On Reading: Stag's Leap, part two

The second section, "Winter," opens with a poem I keep rereading "Not Going to Him". I'm trying to pinpoint what I find so compelling about this one. Yes, there are some lines I love, "…I am a stunned knower/ of not." and "…on his neck, the scar, doll-saucer of tarnish,/ set in time's throat…" but it's more than just strong images, great word choices.

She builds a momentum that starts just under half-way through the poem and ends fourteen lines later with one long sentence snowballing a conjuring of her (ex) husband through memories of physical details. Her line breaks are interesting and help with the snowball effect. For example, when she breaks a phrase ending the line "and then" reading:

…and up to the nape and then
dive again, as the swells fly
at speed--...

My impulse would have been to end the line at "the nape" and begin the next line with "and then" but I see how this particular enjambment helps build momentum. Clever.

The poem ends with:

…He is alive, he breathes
and moves! My body may never learn
not to yearn for that one, or this could be
a first farewell to him, a life-do-us-part.

I appreciate the sentiment of the division between the body and the mind, the realization that this is the beginning of her knowledge, her acceptance that this is the end, even though part of her will never stop longing.

On Reading: Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds, part one

(What is this? You can read about the impetus behind it here.)

Received Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds for Christmas this year, officially from my father-in-law, but chosen and purchased by my husband.

Here's a confession: I haven't read much Olds. I've read some of her work in anthologies, but I've never read an entire collection and I haven't read any of her recent work at all.

Boxing Day, I curled up with the collection and a cup of tea and began to read. The opening poem "While He Told Me" is stunning, so much so, I read it aloud to my husband. The lines:

Later, when we took off our clothes, I saw
his deep navel, and the cindery lichen
skin between the male breasts, and from
outside the shower curtains's terrible membrane
I called out something like flirting to him,
and he smiled.

are gorgeous. I hope I never forget the phrase "cindery lichen." Perfect.

The poem has a sense of foreboding to it and, having not read the back cover or managed to hear what the book is about (how, I have no idea), I imagined what he told her to be his own terminal prognosis.

I flipped the page and read "Unspeakable"--a poem about their impending divorce and the other woman--then turned to the back cover:

Stag's Leap is a stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.

So I looked over to my husband and asked him what he knew of the book before he bought it. "Nothing," he answered. "You're not trying to tell me something with this, are you?" I asked and then read him the back cover. We laughed somewhat uncomfortably (at least, I did).

I pause. Do I want to read a full collection about someone's divorce? It's Sharon Olds and it won the Pulitzer, so yes, I will read it, but will I enjoy it?

"The Flurry" reinforces my bias against dialogue in poetry.

The next few don't excite me. I begin to wonder if confessional poetry just isn't my thing. I don't search it out and perhaps there is a reason for this.

I read "Stag's Leap" and wonder if it's possible to become the writer-in-residence at a BC winery. I'll name my next book "Red Rooster" or "Quail's Gate" for a case or two.

The final three poems in the first section (January-December) feel stronger. Why is this? Am I breaking through the confessional wall? Why do they speak to me in ways that the middles ones didn't? There are lines in each of them that make me pause (in a good way) that the others didn't. Their endings are especially strong. The final lines of "Known to Be Left": "Have faith,/ old heart. What is living, anyway,/ but dying." I love all of "Object Loss." It feels tight and there are strong, unexpected images to ground the emotions. At first, I wasn't sure about "Poem for the Breasts." The title implied a type of poem I read too often in workshops--a "funny" poem that relies on a "twist" or that is ultimately a joke heading towards a punchline. Meh. Thankfully, "Poem for the Breasts" is not a punchline poem, but one that has depth and insight. It was unexpected and a strong way to end the first section.

On Reading, an experiment

This is an experiment whose idea may be better than the execution, whose execution may not survive more than one post or may become a long running series, so we shall see what happens.

I want to keep notes on my reading, especially the poetry I read. The notes, I hope, will help my craft, will help my reading and my teaching. These notes in this somewhat public space are not meant to be read as reviews, but simply notes: thoughts, ideas, revelations, gut-impulses.

And here I go, cannonball.

being liberated from motherhood liberated me into womanhood

"I don’t think I was able to start learning how to be a woman—or how to write about women, or how to earn the trust of women readers—until the moment I left my first marriage behind and promised myself that neither I nor anybody else would ever force me to have children. Being liberated from motherhood liberated me into womanhood, if that makes sense. I honestly don’t think I had realized prior to that moment that someone could be a woman without being a mother, or that someone could be married without being a mother, but that’s the woman I am now, and needed to be. Once I figured out how to let myself be that person, I could finally relax into this gender and feel safe about exploring its complexities."

