...on character, Bird by Bird, p. 53). I’m listening. Mining about ten years worth of writing. Struck a few nerves in my inner calm. I call Barbara Robinette Moss (from my Iowa City writing group). I ask Barbara (author of the two memoirs Change Me Into Zeus’ Daughter and Fierce)... “Do I steer clear of topics that might upset my family? Do I consider my children, who they might one day be (or have become) reading what I’ve written, wondering what to make of their mother?”
In her sweet Southern drawl but firmly, Barbara says: “Kids care about hugs, cute shoes, a sandwich. The person you are day after day after day to them. Shelter. They don’t care what you did in 7th grade...or in college... Use the fear...Use your fears to help you write truthfully.”
Which I’m trying to do against the anxiety stirred up by having “Sheila’s Vine” come out in the anthology, Labor Pains and Birth Stories this month. Which means I’ve had to appear at a bookstore for my first official book-signing. Mary Allen (author of The Rooms of Heaven: A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife as well as my indispensable Iowa monastery, sauna, and midnight shopper cohort) advised me to wear comfortable shoes. She reminded me of the time I came to one of her first readings in San Francisco for The Rooms of Heaven, how she was wearing a new suit and new shoes and felt her insides didn’t match her outsides.
I took Mary’s advice and wore an old pair of beater clogs I’ve had for about ten years and managed mostly to feel like myself except for forgetting Rachel’s name—Rachel my mom friend from the bookclub I’ve had to abandon for a couple of years now in favor of writing time. Kind to a fault, she didn’t bat an eye and told me her own birth story—one of those frighteningly rapid “freight train” births for which she barely had time to make the hospital, and yes, she had to kiss her epidural goodbye.
Surrounded by savvy friends with clearer heads than mine, I’m back in the cabin with a two-story mug from Coffee Catz full of Lady Grey. All the dolls are talking at once, but that’s ok, at least until the bergamot and the caffeine kick in. Then they’ll have to take turns.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
“I trapped my days for about 400 days, then I distilled them into this cross-genre book...
...[that is] partly imagination and partly the fabric of days,” said writer Nona Caspers, referring to her poetry collection: Little Book of Days, which she then proceeded to read from at the 2009 Women on Writing Conference in San Bruno. Basking in the pleasure of her turn of the phrase, I was once again reminded why I can’t do without the company of other poets. Not only were the poems witty and articulate, but the language Caspers used to discuss her work as well.
Like Liz Brennan, my own secret stash of poetry gold, driving to the conference with me. Who I get to see weekly, witnessing the unfolding of her Mother Theresa poems that chronicle the everyday, the ordinary struggle to be saint of the mundane. How does Elizabeth--principle wage earner for her family, mother to her son and herself a loving wife--stay connected to her work, and produce for me to read week after week yet another Mother Theresa poem. Each Wednesday I wonder where she’ll (MT) be next: perhaps surviving an exchange with a bad clerk at the post office, eating noodles from her take-out container while driving, or sprinting to intercept the meter maid.
A woman in the conference audience suggests carrying a talisman of one’s work in order to maintain the thread of the current project at hand. A good plan—though given life’s hectic pace, I’d probably lose such an object. Images work as talismans for me: the core image of the poem, story or essay gives off a certain alluring heat so I can’t put it too far out of mind anyway. I think of Jane Miller (in a 1994 Electronic Poetry Review interview conducted by Jocelyn Emerson): “I've always felt that poetry begins in a powerful emotional seed. Some artists are more inclined to bury this emotional energy than others; I prefer to bloody the back steps”(for context see entire interview transcript at: www.epoetry.org/issues/issue1/alltext/intmil.htm ).
And as a mother and a writer, I was particularly curious to hear the afternoon panelists respond to a question about how/when they write, given the demands of children and family, etc. Writer Yiyun Li answered closest to my heart when she said, “I write between midnight and 4 a.m. Then I try to catch up on sleep on the weekends. My husband knows I am happiest when I write.” I first met Li over ten years ago when she was an Immunology student who signed up for an evening writing course I was teaching through the Arts and Crafts Center at the University of Iowa—one of those students you don’t know how to help since their work already speaks for itself (inevitably headed for success). And here she was, two books under her belt, presenting, her two young boys the only children I saw at the conference. Inside I applauded her...writer, presenter, teacher, mother, going forward with her beautiful work, reading from her latest book, The Vagrants.
