poetic dispatch: adrienne rich

Last one for National Poetry Month, and on my mind as I get ready to go to Mexico at the end of this month.

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

in which i find a child adorable

I spent several hours today with friends of mine from college, and their two small kids. We had tea  rolls and Vietnamese coffee and then we went to their lovely house with a big lawn and large cats and overstuffed couches. Afterwards I came back to J’s apartment, ate some ice cream, watched a documentary, and thought  about my intentionally childfree life.

Today I was looking at some photographs for sale, by a local woman, and I thought of my perpetual plan to do something with my pictures. There are so many things I want to do that depend on having my own space and time, on being able to control that, as much as anyone can. In addition to knowing that I don’t want the life that comes with motherhood, I know I don’t have the wherewithal for it.

Babies are gross. And sometimes charming. A (the 9 month old I saw today) makes these growling sounds that are kind of awesome. When I growled, she’d growl back at me, which made me feel gleeful and accomplished. JT, my friend and the mother of A, astounds me with her calmness and ability to multitask. There was so much going on at any one moment that would make me nervous and suffocated and anxious and itchy and fill me with an unbearable longing for quiet and aloneness. I don’t doubt that JT has moments when she loses it, but still, I thought, you really, really have to fucking want this. And then, even if you do, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at it. If you don’t have the mental or physical ability or desire to sustain the adventure of parenting, and to roll with the demands of it, it seems that you can only get so far. My own mother is a great example of that, I’ve never doubted that I was a wanted and a loved child, but her fragile mental state, the result of years of financial, familial, and physical stress, couldn’t sustain the reality of being a parent. I wasn’t the daughter she’d bet on, for better or worse.

One of the most annoying things people say when they find out that someone (usually a woman) doesn’t want children is, “You’d make such a good parent.” In the first place, a person doesn’t have to do something just because it’s possible, and in the other, why is it completely implausible that someone who seems to have the ability to be a good parent might want to channel those abilities into something else? For the three hundredth time in my life, I wonder why our view of everything is so narrow.

Even though I intend to remain childfree, I will probably always be thinking about this. It won’t go away, because my friends will have/keep having babies, and people will wonder when/if  I’ll change my mind. There will always be the assumption that my life is incomplete, which I will of course internalize, because that’s how this sort of thing works. Women who don’t have children are blamed for not fulfilling a biological destiny, and women who do have them are castigated for not doing it “right”. I always think about Gloria Steinem, who shocked a lot of  feminists when she got married, and was once asked by a reporter if she regretted never having had children. Another feminist writer, in an article about that interview, wondered if Steinem had had children, if she would have been asked if she regretted that.

“denial, deviation, temptation and trial” (erin mckeown)

I’m going to try something new-send me your questions about feminism, politics, Judaism, art, etc. and I’ll answer some and post the responses here. Remember, questions are those things that end with a question mark.

In the meantime: Rain. Laundry. Cat snoring. Some writing. Some chips. Tomorrow I’m seeing an old friend from college. I’m about to spend a lot of time alone, which I think will be the test of how firmly grounded (or not) in my sanity I actually am.

Lately, I’ve been very attentive to the change in seasons. Winter seemed endless, predictable, monotonous, with the snow and ice and cold, but as soon as it started to abate, I started to feel nervous. The passage of time is terrifying, even though there are some interesting and important and exciting outposts along the way, I’m still not sure what I’m moving towards.

A few weeks ago, I read Linda Gray Sexton’s book, Half in Love, which is about her depression and suicide attempts, and the suicide of her mother, the poet Anne Sexton. LGS talks about the notion of a “foreshortened” future, which is a medical term for not being able to see beyond one day at a time. Sexton says, “I took days one hour at a time.”

So I have this big list of what to do while I’m here, and sometimes I’m excited by it and other times, it makes me want to hide, but I’m trying to take it one thing at a time, one hour at a time. The weather, wet and gray and warm, makes it hard not to give the whole day away, crawl into bed with the cat, and watch these documentaries on my list.

