Rachel Zucker SOUTHWEST HARBOR, ME Rachel Zucker is in Southwest Harbor, Maine—not pregnant, not writing a novel, not writing poems but still author of two books, mother of two sons, wife of one husband. Friday: 06.23.06 | Permalink

So, this past March I’m having dinner at Max Soha with my husband. A newish Italian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue and 123rd street frequented by the upscale Columbia community, the restaurant is small—only about 10 tables—cozy, and lit mostly with candles. I am drinking my second glass from the carafe of red table wine my husband and I are sharing. It’s the first alcohol I’ve had in three months and I’m starting to feel warm and slow. I imagine Jonah in the belly of the whale felt warm and slow as well. Then again perhaps I’m thinking of a Disney version of Pinocchio—maybe Jonah felt claustrophobic and panicked and terribly alert. I drink more wine.

“Does it make you feel weird knowing you’ll write about this?” my husband asks.
I know exactly what he means despite the wine and the low light and the ambient noise. Let me fill in more details so the question can make sense enough to you for me to write about why it so unsettles me. First of all, the wine is a self-imposed consolation prize: I am no longer pregnant so I can drink to excess. Actually, technically, I am pregnant. But there is no baby or fetus or embryo inside me. A week earlier we had gone in for a nuchal translucency test—a sonogram and blood test preformed between 11-13 weeks that assesses the risk of fetal abnormalities based on various markers. I was 11 1/2 weeks pregnant. We were loud and jokey in the waiting room. I felt sorry for the other pregnant women who looked timid and nervous. We weren’t nervous. We have two sons—seven and five years old. Each time we’d tried to get pregnant we’d had no trouble at all. (In fact, once we hadn’t really been “trying.”) Why should we be nervous? Also, as a labor doula I’ve attended eight births and have come to believe that women are naturally perfectly equipped to make and birth babies and that, in general, the less anyone interferes with this process the better. In line with this philosophy I was planning a home birth and had not yet gone in for a prenatal visit. I was big and terribly nauseated. I was confident in my body’s ability to nourish and grow and birth this baby. I felt sure that this baby was a girl. I felt sure that everything was fine.

*

“Does it make you feel weird knowing you’ll write about this?”
In fact, at the moment he asked the question I had been thinking about a phrase—it was the subject line to an e-mail I had received that afternoon—that would, I was thinking, be an effective title to a poem: “Welcome to the Blighted Ovum Support Group.” I was turning words over in my mind, fashioning a first line. Yeah, I did feel weird. The timing of his questions made me feel uncomfortably transparent.

Everything was not fine. The technician slid the controls over my belly up and down, around in circles. I’d seen enough sonograms to be pretty confused, right away, by what I did not see.
“Where’s the baby?” I asked her.
“I’m having trouble finding it,” she said. What? Was the baby hiding? “This is your placenta,” said the technician, “and this is the sac.” Around and around went the wand on my slippery belly. The placenta. The sac. “I’m going to get the doctor and see if he wants to do a transvaginal scan.” That’s when I knew. Something was wrong. If he wants to do a transvaginal? What if he didn’t want to do a transvaginal scan? How would they find the baby?

*

“Does it make you feel weird knowing you’ll write about this?”

It is an uncomfortable question not only because I feel exposed.
It is uncomfortable because I feel I’ve been caught doing something unseemly. And yet, this is what I do: make poems, make poems out of my life. Why does it feel dirty?

*

I’ve never blogged before. I think it a place where one writes, informally, about what one is doing, reading, thinking, experiencing. It is a Web journal intended for general public consumption, a kind of writing that is often about unseemly subject matter, a genre that is almost always autobiographical.
No one expects otherwise. We may wonder if the blog writer or the blog reader is wasting his time, but we take for granted the confessional nature of the blog. It seems, therefore, a good place to consider the question of why writing poems about life events such as a miscarriage bothers me (and sometimes others) and why these are, nevertheless, the kinds of poems that interest me the most.

“Well, why don’t you write a poem about it?”

OK, so one problem with email and, I assume, blogs is that it’s hard to accurately convey tone. Try this: imagine you’re in your childhood kitchen with a close friend. You are about 8 years old. You are eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and drinking a glass of milk. You say, “Gosh, I love milk [or insert some food or object you enjoy but not something terribly important like a person] so much!” And your friend says, “Yeah, well, if you love milk so much why don’t you marry it?” It’s that tone. Got it? OK, so now go back and read the above question in that tone of voice.