Floating around in my head for several weeks before the conference was an image from Li’s collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers of four 12-year old peasant girls purchased for a funeral: “The mercury killed them instantly, so their peachy complexions were preserved when they were paraded in sedan chairs before the coffin,” p. 47 from “Immortality.” I still can’t seem to get that image out of my head or heart, and thus must follow it’s heat to the next blank page...sitting on my desk.
(WOW on the web: www.smccd.net/accounts/skywow/)
Like Liz Brennan, my own secret stash of poetry gold, driving to the conference with me. Who I get to see weekly, witnessing the unfolding of her Mother Theresa poems that chronicle the everyday, the ordinary struggle to be saint of the mundane. How does Elizabeth--principle wage earner for her family, mother to her son and herself a loving wife--stay connected to her work, and produce for me to read week after week yet another Mother Theresa poem. Each Wednesday I wonder where she’ll (MT) be next: perhaps surviving an exchange with a bad clerk at the post office, eating noodles from her take-out container while driving, or sprinting to intercept the meter maid.
A woman in the conference audience suggests carrying a talisman of one’s work in order to maintain the thread of the current project at hand. A good plan—though given life’s hectic pace, I’d probably lose such an object. Images work as talismans for me: the core image of the poem, story or essay gives off a certain alluring heat so I can’t put it too far out of mind anyway. I think of Jane Miller (in a 1994 Electronic Poetry Review interview conducted by Jocelyn Emerson): “I've always felt that poetry begins in a powerful emotional seed. Some artists are more inclined to bury this emotional energy than others; I prefer to bloody the back steps”(for context see entire interview transcript at: www.epoetry.org/issues/issue1/alltext/intmil.htm ).
And as a mother and a writer, I was particularly curious to hear the afternoon panelists respond to a question about how/when they write, given the demands of children and family, etc. Writer Yiyun Li answered closest to my heart when she said, “I write between midnight and 4 a.m. Then I try to catch up on sleep on the weekends. My husband knows I am happiest when I write.” I first met Li over ten years ago when she was an Immunology student who signed up for an evening writing course I was teaching through the Arts and Crafts Center at the University of Iowa—one of those students you don’t know how to help since their work already speaks for itself (inevitably headed for success). And here she was, two books under her belt, presenting, her two young boys the only children I saw at the conference. Inside I applauded her...writer, presenter, teacher, mother, going forward with her beautiful work, reading from her latest book, The Vagrants.
Floating around in my head for several weeks before the conference was an image from Li’s collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers of four 12-year old peasant girls purchased for a funeral: “The mercury killed them instantly, so their peachy complexions were preserved when they were paraded in sedan chairs before the coffin,” p. 47 from “Immortality.” I still can’t seem to get that image out of my head or heart, and thus must follow it’s heat to the next blank page...sitting on my desk.
(WOW on the web: www.smccd.net/accounts/skywow/)
Thursday, February 26, 2009
February means skirting the flooded S’s of Green Valley Road...
on the way to Howard’s Station in Occidental for Eggs Benedict and banter with the wait staff we’ve come to love. It means checking on the river house, running down past the sauna to view the muddy swath of racing water, the feeder creek a white froth. Then sitting in Great Grandpa’s chair while the kids color on the floor in front of the fireplace, and the husband reads The Persuader (Lee Child, Reacher in trouble again), all five of us content to play house to the drumming of raindrops on the flat roof, the occasional sharp ping of a redwood frond hitting the skylights.
And....cruising Great Grandpa’s library: The English Years of Robert Frost, Into My Own, by John Evangelist Walsh, where I skim details from the time period when Frost moved in to the London suburb of Beaconsfield. Frost blames himself for some of the toll the move takes on his family (though don’t life’s difficulties beset everyone, writer or not?) And were any of us, in our later years, to put in one sentence the trajectory of our lives, it might sound as harsh. Walsh notes, of a trip Frost makes to visit the bungalow years later: The painful contrast between his lonely present, though filled with honors, and those far-off days when he had lived in obscurity on this quiet street with a happy growing family may well have been too stark for him to face. By 1957, of the five who had shared the bungalow with him, three were long dead—his wife from a heart attack, his daughter Marjorie in childbirth, and his son Carol by suicide—and a fourth, his daughter Irma, was confined in a mental institution. It was also in the bungalow, with his family, that Frost wrote both “Birches” and “Mending Wall” (in addition to others). These details, put forth in the prologue, remind me the life of the writer is one animal, and the work he or she writes is another.
