Essays

The Problem with Labels

I’ve been thinking a lot about this label of “overfocused” ADHD. I’ve gotten some feedback from advocates and specialists in this area who say they aren’t convinced of my diagnosis. While they agree that I have the qualities described in overfocused ADHD, these experts also note that there are politics involved in framing those qualities as “symptoms.”

Pharmaceutical companies are more concerned about patents than patients.

In their view, many people with dyslexia have these qualities, as well as almost everyone with high intelligence. (Their words, not mine, but I am also not going to pussyfoot around the fact that I am highly intelligent. That would be disingenuous nonsense.) One person pointed out that schools for gifted children see these qualities in their students and begin designing curriculum around those students as early as kindergarten.

In short, what’s seen as a disability by some is seen as an ability by others, as a characteristic to be accepted and harnessed, not obliterated through medication, negative reinforcement, or both.

I’ve also been stumbling a bit over the juxtaposition of the word “overfocused” against the words “attention deficit.” That feels like an oxymoron. Some descriptions of overfocused ADHD say that this subtype is not so much a lack of attention but too much attention and that the medicines typically used to treat ADHD won’t work on the overfocused variant because they will make the focus more intense, including aspects such as worry and rumination, which can in turn make the person with high focus feel worse.

How can you have “too much” attention and still be called “inattentive,” I’ve been wondering. Is there not a better term to describe the qualities of the person who can maintain focus for hours on end? For the mind that can execute a task in this manner? For this level of productivity? Why is this type of ADHD lumped in with ADHD at all? Simply because attention is concerned in some way?

Does the metacategory of ADHD even exist? Or is forcing disparate attention-based qualities under one overarching category an example of rigid adherence to a hierarchical construct, one that might wrap things up in a tidy framework but that ultimately says nothing in actuality about how these qualities are, or are not, related.

I would not have been able to be a music performance major if I had not been highly focused. That educational path requires four hours of practice each day, along with another three hours or so of practice in ensembles and in one-on-one study with your professor. That’s seven hours, at least, of intense focus in both mind and body, seven days a week. (Musicians get no days off, especially not flutists, otherwise the embouchure will fail.) You could easily categorize every single person in a conservatory as having overfocused ADHD, especially compared with the dawdling, low-grade focus many (neuro)typical jobs demand, with two days off each week.

Likewise, as a dyslexic English major, I would not have been able to consume all the novels, plays, poetry collections, essays, theoretical works and other reading materials required without high focus. Yes, it might have taken me four times as long to get through those materials, but high focus allowed me to do so. (As a dyslexic person, the qualities described as overfocused ADHD have allowed me to do everything that I do, and that’s been the case for decades.)

Furthermore, do graduate programs not require outright intense focus? What about those that involve research and lab work? My editorial work has largely been in the field of science and medicine. I believe every scientist and researcher I’ve worked with over the past decade and a half would easily qualify as having overfocused ADHD. One of those researchers even tried to recruit me into the field of biology not too long ago, perhaps because she could see I had a focus similar to her and her colleagues, as well as a mind that dissects ideas in the same way as them. (I tried to explain to her that I dissect language and concepts, not frogs, but she didn’t really get it. For her, talking about biology was so close to doing it, that I might as well have been doing it.)

And who says what’s too much attention, what’s not enough attention, where attention should be directed and, conversely, where it should not be directed? These, too, are political questions. What is championed is almost always what any given culture deems important. That is, what is deemed important is culturally constructed, not immutable. Even what we try to eliminate is important, though, because without those aspects of culture—those fringe aspects produced by the minority as opposed to the majority—culture would fold in on itself.

I suppose my concern is that the words “deficit” and “disorder” are part of this label. That’s the case because those lobbying for these clusters of qualities to be seen as a pathology needed (and still need) that framing in order to secure funding, build alliances and justify treatment options. In short, our health care and educational frameworks are built on, responsive to, and supportive of pathology.

Because medicine is involved in this, big money is involved, and big pharma is involved. I don’t really trust big pharma to define me and my life, or anyone’s life, given that their objectives often run contrary to those involving human welfare, human safety and human expression. Money colors everything, even making medicines unavailable to the masses because pharmaceutical companies are more concerned about patents than patients, therefore only the world’s relatively privileged can afford to get their hands on those medicines.

I’ll close by quoting from the book I recently reviewed, Thomas Armstrong’s Neuodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and Other Brain Differences:

One of the great disadvantages of the term ‘ADHD’ is that it speaks of a deficit in attention. Children (and adults) labeled ADHD are actually very good at paying attention. They excel in paying attention to what they’re not supposed to be paying attention to! This is called ‘incidental attention’ and is another trait of the creative person.

He continues:

People labeled with ADHD are also very good at paying attention to what interests them. Many parents have written to me saying that their ADHD-diagnosed kids will spend hours focused on building with Legos, dancing, operating video games, or engaging in other absorbing tasks. Unfortunately, the ADHD community has also taken this admirable trait and turned it into a negative. They call it ‘hyperfocus’ and consider it to be yet another ‘warning sign’ of attention deficit. But the ability to focus the mind for hours on a single topic has been considered for centuries to be the trait of an exceptional mind (otherwise, why do so many cultures and religious traditions cultivate the ability to concentrate?).

