Welcome to the Coal Hill Blog
By Laura Schultz
My father was a farmer turned politician. It was from him that I learned about honoring the land coupled with a concomitant social conscience. My mother was both a painter and a sculptor and through her influence, I was drawn to the arts at an early age. She believed that all artistic pursuits were a form of therapy, and did it with gusto, flair and true artistry. On more than one occasion I was told that “We show our love for people in the beauty we create for them both on canvass and in the culinary delights we serve them.” I never forgot her words nor her inspiration and it was in creative pursuits that I found solace throughout the many twists and turns along the path.
Although my teachers encouraged my artistic interests, especially my writing, I lacked the self-confidence to pursue my dream, until as if over night my world was plunged into turmoil and despair. In the course of a series of dramatic, life-changing events that included several near death experiences, I began a healing journey that transformed my life and gave me a new and hopeful perspective on the human condition. I began asking the tough questions of who we are as individuals, how we relate to our culture, the world at large, and more importantly where we as human beings are going. In many ways I felt that I had succumbed to Thoreau’s life of quiet desperation while the human community around me was in dire straits and so I feverishly began to write..and write from the heart.
Right before I entered UCLA, I was diagnosed with a terminal blood disorder and given about a year to live. I suddenly felt alienated and forgotten, the victim of a capricious universe and a society that was suddenly cold. I was now a lost child huddling in the corner. It was then that I realized that fear is our only enemy and if we give into it, we are lost. Fear obscures our vision and alienates us from our lives. It fragments our being and pits our thoughts against each other. So I fought my fears and the ensuing battles, and despite medical predictions, I survived the year and many since. It was a harrowing journey experience but I survived and never forgot the tenuous nature of our lives. It was during this time, when I felt isolated and alone that I always remembered the “therapy of creating” that my mother had referred to, and I learned to process feelings through creative writing and journaling. Through the process of becoming whole again, I realized that the same transformation was the key to our social malaise. I began to prepare the path to come out of isolation and become a real part of my community, making meaningful connections to others in a very conscious way.
In conjunction with this realization, I felt a growing needed to be of service to others and my community. I became involved in social action, working in a variety of programs to facilitate positive outcomes for people with disabilities and others who feel disenfranchised. My greatest success seemed to be in helping to heal personal relationships so I became a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. As such I have been assisting individuals and families in crisis for 25 years both in private practice as a clinician and in the nonprofit arena with expertise in the field of disability, chemical dependency, and childhood trauma. At the same time I began writing again. I worked on a number of projects including a self-help book but none seemed to satisfy or adequately convey those feelings and perceptions that I first nurtured in my youth and which were coming back to me with renewed energy. Throughout this time, I heard the call of the voice of the poet within that became too powerful to ignore.
Since that time of awakening, I have been driven to write poetry of the heart that illuminates the struggles of life and how we may triumph in the end. I am convinced that the growing fusion of my personal experiences and my professional knowledge is paving a path to further pursue my call to write. My resume does not tell the whole story, but because of my path, I feel passionate about sharing my voice with others to both inspire and to empower, through my poetry. My goal is to speak for many of what I consider to be the lost voices of the disenfranchised among us. I ascribe my poetic voice to the feelings expressed in the quote by Anne Sexton “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
_____
by Ella Stone
Today during the men’s class, the teacher asked one of the inmates how his novel was going. He had been having writer’s block for a while, as he didn’t know what to do with the hero’s lady character.
“So, how did you get over that writer’s block, Marcus?”
“I killed her,” he said.
Everyone laughed. It was halfway through the class, and the energy shifted from quiet and unfamiliar to a lively discussion. I watched strangers respond to each other’s writing, watched most of them raise their hands when asked who was serious about being published writers. They want the same things all amateur writers want. They want the same things I want. I felt the anxiety of teaching at a jail slowly lift from my neck and shoulders.
This week I shadowed both the men and women’s creative writing class at the ACJ. The more I walk through the bleak walls, the less I notice their suffocating boundaries. The classrooms are brightened by the inmates red scrubs, labels that mark them against gray walls with a color that’s hard to avoid. Op-Eds were the topic of discussion and as a class we looked closely at a couple of their pieces. Dashaun, the one with sleepy eyes, who moves his head so slowly when he talks that it seems he’s placing it down for the night to mold his thin pillow, wrote about mandatory drug laws. He wrote about how unjust they were for Black and Latino populations, how 5 grams of crack will get you five years whereas it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to be sentenced the same jail time. He says it needs to be changed.
In the women’s class, I paced behind them as they typed their Op-Eds into computers. One wrote about domestic violence, the difficult struggle between staying and protecting the children vs. finding the courage to leave whilst putting the children in danger. Another wrote about the judicial system, its unfair process, its power to arrest and charge in a second upon entering a living room without any solid background information.
I started wondering what I was truly going to do to help their writing, where my knowledge would best be applied, to their structure? Their grammar? Their use of language? Marcus already knew that by killing off his protagonist’s lady he’d be allowing for more possibilities, the option to complicate plot and give the hero a reason to keep going, to seek revenge, to find closure, to search for another lover. Dashaun already knew that his Op-Ed needed heart and honesty but also specific examples to make a point. And the women already knew that their voices would be heard by writing down their pain, even if my eyes were the only ones to see it.
I realized I could teach these inmates all the grammar, structure and language in the world, but what they really needed was a reason to keep writing, a hope that their words could be better. And sitting in that classroom with no windows, I was forced to look at each inmate, to study the way they move and talk, to realize that anyone in their lives who might have been there to listen, to support, to encourage, has been “killed off” in one way or another. When they wrote the novel of their lives, before they were in this creative writing class, their words were spontaneous and passionate, wrongly laid out, chosen for instant gratification just like the actions that put them in this place; they were not toiled over and thought about, painstakingly read. I realized my job was going to be simple: I was going to help them revise their words. And I started to believe that new novels could be written.
_____
Tradition tells us that muses are angelic creatures who descend from clouds, or drift like smoke through an open window — while my muse is a guy who walks into a bar. But we take what we can get, right? The sources of poetry are too uncertain for me to refuse any gift, no matter how unlikely the messenger. By the same token, a poet usually has to accept the form and scope of the poem as a given. One dare not say to the muse, “Thanks for the epigram, but really I was hoping for an ode…” If we refuse the gift, it may not be offered again.
_______
by Elizabeth Kirschner
I just came in from my evening seaside walk. Exotic black sand harvested by winter storms, heaps of seaweed with chartreuse and fuchsia tints, low, low tide, sun dousing itself in the marsh among cattails and red-winged blackbirds, moon rising on a quicksilver horizon. Such beauty, at its heart-wrenching heights, can be disarming, even alarming the way sudden love can be. A torrent of gorgeous torture, then, which is the high sublime. I greet this sea twice daily as I am addicted to its stunning power, its absolute unwillingness to back down.
I was rounding the bend in the road just before my house when I saw, to my utter horror, a homeless black man. There are no African Americans in Kittery Point, ME and to suddenly come upon one, in such ruins, was an instant heartbreak. Immediately the words, “There but for the grace of God go I,” came in to me fully, totally.
Given that I have a major, at times debilitating, mental illness, I take nothing for granted and o how so many times has the suicidal swan song hummed in my harrowed bones. Far too many times and I hear it now, my stealthy, secret siren. I want to go in a wild fury, to be dashed upon the sea’s boulders by waves that are magnanimously violent. Violence is practically a cult in this country and I became intimately acquainted by it during a childhood that was an evil eternity, my body a killing field.
Deeply damaged, I understand the myriad ways one can be totally, terrifically ruined and seeing that black man, caked in dirt, was just about devastating. When I came into my house I stood before my favorite painting. It was done by a very dear friend, Flynn Donovan. He is a master, a profoundly deep seer and this painting—I have others by Flynn—is of boat people. Golden silhouettes riding green and turquoise waves. Every time I look at it I can’t help but feel that all of us are a hair away from being boat people. Disaster isn’t picky, it is quite willing to be anyone and everyone’s destiny.
This took me back to a memory, one that is singed in me. I was in Cambridge, MA attending group therapy called DBT, which I secretly called The Diabolical Training. It was winter, winter in zenith, winter having a heyday with its tip of the whip winds and penetrating, piercing cold. It was so cold I thought my cells might freeze.
I came out of The Diabolical Training, headed down the alleyway toward the garage where my car was parked. I came upon a homeless man, dead asleep, with an open book in his hands next to the predictable grocery cart that held all his earthly goods. The book broke my heart, but worse, far worse were the cat and dog in his cart. I knew they got fed before this man fed himself. These were homeless, beloved animals loved by a homeless man. I took a twenty out of my purse, put it in his book as a bookmarker and gently closed the book so I wouldn’t wake up this homeless gentleman. I wanted him to find the twenty as though an angel had given it to him.
Which I most definitely am not. Still, each of us has the capacity to shape-shift into an angel sometimes. Perhaps our humanity depends upon it. The damage, the utter demonic violence visited upon me as a child has only deepened my compassion for others who are damaged and damned.
Right now I have two books with no homes. Right now Flynn’s work, his profoundly and gravely beautiful paintings are in a warehouse. Artists and poets are not the legislatures of this world, they are its secondhand citizens except for those lucky few whose work is magnetic.
Of which I am not, nor ever will be. My fourth book, My Life as a Doll, brought out bravely and beautifully by Autumn House Press two years ago has sold less than five hundred copies. My tale of travail, this book chronicles the abuse, abuse so severe it’s a wonder I survived, but I did and there but for the grace of God go I. Nobody or very few really want to know what’s really going on behind closed doors.
The homeless, the boat people—let us not forget about them. They are everywhere. They are multiplying like loaves and fishes. Who will save them? Who will save us from our very own souls? As I write this I’m looking at the cover of Gregory Orr’s wondrous book, How Beautiful the Beloved. All of us are the beloved, most of us have beloved ones, so let us love the beloved fully, whole-heartedly.
There’s another A.A. expression that I love. It goes: God loves a drunk. That means God loves the legions of demolished ones best. My parents were drunks and I am glad, very glad God loved them in spite of their violence and I believe that when they died they went straight up to heaven. Hopefully I will, too, but not by my own hand. Rather may I breathe that wild fury, tortuous beauty into my poems. In the end, God put a pen in my hand and I will keep using it even if my story, like so, so many others, goes largely unheard.
__________
by Ella Stone
They call it toilet talk. She kneels in front of the porcelain bowl, hands cupping the base like a man grabbing his lover’s hips on a dance floor. Her face dips down into the oval hole, calling his name, Marco. His name travels through pipe past grit and grime, coiling through the loops and turns of sewer systems, searching through dark walls for waiting ears. He kneels one floor below her, separated by a two-foot concrete slab, leaning his leathered face down into the cold bowl. Lydia, he replies, holding the “a” long and lovingly despite the rank stench of feces and urine that suffuses the air at his mouth. It is their only way to talk, their only way to pass hours without face-to-face communication. It’s their only choice, behind bars.
It was through these two toilets that a wedding ceremony occurred. Each inmate scooped water out of the bowls and dumped it down the nearby sinks, ladled out its murky liquid until only a thin coating settled below. Each brought in a friend, a witness to the act. They exchanged vows through rusty pipes, a union of two souls coveted by dirty porcelain. When they told the warden they were now married, he looked at them preposterously. It was a Muslim marriage, sir. All we needed was words and witnesses. Neither of them was Muslim, but one of the witnesses was and told them this “toilet ceremony” was official. And that’s all it took for Marco and Lydia to feel victorious behind limiting walls.
This is just one of the stories the man in charge tells us when we go for “security orientation” at the ACJ. He hands out a single-sheet booklet, photocopied in faint ink, rules to follow when you enter the prison community. He tells us it’s all about respect. It’s about giving the inmates a decent “Hey, how’s it goin?” He tells us not to let them manipulate us, that they will try, and that they’re good at it. One of the head security guard shows us a beeper that we’ll each wear, connected to the belt loops of our pants. “Just pull the pin whenever you feel in danger, like a fights goin’ on in the middle of the room,” he says. When the pin releases, it sets off a silent alarm and a swarm of officers follow the beeper signal to where we are located, in case we’re in a situation where an inmate has taken us hostage. No problem, I think. No problem.
“I’d say you’re safer here than if you were to walk into a public high school,” the man in charge says when he senses our dis-ease and anxiety. “I’ve worked here twenty-five years, and I know I’ve got guys that’d back me up should anything go down.” I wonder what a few weeks will get me. “They govern themselves between these walls, you’ll see” he says. “Once they know you’re here to help them, they won’t mess with you.”
I ponder the range of souls sitting in concrete blocks. The Lydia’s and Marco’s who just want to be able to love, the manipulative ones that want to see what I can offer them, the ones that give reason to hand out beepers should something dangerous happen. I’m scared. I can’t deny it. And I keep looking around me at all the people that work here, trying to tell if there’s anyone with fear in their eyes. I haven’t found one yet. They seem at ease and as comfortable as they’d be working at a corporate office or a department store. But the moment I walk into the classroom of inmates, the moment I allow myself to look them straight in the face with conviction, I find that fear where I least expect in, lingering in their eyes like the putrid stench that hovers inside toilets.
_____
Notes toward an understanding of poetic imagination
When I was a student in Iowa City, Stanley Bomgarten and I used to drink at a place called George’s a few blocks from campus. One morning we were celebrating Stanley getting fired from his job as assistant pastor at the local Baptist Church when a young man walked in and sat at the bar. He was tall and thin with short greasy hair. His eyes shone with wild intensity behind thick black-rimmed lenses. His cheeks were flushed as if he had a fever.
“Is your name Mark?” he asked. “No it’s Mike,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said, “God gave me a poem to give to you. You can publish it under your own name if you want.”
