Comrade: On the Death of Adrienne Rich

Neal Boenzi for The New York Times

There are some writers whose work takes up a great space on the shelf, and those whose voice spills out from the shelf, filling the room with the music of ideas and experience. For many years, Adrienne Rich has been one of those poets to me -- unswerving and unapologetic.

No matter how many times I move to a new study, new campus, or new city, her poetry and prose follow. Like many teachers, I've introduced young writers to seminal poems like "Diving Into the Wreck," "Power," "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," "Twenty-One Love Poems." I've also paired "'I Am in Danger--Sir--'" with Billy Collins' "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes" (take that!). Thoughout the years, I've disseminated the usual essays from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, and Blood, Bread, and Poetry. All things considered, I doubt I've done enough to promote her work...

When I was a grad student, Rich's "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson" changed the way I related to the legendary "Belle of Amherst." Rich's individual poems emerged as models, but more important was the longevity of her writing, as well as her ability to evolve over time in terms of formal measure, tone, and syntax. However her style changed, she remained true to those subjects to which she felt called -- both political and personal. 

I never met Rich, nor did I ever attend any of her public readings. Yet, the opening poem from her series, Inscriptions, sums up our relationship as reader and writer:

from "Comrade"

Little as I knew you I know you:     little as you knew me you know me.

*

That Rich knew so many of the people to whom her work meant so much is evident in the eighth section of "An Atlas of the Difficult World," a long poem first published in a book by the same title. It is a poem I have entered and reentered over many years from many different vantages. Whether reading these lines "standing up in a bookstore," while on some "underground train," or more recently "beside the stove / warming milk, a crying child on [my] shoulder, a book in [my] hand," the poem continues to speak to me, as Adrienne Rich's work will continue to speak to and for us for many years to come.                  

XIII (Dedications)                    

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour.    I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet.     I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age.     I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something,
torn between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

The Life

ABT Soloist Sascha Radetsky for Dance Magazine: 

"After my last ankle surgery, I vowed to push beyond any future injuries, and barring true catastrophe, to never miss another performance. I was like an escaped convict who refused to be sent back to the joint, and I had a good run. In the studio and onstage, I worked around and through labral tears in both hips; pinched nerves; pulled muscles; sprained digits, wrists, and ankles; rotated vertebrae; stone bruises; tendinitis; and plantar fasciitis. Outside of the studio and offstage, I sustained a few mild concussions, 13 stitches to the back of the head, bruises and black eyes, and torn rib cartilage. Peter, Julie, and Dr. Bauman worked their miracles and I didn’t cancel a show for most of a decade—until Achilles tendinitis (in that right ankle) forced me out of a performance of Harald Lander’s Etudes..."

yaa ustaadha ghadeer! (w/ lines from Nemerov's "Learning the Trees")

Back in the saddle this week with Sunday's triumphant return to Arabic class!

Correction:

I've gone back to Arabic class. Let's face it -- after seven months and some major lapses in memory, my return might be characterized as anything but "triumphant." In fact, I don't even remember how to say "triumphant" in Arabic. Or "saddle" for that matter...

*
"I can see you're still thinking in English," my teacher says this morning. "Yes," I say with a nod, but only because the first word that comes to mind isn't aywa.

*
When I walk the dog around our neighborhood, I try to identify everything I can using Arabic: ground becomes ard; tree, shajaara; flower, warde -- or is that flowers? aSfar, azraq, aHmar, I think, yellow, blue, red. Hasheesh akhdar (green grass, although there's not much of that), masbaH (swimming pool).

*

    Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn   

    The language of the trees. That’s done indoors,   

    Out of a book, which now you think of it   

    Is one of the transformations of a tree....

*
A classmate returns after a six month's absence. She still speaks in full sentences: "this weekend my sister-in-law and her children are arriving from Seattle," she says (or so I'm guessing). "We're taking them to Petra."

Ahib atakallam 3rabi, I respond. "I like to speak Arabic."

*
I don't like to speak Arabic. I like to read it. I like to hear it. I like to write its ever-shifting consonants and vowels from right to left. I even like to try to decipher its odd grammatical rules and syntactical inversions. But do I like to speak it? The answer is, la.

*

    The words themselves are a delight to learn,   

    You might be in a foreign land of terms

    Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome,   

   Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth...

*
I'm of two minds, I hear folks say. Afternoons, I'm also of two minds: while reading my son classics like Brown Bear, What Do You See?, I secretly try to translate them into Arabic. I can get the red bird and black sheep, but the purple cat stumps me every time.

*

I had a dream:

Move to Jordan (check)

Learn to read and speak Arabic (?)

Translate Jordanian poetry (??)

*

    Still, pedetemtim as Lucretius says,

    Little by little, you do start to learn;

    And learn as well, maybe, what language does   

    And how it does it, cutting across the world...

