Author: Dana Henry Martin

Five Things That Have Happened to Me as a Female-Bodied Poet

  1. 2009. A prominent poet in Seattle agreed to work with me on my poetry. Before the appointment, he googled (from his IP address) the words “married” and “naked” in combination with my name. He then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. But he didn’t stop there. He created a fake blog username and trolled me on my site (again, from his IP address) for months, trashing everything I wrote, including my poems. He later told folks associated with a book publisher in the area to ignore and disregard me.

  2. 2015. In front of a large group of poets, a prominent Kansas City poet screamed that I wanted to take him behind a dumpster and fuck him. This occurred after months of what I thought was meaningful friendship and seemed to be spurred, at least in part, by the fact that I was close friends with a more prominent Kansas City poet. The outburst occurred in front of that poet. Eight years later, he would tell me that I’m the one who harmed him because I’m a reminder of who he was at that time, and he doesn’t want to think about being that person.

  3. 2023. A talented poet who’s part of a tight network of poets outside Kansas City interacted with me for months as he was healing from a serious health issue. I was going to be in the area, and he asked if we could meet. I planned to give him the rare Japanese printing press I’d recently purchased so he and his friends could use it to make chapbooks. Before I left for the trip, he sent me a postcard with a poem of his on the back about how he never gets the girl, then he blocked me on Facebook. I still don’t understand what the hell happened there, but I know it’s bullshit.

  4. 2024. A Seattle poet I’ve known since 2009 decided to attack and threaten me yesterday after fifteen years of friendship and poetry camaraderie. We both lived in Seattle for years and spent time together in person on numerous occasions. Yesterday, he told me (and many others) that I’m cheating on my husband with him. That is not the case. I’ve posted screenshots of his accusations and the conversation he’s referring to because he threatened to out me publicly. For what, praytell? There’s nothing to out other than his unacceptable behavior.

  5. 2009. A poet who was my mentor sexually assaulted me en route to my MFA program in 2009. I’ve discussed that situation at length, including in a fifty-thousand-word essay on my website that was published for more than five years. I managed to stay in poetry until 2015—through my fear and my shame and my lost faith in poets and poetry—then I left for seven years.

I returned to poetry in 2022 with one vow: to never let anyone silence me again, threaten me again, terrify me again, or defame me again. This is a hard commitment to make, but I’m doing it. My responses will be swift when abuses occur, like the one that happened yesterday.

May nothing like any of the above happen again. May poets live up to what they are attempting to do in and through poetry. May poets who are women, female-bodied, queer, and otherwise marginalized find safety in poetry and among poets. May poets stand up for each other when it matters rather than adding ha-ha emoticons to posts in which poets are harassing and threatening other poets. May we find ourselves. May all these things come to pass.

How to Survive in My Father’s World

  1. Write poems.

  2. Hydrate. Eat. Sleep. Exercise. Meditate.

  3. Love yourself. Love your body. Trust yourself. Trust your body.

  4. Put yourself in the world and know that you belong there. The world is bigger than people with power.

  5. Find the exits. Know the exit routes. Plan your exit. Then enter.

  6. See clearly, even what you don’t want to see. Bear witness. Take notes. Synthesize. Learn. Speak. Sing. Recite. Remember.

  7. Write more poems. Stronger this time, more sure-handed, until metal strikes against metal.

  8. Pay attention but do not seek attention. Turn your attention into a Mobuis strip that moves inward, then outward, then inward again with no beginning and no end.

  9. Read people’s bodies more than their words, unless they’re poets, then read their bodies and words together.

  10. Call bullshit bullshit unless it’s meant to be bullshit, then let it be what it is without calling it out. We need a little bullshit, now more than ever.

  11. Read poems. Learn to move in and out of their white space. Listen and respond, listen and respond. Breathe through the lines. Inhale poems, exhale poems.

  12. Believe in poems and their power. Don’t give up on poems.

  13. Write more poems. Softer this time. Less heavy-handed, until the weft of each poem is as strong as churro wool.

  14. Fawn if needed for survival but only for survival. Try not to freeze or flee. Remove the “r” from fright and fight if that’s the only available option.