And here’s the last excerpt I will share:

The fact of the matter is that children and adults with ADHD have a different attentional style than neurotypical individuals. They have a ‘roaming’ attention that can notice many different things in a short period of time and a ‘homing’ attention that can fasten onto one thing of great interest and stay with it for a long period of time. It does a great disservice to those diagnosed with ADHD to say that they have a deficit in attention, when they are acutally good at two different forms of attention and have problems primarily with one other form, sometimes referred to as ‘central-task’ attention, where sustained attention must be paid to routine (and often boring) events that have often been externally imposed.

She Just Doesn’t See

I want to talk about touch, how it’s the only sense I fully trust. When I doubt my ears, my eyes, or both, I find the world with my fingers, skin and lips.

I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear.

I work puzzles by going over the edges of one piece with my forefinger and thumb as I hunt for the matching piece on the table. My eyes pick out the inverse of what my fingers feel, as if my hands and eyes together are what someone else’s eyes are without assistance from a secondary sense.

I have routinely felt my way over a new lover’s body with my face, chest and tongue. It was nearly always a sensual experience. But it was also a sensual experience—a way of learning, through touch, if this was a person I wanted in my life. I’ve even used my eyelashes to find out what my ears and eyes could not tell me about a partner.

For more than a decade, I felt my way through music. I started by opening the faux velvet-lined case of my new flute and running my fingers over its perfect, machine-made nickel keys. It took me days to bring the mouthpiece to my lower lip. Taking the instrument in with my fingertips was all I wanted or needed during those first encounters.

I am convinced, now, that I could have kept playing the flute if the notes had not been named after letters of the alphabet. I believe this connection caused my visual dyslexia to leak into my fingers, tangling them up like the piece of driftwood my father proudly displayed in our front flowerbed. I would play the note I had come to know as “E,” and my fingers would try to play the note I had come to know as “F,” most likely because capital E and capital F look very similar.

I made it a long way with music despite my dyslexia, most likely because touch was involved. When I relaxed my mind enough, to the extent that I felt I was no longer in my body, the notes became what they were: whole and pure sounds that represented, but could not be extracted from, the universe—sounds unadulterated by our arbitrary assignation to them of letters or our perverted desire to pull them apart the way a curious child might want to pull the wings off a living dragonfly.

I loved music enough to take it as far as I could. And now I know why, in the end, I had to set it aside. There was nothing more I could do. No matter how much I practiced or how hard I tried, I was never going to have perfect, or even relative, pitch—and I was never going to get my fingers right 100 percent of the time.

(When creating music, you only have one chance to position your fingers and mouth. If you miss that synchronicity, you sound the wrong note—or a disastrously shrill noise that lies between notes and is not unlike the wheeze I imagine being emitted by a bird shot in the throat. Composing with words is much more forgiving because you can backtrack and change mistakes or, when speaking, you can pause—and it’s OK because there’s no tempo or conductor or orchestra mercilessly driving you forward.)

There was also the matter of listening, of hearing. I was unable to separate chords into individual tones, a requirement of my ear training classes. I was also unable to hear any tonal progressions, save for the perfect fourth and minor second, the former popularized by “Here Comes the Bride,” the latter by the theme song for “Jaws.” Even with this imprinting, there were days when the perfect fourth and minor second were beyond me. I couldn’t hear them in my head, let alone give them voice.

While I feel a renewed sense of mourning with regard to my loss of music, knowing it was my dyslexia that held me back, I also feel more indebted to music than ever. I am certain that when I set music aside and gravitated to writing and literature, I recruited the musical pathways in my brain to handle all the reading, writing, speaking, and other visual and auditory processing my new interests demanded. I believe my ability to hear the rhythm and tonality of texts is an outgrowth of my language pathways taking up residence in my musical pathways. Sure, it’s a little awkward, kind of like steering a ship along a set of railroad tracks, but it’s working for me. Somehow, it’s been working for decades, without my even knowing that my ship was, in fact, on a set of railroad tracks, and that those tracks were not submerged in water.

In some ways, my heart wants to break where music is concerned. Look what it did for me. Look what it gave me, asking nothing in return. All so that, one day, I would be able to speak. And write. And keep speaking and writing. And to keep singing my tone-deaf song, my ugly little song that feels more precious than ever to me, the imperfect song that connects me back to my mother as if she and I are two diminished seventh chords standing side by side on a treble clef.

And there she is. I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear from Anthony’s department store, humming “The Girl from Ipanema”:

Tall and tan and young and lovely, / The girl from Ipanema goes walking, And when she passes / I smile, but she doesn’t see, / She just doesn’t see, No she doesn’t see

And I see my mother now. And I sing for my mother now. And I write for her now. And now her voice is my voice. And now I know her mind—one that always put the cereal in the refrigerator, that couldn’t balance the checkbook, that never wrote anything by hand, that loved to talk but not to read.