This is a question my husband often asks. Other people ask it too, although usually in a slightly less “why don’t you marry it?” tone of voice. Sometimes he’s just joking or being jerky. Something will happen—usually something that upsets me, usually something he’s done that has upset me—and he’ll say, snidely “why don’t you write a poem about it?” as if this is my only recourse, as if writing poems about his shortcomings is my form of revenge. The confessional poem as a form of revenge. The poem as a weapon.

Other times the question is said with seriousness. In these cases it isn’t a question but a suggestion. “You should write a poem about it.” In the past few years the question/suggestion is often inspired by a phrase overheard from our children. (For example, a few months ago my sons were playing a long game of Narnia that involved every stuffed animal and plastic animal and blanket and pillow in the apartment. About three hours into the game I could hear from the other room that the game had come to a halt, and the boys were arguing over something. I held my breath, waiting to see if it would erupt into violence. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying until one phrase was shouted loud and clear, “There are no Jews in Narnia!” My husband looked up and said, “You KNOW you’re going to write a poem about THAT.”

I’m very lucky. My sons and husband are often yelling and speaking provoking phrases (I started to fall in love with my husband when, 13 years ago, he was trying to explain blackjack to me and kept repeating, with innocent sincerity, “always hit on a soft seventeen” and I just couldn’t get the phrase out of my head). Also, my husband has a high tolerance for being talked about in intimate terms in public. Using a poem as a weapon or form of revenge doesn’t work very well with someone like him because he has very little sense of privacy or self-doubt and is remarkably hard to embarrass. I doubt he’d be embarrassed for me to admit, here, that he likes to be talked about even if what I’m saying isn’t always positive. His question/suggestion—“why don’t you write a poem about it?”—is, more often than not, a sincere request or even a sort of challenge. After all, I am the family historian. I document my family’s lives in photographs and carefully save the children’s artwork, stories and poems. “Why don’t you write a poem” is not so different than saying, the kids are so cute, quick, take a picture. The confessional poem as a record of experience, as a snapshot, as a keepsake.

Other times he asks the question/suggestion because the phrase we’ve heard or the experience we’ve shared is so bizarre or surreal that he wants to see what I’ll make out of it. This is a poetic iron chef situation. Given the following language or situation try to make a poem out of it!

There is a wonderful children’s book called Basho and the Fox written by Tim Meyers (Marshall Cavendish Children's Books, 2000). In the story Basho, the famous 17th-century Japanese poet, finds a fox eating cherries from his favorite cherry tree. Basho tries to chase the fox away, but the fox claims that the tree belongs to the foxes and not to Basho. After a brief argument the fox makes a wager with the poet. According to the fox all great poems are written by foxes. If Basho can write just one good haiku, the foxes will let Basho have all the cherries on the tree. He gives Basho three chances. Basho works tirelessly to write a good haiku but the fox quickly dismisses Basho’s efforts. Basho is almost beside himself with frustration. The prospect of failing to impress the fox is so daunting that for his third and final chance he is not able to come up with anything at all and goes to meet the fox without poem in hand. As the fox approaches him in the moonlight Basho is struck with sudden inspiration and blurts out a poem. The fox loves the poem and grants Basho the right to all the cherries. What is it about this poem that impresses the fox? It has a fox in it! Basho is thrilled with the outcome, but the story ends like this: “From that day forward Basho understood that a poem should be written for its own sake.”

I love the book in part because I have trouble with the ending. My husband is a fox. (He’ll like that I said that!) My husband likes poems that have my husband in them. He’s not alone. Some people don’t like to be named specifically or have their privacy violated, but generally, I find that people like poems that have people in them. I like poems that have “me” in them even if the poet doesn’t know me. And what does it really mean to write a poem “for its own sake?” Does writing a poem for its own sake get you all the cherries on the tree? Does it get you any?

Going back to the question I asked yesterday—why does writing poems about my life—particularly about a painful life experience like miscarriage—have the feeling of usury about it?—well, I think, it has to do, in part, with the cherries.

Most of us read poems as if we were foxes and then turn around and talk about poetry with the highfalutin rhetoric of Basho. We like poems that have us in them but we like the idea of poetry written for its own sake. (It’s interesting that writing poetry for its own sake somehow escapes the charge of narcissism.) We say we want a poetry that is pure—are we worried that writing poems for cherries will lead to poetry corporate sponsorship?—and we “serious” poetry types tend to ridicule any poetry that becomes popular.