  15. Be ready to run. If needed, run. But circle back. Never leave. Draw an arc around the threat from a safe distance. Make that arc smaller every day. Remember: You belong.

  16. Know when you’re with someone who’s hostile. Know that anyone can be hostile.

  17. Be hostile if needed. Be loving as much as possible.

  18. If you don’t write poems, instead do whatever you love, whatever keeps you alive.

  19. Write poems.

The Triad of Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate

My mother and I closely fit the archetypes of Demeter and Persephone, which is why I write about both in my poetry. I’m more like Hecate now that I’m older, or at least I’m getting there. My mother began the process of becoming Hecate as well. But first, she had to protect me the way Demeter eventually did by saving me from what she was partially responsible for.

That happened in 1985 when she risked everything to keep one of my father’s friends away from me. I remember that day. She saw his golden-bronze El Camero pull into the drive and told me to run and hide in my bedroom closet, quick. So drunk she could barely stand, she screamed at him to leave, every word she uttered a plosive, a bomb in his face. “SHE’S. NOT. HERE. R—.”

Anything could have happened. He was larger than her, stronger than her, and hellbent on getting access to me. She had no help from anyone in the family or the community. It came down to the two of them. She blocked his path to me by standing between the kitchen peninsula and the dining room table, interposing herself bodily, or at least that’s how I imagined it. I could only hear them from where I was hiding.

Her ferocity was derived from her own trauma, which prepared her for this moment. Trauma is often generational and repeating. It may not be optimal to live with trauma on a daily basis, but when you’re mother sees a moment for what it is and responds accordingly, her embodied trauma can provide the means for freeing you and your body from further trauma.

After that day, the path was cleared for my mother to become Hecate. She didn’t quite get there for complicated reasons, but I saw enough of Hecate in her to know the route. She stacked the cairns for me. Now, the journey is mine to make.

My mother and I are the original triple goddess, as are many traumatized women in traumatized families and traumatized communities in this traumatized world.

Poems as Places

During the Southern Utah Book Festival, poets Paisley Rekdal, Danielle Dubrasky, and Simmons Buntin led the workshop “Real Locations, Imagined Selves,” whose focus was on defining a sense of place through words and documenting a place through poetry.

The conversation was much more far-reaching than expected. Poetry of place tends to focus on physical places, as in Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town or Wendell Berry’s poetry, which is closely tied to the specific farms he’s played in and worked on over the course of his life. Both Hugo and Berry’s approaches to place seem to be consistent with James Galvin’s notion of what a poet of place is, which is someone who situates himself in place in order to lose himself in it.

Rekdal discussed something similar to Galvin’s concept in the workshop, but she also talked about many other layers of writing about place—ones that augment and challenge the notion of place itself. She used the term palimpsest to describe places and our experiences of them, noting that places are layered in terms of their geographies, histories, uses, cultures, and more. Other layers include the ways in which places inform us psychologically, mentally, and politically.

The question implicit in this discussion is this: How can we begin to examine the layers of a place in order to more deeply know it, each other, and ourselves?

Partway through the workshop, an attendee said his body feels like a place, one that’s being politicized and treated like a territory. This was a powerful moment. The idea of the body as a place, one that can not only be inhabited by the self but also invaded, in a sense, by others, is disconcerting. When that type of invasion occurs in a physical space (someone’s community, their school, their place of worship, and so forth), body and space intersect, making both feel less safe. Here, we see layers of place building up and around the human body within the social, political, and physical elements of a place.

Rekdal says much of how place is defined is through bodies, and much of how bodies are being called into or excluded from a place is racial. She then discussed how the Chinese in the West could become white or reject becoming white depending on whether they wanted to be part of the United States. The idea she touched on is that, like places, race isn’t static. Bodies aren’t static. They’re all processes that are in flux and that meld into or layer over one another—and that sometimes collide with each other.

(I want to add that bodies are also excluded from places because of discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, age, national origin, and sex.)

Place is not just where you inhabit. It inhabits you, too, Rekdal said as the conversation began reaching toward the ineffable. I sometimes think about places as hauntings, she added.

