Here’s a great post from my friend and co-student Michelle Ovalle on creating her manuscript. She’s inspired me to try to describe what I’ve been up to, so look for a new post on that soon. Right now, I’m still recovering from the process and waiting to hear back from my mentor so I can send the manuscript to my second reader.
More opinions that one can shake a stick at, and a big part of the MFA process is learning how to build and trust your own opinion….
yeah, this is how poetry is written…
The Law
Gerald Stern in Everything is Burning, 2005
The world is always burning, you should fly
from the burning if you can, and you should hold
your head oh either above or below the dust
and you should be careful in the blocks of Bowery
below or above the Broome that always is changing
from one kind of drunkenness to another
for that is the law of suffering, and you know it.
inside I contain multitudes
Carol Burbank
why don’t we believe
Walt Whitman
when he proclaims
his multitude?
we think, he sings himself,
all that he assumes I dive in
assume, assuming
he only sings in one voice
but what if
he really did (contain multitudes)?
what if his collective consciousness
wasn’t America, but Walt?
what if, over coffee,
(when he could afford it)
he talked to his selves
negotiating the day’s wash
what if, his ink splotching,
he argued revisions
with a buxom washer woman
who hated adjectives, craved strong verbs
and lived inside his head
with a petulant schoolboy
who resented grammar entirely,
nursing mother more worried about food,
bird dog, longshoreman, and of course the poet
we call Walt,
one man if we take his skin
as sign, and the writer who burned
his hidden papers
as if to say, it’s me,
I am the only one,
and that chanting Indian,
that weeping priest,
let them be
I don’t believe that poetry can save the world. I do believe that the forces in us wish to share something of our experiences by turning it into something and giving it to somebody: that is poetry. That is some kind of saving thing, and as far as my life is concerned, poetry has saved me again and again.
Muriel Rukeyser
So I’ve been thinking a lot about what we mean when we say “I,” how that is a convenient, singular screen for something very complex and not at all singular. Is “I” who I am today, who I was yesterday, who I might be? My work self or home self or first date self? My online flirting self, or the me you actually go out with? I’m starting to struggle with this question in some of my writing—more on that soon. For now, these two great quotes from that poet of the personal plural, Walt Whitman.
from “Song of Myself” 51
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
from Days Books and Notebooks
What a history is folded, folded inward and inward again in the single word “I.”
from Gregory Orr’s amazing essay collection Poetry as Survival:
The shape of a doorframe also represents a powerful architecture—during earthquakes, people are advised to stand in doorways because they are stronger and safer than anyplace else in a house. It’s possible to imagine the rectangle of a doorway as the rectangular shape of the page where a poem appears. When we are at an existential or psychological edge, the instability of subjectivity is potentially as dangerous as the chaos of a minor earthquake, and the rectangular shape of the page with its poem can be as reassuring as the doorframe in which we seek shelter.
In our daily lives, the image of the threshold can be useful, too. The threshold is that place where we become aware that we are on the borderline between disorder and order. It can be like standing at the brink of a cliff, or the edge of an ocean, or the beginning of a love affair. In other words, it can be threat or thrill (or, perhaps most accurately, it is both at once).
On a day-to-day basis our threshold is constantly shifting and disappearing and being repressed out of anxiety, whereas in poetry we seek out poems that can take us to our threshold (or one of our thresholds). It is just such a place where we feel most alive, where both exchange of energy and change itself can happen. It is on a threshold, at the edge, where we are most able to alter our understanding of the world and of our own lives in it.
Asking the Unasked Question About Gay Teen Suicide
Elliott batTzedek
On Coming Out Day, October 11, 1987, I was supposed to be in DC. Instead, I’d stayed in Madison, WI, and agreed to have my parents come for an awkward, difficult visit, spilling over with things not said.
That Sunday morning, after they’d left on Saturday night, I stood in my kitchen, my three-theophyllines-a-day in one hand, the whole bottle in the other. I took the bottle. I didn’t plan to, I hadn’t been contemplating suicide, I didn’t want to die. I got to the hospital, went through the horrible charcoal-swallowing, stomach pumping procedure, was put on suicide watch for 36 hours, and sent home.
No, I hadn’t been able to tell my parents I was a dyke, and yes, that was because of the intense homophobia I had always witnessed in my small home town. But I wasn’t a mess because I was lesbian. I loved being lesbian, loved everything about it, had no qualms, poured my whole self into the lesbian community. Seeing my parents made me fall apart because I’d been falling apart for months under the pressure of constant flashbacks of childhood sexual abuse. My mind was remembering images, my body remembering blows, my nose the smell of him. All of this was painful beyond my capacity to process, and I was desperate to just make it stop. Spending two days with my family increased that pain exponentially, and that morning I snapped.
Watching the coverage of gay teen suicide this fall, I am pushed back to that day. If I had died, would it have been spun as a “gay youth” suicide? If it were covered at all, I think it probably would have. And that would have been a lie about my life.
