Joel.Simone

Rob recently provided artistic feedback following an essay I wrote several years ago, “His Name is Luke.” His feedback is applicable beyond the essay itself, and I will consider it in the creation of The Doorway. Here is his letter:

Hi Joel, I would counsel consistent work at the tasks you set yourself. Step by step. Be an artist at least once a day. Don’t rush. Don’t think ahead. Stay in the moment. In your work, particularly in your writing, stay simple. Don’t embellish. Let each word work for you. Resist the impulse to be “poetic.” The poetry is there in the simplicity of honest expression. Here are some thoughts that might help you do this.

1. Wordsworth says that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. This means that your feelings need to settle in and locate themselves, a bit like paint drying, but never quite, for the best work to happen. And then, but not before, you set out to find the conditions for expression. So, the heat of the moment, in this concept, is not the ideal starting point. It’s later, when the whole experience may coalesce and provide fuller, more intriguing means.
2. Eliot talks about the “objective correlative”. This is seeking material, or objective means, objects, sensations to convey intimate, powerful, or tender emotion. So, for example, you might not say, “I love you” but rather, “the tree trunk bent and scraped my heart from its chest”. The first is general and customary. The other is metaphoric, using concrete elements to allow the audience unexpected associations on the way to experiencing something about love. You used Luke in this way in your letter to Jenette, but you might have done so more simply, matter of factly, in order to evoke a more transcendent effect. These things can’t be “worked for”. They have to be so simple they appear as Yeats said, no more than “a moment’s thought”: something that seemingly wrote itself with no intention of “impressing” or “decorating.” Of course you do work, sometimes endlessly, but the end result must be simple as a kiss.
3. In Lee Strasberg’s “affective memory” exercises designed to help players feel a specific emotion and therefore be able to express it, he relaxes a player and then leads him back to a former time in his life when he actually experienced the desired emotion. But he doesn’t ask that the emotion be remembered. He asks for the physical circumstances: the player narrates the exact spot where the emotion occurred. He tries to remember the furniture in the room. Colors. The temperature. Windows. Light coming through them. Everything very specific and concrete. And then the sensory memory of the physical conditions of the moment of emotion, produces the wanted feeling. You can see the psychology of this. If you “try” to feel something you jinx the feeling. You have to know how to trigger the conditions which will lead you to it.

These are some thoughts I’ve found useful. Let me know, over time, if they’re helpful to you.

Stay strong. Take aim.

Rob