“when you’re lucid, you’re the sweetest thing.”

I went to two bookstores and left each empty handed. I ate an ice cream sundae. I walked down the street and saw three separate people singing and playing guitar.  I finished The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and now I can’t let it out of my sight. I read some poems by Jane Kenyon. I went to the cafe with J where the coffee mugs have pictures of roosters on them. I wrote some blog posts. I got a writing assignment and an invitation to a reception. I set up a reading date (June 9th, somewhere in DUMBO, stay tuned). I made a huge list of things to do this weekend, when it’s just me and the cat. I got obsessed with some new songs. I wrote a paragraph about two people on a road trip. I ate dinner. All day, it seemed as though it would rain, but it did never did.

yikes. just…yikes.

 

I am just so mad about this Obama birth certificate thing- that the Obama administration handed it over,  that it’s still not going to be enough, and that so many people insist that Obama’s election indicates the ‘end of racism’ when this is so clearly such an expression of it. There’s no convincing people who believe Obama isn’t a “real” American, these folks don’t want to be convinced. Regardless of how many euphemisms the Right (and yes, I am conflating the Tea Party with the Right) throw out-they all stem from the same place, which is that because he’s a black man, he’ll always be seen as an outsider, as illegitimate, as undeserving of the Presidency, because ultimately, black folks (and anyone who’s not a Straight White Christian Dude) are undeserving of power. There are plenty of ways to see that reflected-in the health care debate, in who fights in wars, in education, and in all systems where racism is institutionalized.

I’ve tried not to engage with this whole thing, convinced that there are other more troubling issues, like the fact that Congress is trying to literally cut off women’s control of our own reproductive systems. Of course, it’s all ultimately related, and there is no ignoring it, especially if we’d like to see Obama or someone like him elected in 2012. We all need to get better at recognizing and calling out racism (etc) as it continues remain the same, to change form and as people continue to pretend it doesn’t/no longer exists.

poetic dispatch: jane kenyon

 

It’s still National Poetry Month. Here’s something I read recently by Jane Kenyon.

Fat

The doctor says it’s better for my spine

this way-more fat, more estrogen.

Well, then! There was a time when a wife’s

plump shoulders signified prosperity.

These days, my fashionable friends

get by on seaweed milkshakes,

Pall Malls, and vitamin pills. Their clothes

hang elegantly from their clavicles.

As the evening news makes clear

the starving and the besieged maintain

the current standard of beauty without effort.

Whenever two or three gather together

the talk turns dreamily to sausages,

purple cabbages, black beans and rice,

noodles gleaming with cream, yams, and plums,

and chaptai fried in ghee.

“my love, you’re in a magazine/my love, you’re doing fine, you’re on TV.”

 

songs of tuesday: trace a line, au revoire simone; dilaudid, the mountain goats; eli the barrow boy, the decemberists; loretta, norah jones/gillian welch; la petite mort, erin mckeown.

River, open window, coffee, sun, excellent book (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender). This café, where I come not nearly enough and is like a song you hear and love immediately and want everyone to hear. I used to put people in my car and drive around and force them to listen to music that I loved and hope that they loved it too. Mostly, this would happen in Ohio, where there is a lot of driving to be done.

I’m not feeling awesome about my characters today,which means I’m not sure if they can endure, and if that’s the case,what’s it all for? I’ve been following the Advice to Writers feed on Twitter, which has been great, if you can leave out the part where the majority of the quotes come from Dudes. This one from  Edward Albee is one I whip out when I need to keep things  afloat:  “The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn’t matter.”

(I also think of therapy as an act of optimism, which means it’s working, because I used to think it was an act of indulgence. I have to consider it differently in order to actually continue with it and take it seriously, but really, you can’t do something like dredge up everything that’s scary and painful if you don’t think it’s going to change things. It’s too scary and painful.)

