Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/

Writing Practice, not Practice Writing

Eli Goldblatt

Abstract: The article addresses the multifaceted concept of practice as it relates to writing, drawing parallels to various domains such as sports, music, and professional life. Through reflections on the dichotomy between practice and performance exemplified by Allen Iverson’s famous quote, Goldblatt explores how writing is perceived and approached as a practice. He highlights the diverse ways in which writing is conceptualized, from a social practice embedded in cultural norms to a spiritual endeavor akin to Zen meditation. Ultimately, Goldblatt argues for a holistic understanding of writing practice that encompasses both the craft and the lived experience of the writer.

We talking about practice. Not a game. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it’s my last. Not the game. We talking about practice, man.

— Allen Iverson, 1999

Allen Iverson had a problem with practice, or at least with the criticism that he didn’t put enough effort into practices for the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team that he led to the NBA finals in the 2000-01 season. For him, the game was everything, but practice was apparently a routine rehearsal that just didn’t interest him much. Too little at stake, maybe, or too much a casual, friendly gathering. Although coaches and managers preach that the way you play in practice dictates the way you play in the game, some athletes at every level don’t quite accept the logic. A game forces the mind fully into the present in a way no rehearsal can.

But what is “practice,” and how can we apply both the noun and the verb to writing (a noun generated from a verb, a verb vibrating within the noun)? Many scholars and teachers in Writing Studies will refer to writing as a “practice.” Charles Bazerman, for example, uses practice in his introduction to What Writing Does and How it Does It: “To understand writing, we need to explore the practices that people engage in to produce texts as well as the ways that writing practices gain their meanings and functions as dynamic elements of specific settings” (2). This use of the term is a nod to literacy theorists who portray composing as a “social practice,” an activity deeply embedded within cultural norms and expectations, lines of communication and hierarchies of power, networks of relationships fraught with danger and occasionally offering rewards. Journalists and ghostwriters, embedded as they are in the daily job of composing, might be more inclined to use practice to refer to the daily hard work of the writer banging out texts, reworking her notes, or tinkering with recalcitrant sentences as night turns into day.

I suspect there are more than a few English teachers today who still see school as the place for practice writing in the sense Iverson loathed the word, getting ready for “real” writing by drilling and rehashing what one ought to say in the way one ought to say it. What is at stake in such a rehearsal for life after the classroom is a grade based on the effort to replicate an exemplar model in a circumscribed mode, such as Description, Analysis, or Argument, as defined by a particular textbook or school district standard. When teachers ask students to write for a prescribed form just to demonstrate they know the form, James Britton called this function a “dummy run” (104–5). Iverson might concur.

Practice is, of course, used in many other ways as well. Doctors, lawyers, dentists, chiropractors, therapists and other professionals refer to their work, both the doing of the art and the organization of their business, as a practice. Musicians, however, regard practice differently. Kids learning their instrument often resent practice as a chore that keeps them from playing outside with their friends, but, if they are to grow into their music, they must find a way to embrace regular engagement with their art. Elite musicians refer to practice with something close to reverence. Pianist Daniel Barenboim, for example, says he determines how long to practice by the quality of his attention: “I never play a single note when my concentration is no longer at its height, for to do so would be to fall into the trap of playing mechanically.” The jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker told Paul Desmond in a 1954 interview that “the neighbors threatened to ask my mother to move once when we were living out West. She said I was driving them crazy with the horn. I used to put in at least 11 to 15 hours a day.” The radio presenter Robert Krulwich notes that in his interviews with musicians “some players, like drummer Allison Miller, told me that sometimes they’ll go into a practice session with no other goal beyond getting into that Flow state, or a meditative state.” Artists refer to an “art practice” that they struggle to maintain, more often than not, by spending long hours a week bussing tables or catering so they may liberate precious time in the studio. Like musicians, artists practice in their studios with a similarly open and intense concentration. For example, Richard Carter recounts that the artist Romare Bearden, working in a print workshop in 1985, listened as a recording by drummer Max Roach and trumpeter Clifford Brown came over the radio. “And I just took a brush and painted the sounds, the color rhythms, and the silences….” He gave the print that resulted to Roach.

