Poetry!

Time for a little scrawled check-in about being a poet. Or really just a moment to be grateful that I’ve stubbornly held onto poetry despite its difficulties, and begun to hold on even tighter this year. Because when poetry is my active companion, it is a balm even in the worst times. And this month has been among the worse times. Judging by what I hear from my larger group, most of us are feeling it in one way or another. For my family, February has been a slog through big and small difficulties. Unprecedented (for me) snow and cold weather, crisis in my immediate family, lingering (non-covid) colds, seasonal depression, a scary but ultimately fine trip to the ER. Pack on poor eating and exercise habits (due to said cold weather, colds, and SAD), and I just feel like I’m walking through mud. A slog, a fog, a muddle, lead limbs and slow head. 

Snow is pretty, but it sure is cold

This morning I attended a zoom workshop and was genuinely horrified by my face in the screen. Like, no haircut for 6 months (and it was unbrushed yet), bags under my eyes, new sags and wrinkles seemingly overnight. Couldn’t stop myself from pulling faces, for some reason, either. And forgot the miracle of “hide self-view” until too late. But lo, physical vanity evaporated when we read and discussed the ekphrastic poems we wrote for the week, and so did some of my muddled slowness.

I’m in another zoom group, this one generative, with more wonderful, talented women, many of them farther along on the poetry “career path” than I am (in what we could kindly call my perpetual emergence). One of them a few weeks ago, because this group too is a balm and we often sigh gratefully as it comforts us, said “why do we have to teach all the time? Why can’t we just keep learning?” And I had the unhappy thought then, “I don’t teach, and I wish I did”. But today, I feel my own luck, the luck of the amateur, who gets to learn and learn without end.

Now a list of poetry things I thought about today, based on conversation among the (honestly) brilliant workshop leader Sandra Beasley, and my fellow poets in the group:

• In an ekphrastic poem (one responding to another piece of art), we can consider how to mimic the making of the originating piece in the making of our poem. How can we think about enacting the way the painter’s brush moves, or the composition of the piece?

  For example, Kimberly Johnson’s “Fifteen” replicates some of the ‘commotion’, the undifferentiated and distracting detail, of a Breughel painting by using bracketed words (with exclamation points! Note – learn to use exclamation points in poems!) and the staggered stanza. 

• In avoiding direct mimesis of the piece you’re responding to, consider whether the title can first give us access to your own slant on it—even if much of the poem is spent directly describing the piece. 

• Ekphrasis requests balance – how much do we want to describe, versus respond? One way of interrogating this balance is to consider the moment you first mention the other piece. In my own ekphrastic poem for the week, I waited till the final lines of the final stanza to overtly mention the figure in the painting, and this worked fine because it’s a piece that many people have already seen and written about (“Christina’s World”, by Wyeth). In this case, the epigraph provides enough ‘framing’ for the reader to understand the poem’s occasion. For a less well-known work, you’d perhaps want to describe at least some of the visual (or auditory, if music) reality of the piece earlier on.

• A qasida or qassida is a poetry form that is entirely new to me as of today. I don’t yet have a full understanding of it so in part, this is a note to myself to read more about it. Here’s Khaled Mattawa’s “Qassida to the Statue of Sappho in Mytilini” And here’s a recording of him reading it. If you need enticement to click on the links, here’s a passage.

• Be careful in stacking mid-line caesuras, in case you’re forming unwanted hemistichs (while I very much enjoy the foreign look of both terms here, I’ll say it more simply too for any readers who aren’t familiar with them – if you have obvious pauses in the very center of multiple lines of your poem, it can create the sense of a series of half-lines, and readerly confusion as to why you didn’t just make the lines shorter. A small thing, but one I’d never thought about so directly).

• Attention to poems charges me with life even when I feel at my most lifeless.

On extended breastfeeding, Larkin, and epigenetics

“Hummingbird at a flower”. That is…one metaphor. I typed it weeks ago at the top of this very document, hoping to come back to it. The metaphor that comes to mind this morning instead is “lamprey suck-flaying a fish”. 

H is still nursing at 22 months; I didn’t think this would happen, but then again I didn’t think it wouldn’t. My approach to breastfeeding has been inertial. He found his latch within the first few days of his life, I happened to have an adequate supply, I didn’t leave home for work so I didn’t have to pump, and so here we are, H nursing on and off all day, and nursing to sleep every day during our epic co-sleeping naptimes. 

These naptimes another example of my “take the path of least resistance” mothering style. This is how we ended up co-napping and not even close to weaning during the pandemic. It was just easier.

But it doesn’t feel easy when he uses me as a drinking fountain at play, or a pacifier in sleep, or when he takes hours to wind down enough to nap while I’m trapped in a dark bedroom fending off minor disasters of toppling lamps and spilled water. Not after weeks and weeks of it with no more than his night’s sleep off. 

