Notabilia

Not About You

A poet from Kansas City berated me today after I posted about needing to evaluate whether to continue writing. The post made him angry. He said he’s still upset that I disappeared from poetry in 2015 after he’d been invested in me and my work. He felt I owed him an explanation for that decision and treated my post today as an affront to him, as if my leaving poetry would cause him more pain than it would cause me. As if my leaving poetry is a situation he’s at the center of.

I don’t know this man. I certainly didn’t owe him anything, including telling him that I left poetry because I was sexually assaulted by a poet who was working with me in the role of mentor. That it had happened on the way to my MFA and that it derailed my studies. That the poetry community was sputtering and vitriolic years later about that same poet but also about anyone who said he’d harmed them. That I had just been diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening form of immunodeficiency. That I had thyrotoxicosis. That I had cancer. That my marriage was close to ending and in a scary place. That I ran. That I had nowhere to go. That I had a nervous breakdown. That leaving poetry was the only way I could save myself, so that’s what I did.

Yeah, I didn’t tell someone I’d only met in person once for a few minutes and barely knew at all any of that, just as I kept most of that information from everyone I did know as I tried to sort through the detrital state my life was in.

This is part of the problem with poets and poetry: The way people feel like they can make demands on the poets whose work they even superficially engage with. The way their parasocial relationships with poets make them feel like they know those poets, like those poets owe them something, like there’s intimacy there that doesn’t exist, like it gives them the right, even ten years on, to verbally attack a poet they’ve concocted a relationship with. The way parasocial relationships tend to be directed at female-bodied poets. The way female-bodied poets have to endure this kind of dynamic on top of trying to do the work of writing. The way social spaces become especially unsafe for female-bodied poets because of dynamics like this.

This is not about you, Kansas City poet. I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s not.

My Accounts

It’s not easy to write about some of the situations I’ve encountered in poetry. I do it because most people don’t talk about their experiences. Certain things happen and happen again and happen again without anyone knowing what’s happening or that it could happen to them. Or something similar has happened to them, and they feel alone in that experience, unnecessarily so because they are not, in fact, alone. Silence just makes them feel that way.

I support poets and poetry and presses of all kinds, including small presses. I will also continue to advocate for myself and my work. Part of that means speaking out when necessary about problematic situations and encounters. I hope my accounts will help others navigate their own situations and know they aren’t alone if something similar happens to them.

Frictions

I’m thinking about the kinds of frictions marginalized folks experience in the literary community, namely when participating or attempting to participate in things like events, readings, residencies, and literary programs. It occurs to me that things other folks might miss or not understand or not be able to “see” can be experienced very differently by those in marginalized groups and can make spaces unwelcoming, othering, invalidating, and even hostile.

One example from my recent personal experience is the trans erasure associated with someone dropping the letter “T” from the acronym LGBTQ+ and instead saying “LGBQ.” That act changed the way I see the university where I planned to study writing and creative writing at the graduate level because the person who dropped the “T” is affiliated with the institution. Along with other frictions I’ve experienced, I no longer feel welcome at that school. Someone else might not notice an omission like that, or they may think it’s no big deal, but as someone who’s queer, that erasure is both obvious and painful.

I’m interested in the kinds of frictions others have experienced and the disproportionate ways frictions tend to aggregate, not only within one type of marginalization but across various forms of marginalization.

Hope Hall

Now, Hope Hall is an empty and quiet place, one where footsteps echo down tunneling hallways. Bob McDonald, who once stayed in an open barrack on the campus, said “the noise level was huge” when patients were “warehoused” in the mental health ward, back in the 1980s and before. Their cries reverberated throughout the building, he said, and patients pounded on their doors. Some had only an eyeball-sized peephole to the outside world.

And more important, perhaps—the patients had little or no treatment for their illnesses. They were the castaways from generations that didn’t understand them. They were locked up and kept out of sight.

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From a story about Central State Hospital / Griffin Memorial Hospital, where my mother worked for thirty-five years. We need to seriously evaluate where mental-health care is headed under the July 24 executive order. It’s headed back, not forward. Back to the days of warehousing human beings like sacks of grain. Story link in comments.

Averse Wind

We have been carefully guarded by kind and zealous instructors from every averse wind of thought and every taint of evil to be met in a world of action just beyond us. Now our hands are unclasped; sorrowfully we separate to go our different ways, to live the lives to which we shall be called, no longer as a class, but as individuals. — Merry Mignon Thonton

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From my mother’s high-school valedictory speech given in Headrick, Oklahoma, in 1950, when she was sixteen years old

Glurb

Welcome to this episode of My Stomach Hates Me. I’ve eaten nothing, taken no supplements, done absolutely nothing at all today other than breathe and walk and sit and put pants on, but stomach here has decided to glurb around inside me like the noisy, mischievous little monster with smelly feet in the children’s book Adopt a Glurb.

Adopt this Glurb: my stomach. Trade me for one of y’all’s. Any takers? Any givers? Anyone? Anyone?

Don’t miss out on this chance to have your very own Glurb.

Meanwhile, my husband is in the kitchen eating more of the rancid meat from the other day, and his stomach couldn’t care less. His reasoning? It’s expensive, and he doesn’t want to waste it.

Maybe he’ll trade me. This seems like one of those for better or worse situations: worse being my stomach, better being his.

Cough-Vomiting

Have you ever tried to swallow a pill but you have to cough suddenly at the same time and you end up choking on the pill and the water and then sort of cough-vomiting all over your new refrigerator and then you get a bronchial cough for the rest of the night that feels like aspiration pneumonia setting in but you think it’s just irritation from all the choking and cough-vomiting so you drink a bunch of zero sugar soda that the new refrigerator is keeping really cold oh so cold but it’s not helping with the cough so now you’re just wired and tired and mad at everything, especially your poems and somehow also the refrigerator, which didn’t even do anything? Me, neither.