From memory he wrote these lines on a paper napkin:
When a man has tried his soul
as if it were open to loss or win
and felt the better for his trial
or felt he has traveled far
from accustomed ways
Cricket chirping
becomes a source of joy, concrete
is comforting to walk upon and churches
have their stained glass lighted.
Then he acquires acquiescence
and the wind is cool on his cheek
and he neither laughs nor cries
but looks upon things about him.
He is in the infinite heart
where the air is cool numinescence
in the sky. He begins to think
of the face he has seen
and his eyes begin searching
for the stars.
He handed me the napkin, got up, and walked out of the bar without ordering anything.
I asked Stanley what he thought of the guy. Stanley said he believed God really had given him the poem. I laughed, but when I realized Stanley was serious, I ordered another beer. We sat for a long time without saying anything. Then Stanley said his life was going to Hell.
It’s been thirty years since I heard Stanley moved back to his parents’ farm. Thirty years since I finished my degree and began wandering in my self-made wilderness. As for the odd young man with the poem, I never learned his name and I never saw him again.
___________
by Ella Stone
“How was your writing week?” the teacher asks from the front of the classroom.
We’re in a small circle, a ring of warm bodies surrounded by cold concrete walls. All women, all eager to share what’s resting inside. They do this at the beginning of every class. Talk about their writing weeks. The good. The bad. The writer’s block. I’m back at the Allegheny County Jail, or ACJ as the employees call it, observing the women’s class this time.
“Sucked. Mine sucked,” says one of the inmates. Her face shifts from the teacher to the floor when she speaks, as though her eyes are being pulled by a string. She goes on to express how her writing week was tough since her sister had been killed the previous month during a big snow storm, a hit-and-run on an icy street in Homewood.
I think of tragedy. The tragedy of these women locked up in here with red suits and thin slippers. She talks about pain, about “losing it” every time she sits down in her cell to write about her sister’s death. We listen. I think about how this writing class could easily be a three-hour therapy session should the lesson plan veer off track. But I realize this opportunity I have to teach at a jail is my chance to show these inmates how writing is therapy, how it can heal. I could give them excerpts from prison writers like Jimmy Santiago Baca or Ken Lamberton so they could read for themselves how writing preserves parts of our lives. Or I could give them a memoir, an essay, a poem.
We continue our circle of discussion. The woman sitting next to me raises her hand: “I’ve got a story to tell. I’ve got a story to tell. I just need someone to help me write it down,” she says gripping the pages of her notebook with clutched fingers, lifting the sheets in the air. I see words scribbled in pencil filling each page to the edge. The writing is illegible from my angle, but I know there’s something powerful in between those sheets just by the look in her eyes. They’re hazel and youthful, despite a few surrounding wrinkles, and they turn to me in the middle of class, glancing down at a poem as she slides it onto my desk. “Will you read this?” she whispers, like the plea of a child in middle school passing a note to her best friend. I read it slowly, making sure to take in every single word and space so she knows I’m really trying. The verbs have power and the images linger, but the syntax is off. And I’m eager to show her how to improve that. But the subject needs no improvement. The poem is about memories that are locked up and dusty in the cellar of a basement, grayed and forgotten in darkness, stifled by walls, and untouched by the living.
“You had a good writing week,” I whisper.
______
It can be done. We can capture the rapture of happiness, bring it home, feed it, love it like a stray animal till it’s named and tamed. Try this—think of the soul as a butterfly net, feel the wild flutterings within. When pregnant some seventeen years ago, my son’s first movements felt like a dancing butterfly, my womb, a cocoon.
These days, happiness is my only forecast. I practice it with the same fidelity I devote to my art. I’m perpetuating spring, harvesting spring, bearing spring even though winter is not yet over and here, in Southeastern Maine, spring is fickle, flighty, here again, gone again till summer rushes in with its dressy breezes.
I came across some lines the other day in a long forgotten poem of mine. In it I assert that I write like a dancer who’s better at falling than leaping. Debilitated by serious illness for a solid decade, I did fall, I fell often, first in seizures, then in bouts of madness. I realized, in an instant, that the deeper the fall, the higher the leap. Fall down ten times, get up eleven was the law I lived by.
This has taught me range. For far too long a time, I struck all the low notes, the minor keys, the bottom notes, but now I’m hitting the trills, the grace notes, running up the scale into the callings of crescendos rather than going down into the despair of decrescendo. I’m light on my feet—both my dancing feet and iambic ones.
Well into my middle years, I’m growing younger day by day. One friend noted that my brow is no longer deeply furrowed and there’s a spring in my step, a spring in my poems. I lay out for them the way my son does for the Frisbee during a game or tournament. He soars for the disc, defies gravity, and is totally, totally in the moment. That happens while I’m writing, the world disappears and fertile words, earthy, herbal words move from compost into composition.
My happiness is not just manifesting in my work. It has many chapters recorded in the illuminated manuscript I’m now scripting, minute by minute. I always loved Pinsky’s title for his anthology, brought out some years ago, called The Handbook of Heartbreak. It is no longer my guidebook and my want bone, another Pinsky creation, has turned into wishbone.
Myriad forms of happiness then—in the work, in my seaside community of what I call the Amazing People, in the beautiful environs I live in. Darkness, darkness everywhere has transformed into light, light everywhere with plenty of it to drink. In this land of light and water, the hard shard in my heart has softened, shape-shifted. The only thing I’m burdened with is the bird of my being and o my God does she love to sing.
Outside my kitchen window is a hand painted bird box, meant as ornament, but just yesterday, a pair of sparrows are making a nest there and that’s what I’m doing, lining my nest with strands of happiness. There’s also some daffodil shoots pushing up from hard soil and gravel, a seemingly impossible feat, but I’m doing the same and maybe, just maybe, I’ll produce a bloom or two.
A great blue heron has alighted in the eel grass down at the water’s edge. She has mastered the stillness in the dancing, and in the hierarchy of poets, she is the supreme mistress. May I follow her example, leave behind dirge and lamentation, fly right into my irreducible, inimitable song.
I have a friend who died a year ago, far before his time, and in the card his wife, now widow, sent to me are these words by Abraham Lincoln: “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” May we all live it up, really live it up, as though our very lives depended upon it, which of course they do.
_____
Read Elizabeth Kirschner’s interview about poetry as healing: http://healmyptsd.com/
A few days ago, an old priest who was a colleague of my wife’s passed away, and my wife came home from work angry at the world. I was worried; Eva doesn’t anger often, and her grief seemed huge and unbearable. I couldn’t console her, so I asked Scott Staples, a friend who knew and admired the old man, to stop by our house. The three of us sat in the kitchen, Eva sipping milk, Scott and I icewater, toasting the old priest’s life, remembering picnics at his farm, his love of poetry, his kindness to Scott during a painful divorce, the old man’s struggle with homosexuality, his coming to peace with desire in his final years. His last weeks were spent in a hospital bed, ranting fragments of Shelley and Yeats, mumbling worries about his fall classes, ripping at his clothes full of bees, he said.
In the long shadows of the kitchen, we lifted glasses to the old man, his love, his fear, the final blessing of death, and as William Stafford says, we thought hard for us all.
***
For ten years I didn’t write. Other ambitions that seemed more important at the time called to me. I raised kids, taught school, built a business, and learned how to be a grown-up. Although I wasn’t writing, I did feel the pull of the spirit toward a life of the imagination. I prayed, I read philosophy, I took my kids to the art museum. I had long conversations with friends that lasted well into the night. I felt love and fear, and I experienced an occasional insight into larger patterns that inspired awe, but these feelings and insights disappeared without my recording them. A stone falls into the water and the ripples push out to the edges until the surface is smooth again, leaving no mark.
What I missed most was a sense of completion. When I write a poem, the desire for a pleasing aesthetic experience compels me to fill in the details, to continue the rhythms, to find closure. Without artistic ambition, the reverie stays half-completed, unsatisfied.
The last six months I’ve been writing like a madman, poems tumbling out one after another like a family of circus acrobats. Every poem I haven’t written over the last ten years is standing in line at the door, waiting for its name to be spoken.
***
So we write poems in order to give form to our imaginings, to make discoveries in our emotional terrain, to understand life in a way that nothing else makes quite as clear. And poems live in the vital center, made of the raw stuff of life. They reside in every small important thing we do: holding a newborn baby, teaching a child to read, consoling a friend in grief.
But why read poetry? What can these exploratory images and extended rhythms mean to someone other than the writer?
During my ten years of silence, I often read poetry for pleasure. Many poems delighted me with their music, wit, and color, but a few I kept returning to because they gave me something more than merely postcards from the poet’s inner travels. Epiphanic narratives such as James Wright’s Northern Pike, Naomi Shihab Nye’s Coming to Cuzco, and Jack Myers’ Jake Addresses the World from the Garden gave form to my own awakenings. I need these poems the way a vine needs a trellis. We might say that poets, in devoting their lives to the act of imagination, engineer the soul of our culture, designing and building the spiritual scaffold we must all climb as we struggle toward the light.
_______
by Ella Stone
It takes forever to get into the Allegheny County Jail. Between the four of us, we only have two quarters, which we stick in the parking meter out front. Once past the first set of doors, a police officer approaches us: “Ladies, you need to lock up all your stuff in the lockers, no keys, no sunglasses, no phones.” “We don’t have any quarters,” we say rummaging through pockets. We bump into each other, unsure of what to do next: four free women voluntarily coming to jail, eager and excited to get inside its walls. A woman standing by the lockers turns towards our frazzled mess, “Here, I have a quarter.” “Oh thank you, thank you.” We feed the borrowed quarter to the small locker, lock up our things, and pass through a metal detector.
The guy in charge leads us through metal detector number two and a woman officer scans us up and down. Daylight peers in through the main glass doors, and as we pass through each stage of security, the light slowly fades behind concrete walls. My eyes adjust to fluorescent, revealing bleak, cream hallways. I’ve never been in a jail, but imagined this was how it might be. Behind glass panels sits a large group of prisoners listening to a pastor. One eyes me, locking to my ponytail and earrings; I feel his stare until we close a two-inch steel door behind us.
It feels like many classrooms I’ve been in before–chalkboards, computers, desks, and a book shelf–but rather than filled with energetic children, difficult teenagers, or nicely dressed college students, this classroom is full of prisoners. Twelve men dressed in thin red pants and v-neck shirts sit at computers, shifting big legs in their seats. They give us a nod, a quiet “hello” or a mere look in our direction. My heart thuds like it used to before my ballet performances, but I’m more worried about how I’ll see the audience, rather than how they’ll see me. I’m expecting criminals, and I’m worried about how uncomfortable, unsafe I might feel. I try not to think about why each one’s here. I try not to care.
I’m observing a creative writing class at the county jail, one that I’ll soon be teaching with fellow grad students. I sit in a chair in the middle of the room, facing my back to a prisoner. I hear him breathe in and out, long steady blows behind me. My fear lessens as the teacher continues her lesson. Some men talk quietly to neighbors, others sit in silence at their computers, and some call out words for the teacher to put up on the board. They’re writing a haiku together.
After class, the heavy breather comes up to me and tells me he’s a rapper, so he wants “to write poetry but it ain’t right ‘cuz all the rappers have been goin’ to jail recently.” One asks me how long I’ve been in school. “Damn” is his response and he tells me he wants to go back to school, “down south where it’s warm, so [he] can get into business.” One talks about how he “just wants to write, man” how he “just wants to learn, man.” Men write on notepads in their empty cells and bring them to class every week, hoping their words and my guidance can provide the air they need to lift up their heels, to imagine themselves beyond walls. Or maybe just the sanity to wait between them.
They ask when we’re coming back. “Soon,” we say, “soon.” We head out through the same doors, the same hallways, the same detectors, but this time we walk around the laser beams. I remember our awkward entrance and think about how long it took for us to pass through these doors, how badly we wanted to get in, and how easy it is for us to get out.
____
For thirty years, I’ve been reading Lyn Lifshin’s poems in independent literary magazines across the country. I admire her integrity as a poet — she’s always true to her voice and vision – she never sounds like anyone else. Here are three of her recent poems:
Salsa
it’s the moves
not the man. He
could be the size
of a 12 year old
but he’s got the
beat in his body.
Who cares if he
is hardly up to
your nose. He
was shaking his
booty. He can get
you to shake
yours too so any
black tulips
pulling you
down go dust
and vanish and
if they try to
return, he’ll
luga palooga
them, slam them
north with a
wild hip
The Man In Front of Me Has Run Out Of The Metro Station
He had just the right
look and carreid the
same book I’m reading.
He might have just
left his wife. He might
have never wanted
a woman. Or wanted
a woman like me. But
he got off at Union
Station, vanished into
a cab. I didn’t see his
face, only his fingers
but he’ll come to me
in dreams where
he won’t slip away
In Virginia, Hardly A Leaf Gone Red
as ice blasts, cold
reels up the ropes of
summer. No hazy
moon this morning.
Leaf scent, cold
wool. Some mornings,
like today, I can’t
read any more bad
news. “Joy,” my
mother’s favorite
perfume on my wrist.
All that remains of
her above earth
_____
by Publius
Although the high school where I teach was locked down for an afternoon, it turns out we were never in much danger. They caught the right guy, the actual guy who shot the cop, a couple of miles north of here. When they cordoned-off this neighborhood, they surrounded the house of the wrong guy. He saw a bunch of cops, so he ran home. In this neighborhood, being black and running is probable cause. They surrounded his house, and cut off the whole neighborhood for blocks around. There were literally 100 cops telling this guy to “Come out with your hands up so we can shoot you.” He was a little hesitant. Armored cars, SWAT. snipers, loud speakers blasting… I figured they were going to do the opposite of a Manuel Noriega, like, instead of torturing him with hours of rock and hip-hop, they’d play hours of Tammy Wynette. Finally, he surrendered, and they saw that they had the wrong guy. But they charged him anyway with five counts of fucking folks up, two counts of being Black and 25, and one count of looking like everyone else in the neighborhood. He’s sentenced to twenty-two years of community service, to wit he needs to show-up at the 7th District police station once a week and help the police with their beat-down techniques.
