hochman, Sandra, author.
Title: Streams : life-secrets for writing poems and songs / by Sandra Hochman.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Turner Publishing Company, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017002569 | ISBN 9781683365310 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Poetics. | Poetry--Authorship. | Popular music--Writing and publishing.
Classification: LCC PN1042 .H55 2017 | DDC 808.1--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002569
9781683365310
Printed in the United States of America
17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Rhythm and timing are everything to a poet.
I have used my own life to forge out my songs.
I dedicate this book to writers who, with joy and desperation,
cast their lives into their work.
I also dedicate this book to Robert Stewart,
who made this book come into my mind;
to Ariel, my daughter, a young poet;
to Marita, who created an evening of my work;
to Teddy, who helps me teach children to bring
their lives to writing.
Contents
F OREWORD by Galt MacDermot
I NTRODUCTION
C HAPTER O NE
The Opening of the Mind
C HAPTER T WO
Words
C HAPTER T HREE
Subjects for Poems
C HAPTER F OUR
Writing Songs
Foreword
by Galt MacDermot, composer of Hair
T HE ART OF WRITING SONGS for me, as a composer, is not a matter of collaboration. That comes later with the singing, staging, or general selling that is involved in today s setup. The actual work of composing music goes on in one head at a time, and ideally it will happen after a poet has gone through his or her own process of composing the poem. Which brings us to the subject of this book-the poet.
My experience with poetry is that it is the perfect inspiration for melody. There are others, like plain elation or gloominess or a dramatic situation. But for that clear unfolding, seemingly on its own, of a stream of delightful notes clustering around a beautiful rhythm, there is nothing like a page or so of works willed into place by a poet.
What makes one person a poet and another not is a mystery. In my school days of learning to compose I used to search through poetry anthologies. I suppose because they were all in there, they were all poets, but some made music and some just didn t. There is a sort of perfume that a poem exudes that triggers something in the brain that starts to jiggle the words around into something that if you catch it, can be a song.
Sandra Hochman is one of those people who put words together in such a way that when you read them you hear them with that extra part of your mind that deals with something other than information; in other words, she is a poet. Because she is also somewhat of an intellectual, a liberated woman, and a business genius, she writes very differently from anyone I ve worked with before and that is refreshing, but the real test of why you write with a person is not what they write about, but what their writing does when it goes into the candy-floss machine in the upper reaches of your mind. Does it start the wheels turning? Sandra s does.
STREAMS
Introduction
T HIS IS A PERSONAL BOOK that I hope will be like a friend. In a simple way I want to tell you some thoughts that I have about writing poetry and songs, and share with you some warm-up exercises for writing that can be used to limber up the mind the same way that dancers limber before a performance. Writing has always been for me a necessary experience-something that I feel compelled to do. If that feeling of wanting to write is inside of you-what I call the Necessary Angel wanting to speak-that writing can be a part of your life experience the way it is part of mine.
The book that is here is put together in a nonconventional way. Like the Book of Changes , you should be able to open it at any point and find some thought that can spark your own imagination. Since writing is a lonely art, think of this book as a friend whose encouragement can lead you into your own mind.
Nobody can tell anyone how to write. Writing often comes out of very mysterious sources. But I do believe that we can all be helped by learning from the experience of others. These thoughts or life-secrets may lead you to have the confidence to go deep down into your own writing self.
Finally, to me, writing is a way of entering. It is something that requires practice and almost daily renewal. It is an art that is never mastered but can give great challenge to the person writing. In the end, one is always one s own critic, one s own master, and no one can take that individual responsibility out of writing. It is a way of finally being alone with your own thoughts, fantasies, and angers, and making something the way a potter makes a pot.
In the Empty Room of Perfection
Love
Opened my eyes to the amulets
of trees-
Green leaves, falling miracles,
Falling, one by one,
On the street. In Japan we bought
White porcelain tipped into palm-eyes
And icicles, pots shaped like
Peach stones and glazed in sky blue.
We touched the rims of the world s glaze
But arrived without anything. Then
You gave me my own room without old things,
Without decorations, without paintings
That hang on the walls
Only to become new walls themselves, without
Shapes that interfere
With what I must be.
My dreams were unshaped and unpainted. I
Lived with the fantasy of the sea-shaped
Always on the verge of words. You-
Looked for emptiness the way lovers seek sleep,
Burned currencies
And seeds of your own beginnings. How easy
For us to change into firebirds, fly
Past history, oceans, striking against the sky
With our own new wings. Now-
Shall we return where we came from?
You be the brush that strikes.
And, burning inside, still burning, I ll
Live as the flaming kiln that shapes the pot.
T o me writing is learning how not to be afraid, how to open doors, how to imagine accidents on paper-learning how to be open to language. Open to experience. Open to nature, to faces, to the senses. Most of all open to one s own inner life. I really feel that I have been encouraged, that certain people have passed on to me their secrets. As a child, I learned from books. Later still, I met many artists. I met Camus. And Neruda. And Lowell. And Bellow. I met Elizabeth Bishop. And T. S. Eliot. And Sartre. I met composers that I learned from-Stravinsky, Shostakovich. I met writers who encouraged me-Ana s Nin, who taught me that writing is a generosity of the spirit, that involvement in the art of letters is the art of jousting with energy, loving others, and giving away all of oneself to others-in the celebration of life. It was Ana s who, in Paris, published my first book of poems with Lawrence Durrell-oddly enough without ever having read a poem that I had written. I know that you are a poet, she said. I can tell. And poets need their work published.
W hat made me a writer? My mother taking me to museums. Apple trees that I dreamed under. Songs that I learned. Girls in boarding school. Women in college. Old people that told me about their lives. Stranger after stranger and lover after lover. The Hudson River. Miami palm trees. Stones in Ossining. Fears in boarding school. Geraniums. Cats. Butterflies and moths. Streets in Paris. Odd people I slept with. The words in dictionaries. The words on the tongues of strangers. All of these people and places taught me to write.
L earning to fly a plane, learning to play tennis, learning to jog, learning t ai chi ch uan, learning to laugh, to sit in silence in the Sangenjaya gardens, learning to listen, to make a fool of myself, to give birth, to hang up the phone when necessary-all of these things have taught me about writing poetry. But none of them has taught me. I write because I have to write. I want to write. I love, perhaps am even obsessed with, the sounds and rhythms of words. For me this is a way of living. I know of no other way to make myself happy.
When did you begin writing?
People ask me that.
All that I know about poetry is locked up in my poems. I have written:
All that I wanted
When I once wanted everything
Was this
To be allowed to name things. To discover,
Like Noah, the name of each vegetable,
To