VIDA: Her Kind

 Eula Biss, Suzanne Buffam, and Lisa Olstein offer an in-depth look at what it means to be a working writer and mother. Excerpted here is Olstein on the difficulties of reconciling her vocation as a poet with the devotion she has for her child:

...I remember, just before going onstage to read, being asked very earnestly by a friendly woman whether I felt “so guilty” for traveling to the reading and thereby being away from my then two-year-old son for two days. Although taking time apart from him is never simple, my immediate reaction was, “No!” and I bet a father—my partner, for instance, who travels regularly for work—would not be asked the same question. 

The (hopefully) less pedestrian effects of motherhood on my writing dart in and out of my understanding like slippery fish. On the one hand, the things that have changed and the things that have remained the same are so fundamental—cellular, I think you said, Suzanne—that they’re difficult to isolate and impossible to predict. On the other hand, I’ve become aware of having real trepidation about writing from a place of motherhood or “about” having a child, a sense of “beyond this point there be dragons.” I realized this when at a friend’s wedding just over a year after my son was born. A writer I hadn’t seen in a long time asked after my family and my writing, saying “Your poems must be full of babies!” My immediate and truthful answer was, “No, not a one.” And then I thought, uh-oh. Just as I hold tight to the conviction that there’s nothing I have to put in a poem, I also believe there shouldn’t be anything I can’t put in a poem; and here I was, very much not integrating into my work this major shift in reality. So, I began to wonder, what are the dragons, what are the internalized judgments? Fear of sentimentality, marginalization, being too close to see, being autobiographical in a way I wasn’t interested in, or possibly, wasn’t comfortable with...

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Currently reading:

Orphan Hours: Poems (Stanley Plumly)

"Let No Love Poem Ever Come to This..."

Excerpt from Camille Brown's profile of poet Eavan Boland published by the Stanford Report:

The "Status of Woman" clause in the Irish Constitution, which clearly defines a woman's contribution to the state as that of a homemaker, added to the tensions that Boland encountered as a young writer. "The Irish Constitution is one of the very few in Europe that enshrined the woman's place as being in the home," she said. Thus, both state and societal expectations made it difficult for her to realize her dream early on.

However, this difficulty is not contained to specifically Irish women, Boland said. "For a lot of young women in my generation, that [tension] boded more difficulty for them to have this interior sense of permission to become the poet they wanted to." Yet this self-authorization, once confronted, led to a powerful voice. "I learned a lot from thinking that I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote and … from thinking what would happen if you didn't do that? You would end up writing someone else's poem and not honoring the life you lived in terms of creative expression..."

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QUARANTINE
by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
    of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
     He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
    Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
     There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
      Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Narrative (Sigh) Narrative

As someone who struggled to write narrative poems in the beginning, I couldn't agree more with Eduardo C. Corral, who describes his writing process in a recent interview for Ploughshares:

"My early poems told stories. And because I didn’t stray from the truth as I remembered it, the poems were awful. The language was flat, the endings were trite – I was writing tidbits of autobiography instead of poems. It took me years of practice to learn how to listen to language, to follow it not lead it. What do I mean by listening? Most of my poems begin with a morsel of sensory detail. The beer-rich breath of a stranger, a snippet of overheard conversation, the yellow throat of a bird. Even before I jot down the detail on the page, I play with music. I utter again and again the detail. I shuffle words and syllables. I let the sounds ricochet in my head. This process allows me to play with syntax and to corrupt the original bit of language. Then I start drafting, which is always chaotic but pleasurable. I don’t impose a narrative while I draft. I follow the language. A phrase will suggest another phrase, an image will demand more attention, an adjective will call out for more vividness. This generates a lot of raw material. I isolate the lines/images/phrases that speak to each other, that form a kind of narrative. Then I start drafting again. Story is a byproduct of my process. I discover it as I draft...." 

Happy Mother's Day!

homage to my hips
by Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips

they need space to

move around in.

they don't fit into little

petty places. these hips

are free hips.

they don't like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,   

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them

to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top!

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("homage to my hips" from Good Woman. Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton.)