And I have her mind. And I am not sorry. And if I could reach out and touch her, I would. I would hold her hand and tell her it’s OK that she gave me this wiring, and I would sing her a lullaby and urge her to rest, just rest, and to please not worry about me anymore.

Until I Return Home

You travel on until you return home; you live on until you return to earth.

— Ethiopian Proverb

I want to tell you about the land in Oklahoma, how it was often impenetrable, how it did not rain for days that stretched into months, until adults started using the word “drought.” I did not know what the word meant, but I knew it did not sound good and nobody looked happy when they said it, therefore it could not be a word that stood for something good.

I want to tell you that we lived without water the way some live without light, that we took this as normal, that water was rationed, and that my father, being a god, had men drill deep into the land until they hit water. The water would become ours and we would call it well water and say it came from our very own well. I would tell my parched schoolmates that I had a well, welled up with satisfaction at having something they did not have because their fathers were not gods like mine. Mine had made something of nothing and refused to let nature dictate our family’s circumstances.

I want to tell you how my father, with his own hands and his nitrogen fertilizers, used our well water to grow a lush area of green that encircled our house. And then the earth was softer, and then I could drive my index finger down into it after parting the thick mat of grass. And somewhere along the line, I learned the word “aerate,” though my father pronounced it with nearly three syllables, not two. He leaned into the first syllable the way I had seen him lean into his tiller when he was preparing the garden for planting. I did not feel I was hurting the soil when I pushed my finger into it; I felt I was aerating it—which seemed to be a word akin to the word healing.

I want to tell you how I ached for the land farther south in Oklahoma, how I watched and watched every time we drove down I-35, trying to find the precise point where the soil turned from brown to rust red.

I want to tell you how much harder this soil was, the soil both my parents came from, and how dry. And when it cracked, it split open in shapes like the lines on the backs of my father’s hands, the same shapes I now see in my own hands. And I always felt sorry for the cracked soil because I could see how the shapes fit together and wanted to be together, not apart.

I want to tell you that my family warned me about this red soil, how it clung and refused to come out, even in the wash. But with time, I wanted it to cover me, to mark me as its own, a sign that I was from Oklahoma the way my parents were from Oklahoma. Near Buncombe Creek, I entered the water of Lake Texoma and let it leave a layer of rust on my suit and skin when I emerged. “Here, here,” the residue seemed to say. “Here is where you belong.”

I want to tell you that I gave myself over to that soil repeatedly, and that I made a pact to never leave it. I want to tell you that it hurts every day to know I will never set foot in my father’s yard again, let alone lie alongside the soil using my hands to care for it. And I will never give myself to the iron-rich soil that spreads over the southern part of the state, not in the same way. How could I? I have had other places in my blood, on my body. I have other lands in my future, not yet explored. Still, I long for my home, for my earth. I long to return.

Viscosity

I wake with a wad of hair in my mouth, thinking about perception: its power in defining how we feel about situations and about people; its power in defining how we are perceived by people and how we come across in situations.

I slept hard. I dreamed hard. In one dream, a group of friends and I were asked to pass up and over a large mountain by way of an asphalt path. On the other side was knowledge. The scene was like an apocalyptic version of The Wizard of Oz. Instead of boulders, trees and greenery, we were surrounded by dark, featureless land, save for the mountain we were on. Instead of a yellow brick road, we walked on a path made from the sticky black material found in crude petroleum.

I have a relative who is a petroleum engineer. When I was a child, he gave me two glass bottles filled with oil. One represented the good oil. It was light, almost golden. The other represented the bad oil. It was dark, like blackstrap molasses. He explained what you could do with each type of oil, what they were good for. As he took a drag off his Marlboro, he explained how we wouldn’t have anything without oil, not even roads. Not even Vaseline. It’s in everything, he told me.

It was then that I perceived oil was a miracle, our miracle. We depended on it; society depended on it.

What this relative doesn’t know is how I would hold those bottles after he was gone, tip the liquid this way and that, judging the viscosity of each by how sluggish their movement was. One moved more like my father, darting quickly at any stimulation or in the face of any problem. The other moved more like my mother, who was slow to respond, slow to rise, slow to move across the room, often without pants on. She was also slow to dress.

How could I not marvel at something this relative gave me—these beautiful representations of the world we lived in and walked on and smeared on our chapped faces and the bottoms of babies. These beautiful representations of what, quite literally, allowed us all to move through the world, to float over it. To hover, to speed, to glide, to ride. Our family could not have had our days at the lake without oil. My mother could not have elongated her body on the speedboat for my father’s snapshots if we hadn’t had the gas to ride into the lake’s middle, where water and surrounding land could frame her.

Nothing on that lake was bad. It is the only place my family was a family. That boat was the only place where I had no fear, and saw no suffering. Until we caught a fish. Then the boat was all suffering. I saw something close to love on that boat, torn free from abuse, addiction and pain. In this way, my family depended on oil. We would not have existed as any kind of recognizable unit without it—both the oil needed to get us to the lake by way of car and the oil needed to suspend us above it by boat.