Lunchboxes & Love Notes

March 21: Mother's Day in Amman. Meaning, street vendors manning major intersections. Meaning, balloons for sale, boxed chocolate tinged with the scent of exhaust. Single roses (red, yellow, white) in plastic wrap just a JD each, the equivalent of about $1.50.

*
My son is bouncing in his bouncer, content to spin the plastic toy with plastic beads inside. Last year at this time he himself was like a little bead -- not yet jumping or kicking, but taking shape inside. I watch him. He squeals and laughs, showing his two teeth. I'm a mother, yet it's another woman I'm thinking of -- a woman in Florida who's recently lost her son, although "lost" is hardly the word to describe when an innocent boy has been gunned down.

*
Activists have been calling for the government to amend the country's citizenship law. In short, Jordanian women want equal rights for their children born to foreign fathers. Over many months, dozens demonstrate in front of the Prime Ministry. Why? Throughout the Kingdom, gender plays a critical role in determining rights and privileges: a man can marry up to four foreign wives, for example, and pass on his Jordanian citizenship to his offspring. Meanwhile, children of Jordanian mothers married to foreign husbands must report to police stations and health centers in order to obtain residency clearance. What's more, they're required by law to secure special permits to enroll their daughters and sons in public or private schools.

*
Upon having a child, I was warned not to write poems about motherhood. Too sentimental, some say. Too obvious, too cliche. Meanwhile, a poet who writes about fatherhood is said to be daring, even brave. 

*
Mother (noun): meaning, a female parent or the superior of a religious community of women

First known use of Mother: 13th century

Maternal: feminine, womanish; caring, giving, nurturing


Mother (verb): to give birth to; to care for or protect like a mother

*
In February, I heard this: an ex-pat (Czech, let's say, or French -- let's call her French) fell in love with a Jordanian man and moved to Amman after they were married. Forward a decade, three children: he has an affair and offers to divide his time between the wife he's basically abandoned and his mistress. Although her husband shows no interest in his children, the woman can't legally leave the country with her own sons and daughter. Her in-laws disapprove of their son's decisions and offer their assistance. The man's older brother uses his passport to help his French sister-in-law, nephews, and niece cross into Israel. From Tel Aviv, they fly to Paris. The only reason this works is because the children share their uncle's Jordanian citizenship, as well as the name printed in their passports.
  
*
My maternal mother's name is Jewell. Her mother's name was Eula Belle.

My paternal mother's name is Carolyn. Her monther's name was Mary; for as long as I can remember, we called her "Peppa."

*
For Mother's Day, one headline reads, many Jordanians opt for practical gifts: electric kettles, a citrus juicer, a mattress, a set of knives. One son purchases his grandmother a new house-dress and headscarf instead of sweets -- the picture of practicality.


*
During my short time as a mother, I've learned this: a child is the most impractical gift in the world.

Our First Haft-Seen

N. & D. worked for weeks to host a Persian New Year's celebration for thirty of their friends. We were happy to help them recognize spring's early days with the "Seven S's," as represented by N.'s traditional table setting. Overall, a wonderful party filled with friends, food, laughter, and libations!

Exactly

sculpture installation by alicia martin

Opening lines of Albert Goldbarth's "Library":

This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it;
    this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death
    list.
This is the book I lifted high over my head, intending to smash a roach in
    my girlfriend's bedroom; instead, my back unsprung, and I toppled
    painfully into her bed, where I stayed motionless for eight days.
This is a "book." That is, an audio cassette. This other "book" is a screen
    and a microchip. This other "book," the sky.
In chapter three of this book, a woman tries explaining her husband's
    tragically humiliating death to their daughter: reading it is like walking
    through a wall of setting cement.
This book taught me everything about sex.
This book is plagiarized.
This book is transparent; this book is a codex in Aztec; this book, written
    by a prisoner, in dung; the wind is turning the leaves of this book: a
    hill-top olive as thick as a Russian novel.
This book is a vivisected frog, and ova its text....

*
 Find the rest of Goldbarth's "Library" at Poetry Daily

*
There are sonnets that reveal "The Secret Name of God" and odes in which the wind is turned over. I know poets who've written about the gourd-stored heart, cement setting on the tagalong moons of Mars, vivisected frogs. There are anthologies of poetry on tape, books archived in skies over the former Kingdom of Prussia. But which poem, I wonder, is it that saved my life? Which one unloosed itself to save yours?

Amman (with traces of Hardy)

during wind and rain

...They change to a high new house,

       He, she, all of them—aye,

       Clocks and carpets and chairs

          On the lawn all day,

       And brightest things that are theirs. . . .

          Ah, no; the years, the years

Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs. 