But then I come across Sampo, The Magic Mill: A Collection of Finnish-American Writing, edited by Aili Jarvenpa and Michael G. Karni. (The title alludes to the Finnish epic creation myth/poem the Kalevala; the mill is one of its images). I breathe into these beautiful memoirs and poems—the descriptions of berry picking escapades in the woods, bears dwelling within reach (Jane Piirto, Blueberry Season), a story of a mother who couldn’t stop knitting (even while milking cows) and thus fell down a well with the needles and sock she was working on (Unto Seppanen, The Knitting, translated by Reino Virtanen). In Eeva Kilpi’s Excerpts from A Woman’s Diary (translated by Inkeri Vaananen-Jensen), I find a more accurate mirror of my experience of what it means to be a writer...and a mother, and how the two braid together, and are in fact, one noisy animal.
Kilpi recounts how an editor once called and asked her to write about how she would live the last day of her life: I would make notes all the time...I would clean at least one closet...I would go to visit my parents....[and] eat food that my mother prepared (perhaps it would be herring baked in cream, good, strong smelling food, food familiar from my childhood). ... I would prepare a good meal for my children...turnip pie, Karelian rice pastries, lingonberries, and pickled cucumbers...I would no longer grieve that many books would be left unwritten but regret that so many books would be left unread. ...I would look at trees. There is something universal in their shape and reach; they resemble nerves... (p.220)
which in turn was a seed, Eeva, for a lucid dream several nights ago: falling, hands outstretched, on my back, some 3 or 4 thousand feet from the very top of a redwood grove. My first impulse, fear. But when I looked up at the familiar green canopy and watched the thick red rivulets of trunk bark hurtling by, I relaxed. And noticed as well, each to their own foot-wide ledges at varying heights along the trunks, women in green tunics. How could one not be at peace in the company of another writer, the trees, and their silent emissaries.
And....cruising Great Grandpa’s library: The English Years of Robert Frost, Into My Own, by John Evangelist Walsh, where I skim details from the time period when Frost moved in to the London suburb of Beaconsfield. Frost blames himself for some of the toll the move takes on his family (though don’t life’s difficulties beset everyone, writer or not?) And were any of us, in our later years, to put in one sentence the trajectory of our lives, it might sound as harsh. Walsh notes, of a trip Frost makes to visit the bungalow years later: The painful contrast between his lonely present, though filled with honors, and those far-off days when he had lived in obscurity on this quiet street with a happy growing family may well have been too stark for him to face. By 1957, of the five who had shared the bungalow with him, three were long dead—his wife from a heart attack, his daughter Marjorie in childbirth, and his son Carol by suicide—and a fourth, his daughter Irma, was confined in a mental institution. It was also in the bungalow, with his family, that Frost wrote both “Birches” and “Mending Wall” (in addition to others). These details, put forth in the prologue, remind me the life of the writer is one animal, and the work he or she writes is another.
But then I come across Sampo, The Magic Mill: A Collection of Finnish-American Writing, edited by Aili Jarvenpa and Michael G. Karni. (The title alludes to the Finnish epic creation myth/poem the Kalevala; the mill is one of its images). I breathe into these beautiful memoirs and poems—the descriptions of berry picking escapades in the woods, bears dwelling within reach (Jane Piirto, Blueberry Season), a story of a mother who couldn’t stop knitting (even while milking cows) and thus fell down a well with the needles and sock she was working on (Unto Seppanen, The Knitting, translated by Reino Virtanen). In Eeva Kilpi’s Excerpts from A Woman’s Diary (translated by Inkeri Vaananen-Jensen), I find a more accurate mirror of my experience of what it means to be a writer...and a mother, and how the two braid together, and are in fact, one noisy animal.
Kilpi recounts how an editor once called and asked her to write about how she would live the last day of her life: I would make notes all the time...I would clean at least one closet...I would go to visit my parents....[and] eat food that my mother prepared (perhaps it would be herring baked in cream, good, strong smelling food, food familiar from my childhood). ... I would prepare a good meal for my children...turnip pie, Karelian rice pastries, lingonberries, and pickled cucumbers...I would no longer grieve that many books would be left unwritten but regret that so many books would be left unread. ...I would look at trees. There is something universal in their shape and reach; they resemble nerves... (p.220)
which in turn was a seed, Eeva, for a lucid dream several nights ago: falling, hands outstretched, on my back, some 3 or 4 thousand feet from the very top of a redwood grove. My first impulse, fear. But when I looked up at the familiar green canopy and watched the thick red rivulets of trunk bark hurtling by, I relaxed. And noticed as well, each to their own foot-wide ledges at varying heights along the trunks, women in green tunics. How could one not be at peace in the company of another writer, the trees, and their silent emissaries.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Do you inform the sensei your two-year-old son...
