lycanthropia

To the GOP right now, in the states and in Congress. Pretty much all I have left to say. (The neighbor and I just watched this last night, coincidentally.)

(via the beautiful amihuman)

I’ve actually told my students I have to recuse myself from any further in-class coverage of political rhetoric. Normally I love teaching rhet in an election year, but I’m too shaken right now. I can’t do it, I told them sadly. I got a dog in this fight. Over 430 of them, maybe. Somehow the latest from AZ just—I’m dismayed, deflated. Is this what Americans want, is this really what we vote into office? Can we really not think in a single shade of gray outside of “slut,” “prostitute,” and “baby murderer”?

Then again tomorrow’s the last bad day of my period and I’m mostly just deflated anyway. Happy discovery from this month’s horrible period, though: there is an, ah, herbal supplement which takes away the stabbing pain (leaving just a dull, bearable one) within minutes. Unfortunately it also leaves me and the neighbor sprawled on the sofa watching campaign speeches in horror, whilst compulsively consuming Brie and potato chips.

“What’s wrong with her face?”

“She’s had a lot of work done, and she can’t move it anymore?”

“No, look at her eyes—they’re soulless. I think she’s literally lost her mind from years of standing around having to listen to all those words which don’t actually mean anything.”

Then we watch Repo Man despondently until we fall asleep. Maybe we have to adopt a resolution like that which originated in the Kyoto branch office: If you must watch The Politics, you must also watch equal numbers of kitten videos per quantity of The Politics absorbed, for good mental hygiene. Directions: please apply kitteh until you begin to experience relief.

It’s just started to rain.

When I came back from Chicago on Sunday night, it was suddenly so spring-like here, like it happened in my absence. I wake in the morning and hold very still and listen to the birds. My life right now is this head-shaking combination of things that are really suddenly unexpectedly working and things that aren’t working, at all, at all. There is a lot of holding still and listening to the birds. The neighbor makes shrimp tacos, makes salsa verde chicken enchiladas, makes Thai coconut green curry, asks me a lot, Do you want to meditate? And the answer is mostly always yes. For just ten minutes at a time, once an hour, sitting side-by-side wordlessly, legs crossed, breathing, not-waiting for the startlingly bowl-like chime from his phone.

I had, I should say, a Moment in Chicago; the moment I have pretty much been trying to have since September, or maybe longer. The moment of: no, they’re wrong and I’m right. The cracking-through to liquid relief, after having a nightmare one night at AWP where I screamed, screamed at my animus that it was my fault—that I kept pretending to be a certain kind of poet in order to get into creative writing programs, then got there and they found out that I wasn’t their kind of poet, and that I did this to myself repeatedly in order to suffer, in order to be ashamed and feel like a wrong thing in a right world—and that I’d sold myself out again and again, sabotaged my own truth, and I was DONE doing that and I wasn’t going to pretend to be a nice rational poet and misrepresent myself ANY MORE, I was DONE pretending, and YOU (I shrieked at the animus) are just going to have to DEAL with it.

The day after the nightmare I went to Ariana‘s reading (my personal name for the Fence/Action Books reading) and I sat across the bar from Ms. S., whom I’d just met in person that day, which was all so very rare and precious and even somehow intimate, like we were the only two people there, the only ones really listening; and the sparks were coming down from the gods, down to our barstools; and accidentally one might have fallen on me; and I got something. An influenza. I mean I think I finally got it.

As in, I really do not care anymore what the fuck anyone thinks. I got workshopped this week and there were suggestions, there always are, everyone was all uh yeah change this change this and I don’t like this and I like this part but you stop short here and you don’t go deeply enough there and you should cut out all this and put in more of that and all men say “What” to me and I just sat there blankly triumphantly thinking WHATEVER, WHATEVER Y’ALL BECAUSE I FINALLY AFTER MAYBE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF DOING THIS EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE REALLY DON’T CARE TOO MUCH ANYMORE WHAT YOU THINK.

This sounds dismissive? Embittered? Conceited? Of course not. Of course I took all the notes and will revise, of course this is the game of workshop that we play, we need readers, we can’t do it alone, we can always be better. But it didn’t lance down into my soul the way it has been doing. It didn’t drain all the joy or self-knowledge out of the piece of paper. I looked at the poem without affect and thought, yes, there are parts that were not understood; but I didn’t immediately think, And they can’t understand these parts, or don’t like them, because I am a mediocre unclear writer who cannot keep her pronouns straight because she clearly doesn’t have a good grasp of usage and syntax, and she stupidly equates being vague and lazy with being poetic.

