Poetry

The House

The house has been doused with gasoline. (You’re welcome in it.) The floor of the house is littered with matches. (Take your shoes off.) The house has no fire alarms. (Have a seat.) The cops don’t respond to house fires in these parts. (Kick your feet up.) The house is on fire now. (Be a love and close the door to save the rest of us.) The house burned down. (We wrote you a loving obituary.)

The loving obituary: We adored them. For some reason, they always looked uncomfortable around us. We did everything we could to make them feel right at home. They died before their time. Sometimes, [insert adjective here] people aren’t meant for this world. We will always remember them fondly.

—

I wrote this July 12, 2023. It’s about how we treat people we want to exclude while they’re alive versus how we talk about them once they’ve died. I was thinking specifically about how queer folks and those living with trauma and/or mental health issues are treated—and the ways in which the very people who exclude those folks from their homes, lives, families, schools, workplaces, places of worship, communities, and societies take no responsibility for their eventual, often untimely, deaths. There wasn’t anything we could have done is a common refrain. Really? Nothing. Not one thing?

I was also thinking about how it felt for me to live as a queer non-Mormon person with trauma and mental health issues here in Southern Utah, where I was routinely excluded and reviled even in literary communities. The poets who run two separate chapters of the Utah State Poetry Society told me they’d close their chapters down if I ever attended them because my work was inappropriate. I was a member of the USPS at the time and had every right to attend any chapter meeting in the state. Their issue was with my gender and sexuality, not my writing, which they hadn’t read.

I’ve thought about this post a few times since the election, so I decided to share it again. We need to bring the way we talk about the dead and the way we treat the living into alignment.

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.

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?

Ab-Normalizing

For the past few days, I’ve written things down about my brother-in-law and my husband’s family. Writing is how I experience the moment, how I express what I need to express, and how I heal. I removed that series of posts after a commenter and fellow poet implored me to see a therapist. That’s not the response I’m looking for when I share my creative work.

Given the fact that thirty percent of folks have negative experiences with therapy and most therapists operate within oppressive frameworks, it’s not a modality that should be blanketly recommended to everyone who’s dealing with the harder parts of life that we all experience or will experience.

It’s not someone’s place to tell another person what to do, and it feels like a form of bypassing on the commenter’s part, like they don’t want to engage in the subject matter or they want the person to shut up and talk about their issues behind closed doors.

This response undermines me and my experiencing while silencing my voice and imposing a framework of shame on my way of navigating the world. It’s a form of ab-normalizing that leads me to feel what I’m doing isn’t normal and should be hidden away because there’s no value in it, either in my life or as writing.

This is my page and my open journal. I’m in the present when I write here. Read my posts or don’t read them. Engage or don’t engage. Stop following me if you don’t like how I use this space.

But don’t tell me to see a therapist. That tells me you know little about me, what I’ve survived, how I continue to survive, and all the elements I’ve put in place that support my healing and wellness, including not one but two therapists and not one but two psychiatric providers. (I have providers in both Arizona and Utah.)

I also removed a number of additional posts, including most of my recent selfies from my Utah bathroom series. I feel self-conscious here. I feel unsafe here. I feel unwelcome here, on my own damn Facebook page. How fucked is that?

Don’t even get me started on how I feel about the poetry community right now, namely the poets and poetry organizations that are too big for their britches and don’t care about each other or their communities. Do what you want, dudes, but I don’t know why anyone would spend their life in poetry if it’s not to cultivate community on all levels—beyond poets and poetry—rather than focusing on yourself and whatever precious accolades you cling to or hope to receive. Maybe y’all should see a therapist.

For Kelly

I just want to reiterate how nice it was to read your poem and actually feel something. I have been pretty much dead inside to poetry this last year so your poem was a great gift to me. I love your poetry and your interior world. So many people do not seem to have interior landscapes and I am always so grateful and honored to interact with people who do.

You are the best, Dana. A brilliant writer and observer. I think it is just really hard to be a person who sees.

—

My dear friend sent this to me just over a month before she died. I miss her, her voice, the way she thought, the way she loved, and the way she wrote. She’s right about it being really hard to be a person who sees. She was right about everything.

Poetry is empty without her. Half of why I’m still writing is to write for her, to connect with her through language. She helps me see the world in a way I never could on my own. She helps me survive. She was a hell of a poet and a hell of a person.

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.

Litophagy

Mitophagy removes and reuses the components of damaged mitochondria while regulating the biogenesis of new, undamaged mitochondria, which in turn preserves healthy mitochondrial functions and activities throughout the human body.