 

*

A friend of mine, a poet, has delightful news! Can't share, can't share, can't share until next week. Oh, but it's good! I super heart when wonderful things happen for wonderful people!

 

*

Currently reading:

 

Devotions (Bruce Smith)

Eternal Enemies (Adam Zagajewski)

Not Quite My Bird --

"The Eighth Wonder of the World"

-- but two-headed all the same. Reviews of the Scottish Ensemble's double concerto are coming in. Writes Kate Molleson for The Guardian: 

The Two-Headed Nightingale is "is a bold, dense and arresting blast of a composition – a work that forcefully reiterates [composer Luke] Bedford's voice and brilliantly showcases its fine set of players...Inspired by a 19th-century poster of singing Siamese twins, ferocious open strings set things thrashing into motion..."

*
What's interesting about the above poster is that it seems to depict Christine and Millie McCoy as Caucasian. In fact, the sisters, billed by P.T. Barnum as "the celebrated African United Twins," were born into slavery in Columbus County, North Carolina, in 1851. For more than three decades they not only sang and danced to rave reviews, but also recited poetry as part of their public performances.

"Quarantine"

"Let no love poem ever come to this threshold..."

"And for a second...

...Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed --
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken."

*
Along routes used by Syrians attempting to flee their country's violence, the Assad Regime is laying landmines. Camps in Turkey and Jordan swell with incoming refugees, some of them wounded. Late one night, a teenage boy takes his chances and crosses a thorn-pocked field. A mine explodes. He loses his leg, but survives.

*

Philip Larkin's "The Explosion" (see excerpt above) isn't about anti-personnel, nor anti-vehicle mines. Yet last night as K. and I discussed Assad's utilization of what are most likely Soviet-era weapons, I couldn't help but think of Larkin's characterization of men "in pitboots / coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke, / Shouldering off the freshened silence."

Of the link between Larkin's poem, which was produced in the 1970s, and the climate of urgency and grief post-9/11, Ron Smith writes for Blackbird:

Larkin was an unbeliever, an artist whose genuine, chronic fear of death’s oblivion was met with a candor that rose to the level of heroism. Consider the last line of “The Explosion,” effectively the last line of Larkin’s last poem. The beautiful eggs, symbols of life and creativity, are retrieved only in imagination, only through grief’s agonized yearning. They are unbroken and will remain so: they will never hatch. Maybe they are Larkin’s poems, the ones that somehow vanished in the subterranean world of the poet’s unconscious. For a poet named Larkin, what is a lark’s egg? 

* 

Meanwhile, at what was once the front-line of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Middle East's first all female de-mining team works to remove potentially lethal devices along the Jordanian border. The conditions are extreme. The women are meticulous. Many come from conservative Bedouin communities where daughters, sisters, mothers rarely work outside the home, let alone devote themselves to dangerous humanitarian causes.

*
Heroism has its grandeur, Smith writes. And some losses leave us inconsolable.

And Larkin: "The dead go on before us ... / ...We shall see them face to face..."

Yes. And yes.

Etc., Etc.

the author as melanie daniels

Why is it that each day the task of changing C.'s diaper feels more and more like wrestling a jellyfish? No. Less a jellyfish (too passive) than a seagull or something prone toward flight...

*
Arrived via mail: Devotions (Bruce Smith), Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (D.A. Powell), Snuggle Puppy (Sandra Boynton)

*
It's lights out at Hayden's Ferry Review, whose editors seek poems and stories that take place in the dark. The Chattahoochee Review, meanwhile, wants all things Irish, while the good folks at Ecotone are on the hunt for writing exploring the "abnormal."

*

Someone emails to say my book is on SPD's recommendation list. Somebody else writes to say my online account has been hacked. Nobody says "we'd like to send you on an all-expenses paid trip to Peru." Or, "the time machine you requested last Thursday is available for flight."

*
The Rumpus Original Poetry Anthology is now available for purchase and boasts work from wonderful writers including Kara Candito, Forrest Gander, Nick Lantz, Josh Rivkin. Oh, and me. I'm in the mix.

*
National Poetry Month comes to Amman. I'll be visiting three middle school classes this April to talk lines and stanzas. Already brainstorming ways to engage the students. Considering fireworks and magic tricks. Happy gas? How best to make kids proclaim, "Poetry doesn't suck."

*  
Why is it that each day the simple task of writing a sentence feels more and more like wrestling a jellyfish? No. Less a jellyfish (too passive) than a seagull or something prone toward...

Neighbors (West & North)

Airstrikes and rocket fire on the Gaza Strip. Heavy smoke and buildings collapsed in Syrian cities. Another Saturday in the Middle East? Today, half of Amman seemed drawn outdoors -- families picnicking and playing soccer in the national park. Drivers out for leisure along the throughways. Vendors on every street corner selling belts, cauliflower, balloons, Birds of Paradise...