Then I came home and wrote another poem. Immediately I thought, “X would write this idea better.” Then I thought: Uh-huh, whatever, fuck you, I’m having more blueberry dark chocolate and coconut LaCroix.

(In the past readers have not liked my fuck-yous, my wild cries of ha-ha, but seriously? They are like a sustaining transfusion of life for me right now. Enabling me to do this shit five days a week, and not just hide here in the carriage house planning my own memorial service.)

And on the airplane coming home I read Coeur de Lion again, my own new copy which I bought myself like an expensive dessert; and then I immediately opened my laptop and started ripping apart Cherry-emily and putting it back together with only the poems I like. With no more blank verse or story-poems or politically correct shapes that describe objects or situations in a narratively soothing manner so that there are no uncertainties on any line. Nothing like that, I can’t, not now, I honestly can’t, I ain’t got time to bleed. When the poet said frankly to me Well it’s interesting to watch her mind at work, because she’s Jorie Graham; and the truth of what that poet meant just hung there—I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t buy it. Frankly, I think my mind is every bit as interesting as Jorie’s mind, if not as well-read, and I don’t care if I founder and ruin and fail, because I ALREADY HAVE, so, so what? So what? So what?

So it’s settled in my brain: I don’t know if I will stick out the PhD, or if I’ll ever belong here, but I am going to write what I have to write and I will just have to take the chance that, after all these years, ALL THESE YEARS, of workshops and conferences and lectures and courses and theses and drafts and drafts and drafts and feedback and comments and reading and writing and comps and revising and and and and and, I am just going to take a CRAZY CHANCE and write what I want, and trust, just TRUST that it will NOT be meaningless undergraduate bad-imitation-Stein-Ashbery-Stevens drivel. Just TRUST that there is an aesthetic, that it is real, that does not revolve around being pearlingly rationally intelligible by every American reader at every single step of the way, every damn turn of every line—

I don’t like the poems yet; but I will. It is all I care about now. That I like them. Because if no one else is going to like them anyway, I might as well. I might at least.

AWP also had some of those magical non-poem moments, about which I have not written: which included an awkward but heart-filled (for me) lunch with some of my old Boston crew; hilarity in the bookfair with Ms. F.; hilarity in the Hilton hotel room with Ms. B.; a quiet breakfast one morning with beloved Ms. V.; and perhaps most magical of all, cocktails (chartreuse!) with Ms. J. and her mixologist bride, followed by dinner at Frontera Grill with extremely fancy margaritas and, well, I’d show you a picture but me and my girls, we all look way drunker than we actually were. I think. It’s hard to remember. I do remember I started sexting the neighbor in the bathroom stall, then later forgot and fell asleep. I’m a bad sexter.

One more day of teaching, then spring break, which, there’s not enough all-caps for that utterance, folks. I have a gorgeous buffet spread of books from AWP, plus Catching Fire and Mockingjay came in the post this afternoon, along with a nice selected John Ashbery, because no dear professors with your suggested reading lists, I am not going to spend another minute of my life reading those poets. But oh, before spring break, somehow I must help my students. Their causal argument topics need so much work I don’t know where to start. I’ll figure that out in the morning.

It’s stopped raining. I’ve made hot chocolate and the cat is purring.

Isn’t she a lovely little old lady? Though in fact she’s only 68 in that photograph. But she had a hard life, Marceline. I woke the other morning with this poem by her in my head, fierce and impassioned, and knew I wanted to blog about it. There’s a little story as to how I came to translate it.

My advisor at Boston University, Rosanna Warren, had suggested about a dozen names that I consider for a translation project. I was intrigued by Desbordes-Valmore, not least because she had been an actress and a singer first, performing in light operas and writing songs—but in our wretched university library (and this was in the days before the Internet was really useful) I could find none of her poems—except, finally, down in the basement stacks for the oldest and least-checked-out books, a mouldering copy of her friend Sainte-Beuve‘s 1870 biography of her, all in French. It has a few of her poems sprinkled in amidst the text, and I literally opened the book to ‹‹Les Séparés›› and immediately translated it in my head, almost as if I were writing it, straight through. That’s never happened to me since. I normally have to plod along through a translation looking up words wretchedly and wrangling with every idiom.

And although, thanks to Rosanna, a fistful of my Marceline translations were eventually included in a very nice MLA anthology a couple of years ago, this particular one has never appeared in print and that makes me a little sad, since the only other translation of this poem available in English, as far as I know, is this kind of limp and tepid version by Louis Simpson. So here you go, Internet. Here is my translation of the poem that woke me up yesterday.