I think language needs to function in a similar way. We need to continually break it down, look at it in novel ways, question it, lay bare the strangeness of words both as sensory experiences and as signifiers, recycle it, make it new, and in turn preserve the flexibility and wholeness of language with the larger system of embodied communication.

This is why I like ascemic writing and erasures and blackouts and transliterations and poems with parts that are or appear to be missing and leaps in thought and elliptical writing and words that bleed into art and back into words again and writing that replaces what’s expected with what’s not expected — maybe with a similar-sounding word or something that creates the effect of reading a book that has several sets of pages stuck together.

And none of what I love is new, but it doesn’t have to be new to be important or to be discussed. Or to need a name, like mitophagy. Litophagy from the Latin lingua? That’s what I’m going to call it. Litophagy. Let’s clear out and clean up and heal what’s on our tongues.

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?

An Imagined Craft Workshop with Mary Ruefle

This may or may not be anything she would say:

Poems are everywhere. Find them. On social media, in thrift stores, in the air, tucked inside your body, in old typewriters, under rocks, on islands, in what you misread, in the margins, in dreams, in the dead.

Pay attention. Not the kind of attention that excludes multiple forms of attention, but rather the kind that embraces polyattentionality.

Write everything down. Keep it or throw it out, but always save what you’ve thrown out or at least part of what you’ve thrown out. Maybe tear what you’ve thrown out down the middle and rewrite the missing half or join two different halves and see what happens. Maybe take some Wite Out to ninety percent of it and see what emerges. It might be what you were trying to say all along.

Save what others throw out. Rummage through lives and handwritings not your own. Put a gilded frame around discarded words and see if they wriggle back to life.

Don’t be afraid to see a poem in a grocery list or a patient education handout or a menu or a box of rusted paperclips.

Collect things. The stranger, the better. Handle what you collect with love, always. All things are related to each other and to us. Treat things the way you want things to treat you.

Do the work. Make your way. Write as yourself and for yourself. Never write for others. To others, perhaps—letters are a lost art, after all. But if you write for others, you may get lost inside them when you need to get lost inside yourself.

Find one poem you wish you could write but can’t. Carry it with you until the paper it’s printed on is worn thin. When you can write that poem, find another poem that you can’t yet write. Carry it until you can. And so forth.

Know that you will die. If that bothers you, write about it. If not, just write.

The Subtle Ordering of Words

One thing that was interesting about the first piece she read was the subtle ordering of the words and how each word relates back to the other words even though the whole piece is rather sparse.

My husband just walked through the front door and said that to me. It’s what he was thinking about on his morning walk with our dog, Lexi—last night’s poetry reading by Mary Ruefle. He didn’t even say Mary Ruefle or Ruefle to identify her. He just said her, like he was saying aloud the last part of something he’d already started saying to himself during the walk.

My husband doesn’t write poetry or read poetry or even like poets much because of what happened to me in 2009. He’s still not sure exceptions to the rule in poetry are actually exceptions. He’s not sure there are actually any rules at all where behavior toward female and female-appearing poets is concerned.

I’ve tried to tell him the exceptions are exceptions and that there are ways to stay safe within the poetry community. I’m navigating all of that myself. My initial response was to leave poetry and never write again. But that is not living. I managed to eek along for seven years. I took up birding. I took up weaving. I love birds, and I love fiber, but I also love words. I loved words first—well, second right after classical music—just as soon as I was able to navigate language, which wasn’t easy because I’m dyslexic.

What a joy I found language to be. An absolute delight. A place to play, work, imagine, create, build, live, linger. I was thrilled to see that Ruefle’s reading had an effect on my husband, that her reading helped loosen language up for him. He’s a software engineer who doesn’t have a lot of flexibility with words and finds writing and speech tiresome. He’s also dyslexic but went in a different way in his life: away from language rather than toward it. Or, rather, toward a completely different type of communication, the many languages of code.

We have a safe word for poetry readings and other outings. It’s a phrase, actually. If either of us says the phrase, that means we’ve seen or sensed some kind of red flag, and we need to leave the situation. After what happened last year with the couple at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, we’ve realized we can never be too careful. We’re especially careful around poets.

I’m glad the safe words weren’t what was rattling around in my husband’s head this morning. Mary Ruefle doesn’t know it, but she and the entire audience at the Poetry Center helped my husband feel like I’m safe, or at least safer, in poetry these days. And he feels safer, too. Now, he can play inside poems like Ruefle’s and find new things to love about language—within those sparse words that do so much vital work.