_____
by Publius
I am in awe of how little I actually exaggerate in these stories. I tend to edit for continuity, so I will, for example, put two different events on the same day, and say they happened to just one teacher. I’ll change a name and such for the sake of anonymity. But, in truth, I invent nothing. And I stand in awe of that fact.
I’m really glad to have the opportunity to do this. How many times, over the years, has someone said, “God, someone just has to publish this!”? I think inner city teachers feel isolated. Everyone thinks he or she knows something about teaching because everyone has been to school. But I have to admit that even I, a teacher for at the time twenty-five years, had little clarity about the life of teachers fifteen minutes from my home until, ten years ago, I went to work in the city. As just one example –
Being the only black person in a room full of white people is a fairly common experience for black folks. Being the only white person in a room full of blacks is an extraordinary experience for a white person. Except, of course, if you’re an inner city teacher. In which case, it’s just called work.
Over the years, I’ve developed a number of defenses for the moment when a kid says, “Hey, man, this is slavery conditions. I mean, look at this. What does this remind you of? A white guy giving orders to a bunch of black folks!” To which I reply, ‘I don’t believe in slavery, but let me explain to you indentured servitude. It’s the difference between having your butt forever, and having your butt till June.’
Well, my kids are doing a final, and I’ve got to act mean for a minute.
_____
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Sometimes chance conspires and the laws of randomness cast good things in our direction at a time that seems exactly right. This is what happened to me this week, when I extracted from two giant reading piles—columns over four feet high, weaving even now a little precariously behind my desk—a thin chapbook by a poet I hadn’t heard of, The Carp, by Yun Wang. I took a break from guilt, put my feet up, and started reading.
But let me back up for a moment and tell you how I got the little chapbook, and why I’ve had it stashed away for two or three years.
My daughter studied bookbinding and letterpress techniques at Booklyn, in Brooklyn, New York (http://www.booklyn.org/) around the time of 9/11. (It’s an aside I won’t go into here, but I was in the air, on my way to JFK, to visit her that morning.) A few years later she started her own press called Spruce Street, named after her then-street-address in Berkeley; she also went to work for a press called Whereabouts. (She’s a teacher now in a high school for English language learners; collectively the students speak a total of 29 languages. Last year she taught Romeo and Juliet; this year they’re doing The Odyssey.)
Whereabouts (http://www.whereaboutspress.com/) publishes prize-winning travel books that are unusual because they are not guides in the usual way—they are, rather, story collections—the country’s literature is what guides the traveler. The owner, David Peattie, is the nephew of the California poet Noel Peattie, who died a few years ago at the age of 72. Noel was the retired Special Collections Librarian for UC Davis, and a prolific poet, writer, editor and supporter of other poets’ work; he was also the son of naturalist writers Louise Redfield and Donald Culross Peattie. (His own poetry collections include Western Skyline, In the Dome of St. Laurence Meteor, King Humble’s Grave, Sweetwater Ranch, and The Testimony of Doves.) Over the years his imprint, Konocti, published poetry books by several of my friends. Noel and I knew each other for a couple of decades; he was a true bibliophile, with a vast collection, many of them rare editions.
A year or so before he died, Noel had obtained a book of my poems (published by my daughter’s press) called The Book of Insects, and he wrote me the kind of encouraging and appreciative note that we poets always hope to receive. After Noel’s unexpected death, David gifted me with a number of books from Noel’s collection, knowing that I would love reading them, and would also treasure them as a link to Noel. Since then I’ve read most of them a number of times, but somehow overlooked Yun Wang’s The Carp—until now.
I was so arrested by the poems in this little cinnamon-colored book that I began investigating Wang on the web. Born in China in 1964, she grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Her father was tortured and imprisoned, and sent away to the countryside to be “reformed.” The Carp is dedicated to Wang’s father, and many of the poems in her little book tell stories from that period. The stories are stark, terrifying, mysteriously beautiful and sad; they fuse into something intangible and true.
As I used what our idiotic and thankfully now former president called “the Google” to read more about Wang, I discovered that she has a more recent collection, the 2002 Nicholas Roerich Prize winner from Storyline Press, called The Book of Jade. I was also amazed to learn that she is a world-renowned scientist and cosmologist, known especially for her work on dark energy, and that she is currently Associate Professor of Cosmology at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. (You can read about her cosmological research, and also several recent poems at her website: http://www.nhn.ou.edu/~wang/)
After reading The Carp I immediately ordered Wang’s full-length collection on Amazon. Then I emailed her. I found her email address at the U of OK, and sent a short note not unlike the one that Noel Peattie once sent me. Later that day, Wang acknowledged my note, thanking me graciously. Then she sent me a postscript: She had looked at my website and read some of my poems, and was writing to tell me that she too had enjoyed them.
And so, here we are, breathing in words, in conversation over poems that a few days ago we knew nothing about. There are poems in The Carp that would have brought Yun Wang imprisonment and torture like her father’s had she been old enough to publish them when the Cultural Revolution reigned. Perhaps the book would have been destroyed—though no doubt some devoted reader or fellow author would have tried to find a way to preserve its pages.
_____
by Publius
Yesterday, the last day of classes, we get a “Faith Based Initiative”. Some preacher from the neighborhood decides to take all the kids who have been suspended a bunch, and give them a barbeque over in the football field. The end result is that all the nice kids are in class doing various onerous tasks, while all the troublemakers are across the street, eating -que, tossing a football, shagging flies. We can smell -que in my room. One sweet little girl looks wistfully out the window. She sniffs and says to no one in particular, “You think if I kick the principal in the balls that I can get a couple of wings and a drumstick?”
Today, in the middle of a final, I get called by a district pooh-bah. I’m asked if I have any students who haven’t as yet taken this standardized reading test.
‘I’m giving a final examination.’
“Perhaps you can send down the ones who finish early?”
‘No. Nobody will finish early. That’s the way I design the test. Did I mention that this test is a final?’
“Perhaps I can come to your room, and explain the results to the ones who did finish the test?”
‘No. I’m giving a final exam.’
So the district pooh-bah comes up to my room anyway, and tells me that I should explain the results to the students, and give them their individual scores. “When you have the time.” Then she hands me the results for the entire school. Almost a thousand scores with all manner of line and column, and I’m supposed to find my thirty kids in this ream of paper. This is in the last thirty minutes of class, the reading portion of my exam.
I smile and say, ‘Of course. Just leave the scores on my desk.’ Where they will remain undisturbed, and live happily for the rest of the summer.
_____
By Songyi Zhang
I remember years ago when my American friend brought me a gift from Arizona, I accidentally spotted the “Made in China” label right away at the bottom of the item. I said to my friend that it was quite a trip for the present—going all the way to the U.S. and coming back home again.
I didn’t know then years later when I am in America I really can see a plethora of products, from daily necessities to local handicrafts, are made in China.
After returning from my two-week field seminar in Southern Louisiana, I couldn’t help thinking about the souvenirs that were manufactured in China. It wasn’t the first time that the “Made in China” label had turned me off when I was about to purchase a token of the scenic spot in the United States. In Pittsburgh, in Boston, in New York, in Washington D.C., in Denver and even in the pristine Amish Community in western Pennsylvania, Chinese goods seem to have penetrated the local markets extensively.
Strolling in the French Market in New Orleans, I wondered if the place ought to change its name to Chinese Market as eight out of ten stalls sold souvenirs produced in China—Mardi Gras beads and masks, New Orleans magnets, trinkets and key chains, not to mention my new “Made in China” Sony camera purchased on Canal Street.
I don’t know if the “Made in China” label gives American consumers faith in good quality or only assurance of low price. But I notice one reason that Americans like to order take-out Chinese food is because its price is reasonable. Yep, I’ve heard of remarks on expensive Japanese food but not yet on Chinese food.
As a Chinese national in the United States, I have a mixed feeling about the Chinese approach to globalization. On one hand, China makes positive contributions to the world economy. On the other hand, these “Made in China” products have consumed enormous amount of raw materials from China, which means China now not only sustains 1.3 billion Chinese people but also maintains 300 million lives in the United States and elsewhere in the world by exporting tons of goods abroad. Will the natural resources in China come to exhaustion sooner than any developing countries in the world? How can the local economy survive when facing the impact of low cost and cheap labor from the Middle Kingdom?
China often says she won’t harm the interest of other countries and wants to develop a just and harmonious economic market. I feel ashamed to see that Chinese products actually have stifled the creativity and competition among small local businesses around the world.
I wish I could see more than voodoo dolls, Mardi Gras beads and masks in any souvenir shops of New Orleans.
As a foreign tourist, I wish I could buy more “Made in USA” handicrafts than made in elsewhere when I am travelling in the country.
_____
Everyone knows that the writing of poetry, of becoming a poet, entails a long apprenticeship. Mine began at age nineteen, which was when I wrote my first poem. Both an initiation and a damnation, it was Plathian and full of deep, female associations: mother, womb, kitchen knife. In the years to come, I would carve out a womb of my own, a place of artistic nurturance. The world would not do this for me, in fact, it would tear out the fragile membranes of the fetal self I attempted to assign to writing.
My apprenticeship, then, was a long travail, a rupture that stained more than a decade. Like Plath, I made a bad miscalculation after graduate school and subverted my energies by trying to write short stories. This is what Ted Hughes had to say about Plath’s digression: “It was only when she gave up that effort to ‘get outside’ herself, and finally accepted the fact that her painful subjectivity was her real theme, and that the plunge into herself was her only real direction, and that poetic strategies were her only means, that she finally found herself in full possession of her genius.”
As for myself, it wasn’t until my life caved in to complete despair that I was able to adequately bear what James Hillman would term my daimon and my calling. Even so, I was still decades away from hitting the vein of my own painful subjectivity, a vein struck and mined, at last, in my latest book, My Life as a Doll, which emerged, evolved, became my most genuine work.
Carol Heilbrun, in Writing a Woman’s Life applies Erik Erikson’s term “the moratorium” (used by Erikson only of males) to the lives of women. He describes this state as “a time when the individual appears to be getting nowhere, accomplishing none of his aims, or altogether unclear as to what those aims might be.” Writing of Dorothy Sayer’s despair at the age of twenty-eight, Heilbrun diagnoses a case of the female moratorium: “With highly gifted women, as with men, the failure to lead the conventional life, to find the conventional way early, may signify more than having been dealt a poor deck of cards. It may well be the forming of a life in service of a talent felt, but unrecognized and unnamed. This condition is marked by a profound sense of vocation, with no idea of what that vocation is and by a strong sense of inadequacy and deprivation.”
My moratorium felt bottomless—although I knew my calling, I trained it in all the wrong directions and was totally without the wherewithal necessary to enact it meaningfully. This, to me, may be peculiarly female—to know what one must do, but to be without the confidence crucial to its realization. Will was not the issue for me, nor desire, but I was very much undermined by “inadequacy and deprivation.”
In the end, my writing was the bridge I built over despair. If the soul of my writing has a primarily female disposition, and I think it must, I will study it—its curvaceous geometry, shifting nature and unforeseeable appearances. Now I may need to write about my mother, as I did in My Life as a Doll, in order to accomplish this or, as in one instance, about a lawn ornament, but my private hell of a moratorium, though I didn’t know it at the time, was my breeding ground and yes, the fish do multiply.
_____
by Arlene Weiner
I recently returned from a trip to Greece, which has me thinking about Homer.
Years ago I was astonished but convinced by the argument that the Iliad was not originally written, but was composed orally. Part of the evidence was gathered by Albert Lord, who journeyed through the Balkans and found men singing long traditional narratives in taverns. (Singer of Tales, 1960.) These bards were keepers of historical memory. A good bit of the content of the Balkan songs, as of Anglo-Saxon verse and the Iliad, is the memory of old battles and praise of the ancestors’ honor. What’s more, they didn’t simply recite memorized pieces—they varied a song from performance to performance.
As individuals we sometimes remember through verse. How many days in November? Does S come after U? Many of us will quickly run through Thirty days hath September, or the ABC song. Even when normal memory is lost—when someone has suffered neurological damage—a person may be able to remember sentences set to a tune.
Oral composition is more than passive remembering. Verse forms enable the very skilled bard to compose, to improvise as he recites. (The bard in the Balkans was a he.) Actors in a Shakespeare play will sometimes be able to fill out a blank-verse line that they’ve partly forgotten. I’ve had, and maybe you’ve had, the experience of making up words to a folk song as I went along, or a line to a popular song I don’t remember. If you ever sing the blues (literally), while you are repeating your first line (Went to the grocer’s, didn’t have my bag/Went to the grocer’s, didn’t have my bag) you can think what your concluding line will be. (I’m sorry to say the ending feeling like a hag leaps to my mind.)
On the flight back from Greece to the U.S., I had no window, but I could follow the course of the flight on a map displayed on a screen in front of me. We headed north from Athens and in a very little time we were over Serbia, Romania, Hungary. So many countries close together (at least in the jet age), countries that have known much suffering and war, and recently. And I recalled that during the Bosnian War, I was horrified to realize that the tavern songs Lord heard memorialized the battles between Serbs and Muslims hundreds of years ago, especially the battle of Kosovo. Poetry may have inflamed the ferocity of that war.
_____
a letter from our friend Rong-Bang Peng in Taiwan
Dear Mike, Jamie, and Una,
Thank you for the heart-warming email.
Mike, don’t blame yourself for not knowing what to say; in face of the Real, no words really convey. You know Li-Shen and I talk a lot, but in front of her suffering, I don’t know what to say either. Words do not do much at this time, but a few words of kindness convey love and care, which I felt deeply when I read your email.