§

Les Séparés

N’écris pas—je suis triste, et je voudrais m’éteindre
Les beaux été sans toi, c’est la nuit sans flambeau
J’ai refermé mes bras qui ne peuvent t’atteindre,
Et frapper à mon coeur, c’est frapper au tombeau
N’écris pas!

N’écris pas—n’apprenons qu’à mourir à nous-mêmes
Ne demande qu’à Dieu…qu’à toi, si je t’aimais !
Au fond de ton absence écouter que tu m’aimes,
C’est entendre le ciel sans y monter jamais
N’écris pas!

N’écris pas—je te crains; j’ai peur de ma mémoire;
Elle a gardé ta voix qui m’appelle souvent
Ne montre pas l’eau vive à qui ne peut la boire
Une chère écriture est un portrait vivant
N’écris pas!

N’écris pas ces mots doux que je n’ose plus lire :
Il semble que ta voix les répand sur mon coeur;
Et que je les voix brûler à travers ton sourire;
Il semble qu’un baiser les empreint sur mon coeur
N’écris pas!

§

Separated

Don’t write me. I’m too sad; I wish I were dead.
Lovely summer, no you—it’s like night without stars.
I have folded my arms which can never hold you.
To knock at my heart is to wave at a hearse.
Don’t write me!

Don’t write me. We’ll learn how to die to desire.
Ask God—ask yourself—if I love you. You know!
From the depths of such absence, to be told that you miss me
Is to hear the sky sing yet be stuck down below.
Don’t write me!

Don’t write me. I dread you; I’m scared of my memory;
It plays back your voice, how it calls to me, calls. . . .
Don’t flash the bright water you won’t let me drink.
Your living script twines about me, your face in each curl—
Don’t write me!

Don’t write me these sweet words which I don’t dare read;
Your voice seems to scatter sparks on my heart.
I see them smoulder through the teeth of your smile;
It feels every kiss stamps them in. They won’t part.
Don’t write me!

Nadar's famous deathbed photograph of the poet—so tiny and frail

I think I finally found something on which I can actually concentrate. I haven’t picked up my Riverside Chaucer since I was in grad school in Britain, but its comforting lump rode in my bicycle basket for two years and now I turn to the big blue paperback’s dream poems and find them compact and modest and companionable. All this time I have been angry at myself for being unable to finish voluminous nineteenth-century novels, when it was just that I needed to be reading poems. I feel giddy with relief.

§

I have gret wonder, be this lyte,
How that I lyve, for day ne nyght
I may nat slepe wel nygh noght;
I have so many an ydel thoght
Purely for defaute of slep
That, by my trouthe, I take no kep
Of nothing, how hyt cometh or gooth,
Ne me nys nothyns leef nor looth.
Al is ylyche good to me—
Joye or sorowe, wherso hyt be—
For I have felynge in nothyng,
But as yr were a mased thyng,
Alway in poynt to falle a-doun;
For sorwful ymagynacioun
Ys alway hooly in my mynde.

And wel ye woot, agaynes kynde
Hyr were to lyven in thys wyse,
For nature wolde nat suffyse
To noon erthly creature
Nat longe tyme to endure
Withoute slep and be in sorwe.
And I ne may, ne nyght ne morwe,
slepe; and thus melancholye
And drede I have for to dye.
Defaute of slep and hevynesse
Hath sleyn my spirit of quyknesse
That I have lost al lustyhede.
Suche fantasies ben in myn hede
So I not what is best to doo.

So whan I saw I might not slepe
Til now late this other night,
Upon my bed I sat upright
And bad oon reche me a book,
A romaunce, and he it me tok
To rede and drive the night away….

{The Book of the Duchess}

Lying in the dark, dabbing on eye cream and half-asleep already, thinking, I let her down, I cannot tell her what she needs to, must believe. Thinking, I am barren myself, how can I hold out any promise to her, even though I feel it in my bones to be true? That her glow will not be wasted? That she will meet someone big-hearted enough to meet her head-on, and fully? Then I think: I am the bad witch at the christening, I can’t hold out any hope. All I have to offer is what the poet called “that consolation prize, literature.” All I can say is that when men and women again and again backed away from me in a cloud of many words, so many words but at the heart of all the words burning the single bright rosebud NO—when they all found me wanting and pushed away from me, I wrote. I wrote straight out of that rejection. Everything I’ve ever written has come right from that fire.