Readers could doubtless multiply these usages, but the point is that such practices involve years of training, sustained effort, time management, relentless focus, and the virtue described in Yiddish as “Sitzfleish,” the ability to sit for hour upon hour on your butt in order to accomplish some scholarly project. In these instances, the game IS the practice, the learning is the doing, because every individual case proves both the virtue of previous experience and the seeds of greater accomplishment.

We are perhaps getting closer to writing as experienced by individual practitioners. Some scholars have described writing in terms of Taoism (Combs) or Buddhism (Yagelski), and popular writing guides like Natalie Goldberg often frame writing as a spiritual practice akin to Zen. An iconic story about Buddhist intentional habits of mind appears in this version from the Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia:

Someone asked a Zen Master, “How do you practice Zen?”

The master said, “When you are hungry, eat; when you are tired, sleep.”

“Isn’t that what everyone does anyway?”

The master replied, “No, No. Most people entertains a thousand desires when they eat and scheme over a thousand plans when they sleep.”

The scholar and translator of ancient Chinese poetry David Hinton glosses the term “practice” in both the arts and meditation:

This is most clearly seen in the arts: calligraphers, poets, and painters aspired to create with the selfless spontaneity of a natural force, and the elements out of which they crafted their artistic visions were primarily aspects of wilderness: rivers and mountains, fields and gardens. It can also be seen, for instance, in the way Chinese intellectuals would sip wine as a way of clarifying awareness of the ten thousand things by dissolving the separation between subject and object, or tea as a way of heightening that awareness, practices that ideally took place outdoors or in an architectural space that was a kind of eye-space, its open walls creating an emptiness that contained the world around it. (Wang Wei xiv-xv)

In Taoism, and later Ch’an Buddhism and its Japanese successor Zen, meditative methods mediate and merge external reality with inner consciousness, accepting the fullness of the perceived world as well as the profound Absence from which that fullness constantly emerges and returns. Writers such as Wang Wei and others in the Chinese literary tradition known as “Rivers and Mountains” [1] practice their art in the same spirit as they sip their tea or contemplate vast landscapes.

We see Wang Wei composing the meditative moment in the fifth part of his famous “Wheel-Rim River” series, the often-translated poem David Hinton calls “Deer Park”:

No one see. Among empty mountains,
hints of drifting voice, faint, no more.

Entering these deep woods, late sunlight
flares on green moss again, and rises. (40)

The poet is not himself mentioned in the poem (other translators employ a speaker, but the Chinese original does not [2], and the main protagonist is a beam of late sunlight acting upon the dramatic stage of a deep forest floor. Writing draws both poet and reader into an instantaneous and timeless enactment of consciousness recognizing breath, the perceived world glimpsed within mountains simultaneously imposing and empty. Such Taoist and Buddhist immersion in the moment has been much admired by a wide variety of poets in the American tradition from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Gary Snyder. Though I could not imitate Wang Wei, I find myself drawn since the pandemic to attitudes modeled by him and others in the ancient Chinese literary tradition.

The Taoist orientation is not where I started my own poetic practice, although I loved Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poets when I first encountered his collection Cathay in college. As I have recounted in my literacy narrative Writing Home, my influences once I left high school were Modernist poets like Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and HD, who were no longer alive or soon to be gone. The poets who came of age in the 1950’s and 60’s— especially those associated with Black Mountain, such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov—indicated to me in poems and essays how I might make a life with poems. They taught that poetry demanded commitment, could be an honorable if dangerous adult pursuit, and promised both great joy as well as a good deal of trouble. Frank O’Hara and Anne Sexton showed that one could be comic and casual as well as deathly serious while Sonia Sanchez and Adrienne Rich demonstrated that living required political engagement from which poems could arise among the bitterest ashes. Lorine Niedecker and Robert Hayden modeled a poetic that was at once humble and courageous, precise in wording and wide in the narrowest straits. As I learned about the craft and art from all these hands and more, my attention was always on practice: not just how one might write verse others wanted to read, but how poems could form a path and guide the eye in finding what was there to see.