She notes that we can be drawn to places we’ve never been before, perhaps because something inside us may be encoded to seek out a place and call it home. Or perhaps we seek out a place and immediately feel the atrocities and suffering that occurred there, such as at the Topaz Internment Camp Museum in Delta, Utah, where Rekdal gives tours as the director of the American West Center.

Whatever the reason, humans seem to have the capacity to carry a sense of place within us that’s larger than life and longer than the human lifecycle.

             Nothing natural but made
             in the beauty of this place. To create a home,
             we imported trees and water, we slashed
             and burned to excavate a state where nothing
             lived, nothing ruled us, and yet in all this nothing
             we were subject to the rules nothingness demande

Those lines are from Rekdal’s poem “Soil,” which appears in West: A Translation. She says places create relationships and help us develop empathy for each other. The forging of community from hardship is evident in the lines above and is part of the universal human experience.

The takeaway is that places can’t be places in any human way of understanding and experiencing them without our presence in them: the communities we build, the bonds we create within and because of place, and the ways in which we come to know place.

Wendell Berry says we’re losing our connection with place because our use of our places is greatly reduced from what it was in the past. Of course, he means literal places and a very specific type of past use of those places.

Perhaps Berry’s not imagining place as broadly as possible. As Buntin pointed out at the end of the workshop, imagination itself is a place. Imagine that. If what we imagine is a place, then the products of those imaginings, such as poems, are places. We really can create worlds out of words.

I wonder what you all think about where we are with regard to our relationships with places in any or all senses of the term? Is our understanding of places—like places themselves—a multidimensional process rather than a half-static relationship in which only human understanding changes, not the very idea of what constitutes a place?

Asked another way, are we as deeply connected with place as ever, even if we haven’t quite identified all our places as places: interior, exterior, past, present, analog, digital, elemental, philosophical, built, imagined, and so forth?

The Skeleton

Two days ago, I saw what was left of an animal’s body on the side of highway 17. It was stripped all the way down to its skeleton, its bones as clean as a museum display. The curved spine is what caught my attention. This was over by the construction for the bypass road on the same shoulder where we moved the porcupine after she died.

Obviously what I’m getting at is I think it might be the skeleton of that same porcupine. I want to get a better look at it on foot before someone makes off with it. But what would I do with the skeleton? I don’t know. Move it to a better spot, I guess, someplace she can literally rest her weary bones.

I have to stop thinking about this porcupine. Someday, I will.

It was not the porcupine’s skeleton. The ribs were much too large, and from one angle, I was able to see that it was a deer who was almost entirely stripped clean save for the head.

I ended up turning around in the cemetery, where I met three cows: Curly, Friday, and Jet. I stopped to say hi. They all came over to say hi back. Jet is the only one who urinated while walking toward me. It was surprising how much Jet could urinate. Jet and Friday appear to be very close. They nuzzle their heads and lie side by side in their grassy pasture. They live with a chicken. The chicken wasn’t interested in interacting with me. I don’t even know their name.

I don’t think this is the real cemetery for Toquerville. There must be another one for the pioneers, like the one over in Silver Reef. This is a more modern cemetery. The dead in it are barely dead.

Last year, a neighbor was upset that land near the cemetery is being developed. I don’t want people in their houses looking at me when I’m dead, she said. She went door to door asking folks to sign a petition to stop the development. Now, the bypass road will be back that way, too, not just houses. Things like that are going to happen, either now or after we’re dead.

If I planned on being buried, I wouldn’t really care who was looking at me from their homes or cars. I suspect something else was going on for that neighbor: something about safety, the fear of being watched without consent, something about trauma.

My husband was great this morning when I told him I needed to drive over and see if the skeleton belonged to the porcupine. He told me to watch for cars and be safe. If it’s the porcupine’s, we’ll have to go back and retrieve it after you get off work so we can relocate it, I said. I know, he said. I’ll clean out the car.

I’m glad he understands me and will

ife and the dead and bones and burials and honor and how it all somehow relates to healing.

A Poem

A poem you sit on. A poem you lie down in and call home. A poem that has pockets. A poem that’s toasty on a cool night.

A poem that’s a place that’s a poem about a place.