Li-Shen is going through a lot of pain today, but in her clear moment, she said to me, “don’t be afraid of what I am going through.” I burst into tears and told her, “I am not afraid, it is just so difficult to see you suffer.” The tumor cells are progressing very rapidly, which is causing her a lot of pain. But if we are able to look beyond her bodily suffering, something wonderful and profound is happening at this stage of her life. People here say that Li-Shen has made a lot of Shan Yuan (good connections) with others in her life, and indeed, those whom Li-Shen made Shan Yuan with show up to offer all kinds of help. I am deeply touched by their kindness, and I am so proud that I married this wonderful wonderful woman.
To be born to this world is a difficult process, but we all forget about it; to leave this worldly body is also a difficult process, and I am witnessing it without fear (but with a lot of tears). Li-Shen said to me once, “don’t be afraid of death, it is the nature of life. There is birth, and there is death.”
Love,
Rong-Bang
_____
by Rachel Hadas
Intertextuality, allusion, remembered scraps of poetry: all gifts we
didn’t know we needed till they arrived. Three recent and very different,
but all happy, examples:
1) Here in the country, I’m getting to spend some time with my 25
year-old son for the first time in many months. The other night, I said
something to him and his girlfriend about the precariously hung curtains
in the freshly painted room they’re sleeping in. ”The curtain cord she
likes to wind,” said Jonathan quietly. These seven words brought back
Eliot’s “The Old Gumbie Cat,” and the days when I read it to Jonathan, and
the fact that he and I both remembered most of this eminently memorizable
poem – remembered it from when he enjoyed it almost 20 years ago. I refer
interested readers who don’t know this wonderful poem to OLD POSSUM’S BOOK
OF PRACTICAL CATS. The gift this little quote bestowed was at least
double: bringing back a wonderful poem, and a past (but not past) layer of
shared life.
2) I’ve been working on a poem, or maybe a series of poems, about a
consuming subject: my husband’s dementia. But more specifically, this
poem is about uneasy sleep, lying as it were curled up around or humped
over a problem. Hard to find words for. But an essay about Sylvia Plath
which recently arrived from my friend Adrianne Kalfopoulou in Athens
turned out to contain a quote from a poem in Plath’s THE COLOSSUS which I
hadn’t known and whose title even now escapes me – something about
“Hardcastle Crags;”
All the night gave her, in return
For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat
Of her heart, was the humped indifferent iron
Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set
On black stone.
Was Plath thinking of me when she wrote these lines? Naturally not. Do
they help me now? Yup.
3) My former student Keith O’Shaughnessy recently published a poem that
gives me several gifts whenever I read it, and which was itself in a way
occasioned by a gift I gave him, as well as by his love for two poets and
also by a cultural event ceelbrating one of these poets. There is a lot I
could say about Keith’s poem, from its triumphantly appropriate deployment
of terza rima and of poetic allusion, but I think I’d rather quote it in
full. (Please think of words in quotes as italicized.)
Il Mio Tesoretto by Keith Devlin O’Shaughnessy
At an annual reading of Dante’s INFERNO
Just a bit more than halfway through my life’s journey,
I find myself raising Cain at the Cathedral
Of Saint John the Divine. It is Maundy Thursday -
Or Hallows Eve for fans of the infernal.
When I was just a bit less than a quarter
Way through the same hellish pilgrimage, an aging James Merrill
(Alumnus of my high school) stood like an immortal
Limbo-bent, before a room of sighing adolescenets
And taught them how a man makes himself eternal.
Now, as if to mingle breath with incense,
I mutter with the cantor, “Ah, Ser Brunetto,
Are you here?” and make tactile his winded spirit’s omnipresence
Through a shade as ethereal as that patrician ghost’s.
One reader finishes. Another adjusts her glasses,
Declaims a Medievalist’s Florentine. At my elbow
Sits my own “miglior fabbro,” Rachel Hadas,
For whom my alma mater’s James was simply Jimmy;
Under her chair, wrapped in plastic shopping bags,
Lies a tiny, wood-framed portrait of Sr. Alighieri
She tells me belonged to him. When at last that “maestro” moored
His lithe craft along the verge we make out so dimly,
His companion found it sitting in a drawer
And passed it on to her, who took it home
And, as if gliding back from the same murky shore,
Buired the little treasure in a chest of her own.
At midnight she, in turn, will pass it on
To me, who will carry it through this Dis’ divinely comic underground -
By subway, ferry, rail – further down, like the baton
At Verona, where the green cloth waves at the foot of the stair
To flickering stars, and the last man in, panting for Marathon,
Crows like the damned at blank space, through dead air,
To proclaim himself, if not the winner, there.
by Maryam Abdul-Qawiyy
“Are you praying?” my mother asked, her voice quavering through the phone. She repeated it again and a sick silence followed.
“No Maam…,” I stared at the floor and saw nothing.
“Girl, you have to pray.” I nodded as if she could see me. In the name of Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful. But she was in Costa Rica and I was in Belize.
“You hear me girl? This keeps happening, so you have to pray. Seek refuge in God, okay?”
“Yes Maam.” I seek refuge in Allah, from the accursed Shaytan.
A week before my mother left for Costa Rica, my little sister, Amina got the chicken pox. My mother boiled and stirred herbal remedies that kept off the severe itching; however, when she left Amina’s chicken pox got worse and she walked around constantly scratching. Her pimpled body twitched during sleep; her contagious itching could spread; so she had to sleep in the living room. The creaking floors and grainy cement walls would be her only allies when the itch crawled on her skin.
A tattered mat, made of sponge, was covered with a thin floral sheet and Amina molded into its soft lumps. She slept in the living room, behind the couch, for an entire week and would come into my room and wake me.
Her hands shook me one night, “Maryam, something’s in the living room.” She was holding the floral sheet tightly around her body; she was too awake for the hour; too alert.
“Aright, I’m coming.” I got up and followed her into the unlit living room. Amina tiptoed as if she didn’t want to disturb the sleeping, but the wooden floor moaned under our steps. Her petite silhouette and head full of dreadlocks were the only things I could make out in the dark. We crouched to the floor to avoid bumping into the bookshelves; our fingers searched for the softness of the sponge.
Soon, Amina was breathing deeply in her sleep. I stretched my body on the soft mat and felt the humid air tighten. The mosquitoes’ high pitched singing was faint. The television was a box without lights. Dark figures stretched themselves across the room: the shadow of the breathing curtain, the lazy broom, a crooked bookshelf. And then…something else.
The thing stood tall: shapeless and wispy at the edges but with human form. An angular body and round head came into focus. Its human-like-shadow was near the couch; as if it leaned any closer it would loom over me and Amina. My body tightened. It braced itself, as if it were ready to charge. It pushed its upper torso and head forward, but appeared stuck. I stared in disbelief. It tried again. Something was keeping it away from us: Liquid-like glass created a wall between us and the Jinn.
A copy of the Quran was on the bookshelf. The bookshelf was adjacent to the couch, half of it blocking the Jinn with its holy powers. I recited the prayers that I knew could delay the bad-spirited creature. I looked at Amina and recited and recited. I knew that Allah created things of which ye know and which ye know not, and a Jinn stood in the living room.
I prayed until I fell asleep.
My mother’s flight got cancelled and her stay in Costa Rica lasted a week longer than expected. The Jinn visited again the following night. SLAP! SLAP! SLAP! It stomped up the stairs and my stiff body was rigid, unmovable. This time it did not stay in the living room.
It lingered in the bedroom doorway and then stepped on the bed. The sheet dipped in small, scattered craters. It walked up to my thighs and then stepped onto my torso, clawing at my stomach and chest. It stood on my chest and its feet scratched at my neck. The air stopped coming inside. My head felt lighter and a dizzying feeling pursued, but suddenly a glowing snake sprang from the ceiling and the heaviness on my chest was gone.
I woke up Amina and told her what happened; she sat with me and we prayed. The Jinn visited every night until my mother returned. Some nights it came into the room and did nothing. Other nights I prayed and prayed and it left me alone. Other nights it didn’t.
~
I realized later that when my mother wasn’t around, a Jinn was. I thought that I was crazy. But I believed in the Jinn. Now, I know that the Jinn represented the physical manifestation of how powerless I felt when my mother left. It was a symbol that reflected my inner confusions and terror. The uncertainty that lurked in my psyche during her absence.
In the sacred pages of my journals, I struggled to record most of what happened and I tried to make sense of it. That’s what writing was, a means to make sense of something that in reality, was illogical, unreal.
“Undated entry, year 2000,
Something is in this house. Something is here. Something is watching me.
I am scared because my mom isn’t here.”
_____
Memorial Day: We should mourn for all who have died because of militarism.
by John Samuel Tieman
May 31, 1993
I remember the first time I prayed for an enemy. It was just outside An Khe, a village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. A helicopter gunship rocketed some North Vietnamese regulars who were about to attack us. I prayed for those kids. My top sergeant berated me for my prayer. I realized then that my enemy was not the North Vietnamese, not the Viet Cong, but militarism. As for the first sergeant, he was a good man who was simply unaware, unaware of the fact that loving an enemy means loving specific people, North Vietnamese in this case.
Loving can also involve mourning. We mourn the loss of people loved. If we truly love our enemies, then we truly mourn their loss. For it is we the living who have lost a loved one. In this way can we realize not only the humanity of an enemy, but our own humanity as well.
In the Tao Te Ching, a victorious warrior is advised to dress for mourning. Perhaps that’s a bit extreme by Western standards. But it is to the point, for it makes the warrior and his neighbors consider what has been done. War is no victory parade. It must be seen for precisely what it is, a choice. A painful choice. A choice that calls for mourning.
Memorial Day honors soldiers who died for our country. Since I’m a Vietnam veteran, that’s OK by me. I would expand the memorial’s concept, however. I would like a day in which we mourn for all–men, women, children, soldiers, civilians, friends, enemies–who died because of militarism. The Iraqis, for instance.
Greenpeace estimates that at least 120,000 Iraqi soldiers and 76,000 civilians were killed during the war. Since then, the civilian death toll related to the war and its aftermath has reached perhaps a quarter of a million. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, between January and August of 1991, 50,000 children died as a direct result of health problems brought on by the bombing of the Iraqi infrastructure. Total deaths among children are estimated to be 170,000.
Can we mourn for 170,000 dead Iraqi children? I suspect the answer is “Hell No!” That answer is disturbing, because the opposite of mourning is not rejoicing; the opposite of mourning is being numb to suffering.
Or perhaps, instead of expanding the concept of Memorial Day, we should create an entirely separate day of mourning. Perhaps we should simply mourn for the children of the world. A Children’s Memorial Day. Consider the following. According to UNICEF, 1.5 million children have died in wars during the last 10 years; 4 million are disabled by land mines, firearms and torture; 5 million live in refugee camps; 12 million lost their homes in a war. Whole generations have lost years of schooling. Millions are vulnerable to famine, illness and disability. UNICEF admits that it cannot measure the numbers of orphans or the psychological traumas brought on by war.
And consider also that the United States is the world’s leading arms merchant. I recall reading somewhere that the third leading cause of death in Cambodia is land mines–mostly American-made land mines.
A Children’s Memorial Day would have a civilizing effect on us, for, in addition to mourning for these, the littlest victims of war, it would allow us to mourn what we have become. And to love ourselves for what we can become.
Being civilized is not something we are just given. In many ways, civilization is a constant series of choices and assents. Granted that from the cradle we are given language, culture and so forth. To be a peaceful society, however, this we choose. To be peaceful in our language, in our actions, in our prayers, to this do we assent. And assent and assent again and again, for in each instance when we feel threatened are we required to assent anew to peace.
I once heard another veteran, a North Vietnamese poet, say that every time he shot an American, he first aimed at the heart of that soldier’s mother. And for that soldier, and for that woman, did he mourn.
Let me be perfectly clear. I do not begrudge our veterans their parades. I’ve marched in a few myself. I ask my neighbors to join us old vets, to mourn for all soldiers and all civilians, to mourn for all victims of militarism. And to mourn those people by name. Yes, to mourn for Robert, my childhood companion, a 20-year-old who died in ‘Nam in 1968. But to also mourn for Ahmed, a 5-year-old stranger, who died in Baghdad this year for lack of clean water. And to mourn for their mothers, their fathers, their families, relatives, neighbors, friends. To mourn. To love.
Originally Posted in the Los Angeles Times
_____
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Last night I joined several other poets and an audience that crammed into an independent bookstore in my city. We were there to celebrate Uncle Walt—Whitman, that is.
The host and organizer, a young poet who writes under the name of SliC (Stuart Livingston Canton), had assembled a range of readers from the poetry community, each of us assigned a particular passage from Leaves of Grass; through fortuitous chance, the Nepalese poet Yuyutsu R.D. Sharma, currently on a U.S. tour, showed up to read Walt too. The poems were chanted, shouted, hurled. Our bodies became electric. We were a cosmos.
That is to say, there we were in a tiny bookstore in Sacramento, California (as, at one point in “I Sing the Body Electric,” sirens outside wailed past) but we were large—we contained multitudes.
Many in the audience were there to celebrate Whitman’s poetry though their own lives had taken some difficult turns; one with liver cancer; a stroke survivor who walks (and writes) with difficulty now; another cancer survivor who nursed her husband through several difficult years of ALS before he died.
Most of us read from pre-printed scripts, but one young poet—who began by railing against Whitman and his poems before reading three poems he seemed to have made peace with—held a small clothbound “Selected” sans dust jacket. Bob Stanley, Sacramento’s current poet laureate (who closed the reading with “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) read from a battered, coffee-table-sized clothbound his grandfather had presented to him many years ago.
Yuyutsu (Yuyu) (who was made a shaman at the age of seven) read passionately while the bright turquoise muffler around his neck swayed against his black suit and his right arm swept the air for emphasis.