The bottles were marked with the name of my relative’s company, as well as drilling information. They were objects that stood as placeholders for who this relative was in the world, what he did. But they weren’t just that. For me, they represented love. He loved me enough to think of me, and to bring these bottles that represented him home to me. I could look at the bottles and remember who he was, and where he was, in the world. That he was out there, somewhere much safer than my home, and that he loved me, and that the roads I rode on were a way of being connected to him. Someday I, too, would be out there in the world, safe, perhaps loving someone who was trapped somewhere unsafe.

I started reading the labels of products I used, hoping to find “petrolatum” listed, just as he’d taught me to do. Every time I found that word, I would smile, having found another point of connection to him and his love.

The other day, I was with my partner at a poetry reading. The reading took place in an art gallery. There was a human art installation as part of the current show. I felt happy and safe in the space, and I was enjoying being out with my partner. Then I realized one of the women in the art installation—who was dressed in a costume and wearing a wig—is a poet with whom there is a history, and a deep dislike.

I was no longer in the same space. My heart began to race, I felt nauseated. I was ashamed to be there, didn’t want to be there anymore. The rest of the night was extremely uncomfortable. But what had changed? It’s not like this woman walked into the room, and I could argue that her appearance had palpably changed the room’s “vibe.” She had been there all along.

All that changed was my perception. Nothing else. This proved to me the power of perception and what it can do to our minds and bodies. If I could be happy in that space not knowing the woman was also there, I have the potential to be happy even when my perception shifts. But potential is only potential until it is realized.

Perceptions can change markedly over a lifetime, even if the actualities behind them do no shifting. The question is, what do we do with our shifting perceptions? How do we handle them? The relative who works in petroleum must have some reaction to a world whose relationship to oil is increasingly being called into question and in which more and more oil alternatives are being developed, even here in the oil-hungry United States, whose move to alternative fuels and technologies is as slow as a highly viscous crude oil.

As my relative moves along more and more paths over the globe looking for oil, does he still seethe when people make comments about its dangers and destructions, both to human life and the planet? Does he still rail against those who say we are running out of oil, defiantly stating that we will never run out?

My perceptions have changed during my own lifetime. I no longer believe a family is a family because of how it functions on a boat on a lake on the border between Texas and Oklahoma, aptly called Lake Texoma. What we are as a family depends on how we relate to one another every day—and includes what happens when nobody else is there to bear witness or keep our behaviors in check.

In the dream last night, the one where my friends and I were instructed to walk up over the mountain on our way to finding knowledge, I veered from the group and our issued instructions. I walked down and down to the base of the mountain. Around the back, it was open. The way it had been opened up, the mountain resembled a woman’s stomach and thighs. The opening resembled her partially gutted pelvis. It/she glowed red inside, as if the cavity was filled with blood.

I realized the red color was the glow of a giant fire. All around the base of the mountain were piles of trash and environmental waste. Some men were feeding refuse into the fire while other men stoked the flames. I asked one of them where the trash had come from. He gave no answer but instead told me that this was the real seat of knowledge, not the destination the path above the mountain led to, where the group and I were being steered.

Here is where you can learn everything about us, he said. Right here. He continued shoveling waste into the giant burning pelvis.

Suddenly someone appeared and yanked me back up to the path. When I rejoined the group, I tried to explain what I’d seen. They didn’t believe me. It’s just a mountain, they said. What are you talking about, they asked.

But my perception had been changed, and there was no changing it back. Wherever we were going, it had nothing to do with knowledge. We needed to go down, down.

my relative saw The Wizard of Oz, it was on a black-and-white TV. But something magical happened, he says. At the point where the movie turns from black and white to color, it did so on the television. For years, he insisted the movie turned to color, despite the fact that it was technically impossible for that to have happened.

Perception is everything. Perception is everything.

—

There are on average 2,600 oil spills per year. On average, 726 million gallons of oil are spilled annually. As of July 19, 2010, between 90 million and 170 million gallons of crude oil have been released into the Gulf as a result of the 2010 BP oil spill. But those are just numbers. I should say something about water, what it means to the body. I should say something about the body, how it yields to oil, succumbs.

First published at Poets for Living Waters.

On Hélène Cixous

The first and most important things that strike me about Hélène Cixous’ theory, and her life, are that both are positioned at a time when the very nature of writing and speech, and the relationship between the two, were being fundamentally questioned by some of the foremost scholars of her/our time. Cixous’ work is directly related to philosophers such as Derrida, who argued that neither speech nor writing can lead us to any fundamental truths, since both are caught between the signifier, the word, and the signified, the meaning.

It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed.

What Cixous was working, writing and theorizing against, then, was a concept as old as the Western world—what Derrida framed as logocentrism, which relied on dichotomies such as mind and matter, light and darkness, presence and absence, and nature and culture. This opposition resonates with me in terms of my own writing, in which—in line with many feminist writers and theoreticians—I hope to overtly and covertly challenge binary oppositions, including self and other, male and female, sentient and nonsentient, dominant and submissive.

