My Gorgeous Somewhere

On Hélène Cixous

The first and most important things that strike me about Hélène Cixous’ theory, and her life, are that both are positioned at a time when the very nature of writing and speech, and the relationship between the two, were being fundamentally questioned by some of the foremost scholars of her/our time. Cixous’ work is directly related to philosophers such as Derrida, who argued that neither speech nor writing can lead us to any fundamental truths, since both are caught between the signifier, the word, and the signified, the meaning.

It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed.

What Cixous was working, writing and theorizing against, then, was a concept as old as the Western world—what Derrida framed as logocentrism, which relied on dichotomies such as mind and matter, light and darkness, presence and absence, and nature and culture. This opposition resonates with me in terms of my own writing, in which—in line with many feminist writers and theoreticians—I hope to overtly and covertly challenge binary oppositions, including self and other, male and female, sentient and nonsentient, dominant and submissive.

Cixous, however, manages to sidestep one of the pitfalls many feminists (and other champions of a non-oppositional way of thinking about relationships between human beings and among and within elements throughout the world) inadvertently stumble into, which is to favor or articulate only one “side” of the story: that of the oppressed or shunned group. Instead, she “ … did not simply privilege the ‘female’ half of an existing binary opposition between ‘male’ and ‘female’ … she questioned the very adequacy of an either/or logics to name the complexity of cultural realities .”*

The result, of course, is that some have in turn questioned or shunned Cixous’ ideas. Those who frame the world in terms of binary oppositions might find it confusing or frustrating to interpret or confront thoughts, speech, writing and theories that don’t conform to such dichotomies. In contrast, I argue that Cixous’ approach could serve as a model for all poets. (It’s absolutely a model for my own poetry.)

For what is poetry if not a lifting of the veil of culture, even if only for a few moments—an opportunity to delay categorization, as cognitive theorist Reuven Tsur would argue, in a world that is increasingly (at least in the West) prodding us to rapidly categorize our surroundings, experiences and interactions? As if the experience of the experience weren’t enough—the one we are currently engaged with at any given time—we are seduced into gazing out as if along a rural Kansan horizon at the next experience, and the next, and the next: All of them lined up before us like diary cows waiting to have their teats automatically milked, those heavy udders of potential experiences ready to burst if we don’t tend to them immediately.

It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed. When we can see the world as this or that, that or this—or being the operative word in each case—we don’t have to use much cognitive (and hence emotional) space to relate to that world, its objects or its inhabitants at any given moment. This frees up even more time to rapidly categorize new experiences and move on to the next (and the next), as if living as a sentient being were simply a matter of peeling out at 60 miles per hour from one drive-through window to another.

Furthermore, overturning dichotomies momentarily only to shift the power (in theory more so than in reality) from one group to another or to reassign blame from the latter, shunned group to the former, desirable one—that adhesive rat trap so many well-meaning theorists and activists fall into—is merely a matter of executing awkward acrobatics on a stage, as opposed to pulling down the props, dismantling the stage, removing the exhausted, underpaid aerialists and then taking a seat in the audience to see what’s left occupying the now-empty space.

Creating empty space in place of dualities and other cultural and cognitive assumptions—space the mind can inhabit and move through unhindered and uninhibited—is the job of any good theorist, any good thinker/feeler.

And hence it’s the job of any good poet, or at least any good poem, or at least any poem I personally would actively take the time to seek out and read and sit with and return to. For if poetry won’t help us resist fast, easy categorization of this tremendously complicated world we live in and instead encourage us to slow down, remove our blinders, snap out of our cultural trances and realize all that we can never realize, it’s hard to say what, if anything, will do the trick.

—

* From The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by William E. Cain, et al.

American Sentences

Lying side by side, we are a Rorschach that won’t give up its secrets.

I ate the apple then picked out the seeds and swallowed them one by one.

The pomegranate had been sliced open; all I had to do was eat.

My dreams as heavy as oil; I wake up trying to remove the filth.

I sleep until ten: All the birds have stopped singing; sky full of pockets.

Seeds lay scattered on the sidewalk: a language we can read with our hands.

Light, Capture and Release

Sometimes our lives don’t turn out the way we would like. Sometimes we imagine futures that never materialize. We keep trying to have those futures, but even though we spend time imagining ourselves inside them—happy and confident and secure—they never appear and allow us to be who we want to be or have what we think we deserve.

My childhood is the one thing I don’t clean up when I think about it.

So we become revisionists. We look at the past and try to make it into something close to what we want. We let nostalgia kick in and do its tricky work of glazing over details until nothing hard is left in our memories and our experience of our lives has been worn as smooth as a worry stone.

