When Sandra Cisneros spoke at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference yesterday, I felt like every poet and writer in the audience was being called to do our best and be our best as creators and as human beings. I felt a sense of purpose and responsibility, the way our country’s leaders used to make me feel when I listened to their most inspiring speeches. I haven’t felt that way in a long time, and I’ve never felt that way as a poet: encouraged to live and write thoughtfully, mindfully, with presence, and with clarity.
Notabilia
Doffered
Meanwhile, locals are sharing a hate flag—you know the one—in Facebook comments on a news story about someone here who’s trans, including one made by arranging four pride flags in a particular way. Tell me two poets misgendering Andrea Gibson over and over at a local literary event is no big deal, especially in this larger context. Tell me I need to be more forgiving. To forget. To get over it, all of it. To at least raise my concerns quietly, privately, and with decorum and grace. Tell me I’m the problem. Tell me.
Quiet never got anyone anywhere other than silenced, gone, or dead. What others say openly will never be a secret I carry. I’m done bouldering men’s shames. They won’t go with me to my grave. Hell, I won’t even have a grave. I’ll be the dust my life partner holds to the Southern Utah wind. I’ll be southwesterly then. You can sing a song to the four elements when the time comes. Right now, there’s work to be done. Do it with me or don’t. Draw scars on the face of the world if that’s your thrust. Make hate not peace if you must. Fulfill your flimsy purpose like a lace doily under a dusty candle in an abandoned cabin in some forgotten town. Be dimity. Go forth and doffer. Tell me again why I bother.
Jacks
Two years ago today, I came out of my medication-induced blackout at the inpatient psychiatric unit and began working on an elaborate origami project that involved making the Sydney Opera House with a theater and stage inside it. I used paper placemats and pages from a colorful book for this purpose. I was given a copy of the Book of Mormon by the staff, but I didn’t use its pages in my project. It sat in my room idle as I worked.
I wrote and performed rap songs with another patient named H— to the delight of other manic patients on the unit. Those with severe depression were not moved by our artistry. We were good at the rapping, and our antics provided a counterpoint to the aimlessness, the hall-wandering, and the five-minute interfaces with the psychiatrist each day in which he blamed us for having depression or bipolar.
I used a deck of cards to map out human networks that are responsible for abusing and trafficking others. The kings and jacks were big players in those networks, and they were also stand-ins for my father and his best friend. The networks were very organized and knew how to hide other cards, and themselves, as needed. My father’s name was Jack. He was a jack of all trades, even ones that weren’t legal.
I wrote short poems and made notes about my stay using a tiny pen that only sporadically worked. Pencils, Intermountain. Give patients on B-Ward pencils.
In my chart, the staff noted that I was well-behaved and posed no threat to anyone. I did throw paper at one point, down a long hall, overcome suddenly by how dehumanizing psychiatric care is. Nobody noted that in my chart, but one tech did scream, If you do that again … without completing the threat.
I declare today, September 10, the Day of Origami and Rapping forevermore. Long live folded paper and battled song.
Folding
This is the two-year anniversary of my stay at the local inpatient psychiatric hospital where the psychiatrist described me as being involved in sex trafficking, as if I was trafficking others as an adult as opposed to having been trafficked as a child. The psychiatrist also said my trauma had nothing to do with my mania, told me in so many words to be a better wife when I expressed my concerns to him about my husband’s behavior, refused to help me get services from the local organization that helps people who’ve survived sexual abuse, and wrote in my chart that I had a poor prognosis because I have no insight into having bipolar.
And he was supposed to be one of the better psychiatrists at that hospital.
This is also the day I briefly saw Utah poet laureate Lisa Bickmore and thought she was some kind of healing Earth goddess, which I still think is the case. When I’m manic, I see essences. Lisa is a lot more than a healing Earth goddess, but she also has the essence of a healing Earth goddess.
These are the final days of my hegira, the one I declared over before it was over. Over the next few days, I’ll be sitting with everything that happened two years ago in a process that’s like folding now and then together the way two ingredients are combined in baking. Not that I bake. I prefer folding time to folding things like whipped eggs and melted chocolate. When I need to eat something, I just eat it. I rarely mix it with something else.