...just peed on the futon in the back of the classroom or do you march all three kids out without her noticing? Do you tell her before you finish filling out the parental waiver, or after you buy your daughter’s Aikido outfit? As you sit facing the altar where the kids bow before stepping on the mat, the spiritual pressure overwhelms you and you blurt out, “Go ahead, fire us before we even start. Can I unzip that cover and wash it for you?” She’s tall, much taller than you, and halts mid-step, spins around, and says quietly...”Did it go through?” You want to die. But you swab off the cover, and find to your delight it didn’t permeate the futon. Mildly, she says, “I”ll wash it, but thanks for offering.”
What the heck, you’ll stay for the first part of class, as long you can still get to the post office by five. Somehow you manage a wave to your daughter, who looks impressive in her whites, and corral the sons on to the post office for the National Poetry Series postmark you need for your manuscript (where the boys swing in tandem from the velvet rope long enough to pull both metal columns down on the stone floor).
I’m thinking of The Fire Cat, by Esther Averill, when Mrs. Goodkind with her mannish smile decides to give Pickles the cat a chance: Pickles, you are not a bad cat. You are not a good cat. You are good and bad. And bad and good. You are a mixed-up cat. What you need is a good home. Then you will be good. Or the Bizarro comic strip depicting Frankenstein waiting outside the pearly gates. The angel says to him: Parts of you get into Heaven, parts of you don’t. How do you want to handle this? Both examples apply to how I feel both about my kids’ behavior and about my parenting abilities. Constantly thwarted, requiring constant assessment. Just like writing, facing that blank page again.
“Nobody under the age of 30 has anything to say,” I remember my undergraduate fiction teacher, Jack Hicks, telling me. Then he handed us a syllabus of assignments, for which we would be trying to disprove his theory. I came to his office hours one day, and he asked, “What are you reading?” To which I naively responded, “If I read, then I won’t come up with something original. I want the ideas to be mine, not someone else’s.” He was patient enough to point out the same stories are told over and over again, but it is your voice, your take, that will differ.
Writer Margaux Fragoso, in her well-written article Two Worlds: Depersonalization, Reassembly, and the Poetic Imagination looks intensely at the concept of “how an artist is forced to live twice”—once living an experience, and than again in the remaking of it in art. (Margie, Strong Rx Medicine, American Journal of Poetry, Vol.7 2008). “Not only does the poet, or artist, rend the world apart by isolating it into its disparate elements, she rends her own self by doing so” (p. 153). In that context, Fragoso asks “...would any mother wish upon her child the uncertain life of the artist: the pain of standing at the cliff-edge of poetic labor each day, to face the unfathomable darkness that leers in the gray space between the blueprints of a poem or story and its actual composition?”
I’d have to say yes, for I grew up listening to my father’s piano lullabies at night: Brahms, Bach, Beethoven. And later as a teen, listening to the syncopated rhythms of Bela Bartok: Mikrokosmos...my father's kitchen a constantly morphing shrine of anything we kids (his three) made—from my brother’s thumb-sized demon sculptures of grey potter’s clay to my sister’s colored pencil drawings of roses to a dreadful digital device I’d made one high school summer as an intern at Hewlett Packard (back when I thought I wanted to be an engineer) with its wires askew, counting randomly from 1 to ten. For better or for worse, I could see wishing the life of an artist on my children, as long as it gives them joy. Wether it be a life of music or words or the ability to drop, roll, and land back on their feet like cats.
What the heck, you’ll stay for the first part of class, as long you can still get to the post office by five. Somehow you manage a wave to your daughter, who looks impressive in her whites, and corral the sons on to the post office for the National Poetry Series postmark you need for your manuscript (where the boys swing in tandem from the velvet rope long enough to pull both metal columns down on the stone floor).
I’m thinking of The Fire Cat, by Esther Averill, when Mrs. Goodkind with her mannish smile decides to give Pickles the cat a chance: Pickles, you are not a bad cat. You are not a good cat. You are good and bad. And bad and good. You are a mixed-up cat. What you need is a good home. Then you will be good. Or the Bizarro comic strip depicting Frankenstein waiting outside the pearly gates. The angel says to him: Parts of you get into Heaven, parts of you don’t. How do you want to handle this? Both examples apply to how I feel both about my kids’ behavior and about my parenting abilities. Constantly thwarted, requiring constant assessment. Just like writing, facing that blank page again.