We looked for Walt under our boot soles. Am I wrong to imagine that I felt Walt’s impassioned and egalitarian dust mingle with the motes of dead soldiers and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of them together welling up as we heard again: “Tenderly will I use you curling grass./ It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men./ It may be if I had known them I would have loved them…”
______
by Maryam Abdul-Qawiyy
On the weekends, my mother hand-washed our clothes at the river. Bending over and slapping the clothes into the water, she would occasionally look up to see us flap around. We children teased the slippery current with our bodies, playing with other children as their mothers sliced the water with heavy clothes as well.
At dusk, when our bodies were shriveled and pale, it was time to go. We each carried a bucket of damp clothes up the river bank. The buckets weighed us down as we trudged up, up; passing the duende tree, the spirit tree. My mother halted at the top of the bank, caging us behind her with her legs and arms. The bucket handles slid out of her grip. We peeked around her flowing skirt and saw ants—everywhere.
Red ants, fire ants, army ants marched tiny streets into the ground. They looked like black and red jelly beans come to life; some were bigger than I knew ants could be. Like an army, they defended their territory and spread out over the walk way toward the clothes line, our home, and the rest of the village. Some of the other women went back down to the river with their scurrying children; others stayed and watched the site. The red swarm covered the ground like bubbling grease in a frying pan, their red specks trembled in unison.
My mother carried my baby sister on her hip and the three of us older children hop-scotched around the swarm and thankfully did not encounter a single bite. We hurried into our home, relieved. But when the darkness adjusted we saw tiny specks on the walls, moving. Our insides crawled.
The walls and ceiling were covered, completely. The ants carried bats, spiders, and scorpions out of the screen-less windows. Some of the ants had silvery wings and flew with their prey dangling beneath them. Some of their victims squirmed and struggled as they were nipped to death. My mother, who was holding my baby sister, ordered us to sit in the middle of the bed. The mosquito net would protect us she said.
She grabbed the Quran and her tongue curled with Arabic sounds. We scooted close around her, making a semicircle. “Ma, are the ants gonna eat us?”
“No.”
We tried to ignore the wiggling cloud of insects that surrounded us. My mother opened the Holy book and recited: “In the name of Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful. Surah Al-Naml. The story of the Ants.” Her Arabic tongue spoke to the air and we gazed at her mahogany colored skin until, suddenly, we were the only living beings in the room.
They had quietly departed, just as they had entered; my mother had spoken to the ants in prayer, and they listened to her plea.
_____
by Publius
I have to interrupt a standardized test in order to give a standardized test.
I am in the second week of giving a standardized test that isn’t a test, because nobody gives a wank about this test. The only reason we’re giving this test is because the district paid millions for it. We bought it, so we give it. But everyone — kids, teachers, administrators — knows it doesn’t count, because, right after we bought it, the state mandated another test. One that counts.
The test that doesn’t count is thirty pages long, and contains four questions that demand full-length essays.
When we finally finish the standardized test that doesn’t count, I’ve also been directed to have the kids grade their own essays. This isn’t because The Central Office wants the kids to reflect and review. It’s because Downtown doesn’t want to bother grading all the tests that don’t count. So this will take us another day or maybe two.
But today I’ve got to take the whole morning, interrupt the test doesn’t count, and give a test that’s really a test. No Child Left A Dime, as my colleagues put it. A serious standardized test, one that has actual consequences. A test that’s really a test. This is one of several such national tests I will proctor this semester.
All this takes the best part of two weeks. And what did I have to stop? Reading Romeo And Juliet. Writing literary criticism.
Is this really what progressive education has come to? That I should give a national standardized test, which interrupts a standardized test that doesn’t count, which in its turn interrupts reading Shakespeare and writing an essay?
I work in a school district that was founded on the ideals of Friedrich Froebel and Johann Pestalozzi, a district that welcomed the philosophies of John Dewey and W. T. Harris. And I mourn for those visionaries, for my colleagues, for my kids. And for me.
____
by Peter Oresick
Yesterday I headed to Costco for apples, the oversized and spotless Granny Smiths that they sell so cheap, leaving from the Chatham campus and driving along Shady Avenue through Squirrel Hill to Homestead, and I passed this grand commotion (story, too-good-to-be-true, above), complete with TV newsvans, at Poale Zedeck synagogue, and I even rubbernecked, but I had no idea, no clue even, that it was the Second Coming, as reported. (Can I get a witness? My late and saintly mother, Mary, would want me to be a witness at the Second Coming.)
At first I guessed it was about the exhumation and reburial story, the Poale Zedeck Orthodox rabbi who, earlier in this week, blocked a family’s attempt, citing Jewish law, to remove an ancestor’s bones from the sacred & orthodox spot in the suburbs to Homewood Cemetery in Point Breeze–Henry Clay Frick, interdenominational ecumenism–but I digress, that’s just another good story that suckered me in: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10117/1053585-54.stm
Today the story seems to me like a time warp, something that happened earlier in Pittsburgh, or should have, in the late ’60s or early ’70s most appropriately. I love that the synagogue characters are actually named Pollack and Dubinsky, that they pin down the suspect and remove his shoes, so he won’t run, of course, and the quote from the seemingly disembodied & high perp named Disabato, who says, “he and a friend were ‘hanging out at my apartment, and I got a call from God telling me to do this,’ the complaint says. ‘I’m not crazy,’ he said. ‘I’m just doing God’s work.’” God used the phone in the ’60s, not 2010.
But I think the whole experience is better left alone, just abandoned by Oresick the poet here in this notebook, and not shaped into a poem. Billy Collins would write this poem . . . which is why he’s Billy Collins. Oresick drives on to Costco to buy the apples at a great price. And eats them for a week.
_____
by Publius
I have a student teacher this year. Her name is Chloe. I also have to give a standardized test this week.
So I’m stuck. Do I give the test honestly? Or do I do what I really do?
As one administrator put it, “This test has no educational value. Do as you will, as long as the scores improve.” I need a ten point gain this quarter. I’ve been a teacher for so long that I can get ten points by winking at kids at the right time. Which is more or less what I do.
Once a kid asked me, “Why don’t you just give us the answers like the other teachers, instead of this half-cheating thing you do?”
So Monday I’m torn. Do I model the honest teacher? Or do I show Chloe the world in which she will make her living?
Before class, I begin by explaining to Chloe how, last year, the department had a long meeting, during which we agonized over the morality of standardized testing. Is it moral to give the test at all? If we give the test, is it ever moral to cheat? How can teachers even evaluate the morality of testing we don’t value educationally? And so I explained to Chloe this question and that one and on and on until – I was struck by another question.
When did teaching become morally ambiguous?
_____
Perhaps the most memorable character from the First World War is “The Red Baron.”
Manfred Von Richthofen died about 11 AM on Sunday, the 21st of April in 1918. There is almost nothing about his death that is not disputed, the exact time, the manner of death, even who shot him. But there is one thing certain.
He was 25. His 26th birthday would have been on the second of May.
Von Richthofen is a romantic character. And I say ‘romantic’, and I say ‘character’, because, in the popular imagination, there is little of the real person that survives. Snoopy has been shot down by him several dozen times. There is a pizza named after him. His red triplane is emblematic of the romance of aerial combat and, indeed, The War To End All Wars. When I enter “Red Baron”, my computer’s search engine brings up 2,900,000+ entires, three out of the first five being the beagle, the pizza and racing bikes.
What survives is a caricature. The red Fokker triplane. The long scarf around the neck. The rattle of machine guns. The noble last salute between victor and vanquished.
All of which, in this time of war, is exactly what I am the least interested in. I am interested in that kid, that sad kid who died so many years before his time.
The myth of the Red Baron has obliterated the fact that that actual man, Manfred Von Richthofen, lived a rather narrow life. He entered military school when he was eleven, and spent the rest of his life in uniform. He like hunting. He liked riding. He seems to have had no intellectual interests. He was an indifferent student. He never traveled. He only spoke German. When I see photographs of his rooms, there are hunting trophies but no books. While he had the social graces of his class, there is little indication of enduring friendships. Rumor of a brief war-time liaison notwithstanding, he seems to have shown little sexual interest in women or, for that matter, men. My point is not that I find any of this remarkable. My point is that I find it young. The guy died before he had time to do much beyond go to school and kill people.
Not everyone who dies in war is young. But most are. So it is curious that, when we read about World War I, many of the histories dwell on the youth of the technology rather than the youth of the soldier. Powered airplanes were barely a decade old. Machine guns were a relatively new technology. Putting machine guns on airplanes, then crafting aerial tactics, all this was new. Yet, when I read about Richthofen’s most famous dogfight, against British Major Lanoe Hawker, V. C., I sadly note that no one else notes that Hawker died at age 26. The man who killed Richthofen, Canadian Captain Roy Brown, was 25.
Not long ago, when I was watching “The Newshour” on P. B. S., I once again paused for that moment when, in silence, they show names and pictures of those who recently died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have grown accustomed to those usually stern pictures of young folks in uniforms. But sometimes, when the military photo is not available, there is a picture of this kid at a ball game or a party or some such.
But nothing quite prepared me for one photo. A Private First Class in her wedding dress. I seem to recall that the linguistic root that gives us infantry also gives us the word infant.
Life never gave Manfred Von Richthofen much of a chance. But then neither do we. We want to see him as The Knight Of The Air. The Red Baron. Or a pizza. A cartoon. It’s easier to see him as a cartoon. Why? Because if we see him as a kid, if we know him as sad, lonely, traumatized, maybe, just maybe, we would see him as someone just like us. But we can’t. We don’t dare. Why? Because it’s easier to kill a cartoon.
Thus the greatest lie of any war, regardless of what side you are on – that the people we kill are remarkably different. That because they have a different language, a different religion, different race, that they are nothing like us. That the enemy is never just a kid. That the enemy is never sad, lonely, traumatized. That the enemy never wears a wedding dress.
_____
by Arlene Weiner
Ray Kurzweil is an innovator and futurist. He developed a number of widely used innovations, notably the Kurzweil Reader, which uses pattern recognition to translate printed material into machine-readable text and the text into speech. In 1976! According to Wikipedia, the Kurzweil Reader project developed both the first flat-bed scanner and text-to-speech generation.
Kurzweil’s interested in art, and while still in his teens he developed a software program that analyzed music by classical composers and synthesized pieces in their style. Similarly, Kurzweil developed the Ray Kurzweil Cybernetic Poet (RKCP), which analyzes poems by one (or more) poets and generates poems in their styles. Haiku included. (You can download the software free, at http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/poetry/rkcp_overview.php3, but sorry, not for Macintoshes.)
There’s a history in literature of interest in automatism in the generation of texts. The surrealists and Oulipo developed methods for making texts collectively or with elements of randomness. For example, in the surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse game, each participant writes a section without seeing what the preceding sections are, and in one of Oulipo’s exercises, each noun in a passage is replaced by the noun that occurs a certain number of entries after it in a dictionary. Still, there’s something disquieting about an automated poetry generator. Doesn’t it call the value of poetry into question? or of poets?
One of my philosophy instructors in college, Judith Jarvis (later Thomson), gave as a topic for a paper “Suppose you found out that your best friend was made in Detroit?” Suppose you came across a poem by RKCP, and found it moving? Would you feel defrauded when you found out later that it was generated by a software program? Is the product, the arrangement of words on the page (or striking the ear), the only thing that matters, or is its origin important? Do we want a guarantee of contact with a mind, a man, a camerado?
Arguably the RKCP poem does carry the faint fragrance of the authors of the poems that are its model, just as poems made from a magnetic poetry kit (one of those sets of individual words that can be stuck up on refrigerators and shuffled into poems, or messages) are imprinted with the choices of the people who selected the words.
If you care to, you can assemble an electronic poetry kit based on one of a number of authors (including Baudelaire, in English; Bukowski; Ginsberg; Plath) at http://www.languageisavirus.com/electronicpoetry/index.html As with the magnetic poetry kits, the words are supplied, but you’ll have to bring your own syntax.
[Much of the factual material in this article from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Kurzweil, downloaded March 16, 2010.]
____
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
I guess like most writers I’d like to defeat time. I’d like the dead to live on forever, along with some trees, flowers, birds and insects I’ve known.
At some point a seed was planted, and it continues to sprout through my eyes, my ears, my mouth—even my nose (that bloodhound for the troubles of others), which sniffs out jasmine fragrance in late April or early May and then wants to memorialize it, make it live forever on the white page.
Tendrils shoot wildly from every experience—for instance, this afternoon, a ride on the bus—a short journey from 28th and I to 9th and J. At the bus stop a small dark woman with twins in the stroller parked beside her coughs up a cloud of frosty breathings.
On the bus headed south, an elderly man in a flannel shirt claps his wrinkled hands together, shivering; the skin shines a little, the veins crinkle.
Two seats behind him a teenager with Praying Hands tattoos and a gold ring through his left eyebrow winks at the girl across from him, then exhales curses at no one in particular.
Their stories sprout everywhere inside me: vinings.
Today a thought descended: language possesses a lost luminosity. It paired itself with a further one: language is the primitive refined by the writing that wrenches us into being. These two notions feel right to me, complete.
Writing as quest, as a hunter going after the scent of music inside every word. Like wine tasters, we need a good nose that will put us on the scent trail for the scent messages whorled inside the fingerprints of music.
Each note a fingerprint, no two alike. Therein, thereby, the trained voice. I believe in the importance of the voice box, listen for its inimitable vibrations. On sound waves, words are caressed into being. Then they align themselves with the rightness, the trueness of stars.
By which we are guided and what we write does guide us, school us in what was unutterable finally uttered, be it taboo or not. Moving into the taboo is important, very important indeed. If we can leave fingerprints, voice prints on the taboo we might just compose those singing sentences that weave us into one human family.
Ah, that word, family. So often the lost paradise not to be regained, but we can attach language to that lost paradise and the doomed can be sung into beauty. I know this. I write about that which cannot be accepted by own very real family. They do not want to bear witness to my truths and I understand this fully.
