Writing

Poems as Places

During the Southern Utah Book Festival, poets Paisley Rekdal, Danielle Dubrasky, and Simmons Buntin led the workshop “Real Locations, Imagined Selves,” whose focus was on defining a sense of place through words and documenting a place through poetry.

The conversation was much more far-reaching than expected. Poetry of place tends to focus on physical places, as in Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town or Wendell Berry’s poetry, which is closely tied to the specific farms he’s played in and worked on over the course of his life. Both Hugo and Berry’s approaches to place seem to be consistent with James Galvin’s notion of what a poet of place is, which is someone who situates himself in place in order to lose himself in it.

Rekdal discussed something similar to Galvin’s concept in the workshop, but she also talked about many other layers of writing about place—ones that augment and challenge the notion of place itself. She used the term palimpsest to describe places and our experiences of them, noting that places are layered in terms of their geographies, histories, uses, cultures, and more. Other layers include the ways in which places inform us psychologically, mentally, and politically.

The question implicit in this discussion is this: How can we begin to examine the layers of a place in order to more deeply know it, each other, and ourselves?

Partway through the workshop, an attendee said his body feels like a place, one that’s being politicized and treated like a territory. This was a powerful moment. The idea of the body as a place, one that can not only be inhabited by the self but also invaded, in a sense, by others, is disconcerting. When that type of invasion occurs in a physical space (someone’s community, their school, their place of worship, and so forth), body and space intersect, making both feel less safe. Here, we see layers of place building up and around the human body within the social, political, and physical elements of a place.

Rekdal says much of how place is defined is through bodies, and much of how bodies are being called into or excluded from a place is racial. She then discussed how the Chinese in the West could become white or reject becoming white depending on whether they wanted to be part of the United States. The idea she touched on is that, like places, race isn’t static. Bodies aren’t static. They’re all processes that are in flux and that meld into or layer over one another—and that sometimes collide with each other.

(I want to add that bodies are also excluded from places because of discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, age, national origin, and sex.)

Place is not just where you inhabit. It inhabits you, too, Rekdal said as the conversation began reaching toward the ineffable. I sometimes think about places as hauntings, she added.

She notes that we can be drawn to places we’ve never been before, perhaps because something inside us may be encoded to seek out a place and call it home. Or perhaps we seek out a place and immediately feel the atrocities and suffering that occurred there, such as at the Topaz Internment Camp Museum in Delta, Utah, where Rekdal gives tours as the director of the American West Center.

Whatever the reason, humans seem to have the capacity to carry a sense of place within us that’s larger than life and longer than the human lifecycle.

             Nothing natural but made
             in the beauty of this place. To create a home,
             we imported trees and water, we slashed
             and burned to excavate a state where nothing
             lived, nothing ruled us, and yet in all this nothing
             we were subject to the rules nothingness demande

Those lines are from Rekdal’s poem “Soil,” which appears in West: A Translation. She says places create relationships and help us develop empathy for each other. The forging of community from hardship is evident in the lines above and is part of the universal human experience.

The takeaway is that places can’t be places in any human way of understanding and experiencing them without our presence in them: the communities we build, the bonds we create within and because of place, and the ways in which we come to know place.

Wendell Berry says we’re losing our connection with place because our use of our places is greatly reduced from what it was in the past. Of course, he means literal places and a very specific type of past use of those places.

Perhaps Berry’s not imagining place as broadly as possible. As Buntin pointed out at the end of the workshop, imagination itself is a place. Imagine that. If what we imagine is a place, then the products of those imaginings, such as poems, are places. We really can create worlds out of words.

I wonder what you all think about where we are with regard to our relationships with places in any or all senses of the term? Is our understanding of places—like places themselves—a multidimensional process rather than a half-static relationship in which only human understanding changes, not the very idea of what constitutes a place?

Asked another way, are we as deeply connected with place as ever, even if we haven’t quite identified all our places as places: interior, exterior, past, present, analog, digital, elemental, philosophical, built, imagined, and so forth?

Ab-Normalizing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Kelly

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

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

—

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

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

The Time Capsule of My Body

I feel this sadness spreading across the time capsule of my body. My cells remember this sadness and pull toward it like iron beads to a magnet hovering above them a little too high for them to fly into the air but not high enough to keep them from vibrating against each other. I don’t mean any sadness. I mean this sadness. I mean how this dying connects with all the dying I’ve experienced.

