Author Archives: thisfrenzy

About thisfrenzy

poet, translator, activist, editor, book seller, dyke, feminist, tattooed, reviewer, explorer, worrier, word lover, rambler

The most difficult of all things

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The most difficult of all things -the only difficult thing perhaps is to enfranchise oneself and – even harder – to live in freedom.

Anyone who is in the least free is the enemy of the mob, to be systematically persecuted, tracked down wherever she takes refuge.

I am becoming more and more irritated against this life and the people who refuse to allow any exception to exist and who accept their own slavery and try to impose it on others.

Isabelle Eberhardt, 1902

Isabelle Eberhardt as Si Mahmoud Essadi

Isabelle Eberhardt as Si Mahmoud Essadi

from the blog Julie Unplugged:

Isabelle Eberhardt’s short life was anything but everyday.

What else could describe a French female journalist who masqueraded as a man, was the first European to be admitted as a member of a Sufi brotherhood who died during a flash flood because her clay home basically fell to the ground upon her?

She was born in Geneva, a child conceived outside of marriage. This not only lead to a life of emotional instability, but also financial instability because she could not gain access to her inheritance. She was a very smart woman, multilingual, and enjoyed spiritual study with her father. They poured over the Koran together and had lively discussion about what they read.

Her choosing to dress as a man started as a young age, primarily because she knew men had more freedom than women. She could move about freely as a man. She could travel alone. When her brother joined the French Foreign legion and moved to his post in Algeria, Isabelle and her mother joined him. What no one could have known is not only would Isabelle convert to Islam and become a part of a Sufi Brotherhood, she became known as Si Mahmoud Essadi and fought against the foreign legion. She is reported to have used hashish and before her marriage she enjoyed a lusty and fulfilling sex life with a variety of men.

She wrote of herself,

As a nomad who has no country besides Islam and neither family nor close friends, I shall wend my way through life until it is time for everlasting sleep inside the grave.

A poem I’ve kept for years, clipped from a feminist newspaper, now yellowed but still true

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Friends Would
by Meg Brigantine

rather she cut
her tendons
resume
the shambling stoop
that was her before this

they would rather
silence her mid-speech
what she speaks of
wimmin are forbidden to speak of

they would prefer
to strike her blind
than see what she has become

her friends would rather
go to the movies
than come over for tea

she laced up her shoes
for action
gained second sight
tore the gag from her brain
hurdled the wall
& lived
as if her life depended on it.

I think I found this in the Minneapolis wimmin’s paper Lesbian Insider/Insighter/Inciter. I hear those last four lines in my head every time I am in a space where I have to muster my the core of my courage.

classics found on a dusty bookshelf – “i have a good digestion and there is a god after all”

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the robin and the worm
archy