And because I know that would have been a lie, I wonder constantly about these teens. While I am generally dubious about any sort of statistical statement about what is suppressed, for the sake of argument I’m going with the stats as they stand – 1 in 10 kids is gay/queer/lesbian/gender queer/etc, but 6-8 out of 10 kids are victims of sexual abuse before the age of 18.
Who is counting the suicides among these 60-80% of children?
And of the gay kids who kill themselves, how many are also survivors of sexual abuse? Is bullying really THE issue here?
By which I mean this – I don’t doubt for a second that physical and psychological assault cause depression and can lead to suicidality. But what other assaults are we pretending not to see? How much easier is it to blame “bullies at school” than to really know what that child’s life was at home? Are we, yet again, looking for an easy exterior identified problem so we can as a culture go on lying about sexual abuse?
That is – is the current focus on “bullies” another form of Megan’s Law? Megan’s Law, and all similar laws, which unload the entire, vast, damage of sexual abuse of children onto the very small percentage of sexual predators who are unknown to their victims and “snatch them away from loving families.” Of course this happens, and of course it is horrible, but 90+% of sexual abuse of children is by an adult the child knows, usually is related to, and has been taught to trust. That’s a whole lot of social resources and fear-mongering for a “solution” which avoids completely the real problem.
The focus on “school bullies” is starting to feel the same to me in the way it is the evening news feed, the only explanation, the “we can fix this with laws and enforcement of laws” false surety. The single most dangerous place for a child is home; the most dangerous people are the adults given access to the child. When I count through everyone I know who has managed to kill themselves, or come damn close to it, every single one of them was sexually assaulted as a child, sometimes for years and years. No anti-bullying initiative in the world could have protected them.
And yes, some of them were also bullied, including me, my life in high school made miserable by my peers; bullies, after all, tend to repeatedly assault kids who are timid, who collapse in on themselves, who, in fact, act like prey. But what do you think would make a child, born whole, be acting like prey by high school, or middle school, or elementary school? Going after only the bullies who target vulnerable children is like blaming the vultures for eating the carcass of a deer killed by a hunter.
But it is so much easier to blame the vultures, who live out there somewhere, than to blame the hunters who live in our homes. And as long as we’re looking out there somewhere, and not inside the home, the sexual abuse of the majority of our children will continue to be accepted and acceptable, and children and teens will go on killing themselves or acting out their abuse on themselves and other children.
So, do we go for the feel-good media blitz of the 10% (if that) solution, or do we really, finally, try to save all our children?
So often now
So often now I’ve no idea who’s
contained within this skin: woman, child
(boy or tomboy), horse. Polar bears
are said to shed their hides and live as humans;
peel my skin and you could find a bear.
What we are is merely social invention:
white, female, human, dyke, all labels
threatening to become as stale as celluloid.
Only a sense of myself seems solid—I’ve
failed at that before. What is the opposite
of shape-shifting? It is my shape that’s fixed,
a screen these movies move across, made
without directors, without a leading lady,
with a cast of thousands, each one an I.
There are no more two distinct brain sides than there are two distinct genders. Why would that surprise anyone who’s ever created anything?
from “A Moment’s Thought” by Ellen Bryant Voigt in her excellent collection The Flexible Lyric
The recent bicameral (and thoroughly Nietzschean) model—right brain for intuition, emotion, art, and music; left brain for logic, rational thought, and language—is already outdated; such neat divisions were never verified except in pathology. In its place has come the concept of “modularity,” of a lifetime of data not stored on labeled shelves in the closet but processed multiply by distinct networks of differing functions: this very sentence as you read it is dismantled by your brain into its component parts—one set of ganglions taking care of the nouns, another the verbs; another flashing up your own shelf, in your own closet at home, from the image depot; a separate hardwired board parsing out the syntax you may have been born to; the brain’s musicians tuning up to the lexical and syntactical repetitions I’m using; and a brand new neural pathway extending itself like algae shot with Rapid-Gro to accommodate this new word “modularity” and its baggage, “modules” and “modern” and “insularity” and “modular housing” and even, from the rhyming crew, “nodules,’ even “noodles.” Thought, it seems, is not the linear storage and retrieval system we know from computers. [So] consider what must be happening when we set out to produce a poem, a complex construct made from intuition, observation, experience, erudition, music, memory, and feeling—what Coleridge called “the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, motions, language.”
Trying to write some about it. Some. Then I found this, by Lucille Clifton in The Terrible Stories. Umm umm ummm.
the mississippi river empties into the gulf
and the gulf enters the sea and so forth,
none of them emptying anything,
all of them carrying yesterday
forever on their white tipped backs,
all of them dragging forward tomorrow.
it is the great circulation
of the earth’s body, like the blood
of the gods, this river in which the past
is always flowing. every water
is the same water coming round.
everyday someone is standing on the edge
of this river, staring into time,
whispering mistakenly:
only here. only now.
This Frenzy 