A poem with protests and threats and gun shows and flags. No, not that poem. This one: a poem with barometric pressure and wind in the scrub and common ravens cawing in the air, talons curled beneath their abdomens.

A poem that’s a pencil sharpener because things can be both things and places. I heard that yesterday and I believe it. Poems believe it, too.

A poem you show to all your other poems. A poem you dress up and take to a parade. A poem with a tiara.

A poem with a behavioral problem. A poem with a hypertrophic scar. A poem with a past.

A poem that launders money through your account. A poem that has a second home it somehow paid for in cash. A poem with a boat at the marina and a state record for largest fish caught in a manmade lake. A poem that’s the grand master of its masonic lodge.

A poem that makes you feel what it wants you to feel. A poem that holds you. A poem that negs, that tucks you in at night, that says I’m sorry, that makes sure your feet are covered the way you like before it rocks you to sleep but always against its stomach, always a little too tight, and it’s rocking, too, against you, and another poem is yelling stop at the first poem but the second poem’s been drinking and the first one says don’t listen to that poem so you sleep in the first poem’s arms the way it wants you to, whatever sleep is, whatever that feels like, floating maybe. Maybe floating. Maybe darkness. You can’t ask the poem, not that poem. So you make another poem you can talk to. And another.

Like a poem you can stand on. Like a poem you can kick. Like a poem you kneel to. Like a poem you run from.

Like a poem for the dead. Like a poem for you when you’re dead. Because you’re already dead even though you’re living. You’re deadly alive. We all are. The poems say so. Because a poem is a body and also a place because poems can be both bodies and places. Because this means the poem is already dead, as dead as a body, as dead as this place will be someday long after poems are gone and the last raven has flown over what would have been our heads if we were still here.

—

The idea that a pencil sharpener is a place is something someone said in the poetry workshop last night, along with the observation that things can be both things and places, not just one or the other.

Neighborly

Morning Prayer October 16, 2024

I’m listening to the chickens on the other side of La Verkin Creek over in the Cholla neighborhood where people have lawns and shade trees and gardens and orchards and side-by-sides and motorcycles and religion-themed Little Free Libraries and trampolines and waterfall-edge pools and corrupt former city council members and huge parties with DJs where all the dirty words in songs are replaced with nice words and big flags and banks of photovoltaic panels and gazebos and bermed landscapes and guns that they wear all the time and men who come out of their homes and surround you and ask what are you doin’ and accuse you of looking in their windows when you’re just out birding and saying you better not be a liberal and asking you what state you’re from ’cause if it’s California, you got no place here and telling you that you can’t be on city property and pointing to the No Trespassing sign they’ve posted on the city-owned bridge that connects your neighborhood to theirs and they pretty much do whatever else they darn well please, like having chickens.

I’m clearly not a fan of Cholla, but I do love those chickens. Listen to the way they greet the day. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. They don’t care about Cholla. Bu-CAW. They just want to chicken. Bu-CAW. So they chicken. They chicken hard, and I get to listen to it from the relative safety of my home because their vocalizations don’t stay in Cholla. They go where they want and are received by those who need to be reminded how to live above repression, above cultural toxicity, and on their own terms.

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW.

Anyhoo. For the record, I’m not from California. I’m from Oklahoma. And I’m not a liberal. I’m an outsider American Leftist who’s not a tankie. And I really was surrounded by three of Cholla’s HOA members a week after we moved here when I decided to go out birding. The city almost took the bridge away when it found out what the Cholla folks were doing to intimidate folks in our neighborhood. I wrote a letter to the city saying it was all good. I made those men chocolate-chip cookies, and they brought me a passel of pomegranates, and we smoothed everything out on our own. So the bridge remains. You’re welcome, Cholla. (You can look all this up in the Toquerville City Council Meeting Minutes from 2020, which are online. I am not even exaggerating about the city threatening to take away the bridge if residents couldn’t play nice. The whole thing was ridiculous but not inconsistent with the rest of my experience in Southern Utah.)

I got distracted. Here’s the prayer part: May we all Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW today. Let’s chicken. Chicken like there’s no tomorrow. Chicken for those who need to hear you chicken—maybe across a creek, maybe on the other side of the world. Chicken because chickens rock and you rock, so you really should chicken.

