Identity

On and Off the Page

What my last post is leading me to is the understanding that I matter, meaning my voice matters, my perspective matters, my experiences matter, and my identity matters. That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. Reading Andrea Gibson all day yesterday led me here, to a place where I can say That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. In my case, those are easy words to say but hard ones to believe.

What’s also true is that I have a new intersection to consider, one that will guide me as I continue to share my poetry. I want to find publishers who like my work and also want to support my being in poetry. I want my voice, perspective, experiences, and identity to matter to those publishers, not just the work that stems from those things. This is especially important as I try to find homes for my manuscripts.

Right now, I feel that level of support from several publishers, including Chiron Review, Meat for Tea (both the review and the press), Moon in the Rye Press, The Nomad, ONE ART, and Thimble Literary Magazine. Each feels like it’s saying why I write what I write matters, not just what I write. Given what I’ve come through in poetry and in life, that’s important to me.

I don’t want to publish with folks who dislike me or just tolerate me. Once they know a little bit about who I am, I want them to feel like it’s important to include me in poetry, on and off the page.

Dream Language

Dream language: Two who mirror can mirror each other, but when one moves behind the back of the other, the second loses their reflection and must recreate it from memory as vision. This is how we learn to worship the self as other when other always is and has been self.

Also from last night’s dreams: A retreat. Cloud decor giving way to wheat sculptures. A grotto. Hallways full of doors. My vision board torn down hastily as the retreat ended. A half-finished project detailing radio stations airing vulgarities that I wasn’t able to take with me. Retreat organizers grinding their words like spices as the life partner and I packed up. We’d overstayed our welcome. Cloud time was for us, not wheat time. They beamed at the incoming group while waving us away like flies. The landscape crew mumbled. They claimed they’d watered things they hadn’t watered. Nothing was real anyway. They’d seen it all before and would see it again. More incomers. More enameled hope, the ill-placed hope that keeps the nightmare alive. Our dog ran off. The organizers made us leave before we could find her.

What We Forget

Poems don’t hurt people. People hurt poems.

Half of what we accomplish is what we manage to not screw up.

We are all polycephalous.

We should all be less concerned with intentions and more concerned with behaviors and the effects of those behaviors.

We have everything to say to one another, but all we talk about is the weather.

Once you have entered into language, you have entered into bias.

What we need to identify in any text is what goes unsaid: What is the underlying assumption or presumption; what are we being sold, and why.

We forget what we love. We love what we forget.

As I grow older, it’s not my own appearance that I’m less concerned about, but that of my books.

I enjoy books with small print and large concepts.

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.

Unfathomable

I remember when 1 million seemed unfathomable—the number of zeros strung along after the 1, as well as what they signified, impossible for me to envision.

I remember people telling me things were supposed to be awkward during what they called my awkward years. I’m not so sure I ever grew out of my awkward years, although I am no longer gangly and my teeth managed to grow in straight.

I used to run away from everything by climbing up a tree or running along an overgrown path to one of many hiding places. It’s not so easy these days to run away.

As soon as I think I’m good at something, someone comes along and reminds me I am not, then tells me the reminding is for my own good.

They tell me I know what I want to say when I write, but that I don’t know how to say it. They tell me my writing is uneven, slightly wrecked. Of course that’s the case, since my writing reflects my life. How could it be any more together than I am? And what’s better: writing that is even and predictable, or writing with a pulse—albeit sometimes weak and irregular—writing that moves under its own control and in ways you, and I, could never anticipate?

For a time after my mother’s death I forgot how little I like people. I thought it was her I disliked and that her death had freed me from that feeling. Turns out it had not.

I went to the grocery store yesterday to have a cheese sandwich. I looked around as I ate it. I had no idea what anyone was doing or why they were doing it. Not one person in that store made any sense to me.

We are all wasting our lives in so many and varied ways.

Writing is just another way to waste time, but at least it allows me to keep a record of how I’ve wasted it. I will always know that yesterday I had a cheese sandwich and took a nap. I will always know the sadness I feel right now, even if one day I manage to move through and beyond it to something else—something that at this moment feels unfathomable and that I can’t yet see clearly.