I see the honey locust against a darkening sky. I see the laccolith darkening before everything else I see. I see the edge of the pasture where Curley, Friday, and Jet live. I see a hummingbird zipping up and over the house.

I hear the dishwasher busying itself in the kitchen. I hear the bulb in my desk lamp buzzing. I hear the cars on Highway 17. No, not the cars: the tires. I hear my tinnitus, especially in my right ear.

I smell mildew from the dish towel I just wiped my hands on. I smell my berry-flavored Eos lip balm. I smell my hairspray even though I didn’t use it today. I smell cloves from my aromatherapy kit.

I taste the olives I just made myself eat. I taste salt because I’m part salt. I taste whatever taste arsenic-laden Toquerville water is. I taste the skin on the inside of my mouth.

Correction: I feel the skin on the inside of my mouth. I feel my wet hair tightening into curls against my face. I feel the balls of my feet pressed against the windowsill. I feel the raised lettering on my keyboard.

I’m forgetting how to spell words like waist (waste?) and buzzing (bussing?) and sarong (which I didn’t even use in this post) and, in a minute here, tranquilizer (tranquelizer?). I’m forgetting words entirely, like laccolith (la- something) and desk lamp (light on table surface) and aromatherapy (smell healing).

This sadness feels like being shot with a horse tranquilizer. At least, that’s how I imagine it feels. I’ve never been shot with a horse tranquilizer, but I’ve been sedated for surgery, which quickly turned into sugary, just as the doctor who performed my surgery, Ryan Cooley, quickly became Dr. Floovr and remains Dr. Floovr to this day.

Language is leaving me. Dyslexia and working memory impediments are taking control of me in ways that aren’t fun or creative or surprising. I want to tell you about the sky now, how it’s the perfect ombre, about the bats fluttering above my street, about the honey locust and how it’s so dark that it looks like it’s gone beyond black. It’s the darkest maroon you’ll ever see. Something like that. I want to tell you something like that.

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.

Ben

Jon hasn’t left yet. At one point, he decided not to go home at all. At another point, he decided to move into the family home indefinitely, for months if needed. Finally, he decided to fly rather than drive and to limit his stay. He could have left last night, but he didn’t. He could have left early this morning, but he didn’t. He settled on leaving tomorrow and staying until he has to come back to Utah for his colonoscopy, the one that will reveal whether he has the same cancer as his brother.

Jon has an avoidant attachment style. That’s part of what’s causing him to vacillate. This attachment style is something he learned in his family. It’s a behavior that goes deeper than a coping skill. It’s a survival mechanism in a family where not everyone survives. What kills in his family are accidents, alcohol, bullets, and more than all the others (or alongside them), cancer. They live with a mutation that’s killing them. They don’t like to talk about it, any of it. Hence the suppression and silencing that lead to avoidance.

I can’t tell Jon what to do or point out that delaying his departure is a form of avoidance that could result in his not seeing his brother alive again. I can’t point out that he did the same thing when his mother died and when my mother died and that his avoidance kept us from seeing both our mothers alive one last time. I can only support him as he works through what he’s feeling and as I work through my own feelings about all of this: his brother, his family, their dynamics, their darkness, this dying, this loss, this death.

Nobody in Jon’s family called to tell him what was happening. The last time he spoke with his brother, which was just over a week ago, the chemo treatments were going well. His brother was optimistic. They planned on starting radiation soon. His edema was under control. He felt good. When Jon called yesterday, the extended family was in a hospital room in Iowa City. Some of them had driven from places as far away as Arizona and Tennessee. Jon’s brother was unresponsive in a bed. He was extremely thin. His hair was gone. Jon knows because his father put him on a video call with everyone in the room.

Jon’s father must have called the rest of the family days ago because those who lived at great distances had time to pack their things and make the multi-day journey across the country to be in that hospital room. Jon only found out about what had transpired because he tried to call his brother and got no answer, so he called his father. His father said, “Now’s the time to come if you’re coming,” as if Jon had let the family down somehow, as if he should have been omniscient and known what was happening without anyone telling him what was happening.

Ben. Jon’s brother is named Ben. He may or may not be alive as I write this. But his name is Ben either way. And Jon is flying home to see him tomorrow either way.