a robin said to an
angleworm as he ate him
i am sorry but a bird
has to live somehow the
worm being slow witted could
not gather his
dissent into a wise crack
and retort he was
effectually swallowed
before he could turn
a phrase
by the time he had
reflected long enough
to say but why must a
bird live
he felt the beginnings
of a gradual change
invading him
some new and disintegrating
influence
was stealing along him
from his positive
to his negative pole
and he did not have
the mental stamina
of a jonah to resist the
insidious
process of assimilation
which comes like a thief
in the night
demons and fishhooks
he exclaimed
i am losing my personal
identity as a worm
my individuality
is melting away from me
odds craw i am becoming
part and parcel of
this bloody robin
so help me i am thinking
like a robin and not
like a worm any
longer yes yes i even
find myself agreeing
that a robin must live
i still do not
understand with my mentality
why a robin must live
and yet i swoon into a
condition of belief
yes yes by heck that is
my dogma and i shout it a
robin must live
amen said a beetle who had
preceded him into the
interior that is the way i
feel myself is it not
wonderful when one arrives
at the place
where he can give up his
ambitions and resignedly
nay even with gladness
recognize that it is a far
far better thing to be
merged harmoniously
in the cosmic all
and this comfortable situation
in his midst
so affected the marauding
robin that he perched
upon a blooming twig
and sang until the
blossoms shook with ecstasy
he sang
i have a good digestion
and there is a god after all
which i was wicked
enough to doubt
yesterday when it rained
breakfast breakfast
i am full of breakfast
and they are at breakfast
in heaven
they breakfast in heaven
all is well with the world
so intent was this pious and
murderous robin
on his own sweet song
that he did not notice
mehitabel the cat
sneaking toward him
she pounced just as he
had extended his larynx
in a melodious burst of
thanksgiving and
he went the way of all
flesh fish and good red herring
a ha purred mehitabel
licking the last
feather from her whiskers
was not that a beautiful
song he was singing
just before i took him to
my bosom
they breakfast in heaven
all s well with the world
how true that is
and even yet his song
echoes in the haunted
woodland of my midriff
peace and joy in the world
and over all the
provident skies
how beautiful is the universe
when something digestible meets
with an eager digestion
how sweet the embrace
when atom rushes to the arms
of waiting atom
and they dance together
skimming with fairy feet
along a tide of gastric juices
oh feline cosmos you were
made for cats
and in the spring
old cosmic thing
i dine and dance with you
i shall creep through
yonder tall grass
to see if peradventure
some silly fledgling thrushes
newly from the nest
be not floundering therein
i have a gusto this
morning i have a hunger
i have a yearning to hear
from my stomach
further music in accord with
the mystic chanting
of the spheres of the stars that
sang together in the dawn of
creation prophesying food
for me i have a faith
that providence has hidden for me
in yonder tall grass
still more
ornithological delicatessen
oh gayly let me strangle
what is gayly given
well well boss there is
something to be said
for the lyric and imperial
attitude
believe that everything is for
you until you discover
that you are for it
sing your faith in what you
get to eat right up to the
minute you are eaten
for you are going
to be eaten
will the orchestra please
strike up that old
tutankhamen jazz while i dance
a few steps i learnt from an
egyptian scarab and some day i
will narrate to you the most
merry light headed wheeze
that the skull of yorick put
across in answer to the
melancholy of the dane and also
what the ghost of
hamlet s father replied to the skull
not forgetting the worm that
wriggled across one of the picks
the grave diggers had left behind
for the worm listened and winked
at horatio while the skull and the
ghost and prince talked
saying there are more things
twixt the vermiform appendix
and nirvana than are dreamt of
in thy philosophy horatio
fol de riddle fol de rol
must every parrot be a poll

“How a Poem Means” class takes on Terrance Hayes’ “Sonnet”

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Last night in my workshop “The Art of Craft” we began our discussion about how a poem means. Not “what it means,” but how poems work, how to pay attention to music, rhythm, sound, repetition, what happens at the end of lines, tenor, tone, and all such matters. The first poem we took on was Martín Espada’s “Alabanza,” and we talked our way through it for a good long while. (Watch Martín read it if you don’t know it already!)

Next we took on the Terrance Hayes’ poem “Sonnet”:

Sonnet
Terrance Hayes

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

Everyone read it aloud (which you should do, too, because the experience of reading the poem out loud is very different than having your eyes glance over it!). A few things about the poem we discovered:

1. By the time you are done reading the same line 14 times, you are SO over smiling. Which is, of course, one of the meanings of the poem.

2. Each line jerks you back and forth between two pairs of sounds, “we” and “watermelon” and “sliced” and “smiles.”

3. The similarity in sounds between “sliced” and “smiles” makes the latter seem not so much smiley at all.

4. The separation of the first twelve lines into 3 stanzas creates cycles of repetition, which both pace the poem and trap you in the nearly-never-ending cycles. And the last two lines, home of the volta in a traditional sonnet, promise a change or resolution. But this doesn’t happen in the words or sounds of the lines, which stay in the same, but in the finality of them. After the reading the line in sets of four, reading it only twice stops you, breaks the pattern, and that breaking IS the resolution of the poem. (or, as Ezra said, “We are SO not slicing watermelons and smiling anymore).

5. Watermelons are the physical and emotional center of the poem. If the slicing and smiling are over by the end, the softer sounds of the “we” and “watermelon” remain hanging in our ears.

6. And this (thanks, MJ!) which I had NEVER seen in the poem: the sounds of the word “sonnet” appear in order across each line. S in slice, ON in watermelon, T in into. Hayes is clearly using the sonnet form, by breaking it, to make a new kind of meaning, but at the same time harnessing the power of the form. Wow.

Next week we take on two different villanelles will discussing how syntax and voice create the spine and joints of a poem. There’s still space in the class if you want to join in! Register here: The Art of Craft Series

once more into the archives…. “The War”

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Again, from either a 9th or 10th grade (so 1978 or ’79) creative writing class. The actual page has the words “picture writing” printed across the top.

The War

One day, the governments of America, Russia, China, Japan, Canada, Germany, England, France, Mexico, Switzerland, and Italy decided to have a war. They decided to have this war in the Sahara Desert, so the bombs wouldn’t destroy their lands.