The Brain

When I was a senior in high school in Oklahoma, a local bank sent toys out to folks in the community as a promotion. The toys didn’t come with instructions. To get them, you had to visit the bank, where they would try to get your business.

The toy was called The Brain. It was a gorgeous thing with a black base, moveable black wedges attached to black pins and transparent layers of clear plastic stacked on top of each other. Each layer had different shapes cut into it. Together, they could either lock or unlock each pin. The goal was to figure out how to move all the pins out and then back in.

It wasn’t easy, but I cracked the code. That’s not what’s important, though. What matters about this toy is that it was the first time I was able to wire up my brain and my muscles and my whole being. I not only cracked the code, I learned how to solve the puzzle in record time. My fingers moved without conscious thought or, rather, so fast my thinking couldn’t get in the way of the movement.

There was a tactile component to the game that was central to the experience. The moving pins clanked like a computer keyboard. To this day, I still look for keyboards that sound like The Brain. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. It wasn’t just one sound, either. The components in each layer of the toy rattled slightly alongside the ticking of the main pins. In the right hands, that toy was a tiny, quivering percussion instrument that sounded like ice cubes rattling in a glass. Its real calling wasn’t being a toy sent out to promote banks. It was being an instrument in an avant orchestra that only performs graphic scores.

The Brain made such an impression on me that, the other day, I noticed I was re-creating its rhythm and sound while taking my vitamins. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. I have a complicated system for retrieving a vitamin bottle, tick, taking a vitamin while retrieving the next bottle, tick-tick, and so forth while also arranging the bottles, tick-tick-tick, in a particular way on the counter and then placing them back on the shelves, tick-tick, following another pattern once I’ve taken them all.

The Brain taught me how to be a better flutist, how to be a writer—how to live in language at all for that matter—and how to process and store information with exceptional efficiency. Runs of notes became compact units that could be compressed in my memory and expanded when I needed to retrieve them. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Language became something I could enter into because I could type at least as fast as my thoughts. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Memory in general became something I could store in chunks without taking the time to think the words I was thinking. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Notice there are eight ticks, one for every pin. The Brain taught me to compress language, music, and thought in packets based in octals, like a computer. The Brain is actually billed as a computer. The side of the box reads, “Can you out-think the computer?” But that’s not what it was about for me. It was about streamlining my thoughts, perfecting my movements, bringing my whole self into unity, into the present, into being-ness, and not having to slow down or get mired in the difficulty of whatever I was performing or creating.

This was profound, and it was my way of making my dyslexia work for me rather than against me. It was an assistive technology that unlocked me as a person. It was an extension of me that led me back into me in ways that had been inaccessible before The Brain. It was a teacher. It was a sage. I will forever be grateful to the bank marketing team who mailed The Brain to my home and to the company that created and sold it.

Someone stole The Brain from me in college. I think it was my friend Terry Holsti. He played the trumpet and had a bag full of teeth and hair and giggled all the time and had a different moral compass from most people. He was fascinated by The Brain. He always asked me to give it to him. I hope it’s making him as happy as it made me. I really do.

O The Brain! It’s smart. It’s beautiful. It’s mysterious. It’s a see-hear-touch explosion waiting to happen with the patience of a lama. And it’s marked sold because it’s on the way to my house in Utah. I shall not navigate this place alone. I shall have The Brain by my side. Together, we will gleefully tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick who live in this area instead of allowing them to tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick run us out of here.

Toquerville Bypass Road

You know that bypass road in Toquerville that I wrote the sad porcupine poem about? Well, while we were away, a boulder the size of a truck unexpectedly dislodged from the lava outcropping they’re slicing through to accommodate the road. The boulder fell straight down into the newly paved roadway while construction workers looked on, then it sat there for weeks because nobody could figure out how to move it.

Apparently, the boulder was eventually blasted to pieces using dynamite. The neighbors told us all about it when we got back. It was the talk of the town and even made it into the local paper. (Tom Bennett from neighboring La Verkin managed to catch the boulder falling on video, which made for a good online news story.)

