Connect the Dots Keynote Address by Poet Earl S. Braggs

 

Let us for a moment concern ourselves with the dots. Let us for a moment see the dots as stars in a Heavenly clear winter sky. Let it be the eleventh night in the month of December, a fortnight from Christmas Day.

In our own individual way, let us look up to the night sky and form our own constellation. Place the stars in a pattern of your own design.

It is now yours. You own it. Now let us connect our lives to the dots, to the stars.

Dots by their own admission are non illuminated points. Let us give light to the darkness.

The intensity of a star’s illumination determines for us its nature in relationship to other stars.

So make your contribution, your constellation bright so that the other stars will grow jealous of the way you designed your sky.

Art is light. Art is the only thing that can take a broken heart and turn it into a beautiful love song.

 

I am going to be talking to you this morning about the art of writing because that’s what I know, but the road I take, the path I choose is a course applicable to the art of all things.

My intent this morning is simple. I want to connect you to the dots as we connect the dots to each other.

 

Audience, my dear audience, I’m going to ask from you, a bit of kindness

this morning. The voices that you will hear will be and not be mine own, for

they will be the voices of the dead and the voices of the living. They will be

voices of Walt Whitman, Phil Levine, Jack Kerouac, Elizabeth Bishop,

Dylan Thomas, Margaret Atwood, Picasso, Richard Hugo, Virginia Woolf

and others.

 

If what I say is funny, I want you to laugh.

If what I say is sad, I want you to cry.

 

If it’s death, I want you to die with me.

 

“Dying is an art like anything else.”

 

When Sylvia Plath’s father died, she said, “I will never speak to God again.”

 

As writers, as painters, as photo picture makers, when the big moment comes

one page, one canvas, one frame is never enough to capture the sounds and the colors I hear, you hear at night when all is quiet and the sweet South city of Chattanooga is asleep on the very edge of your single bed.

 

As writers, as painters, as poets, as people, we all sleep alone; we all tell stories

in our sleep. It like Virginia Woolf said, “We all need a room of our own.”

 

And yes, I love the smells and colors of vibrant paint, but it’s the sounds of

words that intrigue me now. Yet no sound of mine will ever portray the company

I keep. I keep writing the next word, the next line, the next page. I know we must

question the dialogue between daytime drama and dreams. I know we must

question the dialogue between love and life.

 

An artist lives and an artist dies. “Dying is an art like anything else.”

 

But live we must. Live on and face what you feel instead of what you think you

should feel. Never allow anyone to tell you how, why and when you should feel.

 

A cloud covered moon on a night of no rain is nothing to be sad about. Live on

into your own mornings of bright and brilliance sunrise and surprise.

 

We are writing against the clock of life and the town clock is burning down the

city one block at a time. Writing is fire and writing is smoke. Writing is the flames

we feel in our souls. When the big moment comes, one page is never enough to

contain the expanded poetic space of your spirit, of my spirit.

 

Take me, I used to be a drinking fountain at a Greyhound bus station in Toledo,

Ohio. 1970, “Four dead in Ohio,” Kent State University, Neil “Crazy Horse” Young

singing on my radio in black and white. Then the music stopped. And now I don’t

drink water anymore. I buy jugs from the white section of the grocery store, and

as for the fruit I now eat from the Negro section of my hometown, “It has no taste

at all.”

 

I, I can not promise you much. I merely give to you the poetic images I know.

“Do I sound skeptical, then let me sound skeptical. Until your name is placed

on the list, you do not exist.” It’s as simple and as complicated as that. You

choose. Only you can connect yourself to the dots. Understand, There are no

landlords and we are all farmers bent with intent to cultivate the soils of life.

 

 

Every day is spring, planting season. Plant the seeds that you take from the bag

of seed. Do not let them spill to the earth, place them with love into the earth.

Work hard because hard work will test the sincerity of wanting to be a writer,

a painter, a person.

 

Remember the third rail is the one that’s most haunting, most threatening, but

that the one you must walk. You must walk it alone, you must walk it all alone.

I can not be the one to go with you. You must go with yourself.

 

In your blackest night you must be able to see like a black cat on a black and

bleak afternoon on the back porch of your grandmama’s house. Writing is hard

work, living is hard work. Art is hard.

 

It’s like farming, there is a relationship between the seed and the harvest.

Connect the dots.

There is a relationship between the moon and the slow movement of tides.

Connect the dots.

 

The night I came, I danced a circle of snakes and was not afraid. Yes and just

When I thought I could stand it no longer, Friday comes wearing new, soft shoes.

So take off the old and relax a bit, Monday will be here soon. Monday is the strangest of all days. But it’s the strangeness that calls to you as clear as your first name, “Come here,” and you go because it’s the strangeness that you want to be next to, sitting in the next chair in a room with no walls.

 

It’s the strangeness that we need to the be next to, the strangeness in the blonde

woman’s blond eyes, the strangeness in that dark hallway daring you to come inside, the stranger on the city bus seated in the very last seat in the very last row.

It’s the contrast between the knowns and the unknowns. “Nothing exist without

contrast.” Learn to see this in its purest sense.

 

So here we are making up stories and coloring our stories with the poetic of paint.