I had worry stones as a child and developed an almost unnatural dependence on them, carrying several in my pocket at once and running my thumb over the hollow in the middle every time I was afraid, lonely or nervous.

My childhood is the one thing I don’t clean up when I think about it. Recently I was asked to share a baby picture of myself for a “fun” game of guess-which-adult-the-baby-picture-belongs-to. It was difficult for me to open the album containing photos of me as a child. Most of them showed me in close proximity to an ashtray or a glass of vodka. Those certainly wouldn’t do. I finally found one of me as a toddler wearing an adult’s baseball cap. I looked happy. Children are too simple and hopeful not to be happy despite the realities of their lives—or at least to be optimistic, as if each moment carries bright promises on its back that glimmer like sequined wings, throwing light in all directions.

I’m sure the photocopy of my baby picture is in the trash now, the silly game of match-the-adult-to-the-baby-photo long over. Seems appropriate. If only it were that easy to drag all my childhood memories to the trash, like computer files I no longer needed. If only I could overwrite that block of memory with something new, or even leave the space blank until something, anything, worthy of being remembered came along.

American Sentences

Page twenty-eight of Ginberg’s “Howl” bears my bite mark, and I wonder why.

I mourn my lost camera because my friend Jacob is inside it.

When I catch my reflection at a strange angle, I see a stranger.

I mistyped angle as angel and for a moment felt watched over.

I like pizza more than chocolate: further proof I’m really a man.

I pray to gods I don’t believe in because I want to be friendly.

Because I want to be friendly, I pray to gods I don’t believe in.

I read a story that uses “pussy” a dozen times on one page.

The Erotic Bakery reeks of cigarettes and has few baked goods.

Hey, why don’t we thumb through life backwards so we can start with the sex ads?

My Little Poetry Pep Talk

The shit is hitting the fan. In my life, in my friends’ lives, in everyone’s lives—or so it seems. I’ve been thinking a lot, more so than usual, about poetry the past few weeks. And by that I mean I have been dreaming about it, since I was already thinking about it nearly every waking moment.

If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.

What I think is this: We are all going through tough stuff. Every one of us. And poetry is more important to us than ever. We need it. Others need it. The gift economy is where it’s at when the other economy fails.

We are at war. I see us—every single committed poet—as being at war against silence, against sloth, against insult, against injury, against conventional thinking, against greed, against selfishness, against the turning away from self, against depersonalization, even against fear.

I see some poets turning away from poetry, out of necessity in some cases. But in any case, the turning away is an act of betrayal. I had a poet email me two days ago saying he had to stop focusing on poetry and start focusing on what would pay the bills. Yes, pay the bills. By all means. I am in the same boat, so I know where you are coming from. But don’t leave poetry behind in the process. Do not commit that betrayal because it is a betrayal of self and of the life you’ve given yourself over to as a poet.

I see poets leaving the ranks, and it makes me sad. Because of money, because of fear about poetry, or because of the perceived inability to write poetry. Because of any and every impulse in society that tells people poetry is not a worthwhile endeavor or that it is only a worthwhile endeavor by and for certain poets or through certain mechanisms of study.

Sam Hamill says, The way of poetry is a way of being alive. I believe that. Poetry makes us stronger. It changes us. It is our gift to ourselves and to each other. If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.

Yes, it is difficult to stick with poetry, to turn to poetry when our world and our lives are a mess. But that is the trick. That is precisely the trick: to create poetry in the midst of the mess. To create poetry, you must enter the mess. Poets enter the mess of the world in ways most can’t or won’t. We have to do that work, and report back: to articulate the confusion and frustration inside the poem. To let the mess be the poem. But in a way that conveys, that communicates. For, as Hamill also says, The possibility of the poem exists in communication.

We must be here for the poems, and in doing so, be here for one another. This is how we talk. This is how we talk to each other about what matters.

I’ve been trying to ask myself every day when I wake up: How can I use poetry today to change my life and the lives of others. That is how I am entering the mess and staying deep inside the mess.

An American Sentence for Troy Davis

What’s injected into one person is injected into us all.

This is my American Sentence for Troy Davis. Rethabile has asked that we write American Sentences today as a way of protesting Davis’ execution. Poetry most likely will not change what will happen to Troy, but it does allow us to keep from being silent about what’s going to happen to Troy. And, by extension, to us all.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. — Elie Wiesel

I have counted myself among the silent more often than I care to admit. — Dana Guthrie Martin

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.