So if I am honest, that is all I can offer. Not a promise of a someday brave-enough, man-enough lover. But of what to do when again and again there isn’t anyone true enough for what is au fond a relatively simple task: just being there day after day, like coffee or bread or dogs or shoes. (I don’t find it impossible to do—difficult, yes, but not impossible—and have never understood why other people find it so hard.)

(I know when I see my ex-partner next, if I ever do, he will say how much he’s missed me. And I will smile, with my head to one side, not a pleasant smile, and say, “Yet not prohibitively so.”)

Write, sweetheart. Don’t waste your time writing to your beloved, now, but write it bigger than that. Write love poems and epistolary poems and furious blood-curdling cold hatred poems. That’s all I have. I’m sorry. I wish it were more, or different, or more peaceable.

But the truth is that what I have is no peace. I have only those ragged, uneven ink tattoos that prisoners make on the backs of their own hands.

Suddenly the blog is too small for all the things I want to say, all the words that are burning in me—suddenly the piece of paper is too small for the poem, I drive down to the college town for therapy and stop at a drugstore to refill my psych med prescriptions—$90, my co-pay having mysteriously gone from $25 to $45—and I also buy poster board, I am going to write my new poem on the wall with markers, try to visualize it, try to make a bigger space, to use different colors, to say different things. Suddenly there is all this sparking creativity and I have to grab a pen while driving to catch the words as they zoom past, suddenly things seem enormous and yet possible, suddenly, suddenly.

Wonderfully subtle berry flavor, creamy color, and SPF 20

Is this a bad thing? Is it an insignificant thing? Is it hypomania? Is it relief that I don’t teach again until next week? Is it a symptom, is it pathological, or just a natural part of being a person and therefore creative, this sudden uptick in mood, this sudden expansiveness? After buying meds I spend more money I don’t really have, I buy organic strawberries, a lovely new lip balm, mineral water, socks. (Though I need socks, mine are all growing holes and I don’t know how to darn socks as my mother did, putting a light bulb inside one of my dad’s dress socks and threading black thread carefully up and down through the warp or weft of the knitted heel.)

I go to a poetry reading, Jeannine Savard and Cynthia Hogue, both with new books from Red Hen Press, and afterward browse the bookstore and buy Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White because all my friends are reading it and it suddenly seems I must read it too. Suddenly I remember, music! music exists! and I drive around the college town listening to Tori Amos and Eva Cassidy and belting out songs along with them, driving past my ex’s house and refusing even to turn my head to look at it. On my cellphone I call friends, leave messages sprinkled across the continent. Suddenly my solitude seems thrilling and filled with information, rich with meaning. Suddenly.

The thing to watch for is the collapse, the charred despair that sometimes follows these periods of excitement, the deflation and the accounting for. Today is also my late friend’s birthday, or it would have been his birthday, and I still don’t know what to make of the fact that I can remember him so vividly, his soft percipient laugh, his thin voice, the angle of his body in a blue cotton shirt and jeans; and that he isn’t here anymore, and yet is still so very here in my mind, is confusing. It is confusing. And I don’t know why he did it. I mean, I don’t really know why; I mean I do know in some way, I have made attempts, essays on my own life, essayer as in to try, to try very hard; but in the end my fear and my dumb animal survival instinct won out both times, Plath’s old brag of the heart, I am, I am, I am.

I don’t know. I know I am obsessed with this image of the nest, the nest with eggs in it. I am going to paint it tomorrow, draw it and paint it, I am obsessed with blueberries and the color blue, rich soft crayon blue, I am obsessed with the fragrance of vanilla and with playing the piano, with trying to reproduce vanilla and blueberry on a keyboard. I can’t play the piano right now because the casita is too small so both electric pianos are in storage under my bed. Instead I am sitting here eating strawberries and playing this keyboard. Each letter has a color and each number, like each musical key. I never have thought anything about this, I always assumed that was the case for everyone. I don’t know, perhaps it is.

The best thing to do is to put myself to bed at a reasonable hour, the influenza of this particular star can cause a body to think she can stay up all night working, writing, playing and doesn’t need sleep, and not sleeping is the worst thing for it, hastens the crash. So to bed with me, soberly. And regular meals, not just grazing but “food off a plate” as my BFF and I call it. I am also obsessed today with celestial maps, constellations, representations of galaxies and stars. I want to write a book called Celestial, or, no, a book entitled Constellate. I want the cover to be a rich dark blue shot through and riddled with scattered stars. I haven’t ever before attempted a public prose representation of what it is like to have all the ideas and words and possibilities multiplying combinatorily in my head, factors intersecting and cancelling each other out but then replying with new iterations of themselves and ghosts of those selves refreshing and multiplying again.

