Notabilia

Free Poem Fodder

Before the churn of factories and the tang of coal smoke came to dominate modern life during and after the Industrial Revolution, the smells of daily life were intensely organic, shaped by proximity to animals, bodies, plants, and decay. Urban and rural environments offered distinct olfactory experiences, but both were pungent, earthy, and changed with the seasons.

Once industrialization and modern sanitation systems had taken hold in the industrialized world by the mid-1800s (following a transformation that lasted about a century), the smells of waste, sewage, manure, and other organic materials were significantly less common, even in rural areas. Changes in agriculture, the decline of small cottage industries, and advances in chemistry also pushed scents away from earthy and toward synthetic. But understanding these historical odors offers a visceral glimpse into how people once experienced the world — as they say, “the nose knows.”

A Birdless Island

My husband says the use of AI is inevitable. He tells me he uses it all day at work. It’s built into coding platforms now. It’s getting really smart really fast, he says. It can figure out context even when no context is provided.

It’s a requirement for software developers to use it. They’re all using it. Prompt engineering, he calls it.

But he’s using it as someone who knows how to think, not as someone who’s never learned to think, I say. What about those who never learn to form an argument, do their own research, make their own discoveries and assertions?

He doesn’t seem concerned. I worry that I’m losing him, that we’re shifting like tectonic plates only faster: me into the organic and him into the artificial.

He tells me to use AI, to give it a try. Have it write a poem for you, he says. You’d be surprised what it can come up with.

He doesn’t understand. I don’t care what AI can come up with where creativity and expression are concerned. I care what I come up with, what moves through me and what I’m moving through.

We grind past one another as we continue in our respective directions. I spend the rest of the day in bed alone, like a birdless island in a forgotten past.

A Birdless Island

My husband says the use of AI is inevitable. He tells me he uses it all day at work. It’s built into coding platforms now. It’s getting really smart really fast, he says. It can figure out context even when no context is provided.

It’s a requirement for software developers to use it. They’re all using it. Prompt engineering, he calls it.

But he’s using it as someone who knows how to think, not as someone who’s never learned to think, I say. What about those who never learn to form an argument, do their own research, make their own discoveries and assertions?

He doesn’t seem concerned. I worry that I’m losing him, that we’re shifting like tectonic plates only faster: me into the organic and him into the artificial.

He tells me to use AI, to give it a try. Have it write a poem for you, he says. You’d be surprised what it can come up with.

He doesn’t understand. I don’t care what AI can come up with where creativity and expression are concerned. I care what I come up with, what moves through me and what I’m moving through.

We grind past one another as we continue in our respective directions. I spend the rest of the day in bed alone, like a birdless island in a forgotten past.

Intergenerational

Family trauma is passed down genetically and epigenetically, through family stories and family preoccupations, through family experiences, through details like tones and inflections and mannerisms, through what’s focused on and what’s omitted, through place and what place means and has meant to the family, through hand-me-down memories, through objects and their cultural contexts—what they are and what they represent. And more.

Trauma isn’t the only thing passed down in these ways. Beliefs, values, biases, violences, and more move from one generation to another in this manner. We are haunted. The ghosts are inside us. The shadows, as Jung would say. Long shadows. Dark shadows. Shadows inside of shadows. But also light. Light, too.

We are intergenerational beings. Our becoming grows out of pasts we never lived but that we know, ones that lie beyond language and personal memory. We feel this. We struggle to understand it. We can lose ourselves to and in it. This is eternity, the feeling of eternity, of ongoingness, of neverendingness. Our neverending family and what it’s experienced, what it’s done. The hand we raise that is the father’s hand, the grandfather’s hand, the great grandfather’s hand. What we do. How we move. The who what where when why of us. What we’re from. What we’re for.

And what we’re against, up against, not only now but in those layered pasts. What we want and need to break free from. Those histories that riddle us like lead ammunition that can kill us quickly and also kill us slowly. Those wounds. Those poisons.

Deep Clean

It’s been rainy and dark here for days, and I love it, but I always find myself feeling low in this kind of weather, which is pretty much how I felt one-hundred percent of the time when I lived in Seattle. To get motivated today, I had to come up with a project that would raise my dopamine levels enough to make getting out of bed worth it.

The first thing I tried was organizing all the nuts we just bought from Costco in large mason jars. That was exciting and all, but I needed something bigger, something more substantial. So I removed everything—including the furniture—from my writing and weaving room, did a deep clean of the carpet and walls, and placed the furniture back in the room in a different configuration, one I’m really excited about.

And because that still wasn’t quite enough, I organized all my books by subject, then arranged them by the author’s last name. This was thrilling. THRILLING. I’ve always arranged my books by height, which is only a little less ridiculous than sorting them by color. The particular part of me, let’s call her Particular Dana, likes the orderliness of books arranged from tallest to shortest or, in special situations, from shortest to tallest, but it was getting really hard to find what I was looking for. Turns out, I have duplicate copies of several poetry collections for this very reason. I’ve known my system was a failure for a long time, but I’m a creature of habit, and this undertaking seemed like too much work and too much change all at once—a combination that could lead to overwhelm, as the pop-psychology folks say.

I’m digging my books this way. Each row looks a bit like a cityscape, which is as close to a city as I’ll get these days. Plus, my two desks are now back to back and floating in the middle of the room. One side is for writing, and the other side is for weaving. Both desks can be raised or lowered, which is also thrilling.

I am winning this dreary day. Winning against whom? Myself. Against myself, namely the part of me that wanted to stay in bed and not even look across the creek to marvel at all the puffafuff clouds that have pulled off the biggest magic trick ever, which is making the world’s largest laccolith disappear entirely.

More Than Noise

Stephan Torre says that, for him … writing comes when it must, when it’s too hard to hold in the joy or grief without blurting it out. I love that way of approaching poetry, but I personally don’t wait until the point of bursting. I try to do the work every day of cultivating making music out of noise, as Kim Addonizio writes in her poem “Therapy.”

Gregory Orr talks about something similar, which is that the act of writing a poem gives the poet more control than they had at the time of the traumatic event they’re writing about, which in itself is empowering and healing.

And then there’s all this beauty intrinsic to poetry, which the poet uses to shape the experience and move it into a different part of the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allowing us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

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.