Deeded

Ben has a deeded body. He signed it over to the University of Iowa the way his mother signed hers over before she died ten years ago. He will be an anatomical gift, his parts used for teaching and research. I assume this includes his organs, teeth, bones, muscle, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, and lymph.

When he dies, his body will be examined to make sure it’s usable. If not, the family will have to bury him, which they can’t afford to do. If his body is viable, it will be transported to the university, where it will be studied for eighteen months. Whatever’s left will then be cremated and interred in the cemetery the university uses, the same one where his mother’s cremains were interred.

His mother was almost rejected from the program after her death because her edema and her tumors—which had made her skin as thick, lumpy, and heavy as cottage cheese in addition to invading her other organs—pushed her above the weight limit between the time she was accepted into the program and her death two weeks later. The university made an exception and took her body anyway. They’d used her in a case study and given her false hope about the potential for genetic therapy to halt her cancer’s progress. I guess they felt an obligation to her and the family after her death.

Jon and I arrived just after two transporters came to the family home to take Jon’s mother’s body to the university. We’d missed her death by a couple of hours. We stood vigil as the transporters maneuvered the gurney from the home to the hearse. They inadvertently rammed her right foot into the screen door as they navigated the doorway. One of them said, Oh, I hit her foot! I guess it doesn’t matter now. They both laughed until they saw us standing there.

It was dark. Everyone was tired, including the transporters, who had to drive all the way to Clinton from Iowa City and back again that night. The rest of the family was out behind the house staying as far away from what was happening as possible. They stood in a big circle smoking, drinking, and telling stories in their small-town Iowa accents with sentences that invariably ended with a tinny and that. Ben was there. He’d been avoiding his mother ever since her diagnosis but resurfaced the day of her death. His father probably told him, Now’s the time to come home if you’re coming, just as he did with Jon yesterday.

When asked why he’d been absent for weeks and had avoided everyone’s calls, Ben said there wasn’t anything to do. Nothing was going to change the fact that she was dying, he said, adding, I didn’t want to hear any more hopeful stories about how she might live.

I was one of the people telling those hopeful stories. I knew genetic therapy had promise. I wanted it to work. We all did. All but Ben, who was hopeless.

Ben’s mother had a deeded body. Now Ben has a deeded body. There’s no hope. No talk of hope. Ben wanted it that way with his mother and wants it that way for himself. Still, I see him as a light moving up and into a tree, where it spreads like Carl Jung’s illustration in The Red Book. I see it growing larger and larger but fainter and fainter as it expands, as it disperses, as the there of him joins the everywhere of everywhere.

The body was never a body, not really. Our bodies were never bodies. They’re Fabergé eggs that crack when they need to so the light can escape.

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.

It was not the porcupine’s skeleton. The ribs were much too large, and from one angle, I was able to see that it was a deer who was almost entirely stripped clean save for the head.

I ended up turning around in the cemetery, where I met three cows: Curly, Friday, and Jet. I stopped to say hi. They all came over to say hi back. Jet is the only one who urinated while walking toward me. It was surprising how much Jet could urinate. Jet and Friday appear to be very close. They nuzzle their heads and lie side by side in their grassy pasture. They live with a chicken. The chicken wasn’t interested in interacting with me. I don’t even know their name.

I don’t think this is the real cemetery for Toquerville. There must be another one for the pioneers, like the one over in Silver Reef. This is a more modern cemetery. The dead in it are barely dead.

Last year, a neighbor was upset that land near the cemetery is being developed. I don’t want people in their houses looking at me when I’m dead, she said. She went door to door asking folks to sign a petition to stop the development. Now, the bypass road will be back that way, too, not just houses. Things like that are going to happen, either now or after we’re dead.

If I planned on being buried, I wouldn’t really care who was looking at me from their homes or cars. I suspect something else was going on for that neighbor: something about safety, the fear of being watched without consent, something about trauma.

My husband was great this morning when I told him I needed to drive over and see if the skeleton belonged to the porcupine. He told me to watch for cars and be safe. If it’s the porcupine’s, we’ll have to go back and retrieve it after you get off work so we can relocate it, I said. I know, he said. I’ll clean out the car.

I’m glad he understands me and will

ife and the dead and bones and burials and honor and how it all somehow relates to healing.

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.