“Nobody under the age of 30 has anything to say,” I remember my undergraduate fiction teacher, Jack Hicks, telling me. Then he handed us a syllabus of assignments, for which we would be trying to disprove his theory. I came to his office hours one day, and he asked, “What are you reading?” To which I naively responded, “If I read, then I won’t come up with something original. I want the ideas to be mine, not someone else’s.” He was patient enough to point out the same stories are told over and over again, but it is your voice, your take, that will differ.
Writer Margaux Fragoso, in her well-written article Two Worlds: Depersonalization, Reassembly, and the Poetic Imagination looks intensely at the concept of “how an artist is forced to live twice”—once living an experience, and than again in the remaking of it in art. (Margie, Strong Rx Medicine, American Journal of Poetry, Vol.7 2008). “Not only does the poet, or artist, rend the world apart by isolating it into its disparate elements, she rends her own self by doing so” (p. 153). In that context, Fragoso asks “...would any mother wish upon her child the uncertain life of the artist: the pain of standing at the cliff-edge of poetic labor each day, to face the unfathomable darkness that leers in the gray space between the blueprints of a poem or story and its actual composition?”
I’d have to say yes, for I grew up listening to my father’s piano lullabies at night: Brahms, Bach, Beethoven. And later as a teen, listening to the syncopated rhythms of Bela Bartok: Mikrokosmos...my father's kitchen a constantly morphing shrine of anything we kids (his three) made—from my brother’s thumb-sized demon sculptures of grey potter’s clay to my sister’s colored pencil drawings of roses to a dreadful digital device I’d made one high school summer as an intern at Hewlett Packard (back when I thought I wanted to be an engineer) with its wires askew, counting randomly from 1 to ten. For better or for worse, I could see wishing the life of an artist on my children, as long as it gives them joy. Wether it be a life of music or words or the ability to drop, roll, and land back on their feet like cats.
Friday, January 30, 2009
In my writing cabin...
...a photo of our daughter sits next to the printer. She wears a red velvet dress, holds a peach rose, each petal fringed crimson. She’s leaned against the white marble statue of a hand, so large that the palm’s lifeline curves past her shoulders and she is cupped, the hand extending still three feet above her head. She likes the photo, she tells me, because of how she’s held. I tell her I love it too—but don’t wax on about how it’s a great metaphor for divine protection, for all the times I won’t be able to be with her. I tell her instead I love it because it reminds me of our girl date. The rose was for Sandy (that mom-who-happens-to-be-a-sculptor) and we were on the way to see her work on the town square. It was nearly Mother’s day, and we ran into a friend from my grammar school (Doug) who was out shopping for a present for his mom.
“I’m coaching softball now,” he said, and then leaned down on his knees towards my girl. “Do you know what we used to call your mom?” She shrugs shyly. “The Polish Powerhouse. You should’ve seen her hit that ball.” Watching her blush, I realize I want time to slow—she’s only 8, but I want her still to care more than anything about her ferals, the hat she’s knitting, buckeyes.
I can’t imagine being ready to let her go, ever. But I have, she’s in 2nd grade and goes most days. And every day she comes back to me, down the gangplank, lunch basket in hand and an octopus arm’s worth of clothing for me to carry to the car, trailing 11x13 drawings of Philomel and the King of Ireland’s son on horseback.
Later, standing in the stairwell, just outside the bedroom door, seventh milk-skin of the day forming on my tea, I’m reading Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman:
A mushy, brown peach is lifted from the garbage and placed on the table to pinken. It pinkens, it turns hard, it is carried in a shopping sack to the grocer’s, put on a shelf, removed and crated, returned to the tree with pink blossoms. In this world, time flows backward. (p. 102)
If, somewhere in the universe, such a tree exists, well, then, I can stand to love my daughter, my sons, as much as I do. In loving them, I face every parent’s fear: losing them. Maybe you don’t just get to ripen once—but you can actually return to the limb, ripen at a pace dictated by season and sun, and fall again to Earth. That small window of brightness might recur, then, if one allows it. I write in hopes of stumbling upon such a sequence of words or images that alters the world so I might inhabit it more fully. Would that it do the same for someone else, reading.