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In 2002, I studied briefly with Lucille Clifton at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers summer program. During her workshop, a man completely broke down while reading his poem. He simply couldn't continue. The room fell silent. Who knew what to say or do? After all, we were strangers...

Some time passed. The man continued to sob.

Very calmly Lucille said: "If someone is crying and you don't reach out to touch him, you have failed."

I'll never forget it. 

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For an absolutely charming video of Clifton reading "homage to my hips," click here.

AGON

In 2006, Allison Quam, currently an academic librarian at Winona State University, approached me about the possibility putting together a chapbook-length collection for Zumbro River Press, a literary fine press that publishes limited letterpress editions of contemporary poetry. Our collaboration resulted in Agon, which Allison printed from hand-set Perpetua types on dampened Cartiera Magnani Velata mould-made paper. Allison also commissioned original original art to accompany the text. This week a box arrived in the mail with fourteen copies of the project. I couldn't be more grateful to have my poems cared for in such a thoughtful way. Thank you for this gift!

Writers Recommend

Collection: Fuse

Author: Marc McKee

Excerpts:

From “The Value of Information Calculator”

Soon I will cloudburst, soon hailstone tell you,

about the girl on the bus who keeps singing

a cloying chorus from Wheeling, West Virginia

to Springfield, Ohio because she can’t remember

any other words. Backyards in Ohio.

Often sad. About the 75% to scale Johnny Cash

with coke bottle glasses who hitches from Ontario

to Louisville to be rejected when he meets

his love face to face. Daily we are rifled,

even our history of ideas can’t cope...

and

From “How to Stitch Flame”

Hold an unlit match near a lit match.

The Hagakure says It is bad when one thing

becomes two but this isn’t what’s happening.

What’s happening is even at midnight

it’s like soup outside when soup is left

too long on a burner, and the gauzy billows

whip briefly over the skin of the moon.

Hold the jaw of a lion near the neck

of a gazelle, a piece of string near

an oscillating fan, a phone next to an ear

that will hate the news. Now you are

holding one match near another...

Recommended by:
Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties &Brown Liquor (UGA Press) and Dangerous Goods, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.

Stated Simply:

With exhilarating twists and edifying turns, these poems are the best thrill rides I found in 2011! In these expansive poems McKee turns his eye out to the world and gathers it all in. I love the way he accumulates so much energy in his embrace.

Jordanian Girl Forced to Marry Rapist

In the May / June issue of Foreign Policy, Mona Eltahawy writes about the experiences of women across the Middle East. It isn't pretty:

...Let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme.When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests"merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is "not severe"or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing -- or divorce either...

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Although Eltahawy's article (one I urge you to read in its entirety) doesn't mention Jordan, there's plenty of work to do in this country. One of the more disturbing trends as of late is the rising number of sexual assaults reported both in Amman and throughout the Kingdom. A Jordanian friend who has two school-age daughters believes that such violations are, at least in part, the result of increasing economic hardship and social frustration. As she sees it, young men unable to produce marriage dowries are expressing their hostility by attacking women and girls. 

In Jordan, rape is an offense punishable by death. However, the Kingdom's legal loophole enabling perpetrators to escape punishment is equally criminal. Since last week, a petition has been circulating among citizens who are outraged that a fourteen-year-old girl is being forced by her parents to marry her rapist in order to save her "honor," as well as her family's. Naseem Tarawnah summarizes the facts of the case at The Black Iris, (an Amman-based blog at which King Abdullah II himself has commented):

A 19-year-old Jordanian kidnaps a 14-year-old girl (with the assistance of his family) – takes her to a location where a tent was set up for him to rape her repeatedly for three straight days before the police roll in. The court sentences him to death by hanging but he manages to produce a very recent marriage certificate signed by a judge. The court then stays the execution but claims that it will be reinstated should the boy divorce her without a “justifiable cause”. A professor of sociology from the University of Jordan was widely quoted by the original article produced by Arab Al Yawm – that “women are different in nature from men” and that the girl should now make her best of the situation and play the role of a good wife, mostly by putting this whole silly rape thing behind her...