The governments started drafting people. They even drafted women. They started producing weapons and shipping them to Africa. The date was set, and the troops were sent down.

But none of the people like the idea. There was no reason to go to war. None of them wanted to kill anyone just because their government said to.

When the day arrived, five hundred million people met in the middle of the desert. But none had weapons. They had refused to fight.

So instead they had picnics with the provisions. The younger men had tank races. People of all nationalities made friends with each other. They posed with their new friends for pictures, which were taken from the bombers. The bombs were re-fused, and they set off a beautiful fireworks display. This went on for two weeks.

As for the people who wanted to fight, they were loaded on a special ship, and sent into deepest space, where they could never harm anyone again. The End.

out of the archives…

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This poem, from, I think, 9th grade, with original syntax and spelling unchanged:

Study Hall

    Quiet
Is the rule here.
As pages rustle
As pencils write.

    Murmers
Are launched here
Science, English, Math
Float thru the air
Can you
          catch some?

    Dreams
Are manufactured here
Happy or sad,
They come cheaply,
Half price on Friday

“deeper than dirt” by Rachel McKibbens, the best piece of writing you will read today, or maybe even this week or month

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deeper than dirt
Rachel McKibbens

after the poet asked how I would bury my brother

Beyond the carrots and blind white worms, beyond
the yellowing bone orchards and corkscrew roots,
beyond the center of this churchless earth, beloved Peter,
my little sorcerer, brought up dirty & wrong, you deserve more
than to be smothered in mud. For all the gravel you were fed,
for every bruise and knot that named you, I must plant you
in a bed of blood-hot muscle, must deliver you into me,
so I may
carry you as the only mother you have ever known.

About This Poem

“Poets of witness navigate the world in such a peculiar way, seeking justice through writing; punishing and praising with language. This poem is entirely for my quiet brother who is blessed with the gift of withholding.”

–Rachel McKibbens

Poem-A-Day
Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.


Into the Dark & Emptying Field

Into the Dark & Emptying Field

Copyright © 2013 by Rachel McKibbens. Used with permission of the author.

“Suddenly” Sharon Olds’ poem for Ruth Stone

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Too many people close to me seem to be wrestling with grief right now, the horrible weight of the loss of it. So here is Sharon Olds’ poem about the death of poet Ruth Stone, which is about the loss but even more about the love and legacy and connection of poet to poet, woman to woman, body to body.

Suddenly
by Sharon Olds

(Ruth Stone, June 8, 1915 – November 19, 2011)

And suddenly, it’s today, it’s this morning
they are putting Ruth into the earth,
her breasts going down, under the hill,
like the moon and sun going down together.
O I know, it’s not Ruth—what was Ruth
went out, slowly, but this was her form,
beautiful and powerful
as the old, gorgeous goddesses who were
terrible, too, not telling a lie

for anyone—and she’d been left here so long, among
mortals, by her mate—who could not,
one hour, bear to go on being human.
And I’ve gone a little crazy myself
with her going, which seems to go against logic,
the way she has always been there, with her wonder, and her
generousness, her breasts like two
voluptuous external hearts.
I am so glad she kept them, all
her life, and she got to be buried in them—
she 96, and they
maybe 82, each, which is
164 years
of pleasure and longing. And think of all
the poets who have suckled at her riskiness, her
risque, her body politic, her
outlaw grace! What she came into this world with,
with a mew and cry, she gave us. In her red
sweater and her red hair and her raw
melodious Virginia crackle,
she emptied herself fully out
into her songs and our song-making,
we would not have made our songs without her.
O dear one, what is this? You are not a child,
though you dwindled, you have not retraced your path,
but continued to move straight forward to where
we will follow you, radiant mother. Red Rover,
cross over.

Stephanie Vanderslice on Literary Citizenship

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Yes yes yes. We aren’t in community to market to one another.

Literary Citizenship

vanderslice_stephanieOver at the Ploughshares blog, Stephanie Vanderslice talks to Tasha Golden about teaching Literary Citizenship and other “professionalization” topics in MFA programs. Good stuff!

She says:

The two central myths are one, that literary citizenship is all about self-promotion, and two, that it’s connected deeply to the “marketplace.” For example, a lot of students (and a lot of authors who clutter my Twitter feed with tweets about their own publications and nothing else) think that literary citizenship and platform-building means nothing more than promoting their own work.

In reality, it’s about completely saturating yourself in the literary culture—and then curating and promoting the work that interests you, so that other people will find it and care about it as much as you do.

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