If that makes sense which I rather doubt.

So instead of trying to figure out what I’m wittering on about, watch this about-to-go-viral video. For some reason with my current mind-ground I think this is the funniest thing I have ever seen, a giant baby trashing a bar drunkenly. Is it because toddlers do so often seem like tiny belligerent alcoholics? (Thus the wry designation in AA, “King Baby.”) Is it because my ex and I have seen similar persons inebriated in Mexico so many times? Is it the tiny wristwatch, fanny pack and touristy hat with which the baby has been outfitted? I don’t really know. I just know I generally start cry-laughing around the point when she stands up unsteadily and knocks over the palm tree behind her table. I guess this is what MFK Fisher thinks headwaiters are worried about when she writes with pride about being able to hold her liquor. Babies are all little tipplers, as this video plainly shows.

And I’ll try to write more coherently or anyway less hysterically tomorrow.

I feel completely fragile and confused today, like an egg being candled from the inside out. I keep forgetting my medication, maybe this is to blame. Maybe the anaesthetic from a very minor dental procedure this morning. Maybe the psychic wear and tear of chronic teaching anxiety, usually most terrifying at 2 a.m. the night before. Maybe the wind, the stars, an influenza from the heavens. Maybe none of these.

Someone is right now, honestly, practicing the accordion. I can hear them from my backyard. My neighborhood is anachronistic at times.

I came home from the dentist and passed out, the ephedrine in local anaesthetic always hits me right in the middle and I feel that whole heart-pounding, chest-turning-inside-out thing. It’s as if I’ve eaten way too much MSG. So I came home and faceplanted, but tossed and turned and drooled, and then just woke up suddenly thinking very vividly of this passage which was written by my ex-boyfriend to his sponsor, the day he broke up with me:

[redacted because writing not mine]

I woke up from my involuntary nap feeling panicky, with my age completely visible in front of me. Not some other time, but now. I keep having this vision, I see myself at fifty, at sixty, at seventy, still lying in the same bed, my body mine as it is now, the same shapes of me but less defined, with softer wrinkled skin and long gray hair, partnerless and intact, as a friend said nothing going into the body, nothing coming out of the body. A long deep sterility or barrenness I am destined to inhabit. I think menopause is barely around the corner, yet even carrying this much age I cannot write the poem of the salt marrow, the useful poems my friends are writing. I’m glad someone is writing them, but I wish she were me. No matter if there’s a book, there will never be a baby; no matter if there’s a baby, there is no turning back. It sounds or is so facile but I keep having to realize on a daily basis that I will never be 25 or 35 again. As much as I wish he, my boyfriend, had drawn different conclusions from his spiritual awakening, I know very well what he is talking about. It’s one breath.

I became a Zen student circa 2001 because I was so aware of the nearness of death. It seems that’s something all serious Zen students give a lot of thought to, death. We are in fact kind of obsessed with it. My then-husband and I watched the movie Alive, which, kind of ironic that title, and afterward I shuddered late into the night thinking not just, I am going to die, but more, I am actually dying right now. And I was drawn into Zen practice because it was the only spiritual discipline I could find which admitted that.

Poets of course are the other group of people in our culture obsessed with death. A trusted friend for two decades, Richard Ray sent me this sweet yet skeweringly accurate discussion between a poet and a novelist who are married, Naeem Murr and Averill Curdy: “My Poet / My Novelist” (originally recorded in 2008). So many, i.e. all, of the things of which Murr gleefully accuses Curdy, are true of me as well, and I was often teased about them by my novelist, when I lived with one. And I suppose they are true of most of us who write this kind of deep lyric writing, we are far more obsessed with the dictionary and death than we are with narrative elements.

(I have two dictionaries similar to the one Murr describes, which thoughtful exes procured for me in happier days; I think one cost fifty cents in a garage sale and the other, truly gigantic, cost $5, and has its own table, where it sits with a globe on top of it. An acquaintance, seeing it in my apartment, jestingly asked if it was my book of magic spells. Clearly he was both ignorant and percipient, and I never asked him over again.)

Then too, so many female friends going through deep changes right now. Everyone swimming in her process, barely keeping her nose above water, and I can’t help or even give hope from where I am. I am about to turn 42 and I live in a 400 square foot rented casita for $635 a month and I don’t have a lover and I don’t know anything. I teach 24 students twice a week and I can’t help them either.