Cixous, however, manages to sidestep one of the pitfalls many feminists (and other champions of a non-oppositional way of thinking about relationships between human beings and among and within elements throughout the world) inadvertently stumble into, which is to favor or articulate only one “side” of the story: that of the oppressed or shunned group. Instead, she “ … did not simply privilege the ‘female’ half of an existing binary opposition between ‘male’ and ‘female’ … she questioned the very adequacy of an either/or logics to name the complexity of cultural realities .”*

The result, of course, is that some have in turn questioned or shunned Cixous’ ideas. Those who frame the world in terms of binary oppositions might find it confusing or frustrating to interpret or confront thoughts, speech, writing and theories that don’t conform to such dichotomies. In contrast, I argue that Cixous’ approach could serve as a model for all poets. (It’s absolutely a model for my own poetry.)

For what is poetry if not a lifting of the veil of culture, even if only for a few moments—an opportunity to delay categorization, as cognitive theorist Reuven Tsur would argue, in a world that is increasingly (at least in the West) prodding us to rapidly categorize our surroundings, experiences and interactions? As if the experience of the experience weren’t enough—the one we are currently engaged with at any given time—we are seduced into gazing out as if along a rural Kansan horizon at the next experience, and the next, and the next: All of them lined up before us like diary cows waiting to have their teats automatically milked, those heavy udders of potential experiences ready to burst if we don’t tend to them immediately.

It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed. When we can see the world as this or that, that or this—or being the operative word in each case—we don’t have to use much cognitive (and hence emotional) space to relate to that world, its objects or its inhabitants at any given moment. This frees up even more time to rapidly categorize new experiences and move on to the next (and the next), as if living as a sentient being were simply a matter of peeling out at 60 miles per hour from one drive-through window to another.

Furthermore, overturning dichotomies momentarily only to shift the power (in theory more so than in reality) from one group to another or to reassign blame from the latter, shunned group to the former, desirable one—that adhesive rat trap so many well-meaning theorists and activists fall into—is merely a matter of executing awkward acrobatics on a stage, as opposed to pulling down the props, dismantling the stage, removing the exhausted, underpaid aerialists and then taking a seat in the audience to see what’s left occupying the now-empty space.

Creating empty space in place of dualities and other cultural and cognitive assumptions—space the mind can inhabit and move through unhindered and uninhibited—is the job of any good theorist, any good thinker/feeler.

And hence it’s the job of any good poet, or at least any good poem, or at least any poem I personally would actively take the time to seek out and read and sit with and return to. For if poetry won’t help us resist fast, easy categorization of this tremendously complicated world we live in and instead encourage us to slow down, remove our blinders, snap out of our cultural trances and realize all that we can never realize, it’s hard to say what, if anything, will do the trick.

—

* From The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by William E. Cain, et al.

Light, Capture and Release

Sometimes our lives don’t turn out the way we would like. Sometimes we imagine futures that never materialize. We keep trying to have those futures, but even though we spend time imagining ourselves inside them—happy and confident and secure—they never appear and allow us to be who we want to be or have what we think we deserve.

My childhood is the one thing I don’t clean up when I think about it.

So we become revisionists. We look at the past and try to make it into something close to what we want. We let nostalgia kick in and do its tricky work of glazing over details until nothing hard is left in our memories and our experience of our lives has been worn as smooth as a worry stone.

I had worry stones as a child and developed an almost unnatural dependence on them, carrying several in my pocket at once and running my thumb over the hollow in the middle every time I was afraid, lonely or nervous.

My childhood is the one thing I don’t clean up when I think about it. Recently I was asked to share a baby picture of myself for a “fun” game of guess-which-adult-the-baby-picture-belongs-to. It was difficult for me to open the album containing photos of me as a child. Most of them showed me in close proximity to an ashtray or a glass of vodka. Those certainly wouldn’t do. I finally found one of me as a toddler wearing an adult’s baseball cap. I looked happy. Children are too simple and hopeful not to be happy despite the realities of their lives—or at least to be optimistic, as if each moment carries bright promises on its back that glimmer like sequined wings, throwing light in all directions.

I’m sure the photocopy of my baby picture is in the trash now, the silly game of match-the-adult-to-the-baby-photo long over. Seems appropriate. If only it were that easy to drag all my childhood memories to the trash, like computer files I no longer needed. If only I could overwrite that block of memory with something new, or even leave the space blank until something, anything, worthy of being remembered came along.

My Little Poetry Pep Talk

The shit is hitting the fan. In my life, in my friends’ lives, in everyone’s lives—or so it seems. I’ve been thinking a lot, more so than usual, about poetry the past few weeks. And by that I mean I have been dreaming about it, since I was already thinking about it nearly every waking moment.

If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.

What I think is this: We are all going through tough stuff. Every one of us. And poetry is more important to us than ever. We need it. Others need it. The gift economy is where it’s at when the other economy fails.

We are at war. I see us—every single committed poet—as being at war against silence, against sloth, against insult, against injury, against conventional thinking, against greed, against selfishness, against the turning away from self, against depersonalization, even against fear.