Ancestry

I just renewed my Ancestry subscription, and the first new piece of information about my father and his brother is that they performed in blackface in a show called the “Red Shirt Minstrel” in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, November 12, 1946, directed by Maybelle Conger. There are photos. There is a list of “character” names that includes some of my father’s favorite racial slurs. He would have been seventeen years old. He and his brother are listed as “Gentlemen of the Chorus.” I am screaming. I can’t stop screaming. He is in the photos. I shared a fraction of the image in the comments. I couldn’t bear to share the actual photos of the event.

Angles

A poet asked to see my manuscript Crude after praising my writing and telling me I should write a whole collection about my family history. (That’s exactly what Crude is.) After I sent it to them, they asked me if I wanted feedback on the collection. I told them I did not.

But they couldn’t resist giving me feedback they knew I didn’t want. Today, I received an email with the subject line felt like I had to give SOME kind of a response. They led by saying they were almost sorry they asked to read Crude. They then infantalized me using an image from the collection, characterizing me as a little girl who’s always ready for a fight, suggested I rewrite the collection as poetry alternating with prose, said I should add a poem about my father’s death, provided instruction about where to put that poem in the collection, and, as a capper, shared a poem they wrote based on my life and experience, titled “Oklahoma Crude,” I guess to show me how it’s done, since I apparently don’t know how it’s done.

Some of you really don’t see what you’re doing, do you? How you’re coming across? What impulses you can’t contain and how much you’re reacting to your own anima, not the women and female-bodied folks around you, who you confuse for that anima. You really think we’re just super upset out of nowhere all the time for no discernible reason, which is proof we are like children, not adults, not fully grown women or female-bodied humans. To you who see us this way, we are, as this poet said in their email, Silvia Plath [sic] drowning in Lake Texhoma [sic]. *

No we aren’t. We aren’t any of that. I’m here as a witness and as a testament to the fact that you have us all wrong and always have and always will. As long as there is past and future, you will have gotten and will continue to get us wrong.

We deal with this shit from you all the time. All the freaking time. We are tired. I am tired.

So that’s the other part of how my day is going. The first part is the extermination order directed at those who are unhoused, have mental-health issues, and have substance-abuse issues. I mean the executive order. My bad. Incarcination and institutionalization aren’t extermination. At least not yet.

Here’s the thing: You don’t get to angle to move a conversation from a public to a private space using the false pretense of wanting to read my poetry collection, use that privacy to say things that are inappropriate, then claim that private space is privileged and protected and that what you say within it can’t be called out or shared. That’s not how things work. You certainly don’t get to frame me as doing something even worse to you than what you did to me or pressure me to remove your name from my assessment and commentary about what you did. And I didn’t share what you did with friends. I shared it with our mutual writing and poetry community because it’s important for people to know what men like you are doing within that community. They can make up their own minds about you, as I have.

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* It’s Sylvia and Texoma.

The July 24 Executive Order

From the ACLU. This is appalling. Link in comments: President Trump signed an executive order yesterday directing states to criminalize unhoused people and institutionalize people with mental health disabilities and substance use disorder.

The order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets,” directs the Justice Department to expand indefinite forced treatment for people with mental health disabilities or substance use disorder, and those living on the street who “cannot care for themselves.” The order also purports to eliminate federal funding for evidence-based programs, like harm reduction and housing first, that save lives, and directs federal funds toward cities and states that criminalize substance use disorder, punish people for sleeping outdoors, or enforce other laws targeting unhoused people.

The order also calls for sweeping federal data collection on unhoused people and those with mental health disabilities, raising serious concerns about surveillance, privacy, and how such data could be used to justify further criminalization. Instead of funding services or support, the administration is prioritizing profiling and control.

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Headlines about the executive order and the name of the order itself are misleading. It’s going after those with mental-health issues AND those who are unhoused, not just those who are unhoused and also have mental-health issues. Both scenarios are noxious, but the latter is even more noxious. The EO encourages the involuntary commitment of “individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public” and does not specify a time frame for such commitment, only that it be “appropriate periods of time.” It also provides funds for state and local governments to implement this plan, meaning round up folks with mental-health issues. All of this should terrify you, enrage you, and be distilled as outrage that, when intersected with love, allows you to act.

The EO also requires those receiving funding to “share such data with law enforcement authorities in circumstances permitted by law and to use the collected health data to provide appropriate medical care to individuals with mental health diagnoses.” In other words, a registry of those with mental-health issues that must be created at the local and state level and shared with the federal government.

This is a criminal state criminalizing those harmed by the criminal state.

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The executive order applies in part to those with mental-health issues who are deemed unable to care for themselves. You want to know one of the things that makes folks with mental-health issues unable to care for themselves? Overmedication, especially with high-dose neuroleptics or polypharmacology that leaves folks living inside clouded, plodding bodies and minds.

This approach to treatment is exactly what the EO will reward local and state entities for foisting on people with lived mental-health experience. It will create a cycle that justifies continued institutionalization for the rest of people’s lives. This kind of overmedication is sometimes called chemical restraint. It’s basically moving the architecture of control and coercion inside the patient rather than having it surround the patient within a facility.

This EO wants both: chemical control and coercion, as well as external control and coercion. Look who will benefit from this dual approach. It’s not those living with mental-health issues. It’s not their families. It’s not their loved ones. It’s not our communities. It’s not our institutions. It’s not our arts. It’s not our places of worship. It’s not our spiritual centers.

It’s business, big business. We are what’s being manipulated, destroyed, within big business. And, oddly, within a government that’s getting bigger and bigger under this newfangled Republican rule. Police states are always big. They have to be.