For once you have a child you are host to a kind of dual citizenship as parent and child. Behind you: your childhood, which you pack up in a trunk until moments like now, or when you run into childhood friends. Before you: your parenthood, in which you must rise to the occasion and shepherd your little ones through their childhoods. There are many yous under your skin, and you empathize now with your parents, your children, and your own child self who comes out only late at night (when the rest of the family sleeps) to float soundlessly back up to the peach tree, ready to start over again, day after day.
“I’m coaching softball now,” he said, and then leaned down on his knees towards my girl. “Do you know what we used to call your mom?” She shrugs shyly. “The Polish Powerhouse. You should’ve seen her hit that ball.” Watching her blush, I realize I want time to slow—she’s only 8, but I want her still to care more than anything about her ferals, the hat she’s knitting, buckeyes.
I can’t imagine being ready to let her go, ever. But I have, she’s in 2nd grade and goes most days. And every day she comes back to me, down the gangplank, lunch basket in hand and an octopus arm’s worth of clothing for me to carry to the car, trailing 11x13 drawings of Philomel and the King of Ireland’s son on horseback.
Later, standing in the stairwell, just outside the bedroom door, seventh milk-skin of the day forming on my tea, I’m reading Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman:
A mushy, brown peach is lifted from the garbage and placed on the table to pinken. It pinkens, it turns hard, it is carried in a shopping sack to the grocer’s, put on a shelf, removed and crated, returned to the tree with pink blossoms. In this world, time flows backward. (p. 102)
If, somewhere in the universe, such a tree exists, well, then, I can stand to love my daughter, my sons, as much as I do. In loving them, I face every parent’s fear: losing them. Maybe you don’t just get to ripen once—but you can actually return to the limb, ripen at a pace dictated by season and sun, and fall again to Earth. That small window of brightness might recur, then, if one allows it. I write in hopes of stumbling upon such a sequence of words or images that alters the world so I might inhabit it more fully. Would that it do the same for someone else, reading.
For once you have a child you are host to a kind of dual citizenship as parent and child. Behind you: your childhood, which you pack up in a trunk until moments like now, or when you run into childhood friends. Before you: your parenthood, in which you must rise to the occasion and shepherd your little ones through their childhoods. There are many yous under your skin, and you empathize now with your parents, your children, and your own child self who comes out only late at night (when the rest of the family sleeps) to float soundlessly back up to the peach tree, ready to start over again, day after day.
Friday, January 23, 2009
When Elizabeth invites me to a poetry reading, I say to myself: I can handle this.
I, mother of three, can escape for a night. But I get a headache just trying to remember the last reading I attended...ten years ago, was it?! I think so...Tess Gallagher, talking about her life with Raymond Carver. I wondered what Gallagher meant when she mentioned the obligations of running a household (I was teaching a couple classes--using Carver’s Where I’m Calling From--pregnant with my first child, clueless). I remember thinking, Gallagher keeps house? Writers keep house? I clung instead to her next image: Gallagher and Ray looking over one another’s work (guests gone, dishes done) like a pair of horses, one black, one white, pulling the chariot of poetry behind them.
Everything’s lined up: the husband agrees to watch the kids, Liz will drive. I don’t even know who we’ll hear at the bookstore, but I’m busting out. Glitch one: my husband’s cross-country team needs a chaperone for the weekend. Liz’s husband graciously offers to entertain, in addition to their son, my three children; embarrassed by the last-minute ditch, I agree. My two-year old clambers up beside Liz’s husband, and says, Go away Mom, bye. Liz and I don our coats and head for the door. Until (glitch two) my middle child (the five-year-old) falls to the ground, wraps his arms around my ankles, and cries on my shoelaces.
Sure, bring him-- Liz says kindly, she in her lovely black pants, top, scarf. I disengage my son from my snot-damp sweats, zip up the old blue overcoat and take his hand. We’re late; when we walk in a poet’s wrapping up a stanza. We grab a couple seats on the fringe; my son plunks down on the floor. We make it through the next speaker’s comments about the book he’s compiled on Philip Whalen. Then my son (on his stomach) creeps towards the bookshelves on the far wall. The weight-loss section keeps him a few seconds: on one cover, a woman in tight scarlet pants holds a platter of fruit. A few headshots of perky brunettes, blondes, tilted and smiling. My son stealth-crawls, fist over fist, to Relationships: beaming couples that beat the odds and stayed together. I’m wondering where photos of all the couples that didn’t make it end up. My friend’s listening, probably actually absorbing the poetry. When my son starts drumming on the shelves, I scoop him up and step outside.