I see some poets turning away from poetry, out of necessity in some cases. But in any case, the turning away is an act of betrayal. I had a poet email me two days ago saying he had to stop focusing on poetry and start focusing on what would pay the bills. Yes, pay the bills. By all means. I am in the same boat, so I know where you are coming from. But don’t leave poetry behind in the process. Do not commit that betrayal because it is a betrayal of self and of the life you’ve given yourself over to as a poet.

I see poets leaving the ranks, and it makes me sad. Because of money, because of fear about poetry, or because of the perceived inability to write poetry. Because of any and every impulse in society that tells people poetry is not a worthwhile endeavor or that it is only a worthwhile endeavor by and for certain poets or through certain mechanisms of study.

Sam Hamill says, The way of poetry is a way of being alive. I believe that. Poetry makes us stronger. It changes us. It is our gift to ourselves and to each other. If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.

Yes, it is difficult to stick with poetry, to turn to poetry when our world and our lives are a mess. But that is the trick. That is precisely the trick: to create poetry in the midst of the mess. To create poetry, you must enter the mess. Poets enter the mess of the world in ways most can’t or won’t. We have to do that work, and report back: to articulate the confusion and frustration inside the poem. To let the mess be the poem. But in a way that conveys, that communicates. For, as Hamill also says, The possibility of the poem exists in communication.

We must be here for the poems, and in doing so, be here for one another. This is how we talk. This is how we talk to each other about what matters.

I’ve been trying to ask myself every day when I wake up: How can I use poetry today to change my life and the lives of others. That is how I am entering the mess and staying deep inside the mess.

A Convseration with Dorianne Laux

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States and chosen by the Kansas City Star as a noteworthy book of 2005.

Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, recently reprinted by Eastern Washington University Press, What We Carry (1994) and Smoke (2000). Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January 2008.

Co-author of The Poet’s Companion, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Best of the Net, and she’s a frequent contributor to magazines as various as the New York Quarterly, Orion, Ms. Magazine and online journals.

Laux has waited tables and written poems in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Petaluma, Calif., and as far north as Juneau, Alaska. For the last 13 years, she has taught at the University of Oregon in Eugene and since 2004, as core faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. Her summers are spent teaching poetry workshops in the beauty of Esalen in Big Sur, Tomales Bay, Aspen, Spoleto, Italy and Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. In fall of 2008, she and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, will move to Raleigh, where she will join the faculty at North Carolina State University as a Poet-in-Residence.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dorianne Laux the summer of 2006 when she was teaching at The Tomales Bay Workshops Writers’ Conference, and she agreed to this email interview with me so I could share a little bit about her work and her approach to poetry.

—

You have called yourself, in part, a poet of personal witness. Can you explain what that means?

There seems to be a general discomfort right now with the personal, the private, the confessional and the narrative. Of course, poets have been writing poems of personal disclosure since the beginning of poetry. And since the beginning, people have suffered through great historic upheavals, war, geologic disasters, famine, and enjoyed great times of renaissance, scientific discovery, political change, explosions of art, culture, philosophy.

We know some of what happened. We keep records, diaries, logs, news reports, pictographs, paintings, photographs. But it’s poetry that informs us of what we felt while those times and events rained down, and it’s poetry that recalls us to our selves. It’s our emotions that are in danger of being left out, and it is poetry that accounts for, is responsible to, the human element.

I’ve been re-reading a favorite book of poetry with a student in the Pacific MFA Program. The book is called The Moon Reflected Fire, by Doug Anderson. He was a medic during the Vietnam war and the first section of the book recalls that experience in vivid narrative poems that introduce us to the narrator as well as to the men and women he worked with and for and the Vietnamese people we were making war against. The next section is filled with short, lyric persona poems about Goya struggling to create art during the Inquisition. The third section contains poems in the voices of minor characters from the Odyssey and the Iliad, the voices we didn’t hear in the first telling. The final section returns to the narrative, poems about recovery, from the war, alcohol and drugs, damaged relationships, those broken by the war.

The poems are gripping, wrenching. One of the most arresting and heartbreaking lines is when Doug Anderson, the soldier, the medic, asks a wounded soldier slipping in and out of consciousness: Hey, what’s your mother’s maiden name? He’s trying to keep the man tied to the world though memory.

That seems to me what poems do. They call out to us, not by just any name, but by our particular name, and keep us tied to the world by accessing our memories. Poems keep us conscious of the importance of our individual lives. There are many ways to do this, and combinations of ways to do this, but personal witness of a singular life, seen clearly and with the concomitant well-chosen particulars, is one of the most powerful ways to do this.

When we write a poem of personal witness, a poem about an ordinary day, an ordinary life, seen through the lens of what Whitman called “the amplitude of time,” we’re struggling to find the importance of the individual who is stranded in the swirling universe, a figure standing up against the backdrop of eternity. I think of the fisherman’s prayer: Dear Lord, be good to me / the sea is so wide / and my boat is so small.

You realized you were meant to write poetry after hearing a poem by Pablo Neruda. Some poets have that feeling when they first start writing but aren’t able to sustain it, at least not all the time. Have you been able to sustain that sense of being meant to write ever since you started writing, or have you ever had times when you felt poetry left you?