The company building the road won’t comment on what happened or why they failed to anticipate it. There are many more boulders where that one came from. The outcropping that’s being opened up is heavy, dense basalt on top, but below it’s a combination of veins of hard and soft sandstone deposited over time that have been completely upended by geological forces so they may run almost perpendicular to the ground like the ones behind our home do. That’s important because it means water can erode the now vertical or nearly vertical veins more readily than if they were sandwiched horizontally between harder layers. Within all that sandstone are boulders of varying sizes, apparently including those the size of a truck.

There are houses up on that outcropping, too, which makes no sense. A little ways over by the Virgin River, a house slid into the gorge a couple of years ago. Other homes have been abandoned or are at risk. We saw someone trying to shore their property up with a massive retaining wall that eventually slid into the gorge along with their hummingbird feeder. Those people are gone now. They left their Joshua tree behind.

We’re in an erosion zone here as well, so everything is always cracking and crumbling and siding down to the lowest point it can find. This land’s essence is change. It doesn’t care one iota about smooshing people, houses, and roads as it continually changes.

But we care. So we talk about the big boulder and incorporate it into local lore and Henny Penny about it for weeks on end—and when the bypass road finally opens, sure we’ll drive on it, but probably not without looking up and saying a little prayer. We’ll be looking for boulders, to be clear, not toward the heavens.

I’m not sure how this bypass road conforms with Chapter 16 of Toquerville’s City Code, which requires the preservation and treatment of sensitive lands, including ensuring no hazards are created, such as rockfalls, and protecting and preserving significant natural and visual resources, such as lava outcroppings. But what do I know? Maybe I’m still just upset about the porcupine. (I’m definitely still upset about the porcupine.)

Wet Hair

Good morning. What are you all doing today that’s poetry-related or not at all poetry-related? I have some big poetry plans but first I need to work up the will to wash my hair.

Here’s the impediment: I have a strong aversion to wet hair, including loose strands of wet hair that cling to my hands and arms and legs, wet hair matting drains, the feeling of wet hair as it’s being styled, wet hair stuck in brushes, wet hair on the floor, and so forth.

I just got chills, the bad kind, as I wrote about wet hair. I hate the way it looks. I hate the way it’s so soppy and formless. I hate the way it tangles. I hate the way it drips. I hate parting it. I hate smearing hair products around on it. I hate scrunching it. I hate having to coddle it by wrapping it in a towel until it’s dry enough to allow me to dry it.

I hate the towel. I hate the way the towel throws me off balance like Lucy in that one episode where she has that giant headdress on and can’t get down the stairs and everyone is laughing but she’s mortified because all she wants is to get down those stairs gracefully. I mean, it really is a funny scene. I’m watching it now.

My life with my wet hair is never funny. If I could inject humor into it, things might be different. Maybe if I had some Vitameatavegimen I’d be able to deal with my wet hair or I would stop washing my hair altogether and just lie around writing trippy poetry while my hair grows greasier and greasier, which is also a state I don’t like in hair, but more Vitameatavegimen would probably cure me of that aversion, too.

This is part of my sensory processing differences, which make me love the majority of sensory experiences but detest a few specific experiences, like looking at, touching, cleaning up, and thinking about wet hair. Or greasy air. I like clean, dry hair. I love to touch it. I love the way the strands lie together smooth as bristles in a Purdy paint brush. I love the clean lines, the tapered ends, the glimmering color in each strand, the way it feels against my face. I love the expressiveness of dry hair. I love looking at photos of dry hair. I also love beard hair and have an entire Pinterest board devoted to beards, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

I just need to wash my hair, then I can focus on poetry.

And no. I’m not going to shave my head to address the issue. (I have both the wrong face and the wrong head for that.) I won’t wear a wig, either. (They’re too hot, and I don’t like the way wig hair feels, even if it’s human hair. I hate how heavy they are and how they feel against the scalp and how the lace has to be trimmed, and the glue that has to be used, and the powder that has to be applied to the part, and the very real possibility that one would become dislodged in the wind. I live in extremely windy areas. Wigs are a no-go.)

So, yeah. What are y’all up to today?