So there is a sense that even if I am not hurting anyone with my poems—even if I am not writing poems as a form of revenge—that using personal experience in my poems is like putting a fox in the poem to woo the fox. It is all right, good even, that the experience of miscarriage might make me a better doula, a better mother, a better person. It is appropriate that I might become a better person for my misfortunes and in this way learn and benefit, one might even say, profit, from personal experience. But the poem, well, the poem should be written for it’s own sake (say some) and the misfortunes should not end up as poems that win us cherries. To do so is manipulative, exploitative, cherry-mongering.

How strange! After all, would I rather have a child or a poem about miscarriage? Obviously, a child. But, having had this experience, would I rather have a poem or no poem? And, after all this—the miscarriage, the shock, the sadness, the loss, the disappointment—if I am able to make a poem from the empty sac, from the fascination and, yes, pleasure of the attendant language and events (“blighted ovum,” “missed miscarriage,” the tragicomedy of the D & C which my husband kept calling the D.N.C., the liminal place of being pregnant without a fetus), would I like at the end of this to find a tree full of sweet cherries? What do you think?

What a terrific set of comments I’ve gotten. I swear I did not plant them. To summarize: the first was from my therapist of over seven years, now retired, wondering if I’m all right; the second was from someone I don’t recognize or don’t know thanking me (because s/he sees something of her/himself in the blog?) for what I wrote; the third was a cogent reiteration of the problem using the wonderful example of Didion’s book (which I loved reading and didn’t think was a great book in a classically fox/Basho manner) and stating a complicated and resonant form of the question at hand—“What kind of person needs so badly to validate their experience through other people’s responses?” (I shall certainly return to this question!); and the fourth was from my friend, clearly a fox, wishing I would write about her (after all, a good blog entry is an entry that has a fox in it!)

So, in reverse order, let me say:

4. Despite all my talking about it, I have not (yet) written a poem about my miscarriage. Arielle Greenberg, my foxy friend, has written a poem about my miscarriage. It’s a totally kick-ass poem (although maybe I just think that because part of it is about me). Unfortunately, I cannot post the poem to this blog because the poem is still unpublished. If you send her $20 cash or a bag of organic cherries in the mail maybe she’ll send you a copy.

3. Can a poem or piece of writing “validate experience?” I think that what this question is getting at is the idea that writing about personal experience leads to profit (either in cherries or in money or in validation) and that this kind of profit is problematic and wanting or needing this kind of profit reflects poorly on an author. I just started The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr and must say I had a hard time getting through the introduction without feeling uncomfortable on Karr’s behalf. Karr explains that she never expected the publication of her memoir to result in such an outpouring of gratitude and identification. She is honest about having written the memoir to pay the bills (can we fault her for that?), and the success of The Liar’s Club is undoubtedly an important socio-literary event in that it was one of the first in a deluge of memoirs that sold so well that people started talking about the memoir as if the genre had just been invented. Karr writes that she received a lot of letters. In these letters people thanked her and told her their own stories and said that her book changed their lives. That certainly sounds like validation. Isn’t that what a writer wants? To feel she’s affected people, made them think, changed their lives. These letters are an important part of the history of the book; certainly Karr has every right to mention the phenomenon. But it’s hard to write about the letters and the bestseller list without sounding like a big old braggart and that’s what makes me uncomfortable for Karr, worried about her. Why? Because she was successful in what she set out to do (pay the bills) and because the stranger-public responded with so much enthusiasm? Is it envy? Is it (and I’m embarrassed to say I think it might be) a feeling that it is really unladylike to be quite so pleased with one’s success? Or is it her glee at turning a miserable childhood into a bestseller?

Now Didion’s memoir is selling like low-carb hot cakes. And everyone is buying it and a whole bunch of people are complaining about it. Commenter number 2 is concerned that Didion is searching for validation. Interesting. Validation of what sort? Financial? Seems to me she could have gone out and written a screenplay, which, as she says in the book is what she and her husband did when they were low on money. Popularity? Exposure? She was already a well-respected author, and I doubt that she wrote this book to be validated as a writer. It’s possible that Didion was searching for validation of a different sort. Perhaps she was worried that she was, let’s say, a bad wife or bad mother and wrote the book in part to set down the story from her point of view, as a way of propagandizing the general public into sympathizing with her. For my part, I sympathized greatly. In fact, half way through Didion’s book I told my husband, “I think I will have to leave you and the boys in order to dedicate my life to helping make Joan Didion’s life easier and happier. I’m sure you understand. Feel free to find a new wife/mother for the children; Joan really needs me now.” So real was the feeling of horror at reading her story, so personally involved did I feel. In this case, my response to Didion (had I written her one) might have validated her feelings about her behavior. But her experience? I can’t think of a response that would validate her experience. Nor could I validate Mary Karr’s experience. I might make them feel less alone in the world or less guilty about having “profited” from writing about their personal tragedies (if in fact either one was feeling guilt or unease about having done so), but that is about the experience of having written a memoir and not the experience of having lost a husband and daughter or having had a traumatic childhood.