I don’t mean I copied their lifestyles—hard poet-drinkers like Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell or John Berryman didn’t encourage long life or stable relationships—and I didn’t look to poets for advice on making a living. I tried to follow Dr. Williams into medicine but found that practice didn’t afford me enough time to think and feel and listen without being overcome by data and procedures and diagnoses. Often I simply felt bewildered or bedeviled by doubts, but usually I hid my confusion (even from myself) with the stumbling determination that I would find my way. The first Jewish poet I came to know, George Oppen, helped me immensely in accepting that one could be Jewish (though not particularly religious) and still write resonant American verse. The poet I studied with in college, A.R. Ammons, showed me in his informal and rambling way that one could have high ambition and not wreck his life. Ammons exuded an easy compassion, never looking down on others even if they didn’t care about poetry. I probably learned still more from others who were not poets: friends and family and lovers, artists and musicians, people I encountered in the neighborhoods of Philadelphia, co-workers I met on many jobs. In my generation, Vietnam, Civil Rights, Stonewall, and the Women’s Movement made it impossible to imagine practice as untroubled by the imperative for justice.

As I moved from laboring work into high school teaching and then graduate school, I began to develop what I see now as a double consciousness about writing. I wrote and read for my chosen occupation, learning the trade of argumentation and analysis. [3] Meanwhile, I maintained another thread I called the poem-life. I stole time for poetry, attended readings and sent out my work for publication when I could. For many years I didn’t believe these two tracks could cross. Most people who knew me in composition and rhetoric didn’t know I wrote poems while most of my poetry friends and acquaintances knew little about what I did in my academic life. I seldom tried to bring the two together until 2013, when a semester teaching in Rome and away from America challenged this doubleness: my internal split reinforced the destructive separation of literacy from literature that plays out to no good effect in English departments. I had accepted in practice an opposition I knew to be false. As my active career in universities wound down, I felt the lie still burning. I was never two writers, but I wasn’t allowing myself to accept what I knew. No matter what you compose, writing is a practice.

I offer the following four poems in the context of this issue of Composition Forum not to “bridge a divide” but as a small gesture toward my own wholeness. Like Wang Wei, I have retired—rivers and mountains lay before me while court life has left its mark. Like his contemporary Tu Fu, I recognize destruction and disease in my world as certainly as old beech trees are dying in the wild Wissahickon Creek Park near my home. Multiple genres demand diverse rhetorical strategies under distinct situations, of course, but the writer writes at a desk, a café, a train station always balancing external and internal worlds: invention with convention, novelty with axiom, neologism with etymology, urgency with audience. At best in a first-year writing class or a creative writing seminar, teachers establish an environment for students to develop their own practice, which means forging a sustaining method of producing text despite (or because of) demon doubts, maintaining a flexible mind despite institutional calls for standardized language. In a very different but not unrelated key, the Dalai Lama says that “without decisively understanding that the end of suffering is possible, you might consider practice of this path just a fruitless hardship” (32). A writer must cultivate self-compassion while building discipline, operating within the limits of time on task and tempering any ambition for the final product. You may love what you write but know it is never enough.

These poems, all taken from a new chapbook called Wissahickon Creek: Walks & Dreams, grew from the pandemic isolation. My wife and I were walking in our neighborhood and the Wissahickon every morning, working in our studios every afternoon, cooking and dreaming at home every night. The poems in that collection are meditations, elegies, breadcrumbs on the trail. Like everyone else at the time, we could see friends and family only through Zoom and FaceTime. People were dying alone in hospitals. Large and mostly peaceful gatherings protested against racial injustice, while right-wing political discourse grew nastier and more involuted by fantasy. I agree with Allen Iverson. The only practice that matters is the one rooted in the game we play and die for each day.

Four Poems

Weathered Bench

At the end of Woodbrook, post & pole
fencing opens to a loop trail under
beech & maple that leads to a spot
above a creek littered with beer cans.
Fallen trees caught in the forks of leafless
storm survivors cross over my head &
bent branches complicate the white
sky. I stand beside a weathered bench
overlooking the weak brook—it’s too
cold to sit this afternoon—wondering

how long Wendy’s mother can live
alone, denying her need for help or
comfort. Neighbors walk their dogs here
mornings & evenings but I’m by myself
today. Even the spotted lantern flies
we saw in summer, massed congregants
on the body of two sweetgums along
the path, are gone now. They left
only black sooty mold at the roots
& eggs that will hatch in the spring.