The lost luminosity, the primitive refined is what makes the unbearable bearable. The holocaust happened and it had been written about. 9/11 happened, too, has been written about, but those abominable happenings closer to home sweet home is so often silenced with dead silence.
I break the taboo like kindling across my knee to make a little fire and language with its lost luminosity, with the primitive refined, makes that little fire which will warm me on the coldest of nights.
And this is one such night. Wind chill factors well, well below zero, but thank God, my ink doesn’t freeze. Fluidity is what it’s all about and fluidity comes from fidelity and writing does demand fidelity.
Call it the Muse or not. My dog is my muse: it’s her true calling. Down behind my writing chair she nests and her devotion to me kindles my devotion to the work. Being disciplined about writing comes easy to me. Discipline in other areas of my life not so easy, except for mothering.
Yet writing is all about mothering words into being. The hunt is on, yes, the hunt is on for the scent of music in that lost luminosity, in the primitive refined. I have a good nose, a better ear and the intoxications caused by both leave me spinning, weaving word to word.
_____________
These words—fierce and lonesome—hold hands, become mates. A dynamic combo, explosive ammo for the writer. I can’t help but think my lonesomeness makes me fierce. Out of hours and hours of being just one in a universe of many, there comes not a torch song, but torched words, each with its own touché.
It has to be that way. Every word in a poem, story, essay, needs to be a flash in the pan. Generative destruction—that’s how I write. I break down the irreducible into the rich roux of language. Beginnings must have ends, middles must have tides. Sound waves wavering on light years, yes, that’s the particular music. Writers need not hit the pretty keys, but most certainly, the perfect ones.
I who am afraid of so many things—staying up too late, traveling, unraveling—go into writing full tilt. I put down my truth and each line or sentence comes with a death threat. I bear to carry, I carry to bear. The word becomes pregnant and although I’ve only given birth to one child, the birthing of words is perpetual, the clock by which I sing.
I am persistent, insistent, almost demonic about doing the work and doing it right. Others talk about how brave I am, but that’s not exactly true. I’m driven, riveted to the page upon which I write and what emerges is a whirl of words furiously spinning like Sufi dancers or a weaver at the loom. Rhythmic dancing, rhythmic weaving. Sometimes the words are woven together with webs, other times, Whitman’s ductile thread.
Poem, story, essay, click into being with the tip of the whip. I hear it snap. Breaking into any body of writing is like breaking bread—kneaded, risen, shared. So here’s a thought—my lonesome self goes into the tunnel, the dark tunnel, like a train—into, through, out of which, the cars come flying, electric, lit. And fierceness—also electric, lit—is what creates beauty.
I turn to a manuscript now defunct, but the title sticks—The Fire Bones. I imagine flaming ladders lending structure, the fire, the passionate heat by which our hearts are given warmth. I imagine walking into burning buildings to save what can be salvaged. It goes against instinct to perform that act—perhaps writing does, too. Think of the fire dancing, then whirl and weave, weave and whirl.
_____
I generally share my poems with a few friends before I mail them out. A sample audience, as it were. Because of this, I’ve been asked how I came to write the enclosed, as the voice and tone are different from poems I’ve written lately. Perhaps the following note, written to a friend and editor, Mike Simms, may be of some interest. I enclose my poem, and the influences to which I refer.
In the immediate, I was responding to Mike’s comment that my poem sounds “like Charles Bukowski goes to Vietnam.”
———-
It’s funny you should say that. I was just reading Bukowski early this morning. I wanted to find and forward a poem of his, “The House”, to my wife, Phoebe. She counts Bukowski in a category she denominates “Literary Pigs.” Henry Miller. Gregory Corso. And like that. Anyway, I sent her one of his poems. Phoebe is perfectly comfortable with the concept of loving the writing and shooting the writer.
Maybe something in that working class thing stuck. As I wrote my poem, I had to decide which way to go with the voice, middle class or working class. For example, the original read “nonetheless”, which I finally decided to change to “anyhow”. And so on. Something about the situation seemed to call for the working class voice — but with a specific requirement. The voice needed to couple a tone that carries a certain dignity with a crude vocabulary. A requirement that just cries out for The Tieman Touch.
At the very end, I was actually thinking of the ending of Stanley Kunitz’s “The Portrait”. Thinking ‘How does he make that 50 year shift in two or three lines?’, to which question I just answered ‘He just does.’ So I just did.
I also just watched last night the 1979 movie version of All Quiet On The Western Front. For a long time after my war, I couldn’t bring myself to read that novel. I think I finally read it toward the end of my junior college days. I still think it’s one of the great anti-war pieces.
The situation in my poem is, of course, a real memory.
legion
there was this guy I used to talk to
in Nam a Vietnamese
corporal just like me only gook
most the time I couldn’t understand
a word the fuck said but for all
his accent I liked his slant
eyed ass anyhow
so this one day
he disappears so I figure
he’s in the bush
hunting the little evil people until
the next month
I see he got hunted
shows up without a left leg
nobody talks to him
I mean me too
all I could do was for a second
just stare and go
forty years after the war
and all I can do is still stare
_________
by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
I’ve been reading The Splendor of Letters by Nicholas Basbane, absorbed by his stories of poets and writers connecting through time—of literature saved from obscurity or rescued from oblivion by translators, by booklovers, by fellow writers.
I’ve also been inhabiting all those terrible times he details, when an entire culture’s writings have been obliterated—deliberate attempts like the Romans’ against the Carthaginians, the Conquistadors’ against the Mayans, the Nazis’ against the Jews; campaigns of destruction by individuals like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot; natural disasters like Pompeii and Herculaneum.
As I was planning this blog, the earthquake in Haiti struck, the decimation unfolded and hopes ran out. The Chilean quake followed so soon after it seemed like the world was coming unglued. In fact, the earth’s axis did shift as a result of the Chilean quake, shortening our day by 1.26 microseconds.
Here I look around the rooms of my house, at the books, the people, the art. I walk through the streets and imagine it all collapsed, broken, crumbled. Things blur and reel. For I too live in earthquake country—in fact, Words in Earthquake Country was the title of an early manuscript I discarded along the way. I’d written it after the 8.1 Mexico City earthquake in 1985. The title poem (published in Nimrod as “In the Tradition of the Drinking Song,” and since revised) begins:
In Mexico City, Danillo Cabrera
clings to a lintel as the doorframe falls
four floors down, “like an elevator.”
He says the Our Father wedged
among the dead.
In the earthquake country of my living room
none of the old prayers work
though whenever I write “God”
I still use a capital letter.
A few weeks ago we had a 6.9 temblor three hundred miles north of here, along the California coast. We didn’t feel it much in Sacramento, though several people reported seeing the water in their backyard swimming pools spiking. This connected for me because during the 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, (shortly after I started a Stegner fellowship at Stanford ) I was having dinner with my new Stegner clan in an apartment shared by two fellows in Palo Alto. We heard what sounded like the roaring of a locomotive bearing down on us and the world came unglued; as we ran single-file outside we saw exactly what the Sacramento folks described—the water in the apartment complex pool leaping up in wild spikes, sloshing out over the edges. I drove home the next day, trying to avoid every bridge, every overpass, and holding my breath each time I couldn’t. I veered south around the bay before heading north to where my children—who I managed to speak with before the phones went dead—had clung to each other in a doorway as the floors shook and windowpanes clattered.
But, back to Basbane: Even though so much of his book recounts destruction, it’s finally about preservation, about the friendships forged between authors and readers. It’s both humbling and restoring to learn how hard so many have worked to save a single poem, a few lines of a psalm or a treatise on gothic architecture, a few words from a guide for decorating Etruscan pots.
_____
by Publius
I recently went to a lecture on “data dysentery”, the countless reams of data we educators collect for, well, for what?
To this data, I would like to add the following, a record of the sheer number of observations I’ve had in one semester only, this last semester. These observations were done by three administrators and a consultant.
I hasten to add that these reports all say the same thing — they all say I’m a good teacher — and are done largely because the administrators need the sheer poundage of data. Since we have several administrators, I sometimes record various times I’ve been inspected on the same day. That said, the dates and times that I have been observed are:
9/11, 10:20 AM, 11:10 AM, 1:30 PM; 9/12; 9/15, 9:30 AM,
10:20 AM, 11:10 AM, 1:30 PM, and one with no time recorded;
9/16; 9/22; 9/28; 10/7; 10/8; 10/21; 10/27, 1:10 PM and
1:25 PM; 10/29; 11/5; 11/10; 11/13; 11/24; 12/3; 12/8 and
12/16.
It should be repeated that throughout the department, from one teacher to another, these observations differ little in content. They are given in either an indifferent or occasionally complimentary manner. There is no real expectation that they will be read or acted upon.
Last year, one observer regularly fell asleep in my class.
One vice-principal used to observe us as she walked down the hall. I mean she walked down the hall while she was writing the reports. We used to call these “drive-bys”. Once she did, in fact, look into my room, observe, and write a report. I don’t think she was there thirty seconds. The report was most satisfactory. The whole time, I was tying my shoe.
Today I was deposed by my husband’s lawyer as part of what has been a very painful and abusive divorce. The questioning was rigorous, required as much concentration as does writing. For once I felt that my long training in Flannery O’Connor’s notion of “the habit of art” was actually useful under totally different circumstances.
Everything was scrutinized, including my books, piled as exhibit three. How much money did I make from each one? My reply: “nothing,” except for the twenty-four dollars and one cent garnered from royalties on my fourth book, My Life as a Doll, published by Autumn House Press in 2008, one month after I left the marriage.
Understand this much: that lawyer was out to break me as I have a major mental illness and he knows it. I was determined to maintain my integrity, a scrap of human decency. This was not a battle, but a test by God or whoever might be out there orchestrating the universe.
I maintained my composure by doing three things, none of which was planned: I kept eye contact with my interrogator, recited the Serenity Prayer again and again in my head and sat pulled up like the dancer I was trained to be.
It worked. By noontime there was a proposal on the table. It will be thoroughly examined by my lawyers, but the intent to settle is quite clear. If not, my deposition will be resumed in a week, but nothing will be gained by further examination. My husband’s lawyer actually said to mine that I should be paid for what I do.
Integral to all of this is a question I had to answer as my bio for a theatre production that is using two sequences of My Life as a Doll, soon to open in Portsmouth, NH. The question was: “what is love?” My immediate answer was, “love is the catastrophic miracle that makes us who we are.”
An oxymoron perhaps, but one with a crucible of truth. My marriage of eighteen years was a catastrophic miracle, one that produced my son, now seventeen, and living in a different state. Although I detest my husband’s actions since our separation nearly two years ago, I still can’t say I don’t love him. He is the father of my only child. He cared for me more in sickness than in health and that the marriage failed is neither his fault nor mine.
It just died. And just like funerals take us out of life to mourn and celebrate the lost one, so does a deposition. I was in a very dark office on—how perfect!—Battery March Street in downtown Boston and that battery march was also a funereal one. Just as the deposition was suspended, I was suspended in time and space.
Still am. Words on paper are my footprints in the softly falling snow that will lead me back to my real home, that of heart and soul, in Kittery Point, ME. My long lost parents were my abusers, but I could feel them cheering me on from the grave today. I once wrote that I love them better now that they are dead, but God knows how truly I loved them as a child and how truly I mourned their deaths. They, too, were catastrophic miracles that made me who I am.
In the end, my means to an end is forgiveness. I can forgive my parents for their atrocities as well of those of my husband, but can I forgive myself? Isn’t that the hardest part of love: self-forgiveness? I was the one who left the marriage and I did so to save my son from witnessing my madness and from the very real possibility of suicide.
Eye contact, the Serenity prayer, the dancer’s pose. What more can we do when under such duress? A friend advised me to “lean on infinite sustenance” and I leaned hard, like a sailboat in a great storm. Someday I may even be able to tell my son that the divorce helped me grow stronger while trying to destroy me.
I’m home. I’m writing and what is writing but one more catastrophic miracle? I bless it, it blesses me back. I bless my husband and in doing so, bless myself. Just the weight of the pen in my hand feels glorious and my little word etching are my geography, the map by which I live. Today my husband’s lawyer saw me in my most human dimension and isn’t that exactly what we try to capture when writing? The going may be rough, but it is also good.
(The chair of our English Department recently asked me to write an explication of ”fair use” of copyrighted materials.)
Much of the great literature that we want our students to read, for example, Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, Dickinson, and Twain, is in the public domain — that is, not protected by copyright. Any work that was published before 1923 can legally be copied and distributed to our students without restriction. However, most of us want our students to read Modern and Contemporary literature as well as the classics. For work published after 1923, including new translations of traditional literature, copyright restrictions apply.
The United States Constitution gives Congress the power to secure for “Authors… the exclusive Right to their respective Writings…” and authors may assign all or part of their rights to others, including publishers and agents. The Federal statutes regarding copyright can be found in Circular 92: Copyright Law of the United States and Related Laws, contained in Tıtle 17 of The United States Code updated October 2007. The entire 311 page document can be found online: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/
As English teachers interested in exposing our students to good writing, discussing literature in our classrooms, and quoting texts in our critical and creative writing, we should pay special attention to Section 107 — the “fair use” passage — which outlines what we are allowed to do:
§ 107 · Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use40 Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copy-righted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
As you can see, we’re on safe ground if we’re quoting a short passage in a review or critical article, as well as using a quotation as an epigraph to a poem or story; and we are also within our rights when, as part of our classroom teaching, we photocopy or post on a website a short piece which is part of a copyrighted text, for example a single poem or page from a longer text.
However, it is equally clear that there are limitations to fair use. Notice that the limiting principles include (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copy-righted work as a whole. In other words, if we were to reproduce without permission a significant portion of a copyrighted text, for example an entire short story in a book-length collection of ten stories, then we would be violating copyright. Also notice (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. In other words, if we are reproducing copyrighted material as a substitute for students buying the book, then we are in violation of copyright. Also prohibited would be putting together an anthology of copyrighted material over the course of a semester — for example, handing out a poem each week to students over the course of a semester in lieu of assigning readings in a published textbook.