Thinking about novels as a comparison may clarify these murky waters. We simply do not have the same response to successful novels that we do to successful memoirs or confessional poems. We might be sick with envy over Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead, we may feel that Jonathan Franzen should or should not have done Oprah like he done, we may think that The Da Vinci Code was so poorly written and edited that we must be totally out of step to think that anything but plot matters, but we don’t feel that it is inappropriate for a novelist to profit from his work. No one said that Jane Hamilton was doing anything wrong when she wrote Map of the World, that horrific, haunting story about the little girl drowning in the backyard pond. If that had been a memoir? Perhaps we would have wondered why she felt “the need” to write it. And, perhaps we would feel that she was dirty to profit from the story. I was going to say that people don’t complain as much about this “true story” thing with poems because the terms of success are so paltry, but, actually, the few people that read poetry do a lot of complaining about these kinds of poems even though a great many people love them.

Sylvia Plath—I won’t even touch that now although she is central in this discussion.

Let’s take some more recent examples. I have heard, for example, some grumbling about Brian Turner’s book, Here, Bullet, a book I really enjoyed. The snipes I’ve heard more or less amounted to this: “Yeah, well, of course people like that book, I mean the guy went to Iraq!” Yeah, and what, he was sitting around in a war zone thinking “if I live through this maybe I can win the Alice James prize”?! Or, Catherine Barnett’s book, Into Spheres Such Perfect Holes Are Pierced, which no one has had the stupidity to malign in my presence as I am constantly running around shouting about how much I adore this book. It is a stunning book. The book is born out of a tragic personal experience, but my god, in Catherine’s hands, the language just sings and moans and the silences make you stop breathing. It is brutal and I mean that in the best way. I don’t know that it changed my life, but I sobbed on the subway when I read it, and I’ve bought about 10 copies of it so far. She deserves every prize and kind review she gets, and yet I’m sure she’s struggled with what it means to “profit” from such a deep, deep loss. Another book I love is Without by Donald Hall, poems about Jane Kenyon’s dying and death and Hall’s life without her. Now that he has been named poet laureate some people will dismiss everything he’s ever written and others will say it’s terrific because, after all, he’s the big cherryman now. I love that book. I love the book Model Homes by Wayne Koestenbaum, a book that is so delightfully pornographic and revealing that I was almost shy to read it in public. And have you read Jane by Maggie Nelson? You should. These are all great books of poetry that “exploit” personal experience.

Commenter 2, your question is rather perfect because it points so clearly to what needs validating (at least for me).

I think that people write memoirs or memoir-poems in order to work through experiences, to see their lives as stories and in this way make sense of them (and in the case of memoirs, sometimes, to pay the bills). The connection to psychotherapy is obvious here (although money flows the opposite way). What’s interesting is that this kind of writing is writing for its own sake. Despite pooh-poohing writing for its own sake in my last entry, the truth is I write poems because I write poems. It is the only non-self-judgmental space I know. What I write about and what other people will think of what I’ve written is blessedly far from my mind at the moment of composition. When I force myself to try to explain why I’ve written the specific poems I’ve written, the answer often sounds like this: I wrote this poem because there was something I didn’t understand or something I couldn’t accept or something terrible that was so compelling to me I couldn’t forget it, or two things I wanted to put next to each other and see what happened or something I wanted to do to poetry and see what would happen or something so bizarre that I had to put it down and see what the hell would form around it. In other words, I’m usually trying to work something out.