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From what I understand, the 14-year-old described above was kidnapped after school while walking to a convenience store. I've been told she's in a holding facility until her 15th birthday, the age at which she'll be returned to her "husband" / rapist. As a minor, she doesn't have the right to divorce. After all, her parents "consented" -- i.e. forced -- her into the union. The assumption, unfortunately, is that without her virginity no other opportunities for marriage will materialize. What's more, separation from her husband would constitute an additional act of "shame," one that would no doubt put the girl's life at risk.

Similar cases have turned up in Morocco and other Middle Eastern countries where young women and girls often choose suicide -- consuming rat poison, jumping from buildings, dousing themselves in gasoline -- rather than accept their perpetrators as husbands.

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In my view, Jordanian law still decrees its original verdict: instead of sentencing the rapist, its system imposes the death penalty upon his victim.

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As a guest of this country, a country I've come to love, I remain at a loss. What can I as an American offer this girl -- or any woman who falls victim to such policies? As Western citizen, my signature on the petition is invalid.

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When I found out we were moving to Amman, my greatest concerns were gender-related. As a woman, would I face hostility, misogyny, discrimination? In almost two years, I've experienced nothing of the sort and have been treated with the utmost respect. Granted, people on the street look at me. Some stare. I have blonde hair. I don't wear a hijab. In fairness, people also stare at my husband and son. They sometimes ask to pose with us for photos. It's obvious we aren't Arabs. In other words, any extra attention I've received isn't necessarily because I'm a woman, but a Western woman. In light of recent news, I know I'm treated better because of this fact.

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I don't mean to suggest in any way that the rape-related law reflects the general attitude of Jordanians. On the contrary, all of the locals with whom I've spoken are offended by the case and express disgust for both the girl's parents and the court. And yet, Jordan's international reputation is one of moderate sensibility; King Abdullah II, a leader whose life's focus has been promoting regional peace and the betterment of his people.

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When I first heard about this story, I knew immediately that it wouldn't turn up in The Jordan Times, an English daily that happens to be government-owned. Stated simply, it's precisely the kind of story that reinforces the worst stereotypes about Middle Eastern people and politics.

A Jordanian friend argued otherwise. Of course it will be reported in the newspaper, she insisted. Just wait.

I waited.

And waited.

As of this posting, I've found case-related snippets on Facebook and at local blogs. I've seen links to the petition circulated via Twitter. To my knowledge, not one word about the girl and her offender has appeared in The Jordan Times.

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King Abdullah and Queen Rania are parents to four children. Their daughters, the Princesses Iman and Salma, are 16 and 12. 

"My Own Brand of Nonconformity..."

view from the room
where Clampitt died

The most recent issue of West Branch features my essay, "Dear Amy," which also appears online. What follows is the essay's opening section, along with a few photos taken during my visit to Amy Clampitt's Massachusetts cottage:

I've traded Middle Eastern sands for snow: a half acre or so of it, freshly fallen and packed across the fenced-in lot just a short uphill walk from the village center of Lenox, Massachusetts. After travelling almost twenty-four hours by plane and shuttle tram, by taxi, train and car, I've arrived from my home in Jordan's desert capital of Amman to the slate-grey Cape-style cottage on Neilsen Lane where Amy Clampitt and her life partner, Harold "Hal" Korn, spent a good deal of their final two years together before her death in 1994. I've come, in part, to visit a friend—a writer-in-residence picked to live and work among Clampitt's bookcases, antiques, and china—but I've also come in pursuit of what the poet herself identified in the seminal essay "Predecessors, Et Cetera" as "the livingness of the past."

By the time Clampitt and Korn bought the little house on Neilsen Lane—"We have no plans to move out of New York completely," she assured her family via letter in 1992, but want "a place to go to on weekends and in the summer, and eventually retire into"—Amy was already one of the most highly esteemed poets in America. (A fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation helped finance the couple's real estate purchase in Lenox.) The rise of Clampitt's literary celebrity, however, was as unconventional as the woman who lived in relative obscurity for sixty-three years before publishing her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher, in 1983 to widespread critical acclaim. Born into a Midwestern Quaker family, Clampitt graduated from Grinnell College and later abandoned graduate study at Columbia. She once worked as a reference librarian for the National Audubon Society, travelled abroad, briefly sublet her apartment in New York's Greenwich Village in order to help care for her schizophrenic sister in Iowa, took up the arts of jogging and ballet, refigured herself as a political activist, expressed in writing her conflicted feelings about psychoanalysis and the power plays accompanying serious love affairs, and even toyed with becoming an Episcopal nun. Throughout her six-odd decades of anonymity, Clampitt also drafted a series of failed novels and devoted much of her free time to self-education.