Despite its very real seemingness, I get a bottle of kombucha out of the refrigerator and take my meds dutifully, in case all this is just wonky blood chemistry. Ashtanga class is tonight. Now I am truly a white single middle-aged woman, having used the words “kombucha” and “ashtanga” IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH. Someone show the lady what she’s won.

This terrible fragility.

So confused. How can I be this old and this confused. I feel terror, and simultaneously as if inside my chest as if there’s a nest of little brown-speckled blue eggs. But how can this be. There can be nothing left to be born in me, I feel while only halfway through so nearly finished with this life. I dream dreams and wake up having already forgotten them, no one is there to tell them to, to ask about, it’s okay, but honestly there is no one to take a walk with, holding hands like schoolgirls, watching the neighborhood cats come out at dusk and stretch and begin to hunt, no one listening deeply to each other’s deepest allegedly most alien things. Because where are you, my lost black valentine.

Editors continue to respond to VIDA’s head-count of women in literary publishing: Tin House and the redoubtable Jessa of Bookslut weigh in, with the latter’s confessing frankly:

The refrain of “we want more submissions from women” started to gnaw at me. Because I never pitch work. That makes me part of this problem. I have a working relationship with certain publications, and I’m content with staying with them. And most of them approached me initially, rather than me showing up on their doorstep with my CV saying, “Hi! Publish me, I’m good.” And I wonder why that is. God, could it be because I’m under-confident in my writing? I don’t want to talk about it! Okay, yes. Maybe. Fuck off. And it’s easier for me to take an idea to the same editors I’ve been working with for years, rather than try to work for somewhere new, with a higher profile and better pay rate.

Whereas poet Annie Finch (doubly fascinating to me because she’s both a formalist poet and a fully out-of-the-broom-closet witch) puts the responsibility squarely on editors’ shoulders. Her first suggestion to publishers who want to equalize representation:

Merlin and his poet Annie Finch

Actively solicit women contributors. This is the only realistic way to get from the slush pile (likely at least 75% male) to your goal of at least 50% women. You have no moral obligation to reflect the percentages of your slush pile; if you did, most of what you publish would be below your standards. So how can you be proactive about the percentage? A) Read other magazines, or browse in bookstores, and look for women writers whose work you admire. B) Look up their postal or email address online and send them an email asking to look at some of their work for consideration. A query does not put you under any obligation to accept. Follow up until they send, and if you must reject, invite them at least once to send more work immediately for another round of consideration.

(I saw Annie from a distance at AWP but was too shy to say hello, though we have mutual friends. I really wish I had met her.)

This whole where’s-the-women kerfuffle takes a bit of a backseat today, though, to the big post-AWP buzz of Claudia Rankine’s having called out Tony Hoagland on a poem which, to be fair, is not only racist but just kind of awful (because really, Tony? Do you really want to rhyme “dummy” with “tummies”?). Apparently Nick Flynn read Hoagland’s poem aloud, and then Ms. Rankine responded; she has kindly reproduced her remarks on her own website (look under “criticism” for the tiny “awp”), while writer Sara Jaffe describes what it was like to be present at that panel:

Does it sound as if I’ve been holding my breath? I was. It was breathtaking—the degree of bravery and boldness it took for Rankine to present this performance to an audience that, I imagine, was mostly expecting a “regular” poetry reading. The fact that she explicitly addressed a member of the poetry elite; that she publicly allowed herself the vulnerability of admitting that she found the language in Hoagland’s poem to be hurtful. And that she did, again, in this talk what I so admired—loved—in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: she spoke of her grappling with Hoagland’s poem as both an individual and highly personal process that she experienced as a black woman, and located that experience in relation to the wider poetry community, to history, and to the contemporary political moment in the U.S.

Frankly, it sounds as though the worst thing Hoagland could have done was what he apparently did—in trying to defend that poem, and his choices in writing and publishing it. A more gracious and wiser response would have been to plead ignorance and internalized racism, to apologize, and to thank Rankine for bringing his blindness and grave errors to his attention so that he might write from a place of greater awareness in the future.

(I admit I am feeling not a little pleased with myself at this point about my decision not to take a master class in a couple of weeks with Mr. Hoagland, but instead with Connie Voisine, a decision I based almost entirely on a nifty little lyric that appeared in Poetry last year, “Testament.”)

Concerning Hoagland’s poem and Rankine’s response, my former classmate, accomplished Canadian poet Chris Hutchinson, quoted (on Facebook) from Wallace Stevens’s “Of Modern Poetry”; and it is so wise, so perfect, that I think I will let dear Mr. Stevens have the last word.