Violation of copyright is a serious offense carrying severe civil and criminal penalties, including fines and up to 10 years imprisonment (see Appendix F of Title 17). Although it is hard to imagine the FBI rounding up English teachers en masse for over-use of their department copiers, similar infringements, such as trafficking in bootleg CDs, counterfeiting brand-name merchandise, and illegally downloading music and films from the internet – all of which are covered under Title 17 — have been successfully prosecuted in recent years. Thousands of parents of Napster-using teenagers were shocked a few years ago to discover they were being sued for tens of thousands of dollars by a consortium of music publishers; Microsoft and Disney have lobbied the Federal government to include enforcement of intellectual property issues in trade negotiations with China. Copyright infringement on the internet has become so common that many companies and universities have set up websites to streamline the processing of claims against them. The pattern is clear: corporate America and the Federal government take intellectual property issues very seriously.
Significantly, the owner of the copy machine can be held liable in addition to the person using it. So, not only is the individual teacher subject to civil suits and criminal prosecution, but the university (or the local Kinko’s) is liable as well.
Fearing lawsuits from publishers and damage to their reputations, many universities, including Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, strictly limit instructors’ use of copyrighted material. If the instructor wishes to use text taken from a published source, he or she must submit a “course packet” to the officially recognized printer (usually the campus bookstore or a local copy shop) who applies for permission to the copyright holder, negotiates a fee, reproduces the text, and sells copies of the course packet to students. The advantage of this system is that the instructor can customize the course materials while protecting the copyright holders’ intellectual property. The disadvantage, of course, is that students are required to pay for shoddily printed, sometimes unreadable, texts which cost as much or more than a published book.
Besides the course packet strategy, what legally sanctioned options do English teachers have to bring poems, stories, and essays to students?
- We can order books through the campus bookstore and require or suggest that the students buy them;
- We can place books or magazines on reserve in the university library — not only paper texts but also legal digital versions of texts sent from publishers;
- We can use email, Blackboard and Facebook to provide students with hyperlinks to whole articles, either on public sites like the NY Times or via the many full text databases that our academic libraries now provide;
- We can read the literature out loud to the students;
- We can reproduce short passages and distribute them to our students via the internet or printed copies;
- We can request permission from publishers to reproduce longer passages.
Copyright laws exist to protect authors from unfair use of their work, and authors and publishers are entitled to compensation for their efforts. As writers and teachers, we have an interest in respecting those legal rights while setting a good example for our students.
Michael Simms is the founder and editor-in-chief of Autumn House Press, as well as a lecturer in the Creative Writing MFA program at Chatham University. The article above is for general information purposes only and is not intended as legal advice. Peter Oresick contributed to this article.
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by Publius
The kids are reading Romeo and Juliet. So my student teacher is fishing for the answer “dramatic irony”. She asks, “What do you call this, when Juliet is speaking on the balcony, and she doesn’t know Romeo is down below listening?’
To which Marshay responds, “Stalking.”
And then yesterday as I’m walking out of the building with my buddy, Jim Midlord, our vice-principal, a real dingbat given to truly incomprehensible statements — I really mean that — says, “Mr. Midlord, when they show-up, you’ll be in charge of the Koreans.” No context. No explanation. No background. Just “you’ll be in charge of the Koreans.”
To which Midlord just responds, “OK” and walks on.
He thinks she’ll just forget this. She forgets a lot of stuff.
But the story has a trick ending. It turns out that there are real Koreans. The Central Office is going to send six of them, all at the same hour, same class, to learn how to teach grammar next Wednesday. Except the vice-principal forgot that Midlord is teaching Beowulf at that hour. And for this they came half-way around the world.
__________
I have the hands of a writer—a callous on my right ring finger, arthritis in that wrist from holding a pen for decades. If I could, I’d be buried pen in hand, or perhaps my ashes should be scattered upon the white page. Musicians, singers need to take great care of their hands and voices. Might writers need to do the same?
I think yes. There have been too many times when I’ve needed to wear a splint because of my arthritis, but still I must write in long hand, use the perfect pen as I crave the beauty and silence of the white page. My pen is fat, like a black cigar, the fatter the barrel, the less the pain. The labor is long for me, always intense. Once a friend commented that I possessed a serene intensity. O how I wish I could say that about my work.
Most writers compose on the computer, run the risk of carpal tunnel injuries, but there is a subtler and much harder thing to protect and that is voice. It takes years to develop one’s own voice, it can’t be taught, yet is critical to the work. How to explain what voice is—that fingerprint made manifest on the page—how it must run the scales all the way up, all the way down? Musicians practice their scales constantly and although it may not seem evident, writers do, too.
I believe that I protect my voice. Singers drink tea and honey; I drink silence. It is the parenthesis I put around the start and the end of my writing time. I even use ear plugs to deepen the stillness. I write best when I’ve not spoken a word to anyone before I sit down to work. Every morning—early, early—I take a rigorous walk by the sea. This is not just physical exercise, it is my pre-writing time wherein I focus on both my interior and exterior landscapes. Words come while I walk, fetal words that I can then birth on the page.
For the writer then, I suggest that silence, not death, is the mother of all beauty. Sometimes I can’t even read another’s work when I’m deeply engaged in a particular book because of the risk of influences, of letting other voices over-ride my own. I observe silence, practice it like a cloister nun. I don’t even own a television, rarely go to movies. Instead, when I surface out of my long silences, I listen to classical music and lots of it.
One might ask why classical music? Because of its gorgeous architecture, because I love the sheer beauty of sound as it gives me a wordless but deep and direct expression of the human experience. Music and silence then are the best creators of what I hope is my singular voice.
The other great guardian of the written word is solitude. When I’m lonely, I don’t write well. When I’m deep within the honey hive of solitude there comes sustenance and lyric grace. Solitude is food for the soul, a great maker of great heart, and voice the instrument through which poetry is played. I must create from that holy trinity of heart, soul and voice, that rich roux that makes, or at least has the capacity to make us whole.
I once wanted to hang the mask of tragedy and comedy on either side of the door to my study as the true governors of my art. Now there is a third. I perceived it after seeing a local theater production called Love, which uses two poems from my fourth book, My Life as a Doll, and that is the word love. To write well one must love it all—the dark, the light and everything in between. Therefore another holy trinity—tragedy, comedy, love.
I close with lines jotted in many of my notebooks: “The voice is a door to exquisite happenings. That’s why one must ring the doorbell many times.” May the writing always be an exquisite happening and may that door when it fully opens, be an opening into spring churches and sanctuaries wherein writers are protected like an endangered species, which we might very well be. As well, as I wrote in that self-same notebook, “let no one say they suffer from too much creation” and may all our utterances “be a brief summation of the supreme.”
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It happens sometimes, quick as a wink and just in the nick of time—the mega-attack of pure joy. I never know when it’s coming, but when it does, as it did last night, I’m seized by joy, end up singing and dancing around the house just like a child, just like a very happy child, which I never was.
Battered into being by my parents, I’m often crushed by joy’s antithesis, the cold cauls of depression. My mood shifts are incredibly fast, often leave me breathless, but the fact that I can rise into, thrive my way into joy is an unexpected, much beloved gift, almost a crowning and one I hope to give in return.
My greatest source of joy is my miracle son, Dylan, now seventeen—a true mega-boy.
He is by nature playful, delightful and that very lightness of being is something we have always shared. As a toddler we would take bubble baths together, run naked out into the yard and perform nudy-tudy dances among the fireflies. As a young man he never fails to make me laugh. Not long ago we had a whipped cream fight in the car—Dylan even blasted some of it up my nose. When he plays Ultimate Frisbee, which he is passionate about, he is joy embodied, in flight.
I have learned much from my son, but one thing persists and that is just how intense joy can be. We’ve all felt the intensities of grief, but joy distilled is equally potent. It is, at its height, a power surge. It isn’t just contagious, it is powerful and empowering.
That lesson is evident in the dance world and because I study ballet, I know how physical joy can be. It is also strenuous—soaring into the leap, nailing multiple pirouettes—anyone who has observed dance is made captive by joy.
Why then is it so rare in the writing life? Is joy too fleeting, too effusive, elusive to capture? There are poems and stories that make us laugh, but I can ensure you, mine never do. I take my work very seriously, perhaps too seriously. Nonetheless, the practice, the daily practice of writing, does bring me much joy. After thirty-five years, I’m still eager to get down to work each morning and am unhinged on those rare days when I can’t practice my art.
Sheer joy, penultimate joy, heavenly joy. It’s a mega-attack on our highest side. Its complex is complex and sometimes its manifestations can be overwhelming. How so? I return to my son. When he was born I was enraptured. I remember looking at Dylan when he was just ten days old with a passionate happiness, knowing I would never gaze at a newborn of my own again. I was highly conscious, terrifically grateful that I had another passion—my writing. Without it to ground me, I would have, if it’s possible, loved my child too much. I would have gone off the deep end and those few degrees of separation have been essential to his well-being.
Every day I sit down ready to make a mega-attack on the poem and most days, it attacks back. What can I say about the writing life, why I persist, most writers persist, against all odds? We create the work, put it out there and are greeted by silence and rejection, rejection and silence. One artist once said she felt her music went into a big, black hole. I know that big black hole thoroughly, but the work never fails to bring me joy—it is ever enlivening, ever enlightening.
Dylan infected me with joy from day one. Writing did, too, even blood and guts poetry, naked poetry. My often melancholy muse can be celebratory: every poem is a wedding, even if it is a Baudelarian bouquet of the flowers from hell.
Let’s leave it like this: art is the highest form of play. I don’t know who said it, but it holds true for me. My only wish is that you, too, catch the fever of joy just like spring fever. It’s February outside and there’s a big winter storm happening, but I feel like May on the inside, an aging May perhaps, but oh how I long to play all day long, every day, come what may.
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My mother is slipping slowly now. She has no sense of the real world around her. Yesterday, she told my sister that she is flying. When sis asked her where she’s flying to, Mother answered, “To heaven.”
I find myself in this strange world that my wife Phoebe calls, simply, a death watch. I’m supervising two student teachers, so, fortunately, my job is not too demanding right now. They’re teaching most of my classes today. But it’s strange and sad. It has a kind of rhythm,a kind of schedule.
I go to work, check on my student teachers, leave them with the class, go to a near-by office, remember my mother is dying, cry a little, have lunch, think of mother, cry, come home, call Sis, see if Mother died, cry some more …
Friday, I took off work because I just couldn’t deal with it.
So that’s my life. I thank God for those hours when I just forget. Like last night, when we went to a play. Strange… I can’t remember the name of the play….
She could die tomorrow, or it could go on like this for months.
My greatest prayer is that she comes to a peaceful end. That she doesn’t suffer.
_________
By Arlene Weiner
“The trouble with you, Arlene,” a friend said, “is you can’t stay mad.” How right she was. Too much negative capability, I suppose—I begin to put myself in someone else’s shoes, see there might be another side to the story. As soon as I make a sweeping generalization, I think of an exception.
So though I once said, “If I ever write a poem about Icarus or Persephone, just shoot me,” I quickly repented. True, I’d read too many, in classes, workshops, and elsewhere. But now I began to think, “Why? Why those figures?” One reason is the emerging poets’ pride in knowledge, in taking possession of mythology, a knowledge not shared by everyone, but something discovered, almost private. But primarily because these are two young figures that are attractive to the (mostly young) poets writing about them: the ambitious young man wishing to soar, the romantic young woman imagining herself prized by the Dark Lord. In these stories the limbs of wish and fear are entangled, because they are warnings—Don’t stray from the path, don’t aim too high! Persephone is a Little Red Riding Hood in classical draperies, Icarus falls. I haven’t seen many contemporary poems about young men in myth whose ambition is satisfied,.like Perseus or Jason. (Well, if you know Jason’s whole story, you know he’s slime.)
I’m not the only one who issues prohibitions for poetry. Teachers say: No adjectives and adverbs! Show don’t tell! No ideas but in things! Just like my (now given up) ban on Persephone and Icarus, their bans probably come from reading a lot of poems, sometimes from, let’s say, passion fatigue. Sometimes the fatigue is more specific, a “not [that trope/subject/word] again!”
Once I showed a poem to a poet friend, and she said, “Not ‘shards’! Please don’t use ‘shards’!” It seems that she’d been judging poetry contests, and the word “shards” appeared over and over, a kind of mark of poeticism. And since she said that, I’ve seen the word many, many times, in workshops and, yes, in published poetry. Again I ask, “Why?” Why is the word “shards” so attractive? As with the allusions to the myths, one reason is that it displays a little learning: it’s a word out of the common, a discovery. It also has a sound that is quite close to “sharp,” which pleases because it means something sharp. Most of all, because it means something fragmentary, and fragmentation is the great subject of modernism.
As my friend understood, I’m easy. I wouldn’t deny myself the pleasure of Jack Gilbert’s Falling and Flying, a perfectly fresh use of the Icarus story. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177687, and I’m still willing to entertain a poem with adjectives, adverbs, Persephone, or “shards,” even Persephone and “shards.”
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This spring, I’m gaining in altitude by humbling myself before brocades of seaweed, breathing in the glow echoed in broken seashells and by glorifying the tree rings inside me. I want to write sap. I want to write purple prose, embellish an altogether elegant alphabet. Pristine light stalks me. Clouds are full of rosy, soul stuffing.
Last weekend, a Biblical deluge. It lasted three days long. I waited for the dove to return with the olive sprig in its beak while the floodgates of heaven fully opened. I was mesmerized by the rain, listened to its rhythmic pounding on my red roof, watched it streak its pure juices down my dormer windows and best of all, I walked in it before a wildly, outrageously bewitching sea, leaned into the mean and wicked winds and I absolutely loved it.