I’m sorry, I say to Liz when we reappear (my son and I having downed ice-cream cones around the corner and yet another poet at the mic), I have to go. I’m worried about the two-year-old (who informs me indignantly when we get to the house that he’d like to stay longer). It’s not that I can’t stomach poetry anymore--though, on occasion, I too, dislike it (as Marianne Moore opens with in her crucial poem Poetry)—but after eight years of either being pregnant or nursing a baby I’m used to sleeping by 9. I’m grateful we escaped, edging back to the public world of poetry, and for those rare minutes I got to spend alone with my son over scoops of mint-chip ice-cream. I’m just a bad date these days, I remark on the way out of Liz’s house. Don’t mention it, she says, and shortly scores us a pair of tickets to hear Mary Oliver, balcony seats, the parking lot and entire theater--we note with glee--full of people who came out just for the love of poetry.
(See also: A Dangerous Mission: Tess Gallagher by Gary Lehman on Gallagher’s trajectory as a writer and which portion of her writing defines her in the public eye at: http://jmww.150m.com/Gallagher.html )
(For complete text of Moore’s poem: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1169.html)
Everything’s lined up: the husband agrees to watch the kids, Liz will drive. I don’t even know who we’ll hear at the bookstore, but I’m busting out. Glitch one: my husband’s cross-country team needs a chaperone for the weekend. Liz’s husband graciously offers to entertain, in addition to their son, my three children; embarrassed by the last-minute ditch, I agree. My two-year old clambers up beside Liz’s husband, and says, Go away Mom, bye. Liz and I don our coats and head for the door. Until (glitch two) my middle child (the five-year-old) falls to the ground, wraps his arms around my ankles, and cries on my shoelaces.
Sure, bring him-- Liz says kindly, she in her lovely black pants, top, scarf. I disengage my son from my snot-damp sweats, zip up the old blue overcoat and take his hand. We’re late; when we walk in a poet’s wrapping up a stanza. We grab a couple seats on the fringe; my son plunks down on the floor. We make it through the next speaker’s comments about the book he’s compiled on Philip Whalen. Then my son (on his stomach) creeps towards the bookshelves on the far wall. The weight-loss section keeps him a few seconds: on one cover, a woman in tight scarlet pants holds a platter of fruit. A few headshots of perky brunettes, blondes, tilted and smiling. My son stealth-crawls, fist over fist, to Relationships: beaming couples that beat the odds and stayed together. I’m wondering where photos of all the couples that didn’t make it end up. My friend’s listening, probably actually absorbing the poetry. When my son starts drumming on the shelves, I scoop him up and step outside.
I’m sorry, I say to Liz when we reappear (my son and I having downed ice-cream cones around the corner and yet another poet at the mic), I have to go. I’m worried about the two-year-old (who informs me indignantly when we get to the house that he’d like to stay longer). It’s not that I can’t stomach poetry anymore--though, on occasion, I too, dislike it (as Marianne Moore opens with in her crucial poem Poetry)—but after eight years of either being pregnant or nursing a baby I’m used to sleeping by 9. I’m grateful we escaped, edging back to the public world of poetry, and for those rare minutes I got to spend alone with my son over scoops of mint-chip ice-cream. I’m just a bad date these days, I remark on the way out of Liz’s house. Don’t mention it, she says, and shortly scores us a pair of tickets to hear Mary Oliver, balcony seats, the parking lot and entire theater--we note with glee--full of people who came out just for the love of poetry.
(See also: A Dangerous Mission: Tess Gallagher by Gary Lehman on Gallagher’s trajectory as a writer and which portion of her writing defines her in the public eye at: http://jmww.150m.com/Gallagher.html )
(For complete text of Moore’s poem: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1169.html)
Saturday, January 3, 2009
My husband is my Pretentious Monitor. I’ll hand him a fresh poem...
...and if he squinches up his face and says, “Dumb it down,” I know I’m getting stuffy. On the other hand, I can tell if he’s just using that line as an excuse not to focus for more than five minutes on something that doesn’t involve underwater hockey or chainsaws. We’re a good balance that way.
And he’s the one to harass me, when I get rejection slips in the mail, “Was it a poem about me?” I give him The Look. He shakes his head. “Write about me and you’ll be fine.” To appease him this Christmas, I compiled the thirty poems I’ve written in the ten years we’ve been married into a chapbook: The Ironman and the Poet. I caught him on the couch a couple of days actually reading it. Ok, so the poems were either about him or mentioned him. But I took it as a good sign.