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage….

In non-poebiz news…there’s not much news. I can’t figure out why I have had literally the worst menstrual period in months and months. Every time I think I can safely get out of bed I wind up back under the covers clutching the hot water bottle. I actually had to cancel therapy, which, if you know me, that’s mighty rare. Was AWP somehow to blame? Was it the night of the many brandy alexanders? If so, it was still worth it. I do have two posts simmering in me, one on sex work and feminism, and one on the representation of women’s bodies in dance (with, yes, a bit of bavarder on Black Swan), but neither of these are so exciting that they can’t wait for me to be able to sit upright without twisting pain and the overwhelming desire to eat every piece of dark chocolate within reach. (And there’s not any left.)

The thing about AWP is, I always wish when it’s over that I could do it again. Bit of a Groundhog Day experience—I wish I could go to different panels, have drinks at different off-site venues, hear different readings, and not go to bed at 11 pm but find this or that person and stay up all night talking. Then I’ll tell myself, there’s always next year—but it’s not so much that I want to go next year, it’s that I wish I had a second crack at THIS year.

Another chance. Precisely what each poem denies its writer as well. I can’t really imagine being Tony Hoagland and not just copping to that immediately. Not just falling all over yourself to say,—I know, I know! It’s terrible, that poem didn’t do at all what I wanted it to do! I wanted it to skewer racism, make it visible, it didn’t do that though did it, that is not what I meant at all, that is not it, at all.

(Because I basically want to preface all my poems with such a blanket proleptical erratum anyway. Cf. women’s lack of writerly self-confidence, above.)

(A lack of self-confidence which also might extend to what one did or what one did not do while tipsy on aforementioned brandy alexanders.)

though I know what I love most of him
I’m walking on needles and pins
my addiction to the worst of him
the low moon helps me sing

he’s my brandy alexander
always gets me into trouble
but that’s another matter

I am I? Who is this I. This supposed person.

The wolf-girl yips and whinges.

I just got back from AWP. It was as ever blindingly astonishing and also just plain exhausting. I got to spend time with dear friends I love and also meet writers whose work I admire. This is a wrong start, a bad start.

I will start with where we all start, the body. There is a lump on the right side of my throat and it hurts. I don’t know, is it because I got too little sleep for the last six nights running, because I drank too much alcohol, because I had too many brandy alexanders one night, sweet and pungent, staggering through the gorgeously busy-carpeted old hotel lobbies trying to find my room again at three a.m., is it because I had white Russians another night, is it because I shrieked over the volume and noise of the bars, trying to make my voice heard, shouted over the roar of the bookfair, trying to make my voice heard, introduced myself to scores of editors and publishers and reintroducing myself to friends, trying, trying, trying to make my dry pale drab wispy little soprano voice heard?

I don’t know. But I am drinking green vegetable juice and tenderly, ruefully palpitating the sore lump, which is maybe an inflamed tonsil. Celery, spinach, parsley, cucumber, kale, wheatgrass and sprouts. It tastes so strange and herbal it must be good for me.

I introduced myself to Ariana Reines and she signed my copy of The Cow and was kind to me when I fumblingly tried to say that it had been a gamechanger for me, well The Cow and her essay about The Cow, and that her work had given me permission to write my long poem Cherry-emily, of which no one has ever heard of course because it hasn’t been published yet or maybe ever.

I also introduced myself to Kate Zambreno (who had already signed my copy of O Fallen Angel, because she awarded me one in an HTMLGiant contest, though I haven’t yet reviewed it as I promised, though I will) and she was also so obviously brilliantly intelligent, and so kind. So kind! They are such delicate polite good women, as also Cate Marvin seemed to be, though I only saw her from a distance, and I cannot understand why people are afraid of them or mean to them or write them hate mail or anything like that.

We are all actually kind of small. What my best friend calls, a little cat in a big-cat suit. All silky fur and lipstick bravado.

(Bravado is male but there should be a female version. Bravada?)

My throat hurts but I did comport myself as planned, meaning I missed all the good panels and wore a fabulous lipstick and flirted with the prettiest girl in the bar. I’m only six months out of a really bad breakup and that was all I think I really felt safe doing. There’s kind of a pattern for me where after the horrible imploding violent ending of a serious long-term relationship with a man I immediately get crushed out on some much younger, unavailable/straight friend, and I then mope and brood over her until she finally has to forcibly/politely reject me and I get to howl after the moon.