Sometimes not even that. We had a power outage last night, and the cessation of his noise machine woke him. Who knew how long it would be, so in he came. Clambering and sliding under the blankets, pulling and contorting new stretch marks into my breasts (which I thank for their flexibility). Pushing up my shirt and instructing me to hold it up, no on both sides please, so he could find the other breast and investigate it as he drank. Scratching me as he went, so I took his little thumb and bit off the too-long nail, missed last time I clipped. 

I dozed. Woke in the dark to H still busily nursing and his fingernail, little scrap of him, still in my mouth. So tired that ugliness coated the world around me, anything my mind touched ugly, broken. I wondered what the laws were for unemployed mothers giving up custody. They couldn’t force me to take care of him, could they?

But then again, there we were eating each other. There we were literally ingesting parts of each other. My leaving. What a joke. What a fiasco. I keep trying to write about the fact that mothers become literal chimeras after birth. Scraps of fetal DNA floating around in us for years. Lodging in our brains. Some researchers think it causes cancer. Some think it saves us from Alzheimer’s. Regardless, I contain him. 

He contains me too. I’m reading about generational trauma, cycles of abuse, all the ways in which we ruin each other. One psychologist says “good” parenting works as the placenta worked, to take in and filter toxins from the womb.

If good parents—mothers, inescapably—are a life-giving, filtering organ of support, “bad” mothers make their children their “poison containers”, discarding their negativity into them instead. Such an incisive image. Such a searing one. If it weren’t for the undercurrent of misogyny I’d be seduced. If it weren’t for the fact that being a good mother in this case means being a self-negating mother.

But the metaphor sticks with me anyway, beyond the mother-child dyad. Because I believe it. That in my worst imaginings a family is just a group of scapegoated poison containers. That we inject our self-loathing into each other, that sometimes all we can see in another’s face is our own void staring back. 

This feels especially true right now, when our worlds have shrunk. How easy it’s been, lately, to revert. The now-closed home become the reflection of my own dirty, dingy, exhausted mind. How easy to inject poison into those who are now always there, instead of defusing or diffusing the emotion. I’m being purposefully vague here. Because this isn’t about my particular wounds. It’s about the pain of carrying them around, and the pain of re-inflicting them.

“Man hands on misery to man”. The only poem I can recall in its entirety anymore. Partly because I used to teach it for meter and prosody, but mostly because I adore an incredibly dark poem. 

I envy joyous poems & their poets—you know the ones, because they’re rightly popular, all these geniuses able to find the uplift, to sing it strong. But I’m at home in the dark stuff. Which is how I prefer to read Larkin, even with the sing-song insouciance and humor of it, I zero in on the trauma, of course. For the uninitiated, here:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Larkin was likely thinking of nurture, not nature, when he said “they fill you with the faults they had.” But even when we don’t directly re-enact our own wounds onto our children, the traces are still there, trauma inherited; he may as well have been talking about the reverberations of trauma in our epigenetics. The vision of our unhappy lineages “deepen[ing] like a coastal shelf” comes to me in the still-dark. Murky water sparking with corrosive little add-ons to our slowly spinning helixes.

And of course, then, the nature becomes the nurture, and on and on. How far back must I peer to find the root of my unhappiness, my addictions, the root of my short temper and rage, the root of my quick-to-overwhelm personality. 

Or, more fearfully, how far will these press forward from me. Especially if I take the path of least resistance. How easy it’s been, lately, to growl, exhausted animal, and shamble down the well-trod paths. Paths trod by repetition, by chemical markers, by memory. 

H is this open faucet streaming life, and I’m terrified that we will wrench him closed. I’m even more terrified that what’s streaming out will start carrying heavier and heavier toxins. That it’s all already lurking in the depths.

And so. What a horror. To pre-ruin your child not only with your bad genes, not only your bad actions, but the bad actions done to you even before their birth. My favorite novel, The Shining (yes, for all its overwritten faults) finds its worst terror in that dark reverberation. Those dark birthrights. Jack shuffling down the halls, turned into his father, turned into the hotel, turned into his addictions.

I am thinking of you, reader, in hoping to think my way towards something beautiful to end with. But no image of H smiling in the sun today, no snow shining like fire in the votive of a lilac bud, no light-hungry tulip unfurling air towards me on the deck can wipe that away, not truthfully. Not without it staining through, ugly palimpsest. Like how, at night, I imagine H’s cry and it joins with the rush of blood in my ears, is as constant, embedded.

At best it’s a can’t//must scenario. We can’t go on we must go on. He’s my last hope and he’s the container I pour my (our, our, our) toxicity into. Bad mother, source of sustenance. Little lamprey, erstwhile hummingbird. Scrap of me, best of me.