Remember the first day? I don’t remember what day of the week it was. Perhaps

it matters not when all days look and feel the same. What I was wearing don’t count

for much either. I only know that I was the stranger wearing dead people’s clothes

because I shop at the goodwill part of town. Perhaps you do also, only no one ever

told you what knob to pull for your cigarettes of inspiration, so you walk on into

your strange fields of smoke. Someone left an ashtray burning.

 

Everyday when you sit down to create you have to reconnect with yourself. You

have to reconnect with that stranger in your smoke filled morning mirror. Put

on your makeup.

 

 

 

Lights-camera-action.

This is a play-Act-1, scene-1, center stage

-a chair. Sit down, have a drink, get drunk from the drink of life. We are all actors,

we are all liars. Art is a lie and the poem is the liar’s art.

 

And I’m here to tell you we all have to learn to be because as James Baldwin tells

us, “We all can be better than we are now.”

 

Strange now that I should pose this question. But what do I want you to take from this talk? I want you to take the voices you heard and the voices you thought you

heard, my voice and the voice next door, both left and right. Take them as you leave. May they always be with you like the smell of your own soul. I want you to take the dance and make it better. I want you to glide on ice like skates in winter. If you fall, you fall. Fall if you must because you are looking for the moment when you, the dancer, become the dance, duende. To find rhythm, you must be unafraid of the free fall.

 

I want you to be able to see through the many layers of life and uncover the truth. Take off those old cover like an old bed spread and let it swing in the noon day sun.

Throw it across the line, and let your mind feel the replenishing rays. These that we

Are living are years that answer and this is a season that smells of rain.

 

Clinton-Obama-McCain. Connect the dots.

 

I want you to ask yourself why don’t the lens of a camera tell us everything it sees

and if it did, would you, would I be able to see through the dirty panes of life and

love and perhaps forgiveness? I want you to forgive me for asking you to follow me

along paths that were not really paths because the tracks of humankind has not

worn them enough, for taking along unknown rivers and channeled waterways.

There are and there were no maps, we were guided by faith. Forgive me for the dangers in the rim of possibility, but understand that making art is a dangerous

game. Just ask Akhmatova and Brodsky and Boris Pasternak.

 

The rule says, “One must be ruthless with one’s own writing or someone else will.”

The rule also says, “The reward for writing a true poem is the reward for writing

a true poem and none is greater.” And none, may I remind you, is greater.

 

I want you to know “My intent is to be as inviting as blue water,” pool water

blue water to be exact. I want you to know “It takes courage to achieve, otherwise

you are merely imitating yourself, going nowhere because that’s always easiest.”

 

I want you to remember Richard Hugo, “You owe reality nothing and the truth of your feelings everything.” Be who you regardless. We all were wear masks. Always the mask hides and reveals. Always the subject we choose hides and reveals. But

who are we hiding from? Is it the stranger on the roadside trying to hitch a ride to nowhere with you? Do you know this man? Do you care to know his family, his years of hitching and unhitching horses too tired to cross his fields of hopeless dreams of one day ending up on Santa Monica Blvd. with movie stars in his now sad eyes?

Do you know this man? Do you know these people, caught in the day to day blue collar way of Monday morning life, always Monday morning,

changing sheets in every hotel and motel room,

cleaning every toilet in every restroom,

cleaning every ashtray in every smoker’s lounge,

picking up every trashcan on every street corner,

making every hamburger, every cheeseburger, every hotdog?

Do you know these people?

 

Look around you. No, really look around you. Look at the trees, look at the ground, look at the birds flying by the thousands in a direction nobody told them to go. They

know it’s springtime.

 

And in the process of looking at birds, I hope you learn to see in them the connection of stars.

 

I look, I listen and I hear in this room this morning the voice of the good gray father

of us all, Walt Whitman. Listen:

 

I bequeath myself to the dirt

To grow from the grass I love.

If you look for me again,

look for me under your boot soles.

 

Like Whitman, we must find our touchstones where we can. It doesn’t matter what we touch, as long as we touch something, as long as we touch it with our hearts, touch it with our souls, and for God sakes, touch it with passion. For passion is the poetry we feel at being alive. So I say to you, live!

 

Elizabeth Bishop tells us that life is made up of things we can not say. The poet and

the painter say it anyway. I will tell you that any circle we draw, we leave something out. What we leave out is just as important as what we encircle. I will also tell you that it is the poetry of the dancing bee that shows us where the honey is.

 

And as I stand here before you this morning, naked, covered only by the art of words, the cadence of every sentence haunts me as I strive to make sense of the words.

 

I bow my head and I listen. I listen to the ground, I listen to the earth, I listen to the turning of the leaves, the sky, and the clouds. I listen.

 

I listen to the sun in all its light and radiance, I listen.

I listen to the night and the full figure of the moon obscured by pine trees and leaves of maple and oak. I listen.

 

Never stop listening, never stop learning, never stop asking questions, always new questions.

 

When you stop it’s time to die and yes “Dying is an art like anything else.”

 

Now as I end my early morning ramble through parks and fields where the weeds

and flowers of poetry grow, I go to Donald Justice’s poem simply call “Sonnet”

to close out the morning and open up the day.

 

…The walls surrounding us at time times

We never saw.

Some nights we dreamed we saw the lion

Sharpen his claw.

As for the fruit we now eat,

It has no taste at all.