I think I do want to have a girlfriend but am only attracted to girls so femmy that they’re never attracted to me.

I want to have this blog under my real name but what if my parents find it?

What if my ex finds it? What if I find it?

I have been blogging off and on since about 2001, mostly secretly.

It’s warm back here in the desert and it was so cold in DC. I didn’t have boots or tights and I was cold. I’ve applied to five PhD programs and some of them are in cold places. I don’t know how I will live in a cold place again. I drove to my class today, I am a teacher, I drove in a t-shirt and had to turn on the air conditioner in my car because it was so warm. But then it would get too cold and I would turn it off again. On and off, on and off, all the way out to exurbia where the community college is. Then I got there and realized I’d left my keycard at home. The college is all locked up because it’s stranded in the desert and they are scared of shooters and lunatics and lycanthropes and crazy folk like me, so I had to drive by the public safety office and they let me into my classroom.

I am supposed to be teaching “literary analysis” but there is no textbook for the course, so instead I am teaching rhetoric, which I have summarily decided will benefit the students more. I am very nervous about this decision, but I seem to be doing it anyway. Today we watched video clips of Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow and we talked about the exordium, the peroratio, and enthymemes. I was hired a week before classes started and no one told me I was supposed to be teaching literary analysis with no literature to analyse. If I’d had time to put together a proper syllabus and order a book or two I would’ve loved to teach literature again.

Teaching literature is the best thing I have ever done. I can’t seem to find a job doing it full-time.

Instead I teach rhetoric/creative writing/critical thinking/anything else part-time, and part of the time I am crazy.

Let me say that differently. Part of the time I am a disabled working American.

I am a lycanthrope.

I have a twenty-year history of some kind of mood disorder, mood disorder NOS, which might be bipolar II or cyclothymia or PMDD or major depressive disorder or borderline personality disorder/emotion dysregulation disorder. After so many years I tend to be less interested in what it gets called and more interested in how it gets treated, and most importantly can I still write and read poetry and prose when it is being treated with medication.

There is also in me some social anxiety disorder/general anxiety disorder/obsessive compulsive disorder, and things like that. I get scared to leave the house, scared of my students, scared of my friends, and I tend to organize, sort, and arrange things and objects and concepts and words to the detriment of other better socialized forms of behavior, e.g. work.

Also I was anorexic for pretty much the first 30 years of my life. Also I was raised in an isolated environment of fundamentalist Xianity and political conservativism, and it is often to me a miracle that I have survived it all, at all.

These things you might think are not important but they are the backbone onto which I sew my fascicles, with the sinew which is my spinal cord.

I am running out of things to say: except:

I also write poems. I mean to say, I am a poet.

Since I was rejected by my male lover last year, I had decided that if nothing else I would find a publisher this year who would not reject me. Now it seems, especially after AWP, that I have as little choice about that as I did about whether my partner would reject me.

Is it worthwhile to send my poems out? I have no idea. Once in a while I get on an envelope-stuffing tear, though, and I do it. Once in a while I get busy and start gnawing off my own foot to get free of the metal.

Tomorrow night I am having dinner with an old friend who is town for a conference, now that I am back from my conference. We have known each other since we were maybe thirteen. She’s gay and always has been, ever since we were girls, but she’s trying not to be gay because she doesn’t think God likes it. I don’t want to just keep on telling her I don’t think God cares about her being gay, so instead I just try to smile a lot and hug her and make her dinner.

For the last two months I have been stuck halfway through Moby-Dick, which I was loving, all the multitudes it contains which contradict each other, but I don’t seem able to finish it since I started my new antidepressant. I am definitely not depressed, not crying all the time and thinking about ways to kill myself, but I also can’t really concentrate or read anything difficult.

I haven’t been able to write either, anyway not those long bulimic sieges of writing, that take you by the nape of the neck and breathe all over you and won’t let you sleep until your writing hand is cramped around the pencil. I write one poem every month, premenstrually, a premenstrual poem, and it’s flat and narrative and some of my friends are politely disinterested because the work is not experimental. But I need to be manic to write experimental writing it seems, and I don’t know what I will do about that.

I may stop reading Moby-Dick and start reading I Love Dick, which everyone has read but me and everyone loves.

I wanted to meet Suzanne Scanlon this year at AWP but she didn’t come. Maybe I will finally meet her next year in Chicago.

I picked up dozens and dozens of flyers/brochures/stickers/postcards/bookmarkers from publishers.

Maybe someone will publish Cherry-emily finally.

Or maybe I will write a new book and then I will not care.