Notabilia

The Others

The last lines of Linda Gregg’s poem “The Girl I Call Alma” read:

              Tell me we are one
              and that it’s the others who scar me,
              not you.

But the first edition of the book, which I have, has a typo. Those lines read:

              Tell me we are one
              and that it’s the others who scare me,
              not you.

For years, I thought the poem with the typo was the correct version. It resonates with me because of my trauma history. Being scared. Being scared. And wanting the person who’s scaring me not to be the person who’s scaring me. Father, mother, like the parents in Sharon Olds’ poem “Satan Says.” Like that. And more. And others. And this always-fear like the fear Hannah Gadsby talks about, only it’s not just a fear of rooms full of men. It’s people. People do such harm. They are terrifying. Maybe Jon’s right. Maybe I shouldn’t write poetry because poetry puts me in the world, and that’s hard for him because it’s hard for me. And he doesn’t like it. And I’m not scared of him, at least there’s that. But I’d rather face my fears than hide from the world even if the latter makes him happier or “us” happier, as he says.

Scare. Scar. I’d rather be scared than scarred. Both work. Both versions of the poem work. I’m probably scared and scarred. At least I no longer think I’m a monster or the devil, both of which I was pretty certain of a couple of years ago. Because I am of my father. Of him. Of that. I was always his. And he was a monster, a devil.

On Artaud’s time in a mental institution in the occupied zone during the Second World War:

To make matters worse, Ville-Évrard was in the occupied zone, which meant that the patients had insufficient rations. Stephen Barber points out that “in each of the final two years of Nazi Occupation, nearly half of the asylum’s inmates died” from starvation and related complications. Sylvère Lotringer explains that more generally that there were not many other treatments available at the time, and no psychiatric pharmaceuticals available so psychiatrists simply let their patients waste away in overpopulated psychiatric units. The incurable ones were referred to as “asylum rot.“

—

I could have been asylum rot if I’d lived in a different era. I could become asylum rot if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets his way with his health camps.

Mary Ruefle’s ‘Lapland’

Mary Ruefle created a powerful moment for the audience here in Tucson when she read at The Poetry Center last fall. I was there and will never forget what she did. She read her poem “Lapland,” which she wrote fifty years ago. Then she read an essay about how the word Lapland is not offensive, but now it is offensive to use the word Lapp to describe the people in Lapland. She ended her essay by saying that although the poem’s title is “Lapland” and it’s set in Lapland and the word Lapp appears twice, it’s not about Lapland. Then she uttered this sentence, which enveloped the room:

“And if you don’t understand that, then I would go so far as to say you don’t understand poetry.”

Then, in the tradition of several poets who’ve come before her, she read the entire poem again without comment. So that we would hear it. So that, with our hearts and minds adjusted, we could hear it or have the hope of hearing it.

It was powerful. It was incredible.

Click on the image below to experience Ruefle reading “Lapland,” then her essay, then “Lapland” again. The recording of the entire video is on the VOCA Audiovisual Archives. I’m just sharing the section that contains “Lapland” so you can have the experience attendees had that night at Ruefle’s reading.

Earth Dream

We’re heading back to Tucson in the morning. We’re just watching the day’s eyes close slowly here in Southern Utah. We’ll leave when the world wakes tomorrow.

Does Earth dream, too? Of course it doesn’t, but I hope it does. I want Earth to have a lucid dream about its own beauty and wake startled into itself the way we feel when we realize we’re more beautiful than we think we are.

Who’s that whistling down the street? A whistle is a bell and a bell is an angel.

Angel of the sandstone. Angel of the desert. Angel of this dry land we curse and pray to and live in and die for.

Angel of sage. Angel of globemallow. Angel of creosote. Of saltbrush and buckwheat and prickly pear and rabbitbrush.

Angel of the bell, of the child’s whistling mouth, of who the child is, where he came from, and where he’s going.

Cloud angel in the sky tatted like a mourner’s black lace.

Laccoloith angel who I’ve seen burn red as fire.

Farm angel with its sweet cows and shy horses.

Illumination angel steadying a light above a herd of cloned white bulls who shine like stars.

Goodnight, Toquerville. Sweet dreams. See you tomorrow, Tucson.

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.

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.

Stalled

Jon is on his way to Iowa. I’m watching traffic along Highway 17 from my front window. The gothic farmhouse painted a beige bordering on butter yellow depending on the light makes me think about Walla Walla and all the old homes there, mansions in their day. I miss loess soils and Horse Heaven Hills and The Three Sisters and the lone alpaca who lived on Electric Avenue and Mill Creek and the closest crossroad to the home we rented when we first moved there: Stahl. That’s Jon’s mother’s maiden name.

Then my thinking stops. My mind hangs on the word Stahl, which in German means steel. Family of steel, of armor, of pounding the table until everyone shuts up, of long days and short conversations, of bending life like metal to their will.

But also of stall, a small compartment or enclosure from which an animal can’t escape.

Also an impediment or a stoppage because of an overload. A lack of progress where there was once progress. A deliberate way of speaking that buys time by being vague. A delay. A diversion.

Stalled life. Stalled death. A stalled family in a rural town that stalled years ago before or maybe because industrial plants moved in with their boxcars, silos, cranes, ladders, oversized pipes, midair walkways, pole-mounted alarms, and smokestacks puffing nitrogen and sulfur dioxide into the air inside billowing clouds—all of it larger than human scale, larger than the family farming that came before, larger than a faithful community, larger than a downgraded family.

I’ve learned to interpret my body and to know when I’ve reached the limit of what it can hold at any given time. The word Stahl was that limit this morning, so I turned to language as my mind stalled. It’s not that I don’t want to say more about Walla Walla, about my husband’s family, or about that little house near Stahl that we shared. This just isn’t the day.

The Skeleton

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

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

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

The Dead

I’ve conversed with the dead for most of my life. It started consciously when I first played Christoph Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits for Flute and Piano. I was in conversation with Gluck, my flute, the pianist, the spirits, ancient myths and archetypes, and my father, who had just died.

You could say I was haunted. That’s far better than being hunted, which is often what I was when my father and his friends were alive. Just one added vowel, with its open ah indistinguishable from awe, made all the difference. Haunted. Haunted. Haunted.

I no longer had to live inside the territory known as hunted, which was piss-marked at each corner with words like blunted, grunted, shunted, and fronted.

I will always give thanks to the dead for allowing me to fully live. The dead composers, the dead musicians, the dead artists, the dead poets, the dead weavers, the dead spirits, the dead mythical figures who never actually die, the dead archetypes who are alive in all of us, and the father who died an untimely death just as his abuse was moving from covert to overt because his daughter’s puberty triggered something inside him that was even darker than the dark he was before.

Soon

I want to write, but my dog, Lexi, is on my lap. Her head is where I rest my right arm when I type. She had a hard night. Wind-driven rain pelted the windows on the north side of our house, things were blowing all over the place outside, a roof vent was squeaking, and something was making a sound like water hitting an empty metal bucket one drop at a time. Lexi started shaking and licking my face in the middle of the night, even though this type of storm isn’t new to her. I finally got her calmed down. She’s tired today and still somewhat concerned about all this wind, which makes our home howl periodically as if it’s haunted. I don’t have the heart to move her, but as long as I’m pinned in, I can’t write. My body is too restricted.

I will say this: The laccolith is beautiful today dusted in fresh snow and capped by clouds.

Soon, I’ll move Lexi. Soon.