I don’t think we ever get back the energy of our youth, the idealism and innocence of that time. But with that loss come certain gains: experience, patience, a sense of wholeness. Once we’ve begun the journey of a reading and writing life, we begin to see certain familiar themes, ideas, language, returning again and again, in our own work and the work of others, and we can sometimes tire of it.

But there is nothing like finding a new love at an old age. Poetry will go underground for a time, but will also pop up when I least expect it, fresh and new again, and more importantly, when I seem to most need it. Poetry saved me early on, and it continues to save me, just at longer intervals.

I also look around at the poets of the generation before mine, now in their 70s, 80s, 90s—Stanley Kunitz just died at 102 and was writing the best poems of his life. Adrienne Rich and Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone. All poets who still have something mighty to say and are saying it with power. These poets inspire me and help me to see again, to feel a life sometimes buried by habituation and stagnation.

And younger poets coming up all the time who give us all a fresh way of looking at the world. I’m moving soon to North Carolina after living on the West Coast most my life. It’s a big move for a 56-year-old woman, and I welcome the adventure of it. I know it will shake me out of certain mental ruts, enliven my art.

I also have a stint this summer at VCCA. I haven’t been to a writer’s retreat in a few years now and just knowing I’m going there has motivated me. Looking forward to a time when I can be quiet and alone with my inner life. I think many times when we think we’ve lost poetry, it is a matter of lack of solitude, lack of support. Poetry is always there, waiting to be unearthed. To be necessary again.

I’ve spoken to people who think we have too many poets and aspiring poets in this country, and not enough ways to sustain those poets—or enough readers to read their work. Others have a different view, seeing this as one of the most vibrant times for American poetry. What are your feelings about the state of poetry today and its future?

I think a bit of both visions are true. Everyone seems to want to be a poet, though I think this has been the case for a good long time. At some point in a life something happens that is just so incomprehensible and emotionally powerful that it seems the only way to process it is through poetry.

If you went out on the street and asked people if they had ever written a poem, I think most would say yes, at least one. If you asked if they had ever painted a portrait or composed a musical score or sculpted a bust or thrown a pot you’d get fewer yeses. Poetry is the art of the people. Anyone can write a poem. And that’s a two-edged sword.

On the other hand, there can never be enough poetry. It would be like asking a drunk if he’s had enough wine. What’s too much? And how will we find the next Whitman or Dickinson, the next Neruda or Akmatova? One could be living right now, hidden away in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in the middle of America. A young Etheridge Knight in Corinth, Miss., or a Gwendolyn Brooks in Topeka, Kan. That’s the kind of democracy that makes way for genius.

It also makes way for mediocrity, but you take the good with the bad. So yes, this is a vibrant time for poetry simply because so many people are interested in reading and writing it. And no, we don’t have enough support for all these people, but there is also more support for poetry now than there has ever been in the past.

The expectation here is a bit skewed as well. Most of us don’t enter this practice with material gains in mind. The university system has helped to create this expectation of fortune and career, as though poems were a commodity. A good book to read to disabuse oneself of this mindset is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which has just been reissued on Vintage Books. When it first came out in 1983, the subtitle of the book was Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. That’s been changed to Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

Lewis Hyde* uses anthropology, economics, psychology, art and fairy tales to examine the role gifts have played and continue to play in our emotional and spiritual life, and describes how poetry is the one art that resists commodification and holds tribes of people together.

You’ve talked about being drawn to, and about writing, poetry with some blood in it. Can you describe what that means, both in terms of your own work and the work you are most drawn to?

Yes, blood. In other words, poems that possess a heart beat, the blood pumping, flowing through the veins. Poems with energy and drive, force and counterforce. Poems speaking with directness in the telling, where the reader can feel the human need from which the poem emerged. Hot-blooded poems. Which doesn’t preclude quietude. But a weighted silence, in which you can hear someone breathing. Poems with tension, velocity and vigor.

We get born from salt water into blood, we suffer injustices and loss. Sometimes unfathomable injustice, unbearable loss. And we die. Sometimes quickly, quietly, sometimes slowly, painfully. Always alone. I want a poetry that acknowledges this. I want to be broken into, like a house. I want to have everything stolen from me but my life and I want to wake up grateful for being spared.

I want poetry that tells the truth with compassion. I see so many poems of which anyone could say: There is absolutely nothing wrong with this poem. Or this poem is interesting. Or this poem is so smart. What does that mean? Smart? Was Neruda a smart poet? Or this is so well-crafted. I’m looking for poems that leave me speechless. Breathless. Slayed. My spell check says there’s no such word as slayed. And this is what I mean. I’m less interested in the right way than the only way.

When I read a Sharon Olds poem I think, this is the only way she could have written this. She’s our D.H. Lawrence. When I read a Philip Levine poem I think, this is a poem that has some sweat on it, some muscle and bone in it. Lucille Clifton, daring to tell us what we don’t want to hear, with power and anger. Yes. These are my heroes, not because they have mad line-breaking skills, but because over and over they are trying to say something important about what it is to be human.