Why does this spring seem so singular for me? The answer is simple. It is because all my other springs, so many floundering springs, false springs, stillborn springs always reminded me of Sexton’s killing rains in killing springs. A year ago, I attempted suicide,
downed med after med while drinking wine, woke up in the ICU. And the spring before that I landed, once again, in the psych ward because for hours the only word I could utter was die, die, die.
How did I shift from walking numbly in Sexton’s killing rains into dancing in a Biblical deluge? Why does every minute in this spring feel like a tiny triumph over darkness? For years I lived in icy isolation, voiced my nearly voiceless voice in a void, a vast vat of a void, traumatized by dramatic demons which were the only creatures in my field of vision. These demons erupted in moments of madness so excruciatingly painful, I would bite my own hand, really hard, in order to stop screaming, bang my head against the wall, go into a fetal ball and mirror, exactly so, the little girl I once was, a child who was tortured by demonic parents, tormented nearly to death, repeatedly so.
The demons are gone and right now the only creatures that are in the field of my vision are the song sparrows nesting in my ornate bird box. My demons have been demolished. I took them on and killed them, one by one, by re-living my horrific childhood, blow by blow and violation after extremely violent violation. I then became the only one who could heal that child by loving her lavishly so and letting me, not her, be crucified by her wounds.
Now comes the resurrection. Scars once pregnant with pain have become the achingly gorgeous wounds in trees so old they rustle with the spirits of ancient mystics. I venerate these wounds, they are grottos to which I pay homage and I honor their timeless beauty. Out of these wounds come poems. Out of these wounds comes a woman I can love because she loved that child christened only by pain till she could run out into the sun to play.
Which she does. She also weaves daisy chains, skips down by the sea, pulls the dog’s tail who, in return, licks her back. I treat her the way I treated my son when he was a child and she is alive and well as he is alive and well. This spring, our singular spring, I am getting her a kitty that we will name Twodiful because wonderful times two is Twodiful. Dog number one is wonderful as the kitty will also be wonderful, hence Twodiful.
In the end, I married my wounds. I was and am true to those beautiful, twodiful wounds. They are my wellspring, the genesis of whatever genius I might generate because I was re-created by them. I don’t stand by a man, I stand by a woman who stands by a child who was nearly killed more than once. She is what gets me out of bed in the morning. She is the one who puts my pen in my hand to write that sap, sweet, sweet sap and passionately purple prose while embellishing an altogether elegant alphabet.
I was made vulnerable, voluminously so, by her stellar wounds, sterling wounds, her very beautiful twodiful wounds. That very vulnerability is what makes me capable of championing words turned into verse and it is those words that truly resurrect us, connect us and binds us, not only to each other, but to life itself which is lengthening its luxurious minutes in radiant, lifelong light.
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by Songyi Zhang
“I passed my driver’s test!” I cried and jumped like a 5-year-old seeing pandas for the first time in the zoo.
I got my temporary Pennsylvania driver’s license last weekend at Penn Hills Station, Pittsburgh, after four months’ constant practice behind the wheel. It was my belated rite of passage since I am ten years older than the state’s legal driving age of 16.
Accompanied by a soft spoken, blue-eyed young examiner, I was in and out of the parallel parking zone in two minutes. I had practiced the move only one hundred times. I then slowly drove along Rodi Road behind a crawling sweeper truck to make the loop from Stoneledge Drive to Darrell Drive. In fifteen minutes, the test was over.
“Congratulations! Not many people pass on their first try,” a middle-aged clerk at the counter where I posed for my new license photo.
I feel it’s surreal that I can operate a four-wheel machine in a city famous for its hilly roads. It’s not easy for Pittsburgh’s foreign drivers, more accustomed to flat land, to deal with the winding roads and the narrow, two-way streets, on both sides of which cars often park back to back.
As a matter of fact, I had never felt the urgency of learning to drive when I was in my hometown, Guangzhou, China, a metropolis of ten million people where public transportation is as convenient as flagging a New York Yellow cab. But until I got to America last summer, I realized that learning to drive is a survival skill not only for Americans but for aliens like me, who want to travel freely in the great Land of Opportunity.
In my first few months in Pittsburgh, I’ve learned that nothing in America is within walking distance. If I were told ten minutes to get to a place, it meant by car.
Learning to drive in Pittsburgh was unforgettable. I attended four lessons instructed by Ellie Miller, a veteran instructor from Easy Method Driving School. She’s lately retired. In her 28 years of teaching, Ellie experienced dozens of life-threatening moments with her foreign students. She recalled a 24-year-old Indian student who made a left turn, driving into the oncoming traffic lane by instinct because in India, drivers keep left. Fortunately, there was no traffic coming.
Although I passed the driver’s test, I still feel intimidated to drive uphill like South Negley Avenue where I cannot foresee the traffic on the top of the hill. Surprises, such as a stop sign, might wait for me on the hill before I make a sharp turn.
“You’ll learn the principle of gravity quickly in Pittsburgh,” Ellie repeated to me about the importance of controlling brakes in Pittsburgh.
Maintaining a good speed is also a challenge. My Rwandan friend, Justa Igihozo, who is a new driver in Pittsburgh, says she would be speeding if she drove at 55 in her home country, because 60 kilometers (37 mph) is the speed limit in Rwanda.
I often find myself the only one who drives under or at the speed limit in Pittsburgh. This is apparently so when I drive to Penn Hills on I-376 at the speed limit of 55 mph, most vehicles pass me.
It’s too easy to get lost in Pittsburgh for most roads in the city are not straight. At times Y intersections join in the middle of a curvy road. My teacher Heather Lai, who recently moved to Pittsburgh from Taiwan, got her family an automotive GPS receiver. She named it “Lydia” because the gadget gives direction in a sexy female voice.
“Now my husband loves going out alone with Lydia in Pittsburgh rather than with me as his co-pilot,” she says.
Despite my frustration as a new foreign driver, I’m impressed by the courteous driving manners in Pittsburgh. My Indian friend, Harpreet Sarao also agrees.
“We don’t have polite hand gestures (for drivers) like here. If you did that, people think you are crazy,” Harpreet says. She also says she doesn’t hear many honks in Pittsburgh as honking is fairly common in India.
I feel differently about honks though. One time I almost had a fender bender after a driver in the next lane honked at me when I changed lanes. I instinctively tapped on the brake. Later, Ellie told me it was a friendly, brisk honnk-honnk instead of the angry honnnnnnnk.
How would I know the sound of honk has such knowledge? I’m sure my PA driver’s license will enrich my understanding of American driving.
_____
by Songyi Zhang
The United States is a nation of freedom. Indeed. As I landed in Chicago O’Hare International Airport after a long distance flight from Tokyo, I learnt that from this moment on I had to depend on myself completely. There was no friendly airport staff like in China who could help me lift my heavy luggage on and off the security inspection machine. In fact, after I politely asked for help from a robust security guard who stood indifferently next to an X-ray inspection machine, he flung my luggage unwillingly on the belt. As a result, the handle of my luggage was broken.
In many public locations in America, such as airports, supermarkets, subway stations and even student lounges, you’ll find self-service facilities. Americans are independent. They like Do-It-Yourself—they do self check-in at the airport with their printed boarding pass instead of using counter service; they do self check-out at the supermarket instead of waiting in lines for assistance. Vending machines, ATM machines, newspaper boxes and subway ticket machines are everywhere in the U.S. It’s more likely for a tourist in America to communicate with a machine than with a person when he requests a service in public.
For example, I’d insert some coins in a newspaper box for the newspaper instead of giving my money to a vendor. As long as you have a credit card, you just swipe it through a machine before you check out in the store or at the gas station.
I miss the people contact service in my homeland.
DIY may bring convenience to most of us but it also puzzles the first-time users, especially foreign visitors. In my opinion, it’s tourist-unfriendly. My recent experience in the subway service of Washington D.C. was unpleasant. Unlike in Guangzhou, China where helpful conductors are at the entrance and on the platform in every subway station, I had to learn step by step how to purchase a ticket from the vending machine. What would happen if I did not understand English? There was no assistant at the station. It was difficult to find my fare on the machine in a dim light. But I made it eventually.
Do we need all this convenience? Is this complete self-service really helpful to everyone? What if the parking ticket machine swallowed your credit card and you couldn’t find any staff to help? We’re so dependent on automatic facilities but what if these machines betray us? Thanks to the DIY system, human contact has been reduced to the point we’ve become more like automatons ourselves.
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I am a Roman Catholic. I was not surprised last month when I read of yet another pedophile priest. Nor was I surprised by the cover-up. But I was shocked to hear that two boys, ten and fourteen, were administered a solemn oath, on peril of their immortal souls, not to reveal that they were molested by Fr. Lawrence Murphy of the Milwaukee Archdiocese.
We need a new Reformation. The last one started with the selling of indulgences. The current estimate is that 4% of all priests are sex offenders. That is one in twenty-five. I doubt that 4% of sixteenth century priests sold indulgences.
Catholicism is a universal call to holiness. But a call to holiness is not a call to a static state. Holiness is change. Holiness is transition. Holiness is reformation.
Holiness is reconciliation. We need to publicly confess, in the simplest terms, that our priests committed felonies, and our bishops conspired to cover-up of rape and molestation.
Catholics are in the business of mercy and justice. But as there can be no justice without mercy, so there can be no mercy without justice. Only then can there be forgiveness. But the problem is not as simple as throwing felons into jail. Many of the pedophiles, like Fr. Murphy, are dead. In other cases, statutes of limitations prevent prosecutions.
How, then, do we achieve reconciliation?
We need a new Reformation filled with more questions than answers. This reform must be unitary, one in which ministers and laity participate equally. Any reform, led solely by bishops, is doomed to failure because – and this cannot be said too bluntly – our bishops, as a group, now lack moral credibility.
One place to start is with what we Catholics do well, public penance. We could, for example, set-up panels modeled on South Africa’s Truth And Reconciliation Commission. Ideally, these panels would be both national and diocesan. Victims of sexual abuse would be invited to give witness to their experiences. Perpetrators, and the Church officials who shielded them, should also give testimony. The mandate of the commission would be to record, to reflect, to reconcile, and to form the questions that lead to further dialogue.
It is worth noting that I refer to reconciliation that in essence is relational. Such reconciliation does not shield anyone from criminal prosecution. Nor am I oblivious to the fact that one cannot change the sexual orientation of a pedophile, any more than one can change the orientation of a heterosexual or a homosexual. I speak here of the healing of the emotional wounds. We despise abusers. We feel betrayed by bishops. The greatest danger is in leaving these feelings unexplored. It is easy to despise pedophiles. But there is much risk when we despise the mentally ill. There is also a certain hazard in using his worst decision as the measure of a bishop’s entire career. These risks, these hazards, lead to the closing of our hearts, which leads to the closing of our minds, which leads to the closing of our church doors. There can be no reform without dialogue. And dialogue is nothing if it is not the promise to stay in relationship.
One dialogue that is not happening, one that must happen, concerns celibacy. Many feel that celibacy is a terrible idea, a medieval vestige like self-flagellation. Asceticism will always be with us. It can be a healthy choice for a few people. A very few. But celibacy is a problem also. Celibacy does not cause pedophilia. It causes isolation. If the Archbishop of Milwaukee had a ten year old son, he never would have protected Fr. Murphy.
How did we come to this? Why did we come to this? I am not suggesting answers. I merely am suggesting ways to frame the questions. That we are in a state of transition, this is all that is clear. To what we are transitioning? Who knows?. I sometimes wonder if I am a member of a dying religion. Are we Catholics destined to become the Zoroastrians of the West, colorful but irrelevant to the larger culture? Or are we on the cusp of a great revival in the Church? I don’t know. But unless we open ourselves to dialogue, we surely will die of the silence.
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by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
I’m not quite sure what got me thinking about Irina Ratushinskaya recently but something did, and brought back how closely I followed her work during the eighties; Poets all over the world took her case very personally. Many of us wrote letters protesting her imprisonment and asking for her release. (Here is a link to an appeal in the New York Review of Books on June 30, 1983: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/6168 )
Arrested in 1982 for her involvement with the human rights movement and for writing poems that were considered anti-Soviet propaganda, she was tried and sentenced to seven years hard labor and five years of internal exile; almost immediately she was sent to a labor camp where she lived as a “zek” and continued secretly to write poems by carving them into bars of soap, memorizing them, and then destroying the evidence by washing them away. (She also copied poems in minuscule script onto strips of paper which she managed to smuggle out; a number of these were published in the 1984 collection Poems and later in Pencil Letter.) Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated her release in October, 1986, an agreement timed to warm things for the summit in Reykjavik. Ratushinskaya’s Soviet citizenship was revoked; physically frail after years of harsh camp conditions, she emigrated to the U.S., where she lived for two years (as the poet-in-residence at Northwestern University) before moving to London, and then finally back home to Russia in the late nineties. A book of her poems, Beyond the Limit, came out in 1987, shortly after her release; Gray is the Color of Hope, a memoir, appeared in 1988. If you haven’t read these, you should.
Since then Ratushinskaya has published a number of volumes, including Wind of the Journey, poems in Russian and English from Cornerstone Press (2000), translated by Lydia Razran Stone. Here is poem 35 from that collection:
- The cock has sung
- But angel horns are still.
- We live on a narrow ledge above
- The precipice of time.
- We sense the end is near.
- But, heedless, children run.
- There are no dreams that will
- Assuage their urge to fly.
- What power then is this?
- Drawing them to the abyss?
(1991)
I also located a number of new poems in the May 2008 issue of The International Literary Quarterly: http://www.interlitq.org/issue3/irina_ratushinskaya/bio.php
Why do I think of her now? Perhaps because we still have so much to learn from the Russian poets—not just Ratushinskaya but also Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva. In this time of inflammatory talk radio hosts and shows, and of senators who shout “You lie!” to the president in the middle of a congressional address, I say to myself, let us look to the Russian poets and be both heartened and instructed.