I want to start this examination of the act of writing with a poem written and gifted to me by a friend and contributor in one of the workshops, Milena. This poem is a piece of literature, but it is also a statement by the author about her relationship to the city. There are, represented in the poem, a series of visible interactions depicting the act of creation. These relationships are as follows: the relationship between the writer and the world of Havana, represented in the leaf, which is both the idea for the poem and the material of creation; between the writer and the character of the leaf; and, finally, between the writer and me, the reader. I believe this leaf—at once a source of an idea and the materiality of the poem—and the relationships and discussions
stemming from the exchange of the poem, introduce the themes of this chapter perfectly. Because I was given this poem, in its original form on the leaf, by the writer during a discussion on ideas, and because I was able to speak of my interpretation of the poem and hear her thoughts on my
thoughts, this situation provides a unique understanding of how Milena, the writer, moves through the world, how she writes, and how her literature or poems move out into the world, encountering readers.
As you can see from the included photo, she wrote the poem just before we met, on the 3rd
of October, on a leaf she plucked from a tree. She gave it to me as we were having one of our many ponderous conversations on where she finds certain story or poem ideas. In speaking on the topic, we were looking through her notebook, which she carries everywhere with her. As ideas come to her, she writes them down immediately sometimes in poem form, which she may or may not translate into narrative form later, or sometimes just as a rush of ideas. The ideas can be about character development, about a specific place or a narrative idea, but the ideas usually come from some form of provocation, which I discuss later in the chapter. That said, her notebooks are not only filled with writing, but also with drawings, sometimes on the pages of the book or sometimes written on things found externally, like on a napkin, including them in her notebook after the fact. It is also filled with flowers pressed neatly between the pages, with leaves, and I have even seen her quietly catch a seed found floating through the air during one of our post-workshop, social
gatherings, and place it in the book. Her notebook holds sources and ideas for writing in many ways.
When I questioned her about her collection and about her ideas, we talked, and eventually, as if remembering a way to convey her understanding of her idea collection more deeply, she paused to give me the poem on the leaf. I am not sure I really understood the depth of the poem in
the moment she handed it to me, but in reading through the poem and working through the translation, it seems like the perfect way to encapsulate the way Milena, the writer, interacts with her world.
In the process of translation, I have tried to capture the essence of the poem as I understood it. After I spent time interpreting it, I spoke with Milena about its meaning. As I understood it, many of the words take on multiple meanings connecting the image of the tree and the act of gardening with the act of writing or making. Most obviously, hoja can be translated both as ‘tree leaf’ and ‘leaf of paper’. Castrar can mean both ‘to castrate’ and ‘to prune’. Marcador is both ‘marker’, as in writing tool, and ‘bookmark’. The juxtaposition of the two acts, for me as a reader, comes together with word inextirpable or ‘inextricable’, which conveys the relationship between the tree leaf as a source of an idea and the leaf as a participant in the act of writing. In other words, the tree leaf is easily plucked or castrated from the source of its power, but the leaf as a poetic subject (and object), in contrast, is memorialised and forever connecting this now dead moment of discovery to Milena’s creative output. It is a poem that carries meaning in the most straightforward sense: She took a distinctive leaf from the tree to put in her notebook as a bookmark. Yet it carries a powerful meaning in metaphor as well. The leaf, which to her seemed unique and representative of strength, could be plucked and placed within the pages of her ideas and writing, transferring the potential power of the leaf to the leaves of her notebook. Or at least this is my interpretation of the leaf and poem. After explaining my ideas to her, she in turn explained her intent to me.
‘I took it from the tree,’ she told me. ‘It was so easy to get, so close to the ground, everything about it was telling me to take it. What made me take it without thinking too much— apart from the fact that I really love trees, and leaves, and flowers, as you must know—were these two kinds of balls it had, so I thought it seemed to be a cojonuda [bad ass/ballsy] thing. And I took this appendage from the tree and I felt that I was making a radical change on its form and character [carácter not personaje]. I was transforming its appearance, but also its meaning to me. That is what happens with everything around us… we [writers] take and change, there are a few instances when we can use things as they are without imprinting ourselves on them. So, the poem is about this, and how something can stay in your head, while only being in a notebook as a mark, as a tool of turning back time, or recalling the moment of discovery’.
Unlike my interpretation of the poem, Milena speaks of the nuanced and complicated way writers interact with the world. They ‘take and change’ in most cases, which describes an act of agency with volition. Sometimes, though, as she claims, writers can use the world around them without ‘imprinting’ themselves on the subjects that inspire. In others, like the case of the leaf, it becomes a tool of the author, something that the writer radically changes in ‘form and character’. The leaf is unquestionably changed. Not only has it been separated from the tree, its life-giving bearer, but it has been inscribed upon (altering the physical state of the leaf) and about (altering the conception of the leaf both for Milena and her reader). Turning the leaf over, I look for the two bulbous forms described by Milena as what defined the leaf to her as a ‘bad ass’, but I can no longer see those markings. Rather, I see her poem, inverted. Where she pressed upon the leaf, the leaf is yellowed, as if her words actually sucked the life from the area upon which they were written. Yet, as her analysis dictates, she did not only leave her mark upon the leaf; the leaf also impacted her. The leaf’s physical characteristics and metaphorical signification to Milena led to the poem, which impacted her idea of creation itself. The leaf then, with the poem, lived in her notebook as a marker, bookmarking pages, but also marking the specific moment of creation and invention, her tool for ‘turning back time’.
Moreover, this leaf, which now exists as a marker in my field notes, has impacted my idea of how Milena moves through her neighbourhood, through her city, and how and where she finds her stories and poems. It has also sparked discussion of the concept of invention (the taking and changing), in turn motivating me to question how other writers move through their environments and providing the structure and ideas behind this chapter. As a writer, the leaf effected an idea in Milena, provoking a poem, a memory; but as a reader, the leaf has also effected an idea in me, via
the poem. The leaf or perhaps the moment of Milena’s encounter with the leaf then becomes, as Milena puts it in her poem, the perfect ‘bookmark in between so many/an inextricable thought’ for both of us23. The leaf is one example, however, as I show later on in this chapter, the idea of ‘taking
23 In seminar presentation of this chapter, someone noted Gertrude Stein’s famous quote ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ from her poem ‘Sacred Emily’ (1913), which interestingly also speaks to the negotiation and invention of signification and symbol in literature.
and changing’ appears often in the discussions of representation, translation and communication in the talleres.