Andorra Meadow

Mid-morning late October, we wish a happy
Halloween to masked walkers & their costumed
dogs who pass us on the trail. Sun shines
but doesn’t warm the air. Election threats,

police murder, lost jobs like foul smoke
after fire over the park but here sparrows
still shift from cherry sapling to pioneer
beech above grasses that stand or lie flat,

marking storms & bad dreams that rolled
thru last week. An abandoned bluebird box
alone in the meadow recalls summer’s heat
& plenty. Now black walnuts gnawed open

litter the ground, soon to be bleached by
freezing rain. As we near the road we hear
hammers at work on new condos. We
turn away, seeking cold shade under

tattered catalpas at the meadow’s edge.
You & I remember what we try
to forget at the margins. Dry yellow
maple leaves against damp soil imprint

afterimages when I blink but I must
watch my step over roots & jutting stone
on the path down to the drive where
runners gather for afternoon practice.

One morning

One morning, only this was left from a dream:
I was approaching our town courthouse to
postpone a hearing scheduled for later that
afternoon when I heard a dreadful screech.
I looked up at the courthouse’s formal granite
facade & saw, emerging from a hole in the
bottom corner of the pediment, first a rat’s
screaming head & then a grey cat shaking
the rat’s body from side to side so violently

guts & brains showered the pavement below.
As people gaped on the street, the cat leapt
from the cornice & landed with a thump on
the roof of a dark blue sedan parked beside
me, the rat still screaming but clearly losing
spirit. Scrambling down the hood of the car,
the cat jumped into the air & turned into an
owl, the rat now limp & secure in its claws.
The bird flew with immense wings down

the avenue & away. I walked up the stairs
to the entrance, stepping carefully around
bits of rat before the double glass doors
that led to court offices.

At Carpenter’s Woods

As we stepped down the path from root
     to rock edge, a bare trickle in the creek
flowed to meet the stream that joins
     the Wissahickon further on. We sat
on a bench beneath a Japanese maple,
     not noticing at first the plaque for
Blaine, our son’s friend gunned down
     years ago on a corner because he looked
like another dark-skinned teen a gang
     wanted dead. We watched the stream,
children playing on a bridge nearby,
     shade & haze hiding early heat, catbird
& red-eyed vireo singing hieroglyphics.

Note: Writing Practice, Not Practice Writing appeared originally in Goldblatt’s Alone with Each Other: Literacy and Literature Intertwined (Peter Lang, 2024). It is reprinted here by permission from Peter Lang Publishing Inc.

Notes

[1] See Hinton’s anthology Mountain Home.

[2] See Weinberger for an exhaustive and entertaining review of more than 20 translations of this poem.

[3] As Agatha Christie’s biographer Lucy Worsley said of Christie’s initial experimentation in becoming a mystery writer: “One is a tradesman,” she explained, “in a good honest trade… you must submit to the discipline of form” (Hughes 3).

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles and Paul Prior, editors. What Writing Does and How it Does It. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004.

Britton, James et al. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). MacMillan, 1975.

Carter, Richard, ed. The Art of Romare Bearden. Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003. https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/Education/learning-resources/teaching-packets/pdfs/bearden-tchpk.pdf.

Combs, Steven. The Dao of Rhetoric. SUNY P, 2005.

Dalai Lama. How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life. Translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Atria Books, 2002.

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. 2nd edition, Shambhala, 2005.

Goldblatt, Eli. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography. Southern Illinois UP, 2012.

———. Wissahickon Creek: Walks & Dreams. Moonstone P, 2022.

Harnum, Jonathan. Finding a Flow in Practice: Glenn Gould. The Practice of Practice. Sol Ut P, 2014, https://thepracticeofpractice.com/2016/02/16/finding-flow-in-practice-glenn-gould/.

Hinton, David, editor and translator. Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. Counterpoint, 2002.

Hughes, Kathryn. Much Ado about Miss Marple. Times Literary Supplement, 9 Sept. 2022, p. 3.

Parker, Charlie, and Paul Desmond. Paul Desmond Interviews Charlie Parker. 1954. Bob Reynolds Music, n.d., https://bobreynoldsmusic.com/paul-desmond-charlie-parker/.

Pound, Ezra. Personae: Collected Shorter Poems. New Directions, 1971.

Tu Fu. The Selected Poems of Tu Fu. Translated by David Hinton, New Directions, 1989.

Wang Wei. The Selected Poems of Wang Wei. Translated by David Hinton, New Directions, 2006.

Weinberger, Eliot. 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with more ways). New Directions, 2016.

Yagelski, Robert. Writing as a Way of Being. Hampton P, 2011.