Yesterday, a demonstration in support of the opposition activists in Idlib. From the hilltop citadel, we could hear downtown's crowds a half mile or so below chanting as they marched. Buses of European tourists came and went, carrying with them conversations in German, Italian, French. We posed for family photos. Smiled and laughed. The Dead Sea was next, I overheard a British woman say. She hoped its mud might help reduce a scar "just there" at the base of her elbow. Such marks, I thought, are too easy to conceal.   

Sound & Sense

Since my son's birth in September, I've found it impossible to keep up writing's daily grind. Yet, between feedings and diaper changes there is growth:

doodle-bug's first tooth

There is also anxiety, worry, grief of the when-will-I-find-time-to-draft-another-poem / stanza / sentence? Naps interrupt drafting sessions. Playdates replace study and memorization. There is exhaustion. And sometimes impatience. Self-doubt. There are others' presumptions and attitudes. Here's Joy Katz writing for Best American Poetry:

Shortly after I finished a Stegner Fellowship, some years ago, a former workshop poet and I were trading news about our colleagues. One of them had just had twins. "Well," he said, "that's the end of HER life." A mean-spirited comment for sure, but I forgive him because he had no idea what he was talking about (it's not his fault; maybe no one without a baby could imagine it), and because I've become more philosophical since becoming a parent.

What he was talking about, besides writing, was: applying for grants, taking big literary administrative jobs across the country on short notice, going to residencies and conferences, et cetera. He meant that she was off the landscape, like a cactus at Los Alamos after the Trinity blast.

It's true that people raising young kids don't have a lot of time. But that's not why they don't write. The reason they don't write much, at least at first, is that they are in stupid, staggering, consuming love... 

* 
My (almost) six-month-old son ran me in circles today: play, laugh, costume swap, feeding, feeding, walk, play, read, diaper / diaper / diaper, spit up, repeat. When he finally drifted off to sleep around 6:30, my own day began. Two and a half hours later, I'm ready to call it a night. I didn't draft a poem. I didn't even write a line. I wondered little (or nothing) about image and prosody, about why some phrases swing shut while others open out. Instead, I listened for hours as C. rehearsed the earliest babble we'll soon call language. I heard his invented rhythms, insistent repetitions, monosyllabic rhymes. I recognized the joy in his voice, its frustrations. Somewhere between variation and pitch, I could almost hear what he was trying to say. 
 

A Mind of Winter

Amman's snowstorm has moved on or dissipated or done whatever storms do. Favorite headline this week: "Four-day Depression to End Sunday Afternoon" -- if only moods would announce their demises with such specificity. Come Thursday's sunset, this too shall pass. By three-o-clock Tuesday you'll feel nothing.

Though the snap has gone elsewhere, my mind still rings with the cold. Last night I stayed up late surveying winter poems and stumbled across one by William Carlos Williams I hadn't previously encountered:

WINTER TREES

All the complicated details

of the attiring and

the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon

moves gently among

the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold. 

*

Of course, it's difficult to think about the season without thinking Stevens, "not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind / In the sound of a few leaves..." Not to think of "The Snow Man", that master poem calling to mind "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

Here's a link to a 2005 segment of NPR's "All Things Considered" in which "The Snow Man" is admired and discussed.

And here's Jeff Gordinier for The New York Times retracing the poet's (almost) two and a half mile commute from home to his office in Hartford:

"It would be silly to suggest that a couple of hours of walking around gave me miraculous insight into a poem like “Peter Quince at the Clavier” — yet I did come to understand something simple but crucial about Stevens. What moved me about the walk, in the end, was that he had chosen to walk at all. In a car-mad country that prides itself in being perpetually in motion, the poet made a clear and conscious decision to stop, to slow down, to burrow into his imagination. And walking had opened his eyes and ears to a place that was full of surprises. As Stevens himself put it in a poem:

'It is like a region full of intonings./It is Hartford seen in a purple light.'"

*

Currently reading: A Gate at the Stairs (Lorrie Moore)

A Short History of My Leaps

February 29, 2012: Amman, Jordan (caught with husband & son in snowstorm)

-4: Madison, Wisconsin (running solo, record winter, contact lens flies out of eye and freezes to side of face) 2008

and four before: San Francisco (hardwood floors, apartment in Noe, books and books and poems) 2004

less four more: Washington D.C. (restless nights at The Kirov Academy) 2000

minus two and two: Irvine, CA (Balboa Island, long before the county became known as The OC) 1996

take away one and three: T-Town, CA (my parents' house on Road 132, two dogs, a brother) 1992

subtract several rounds of one and one and one and one = girlhood: i.e., Februaries passed in Catholic schools, mirrored studios, plus a series of cuts and scrapes