That being said, there have been days when I am deliriously excited about these characters, when I’ve looked at them and thought, “Hello, my darlings, my saviors, my imperfect perfections, I’m so glad you’re in this world.” And then, there are days when I can’t believe that people who don’t exist have the capacity to injure and frustrate me, how vulnerable I am to them. Today I actually thought, fuck you, New Character, when previously, I was so enraptured, I wrote scene after scene that I might never even use, just so I could be close to him. (Boys: they screw up your life even when they’re imaginary.)

It looks like I’ll be doing a reading sometime this summer in the city, so it would be great if these folks got to show their capricious, neurotic, endearing, slight nerdy faces then.

“you have everything you need to survive in this world.”

Just now, I wrote a nerdy fan email to someone I knew a little bit in high school who runs this lovely blog. I have no idea if she’ll acknowledge the note, but having written it makes me feel like I’m taking risks. Plus, everyone likes to get fan mail.

I just read this snippet from the Awl: “Godrej and Boyce – the last company left in the world that was still manufacturing typewriters – has shut down its production plant in Mumbai, India with just a few hundred machines left in stock.”

This makes me super sad, because the typewriter was one of my first loves. My grandmother bought me an electronic AT&T when I was 12 and in spite of not knowing how to type, I felt immediately like a legitimate writer. I remember buying typewriter ribbons and eraser tape and big blocks of paper, and thinking about it now makes me miss the sound of assertive clacking. I had a word processor in high school, a big clunky thing with a pull up, rectangular screen where the text would appear, so you could write a draft before it printed out via the typewriter. At some point, my aunt and uncle gave me an actual computer (think giant monitor, hard disks, green print, because I am as old as the hills), on which I wrote a terrible, melodramatic novel. I left both in the house after my mom died, and like a lot of things there, I never went back for them. 

I’m in Western Massachusetts this week, which mean petting a cat, being driven around in a car, sitting in coffee shops, and wondering what it would be like to live here again. My plan is to write, take some pictures, watch documentaries that make me scared to go to sleep alone, record part of the podcast, cool down my brain, temper some stuff that’s gnawing away at my heart and try to look at the future without having a panic attack, even if it’s just for thirty seconds a day. Let’s hope it works.

to be added to your feminist reading list:

Riots Not Diets  and tumblinfeminist are two recent discoveries of mine. I love when they combine powers.

“Being a feminist doesn’t mean suddenly no longer liking problematic things. If you stopped liking everything that was sexist in media and entertainment there would be no media or entertainment left. Being a feminist, to me, is being aware of what it is you’re liking, and of its problematic aspects.”
- sabrina_il (via tumblinfeminist)

from Margitte, of Riots Not Diets: “I would also add to this that it’s not only being aware of what you like and how it’s problematic, but about TALKING to other people about the problematic aspects of the thing.”

from me:  It makes me crazy when people wonder how I can be a feminist and a consumer of pop culture and I’ve said before that I don’t see a contradiction here, I think feminists and everyone who works for justice has to be well versed in pop culture. I’m so freaking glad someone else is saying it. This is how you build a movement, after all.

“is it that fucking hard to get fruit roll-ups?”

songs today: waves, folded light; brave day, tilly and the wall; how to survive a broken heart, ben lee; waist deep in the big muddy, richard shindell (pete seeger); the ocean, tegan and sara; this is why we fight, the decemberists.

I went to bed at 3 am and woke up at 7. I can tell I’ve had too much caffeine because my insides are quivering. I’ve made a list, and re-read a lot of notes. My new journal is slowly becoming a lived in mess. I keep staring at the clock, because I need to leave here at 6 to meet K for dinner. I’m filled with dread and with the realization that it has been a super long time since I’ve attempted to create fiction on purpose. I have literally thousands of scenes, of details, of lines, but I forgot how insanely hard it is to put that together into something that makes sense and is satisfying, especially when it feels so urgent, which right now, it does, but that doesn’t make writing it any easier. I feel a lot like there’s a window open, but only for now, and I’m jamming things under the sill to keep it from closing.