At 3 a.m. (having weaned the youngest but unable to sleep after waking three times to rock him back down) I found myself skimming my husband’s copy of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales (because the intersection of our secret lives, when we’re not parenting means The love poems of Elizabeth and Robert Browning sit next to Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army; The Warrior Athlete sits next to Richard Bach’s Illusions; Sfar’s graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat sits next to Lee Child’s One Shot.
By 5 a.m., I finish reading the accounts of snow mobile accidents, disoriented hikers, sailors stranded at sea, a teenager who fell out of an airplane and navigated the jungle alone until she found civilization again (the17 others who survived falling out of the plane decided to stay put and wait for rescue, an iffy decision at best). Arms numb from the two hours of rocking and reading, my son snoring peacefully, I’m wondering how young is too young to sign the kids up for survival camp.
Though Gonzales notes that we start teaching them in the womb—as he observes a woman, pregnant, surfing: “Limor looked like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus out there, drawing the mana into her womb from the sea, filling herself with that energy (p.147)”... and a page earlier, describing what she’ll pass on to the child (surfing in utero): “Now there’s a child out there somewhere who began amassing a critical kind of knowledge about a certain type of energy system before he or she was born. True knowledge.”
Do I start that list, now, of things I did pregnant with the kids, chasing my husband? I’m thinking of the time we got stuck swimming in post-storm waves outside a coral reef just off the Big Island of Hawaii. Last morning of our vacation; “Last chance to swim with the spinner dolphins,” the husband had said to me. 3 month’s pregnant with my youngest son (the former nurser). My daughter, on shore, waving us in. The desire to run across that Kona beach house lawn to her so strong it hurt. A coral reef at low tide to skim with our bellies and chests, the disorienting suck and pull of the receding waves to withstand...
...(sneaking a read over my shoulder, the husband adds, “How about those half-dozen sea urchin spines we pulled out of my instep, or how about you, in your bikini, crawling out of that cove without a single scratch?”) Absolutely: I was in charge of the in utero lesson that day.
And he’s the one to harass me, when I get rejection slips in the mail, “Was it a poem about me?” I give him The Look. He shakes his head. “Write about me and you’ll be fine.” To appease him this Christmas, I compiled the thirty poems I’ve written in the ten years we’ve been married into a chapbook: The Ironman and the Poet. I caught him on the couch a couple of days actually reading it. Ok, so the poems were either about him or mentioned him. But I took it as a good sign.
At 3 a.m. (having weaned the youngest but unable to sleep after waking three times to rock him back down) I found myself skimming my husband’s copy of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales (because the intersection of our secret lives, when we’re not parenting means The love poems of Elizabeth and Robert Browning sit next to Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army; The Warrior Athlete sits next to Richard Bach’s Illusions; Sfar’s graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat sits next to Lee Child’s One Shot.
By 5 a.m., I finish reading the accounts of snow mobile accidents, disoriented hikers, sailors stranded at sea, a teenager who fell out of an airplane and navigated the jungle alone until she found civilization again (the17 others who survived falling out of the plane decided to stay put and wait for rescue, an iffy decision at best). Arms numb from the two hours of rocking and reading, my son snoring peacefully, I’m wondering how young is too young to sign the kids up for survival camp.
Though Gonzales notes that we start teaching them in the womb—as he observes a woman, pregnant, surfing: “Limor looked like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus out there, drawing the mana into her womb from the sea, filling herself with that energy (p.147)”... and a page earlier, describing what she’ll pass on to the child (surfing in utero): “Now there’s a child out there somewhere who began amassing a critical kind of knowledge about a certain type of energy system before he or she was born. True knowledge.”
Do I start that list, now, of things I did pregnant with the kids, chasing my husband? I’m thinking of the time we got stuck swimming in post-storm waves outside a coral reef just off the Big Island of Hawaii. Last morning of our vacation; “Last chance to swim with the spinner dolphins,” the husband had said to me. 3 month’s pregnant with my youngest son (the former nurser). My daughter, on shore, waving us in. The desire to run across that Kona beach house lawn to her so strong it hurt. A coral reef at low tide to skim with our bellies and chests, the disorienting suck and pull of the receding waves to withstand...
...(sneaking a read over my shoulder, the husband adds, “How about those half-dozen sea urchin spines we pulled out of my instep, or how about you, in your bikini, crawling out of that cove without a single scratch?”) Absolutely: I was in charge of the in utero lesson that day.
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