Not About You
A poet from Kansas City berated me today after I posted about needing to evaluate whether to continue writing. The post made him angry. He said he’s still upset that I disappeared from poetry in 2015 after he’d been invested in me and my work. He felt I owed him an explanation for that decision and treated my post today as an affront to him, as if my leaving poetry would cause him more pain than it would cause me. As if my leaving poetry is a situation he’s at the center of.
I don’t know this man. I certainly didn’t owe him anything, including telling him that I left poetry because I was sexually assaulted by a poet who was working with me in the role of mentor. That it had happened on the way to my MFA and that it derailed my studies. That the poetry community was sputtering and vitriolic years later about that same poet but also about anyone who said he’d harmed them. That I had just been diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening form of immunodeficiency. That I had thyrotoxicosis. That I had cancer. That my marriage was close to ending and in a scary place. That I ran. That I had nowhere to go. That I had a nervous breakdown. That leaving poetry was the only way I could save myself, so that’s what I did.
Yeah, I didn’t tell someone I’d only met in person once for a few minutes and barely knew at all any of that, just as I kept most of that information from everyone I did know as I tried to sort through the detrital state my life was in.
This is part of the problem with poets and poetry: The way people feel like they can make demands on the poets whose work they even superficially engage with. The way their parasocial relationships with poets make them feel like they know those poets, like those poets owe them something, like there’s intimacy there that doesn’t exist, like it gives them the right, even ten years on, to verbally attack a poet they’ve concocted a relationship with. The way parasocial relationships tend to be directed at female-bodied poets. The way female-bodied poets have to endure this kind of dynamic on top of trying to do the work of writing. The way social spaces become especially unsafe for female-bodied poets because of dynamics like this.
This is not about you, Kansas City poet. I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s not.
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.
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.
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.
Ableist Culture, Go Fuck Yourself
Folks with mental-health issues are encouraged to create emergency plans for when things go wrong, but scant attention is given to wellness plans that prevent things from going wrong in the first place. To make matters worse, emergency plans are behavior-driven, when we should instead focus on the dozens of easily trackable biomarkers that indicate the presence or absence of metabolic/circadian homeostasis and that precede behavioral issues by days if not weeks.
Why don’t we do that? Because those with mental health issues are routinely dehumanized, discriminated against, abused, maligned, written off, and seen as incapable of attaining health, wellness, and happiness. The system doesn’t even try to help us be fully human and to live full, productive, creative, enriching lives.
We aren’t as far away from locked rooms, back wards, lobotomies, electric shock, insulin shock, and chemical lobotomies as we think. The medical establishment still treats us like that’s where we belong and that’s what we deserve. (And in the case of electroconvulsive therapy and chemical lobotomies, they’re still happening, just not as barbarically, one could argue.)
So when I resigned from my role at the University of Arizona and passed a vehicle on my way out with a bumper sticker that read Ask Me About My Lobotomy, I was understandably livid. That sticker encapsulates all the sanist* comments I heard while working at UA, from library customers being called meth heads and trash humans to the word crazy routinely being used to describe people and situations to the phrase homeless people being used with derision.
Fuck all of that. UA culture, go fuck yourself.
—
* Sanism is a subset of ableism, so these are more examples of the ableism I witnessed or that was directed at me while employed at UA.
Time to Eternity
We live in an ecotone, those of us here in Southwest Utah. An ecotone is the transition between two biological communities. Here, we have three: the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin, and the Mojave Desert. A triad, a trinity, that perfect number we arrange interiors to and pray to and dance the waltz to.
1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3.
Look around. Look up. You’re in an amazing place, a sacred place, the kind of place Wendell Berry talks about in his poem, “How to Be a Poet.” He writes:
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity.
Patience joins time to eternity. Be patient. I’ve been patient for more than fifty years—fifty going on eternity.
Good morning, all of you. Good morning, all of me. Time to wake up. Wake up to where you live, to who you are, to what you can do.
Dana Henry Martin 