clampitt's beach glass

Although it would be years before she would move from the margins and into mainstream literary circles, thanks in part to championing in the late nineteen-seventies and eighties by The New Yorker's Howard Moss and critics like Helen Vendler, the poet's correspondence reveals a long and steadfast belief in her rightful place among the artistic elite. "I feel as if I could write a whole history of English literature," Clampitt avowed to her brother Philip as early as 1956, "and know just where to place everybody in it, with hardly any trouble at all. The reason being, apparently, that I feel I am in it." Thus, without any publication history, nor professional affirmation of her talents, the then thirty-six-year-old somehow intuited her work would one day find its readership. In the meantime, Clampitt bided her time, absorbing texts by the likes of William Wordsworth and Marianne Moore, Henry James and Charles Darwin, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Virginia Woolf. She devoured Greek classics, the letters of Keats and, at one point, considered Dante her master. "Vocation is a curious thing," she later admitted in print. "I made a real try at not wanting to be a writer..."

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For more on Clampitt's house, selected letters, and poems, click over to West Branch to access "Dear Amy" in its entirety.

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Currently reading:

The Children (Paula Bohince)
Mule (Shane McCrae)

 

Writers Recommend

 Collection: The Irrationalist

Author: Suzanne Buffam

Excerpt:

TO LIVE HERE

            Paul Éluard

I built a fire, the blue sky having abandoned me.

A fire to befriend.

A fire to introduce me to the winter night.

A fire to live better.

I fed it what the day had fed to me.

Forests, foliage, wheat fields, vines.

Nests and their birds, houses and their keys.

Insects, flowers, furs, festivals.

I lived with the solitary sound of crackling flames.

With the solitary perfume of their heat.

I was like a boat coursing in closed water.

Like the dead I had but one element.

Stated Simply:

Although published by Canarium Books in 2010, the lyric and philosophical lucidity of Suzanne Buffam’s The Irrationalist makes it seem just-written. The book is concerned with process—the writing process, the processes of thinking and being—and, consequently, Buffam’s poems practice a patience that’s both rare and brave. “Trying,” for example, begins as a meditation on trying to have a child and then evolves into a meditation on faith and science, and this evolution, which accumulates through fragments of thought and space, reminds us how poems measure and endure time, occupying their own life spans. The book’s centerpiece, “Little Commentaries,” does similar work, collecting exquisitely irreverent observations on, among other topics, Antigone, ghosts vs. zombies, winter, Romanticism, paradise, Nova Scotia, exile, parakeets, and Borges. These tiny lyric sparks are diamond-sharp and make for an addictive read, one I keep returning to, gratefully, in moments of disarray: it’s as if Buffam were marrying Anne Carson to Benjamin Franklin, or Bartlett’s Quotations to Marcus Aurelius. She’s also quite wonderful in the shorter poems surrounding “Little Commentaries,” and “To Live Here” [see above] is one that flaunts her stunning fusion of wit and quiet revelation.

Recommended by:

Jennifer Chang, author of The History of Anonymity and teacher of creative writing and literature at Bowling Green State University.

Drum Roll Please...

...and the winners of the Great Poetry Giveaway 2012 are:

1. Paradise, Indiana by Bruce Snider (Karen Weyant)

2. Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (Molly Sutton Kiefer)

3. Two-Headed Nightingale by Shara Lessley (Katrina Roberts)

Many thanks to those who entered. It was lovely to hear from good folks with great affection for poetry!

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In other news, I'm happy to announce that my web site is now live. Please visit me at www.sharalessley.com, where you'll find information about my poems, projects, and editorial and mentoring services. Please note that I'll be teaching online this fall for The Writer's Studio at Stanford University and will post additional details about the course as they become available.