Elizabeth Gilbert in an interview in Believer Mag

on biases

Yesterday, when the David Gilmour "I don't teach women, or Chinese" thing exploded all over my social media feeds, I have to admit, I was enjoying it. The man was so clueless about his privilege, about his sexism, he was the talking embodiment of what's wrong with old white men (yes, old, Mr. Gilmour: 63 is not middle-aged). I found so much joy in watching him not understand why everyone was so mad. I mean, of course, he found absolutely nothing wrong with filling his course with "books he loved" that were only written by "guy-guys" and that he doesn't love any books written by women.

In the midst of my cackling and being snippy on twitter ("I'm going down the hall," I wrote and retweeted others like a crazy person), I was supposed to be going over my notes for my class that afternoon. I stopped as I reviewed the names of the poems I was teaching that day: all white. Yes, there were men and women (mostly women), and there were straight and queer (mostly straight) writers, but all white.

My stomach turned as flipped back over the previous three classes I taught. All white except two: Vikram Seth and Claude McKay. I flipped forward--a bit more diversity coming up: Natalie Diaz, Dionne Brand, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, anonymous Afghani women, Fred Wah, Rita Wong, Sachiko Murakami, LeRoi Jones (Amari Baraka). That's not many. That's not enough.

I'm frustrated with myself. I like to think of myself as not a racist, as an ally. But my bias is obvious: I favour white women. I mostly read white women poets. This has to change.

I'm in a very privileged position in exposing a dynamic, interesting group of young writers to "advanced forms and techniques of poetry"--I get to introduce writers they may haven't read yet. It's my duty to reflect a larger world to them than what's on their shelves and what's on mine.

research notes: Shaker worship was loud and unruly

"Shaker worship was loud and unruly. It involved singing of an impassioned kind, very out of kilter with the great British tradition of mouthing hymns in a combination of boredom and respect. What the Shakers would have lacked altogether, from an orthodox point of view, is any sense of spiritual etiquette. Indeed, as the writer in the Virginia Gazette had pointed out, they didn't scruple at using folk tunes, some of which had distinctly racy connotations. This was home-made religion, which would have offended the decorum of the established churches and, perhaps more importantly, challenged the class structure and social regulation that were implicit in it."

from Ann the Word: The Story of Ann Lee, Female Messiah, Mother of the Shakers, The Woman Clothed with the Sun by Richard Francis

Polygamy, I wish I could quit you.

I've been pretty quiet in Coffee Talks. I'll pipe up now and then, but I do feel like the stupidest person in the room. I'm not an academic, despite my love for research and Big Thoughts, and being in a room of high level, very interesting academics makes my artistic brain feel very, very small. And when I do talk, I usually end up getting flustered. I'm a writer, not a public speaker for a very good reason.

But know what will get me talking? Ask me about something to do with early Mormonism, polygamy, or best yet, early Mormon polygamy!

A lovely new fellow asked me about whether the messiahs I'm researching for The Voice in Your Head think about succession (leadership after they're gone), and I said that I'm too early in my research to talk about any of those, but I could talk about Joseph Smith and Mormonism. And whoo-boy, did I ever. We went 15 minutes overtime, which is a lot considering Coffee Talk is supposed to be 45-60 minutes. Will I ever be asked a direct question again? Time will tell, but I imagine it won't be any time soon!

The conversation went all over the place, as it does, but oh the joy I felt talking about Mormonism and polygamy. I really, really love both so much.

But, one of the highlights for me was when one of the fellows (an Anglican priest) asked the two fellows from Algeria and Palestine about polygamy in their home countries. A lot I already knew--the rules in the Qur'an, how it wasn't common, mostly amongst the very rich and very "faithful"--but, I did learn something new about modern polygamy, which I found fascinating.

Apparently, after the bombing of Gaza in 2008 when many men were killed, Hamas not only announced that married men should step up and marry all these new widows, but also they would give the families money to do so. What angered this fellow so much was that it was incredibly rare in this area to see polygamous families, it was almost non-existant in this culture (unlike, he said, in Saudi Arabia and Yemen) and that it was a very expensive to get married in Palestine, so many people simply don't do it because they can't afford to. That Hamas was willing to give money to support polygamy, but not to support monogamous marriages infuriated him. I can understand why.

Exciting new information on modern-day polygamy makes me very, very happy.