Gerald Stern. Talk about energy, force, drive. He’s our Whitman. He cannot be contained! You can’t coolly appreciate Stern. C.K. Williams, his forward momentum, his brooding vision. Adrienne Rich at her fiercest and most direct, Ruth Stone beating out the singular loss of her husband over and over again, struggling, at 93, to get to the heart of it.

Galway Kinnell’s rawness, riskiness and originality in a poem like “The Bear.” Jack Gilbert, a poet of great compression, bearing the weight of his loneliness, his bleakly romantic vision. Stanley Kunitz, the pressure of that early cruelty, injustice and grief forging a poetry of compassion and tenderness. When you read these poets you don’t say, Gee, isn’t this a great line break, you say, Jesus!

And craft is important to all these poets, but it’s not why they sat down to write or why I have to sit down to read them. Craft is important, a skill to be learned, but it’s not the beginning and end of the story. I want the muddled middle to be filled with the gristle of living. Sexton and Plath. Yes. And I expect no less from myself. That doesn’t mean I don’t write poems that fall far short of my own expectations. Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t. I want blood.

—

This interview originally ran March 14, 2008, on Read Write Poem. I am reprinting it here with Dorianne Laux’s permission. You can find Lewis Hyde’s The Gift at www.lewishyde.com/pub/gift.html.

Drizzle

Last night I slept as well as I’ve ever slept. I woke up at one point just long enough to think Oh God I’m sleepy! Could I sleep any better than this, ever? before falling asleep again.

But now that I’m up, my head feels like a bowling ball. How much does this thing weigh anyhow?

I just looked it up: about 12 pounds. That is a lot of weight for my delicate neck to manage. No wonder I have tight shoulders and suffer from neck pain. No wonder my trapeziuses are overdeveloped and make me look slightly freakish with my shirt off. (And yes, trapeziuses is the plural form of the word trapezius. I looked that up, too.)

My shades are closed because I still want to inhabit the small domain of my house for a while longer before acknowledging that the world extends beyond my doors, windows and walls.

I can tell it’s out there even without seeing it. Birds twitter and cackle. I just heard the shrill reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee of someone’s scooter trying to make it up our hill. The street’s incline is so steep that it always taxes underpowered vehicles and makes them sound like wind-up toys.

Now I hear a small airplane rattling its way from somewhere to somewhere else.

If I were to tell you what the world consists of based solely on what I hear, I would say there are scads of birds, a scooter and a single plane. Wait, there go two cars. Add two cars to the list. The world is growing larger with each moment.

Now it’s silent. The world, for the moment, is empty.

Even with the shades closed, I can tell it’s cloudy and will probably rain. What little light comes through the blinds is as diffuse and gray as the sky. I hate it when the sky holds the sun hostage this way, blanketing it in dark wool as if its rays need to be dampened for our protection.

This is another reason I am reluctant to look outside. I know we’re in for about six months of this nonsense, and I am not ready to acknowledge it: sky whose color ranges from wet cement to drying cement to freshly dried cement, mountains obscured by clouds that try but fail to mimic the shape of mountains, everything running for cover from rain that’s not even heavy enough to earn the label rain—more like the effect produced by the Wham-O Fun Fountain I had as a child than anything wondrous or natural.

How I long for Midwestern thunderstorms, the way light and sound move through everything. I want a storm that shakes my windowpanes and rises through my feet. I want rain with rhythm and intensity. I want an unapologetic downpour, not its inferior substitute, drizzle.

I Want

I’ve woken up feeling comfortable, relaxed even, which leaves me not knowing how to go about writing. I like to work against something when I write, and often what I work against is my own feelings of discomfort, physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. My state of comfort will pass, of that I am sure. But for now, I feel untethered—not quite sure how to write what I want to write, so instead I will focus on what I want to write.

I want to write about holograms. I want to write about time, space, the notion of self.

I want to write about authorship, the need to author. To own. To get credit. To take credit.

I want to write about poets being so obsessed over having “publishable” work. When did publishable become our standard for writing?

I want to write about women who are obsessed with acting like and being seen as girls. When did womanhood go out of fashion? When did we decide we wanted to trade whatever level of empowerment we have as women and go back to having much of our lives scripted for, dictated to us, as girls? It’s not all baby-doll dresses and piccolo voices and hopscotch on the asphalt playground. When did we forget that?

Do we really want to feel our first abuses all over again? Do we really want to be dismissed? Do we really want to unlearn our bodies? Have we forgotten what it took for us to survive, and do we not want to own, get credit, take credit for what we’ve managed to grow into, even as forces worked against us all along the way?

I want to write about my strange dream, where a room in my house was filled with plants. I could see spores rising from every leaf, wafting toward me. Some were threads, others particulate, the majority large and ethereal with skins thin as oolemmas and insides like jellyfish. I tried to grab the large ones, but my hands cupped nothing. I batted at them with my arms. The heat my movements generated made the spores move faster and more unpredictably. I want to write about how it felt to take those spores into my lungs.

I want to write palindromes but can’t seem to find anything worth saying as a palindrome.

I want to write about how thick the body can become with wanting.