The thing is, when I revise my poems I am thinking of the foxes and the cherries. When I order my poems into manuscripts and try to put the work out into the world, when I read these poems in public or try, rather shamelessly, to sell my books like a traveling salesman to every bookstore I pass, well then I’m deep in the land of foxes. And it is incredulous and wonderful to me that anyone wants to read my workings-through or anything at all about my life (or this incredibly long blog entry). And when people buy the books or thank me at a reading it feels strange and fantastic and uncomfortable and narcissistic and often people seem to say that they like the poems because they have foxes in them and I wonder if that’s cheap and if I’m profiting from my own or others’ misfortunes and if there is something for which I need validation (which is what all these blogs are really about) it is that it is weird to know that I will probably write a poem about my miscarriage but it’s also my way, my right, my job. It’s weird to be an artist and think that anything you have to say or make will be of any interest to anyone else. Its incredibly narcissistic and a profoundly important social action.

2. You’re welcome. Thank you for reading the blog. I hope you will buy one of my books or send me a bag of cherries. I like all the varieties.

1. It took almost three months, but now, physically, I am truly all right; thanks for asking.

Two days ago I hiked Great Head Trail. The trail started at the end of Sand Beach (Acadia National Park, Mount Desert Island, Maine). I left the boys and the husband down on the beach (which by the way is made of crushed shells that look like sand) and started out. The trailhead began with uneven steps leading up the hill from the East side of the beach. The trail was supposed to loop or, as one ranger described it, “figure eight about.”

In the beginning the trail was mostly flat. It cut in and out of the woods and along the rocks looking out over the ocean. Every once in a while I’d see a dash of blue paint on a rock or tree trunk indicating the direction of the trail. It was a stunningly beautiful walk. At one point I came out of a longish stretch of forest—through the trees, over gnarled roots, across some double planks laid over a swampy area—and onto a smooth, large rock overlooking the ocean. Other than a few small boats and tiny islands far off shore and a cluster of bobbing lobster trap markers, the ocean spread out below, a glinting gray-blue surface. Occasionally I passed hikers walking in the opposite direction, but mostly I was entirely alone. I was enjoying myself, trekking along, getting sweaty and feeling independent. Because the trail was so short (1.6 miles according to both the ranger and the guidebook) I hadn’t brought anything with me (please don’t send me parental comments about this)—no watch, no money, no water. Part of the journey’s appeal was the carefree, unburdened solitude of it. I didn’t even want to be distracted by a camera’s greedy eye—I just wanted to walk and look and listen.

It seemed, after a while, that I had been walking for a while. For maybe, well, almost the time it would take to walk 1.6 miles. I happen to have a terrific sense of direction, but because the path wound around and around, I was unable to get my bearings. Sometimes the ocean would be on my right, then on my left then on my right again. As I walked I thought about the phrase “figure eight about,” and thought of Nancy Kerrigan crossing and recrossing the ice thousands and thousands of times. I wasn’t really worried; I knew I was still on the trail (blue dashes appeared at irregular intervals, friendly and encouraging ellipses). Still, I thought it might be time to start paying even closer attention. I now looked at the trail not to appreciate its beauty but in order to determine whether or not it was familiar. If it was familiar then I was going back the way I’d come which was not the way I should be going (remember that the path went in a loop). In this case familiarity was bad and strangeness was good. Nothing looked especially familiar, and I’d been doing my best to be observant. I kept going. I came to a stretch where everything looked familiar. Then, a bit further on, nothing looked familiar. The problem was, I realized, that I had to look at the path and imagine what it might have looked like if I’d been coming from the other direction. In this case, even if I was going back along the very same path I’d been down, things would look different because I was seeing from a different vantage point. In this case, hindsight was definitely NOT 20/20.

Some time later I came upon a place where the topography seemed particularly familiar. I hadn’t seen a single hiker for a while and even though the dashes were still there, I was getting worried. I walked a few steps off trail to see if this was the place where I’d squatted behind a low rock to pee. I’d been nervous about being spotted by another hiker and checked out the surroundings carefully. Surely if this had been the place where I’d “marked my territory,” I’d remember it. To put it bluntly, there was no wet spot. Then again, I’ve lived all but 2 of my 34 years in New York and New Haven (the other two years I’d spent in Iowa City and even though it wouldn’t have been the weirdest thing to happen around there, I never once squatted down around town to pee). I’ve done more than my fair share of peeing along highways and in the woods and in Central Park (when you’re pregnant with baby #2 and have just spent an hour getting baby #1 out of the apartment and all the way (2 blocks) to the park, you are NOT going to go home if you have to pee and you ARE going to have to pee). The truth is I have no idea of how long it takes for pee to dry on a rock.

Stepping back onto the trail I noticed that the blue dashes led back the way I’d just come and the way I thought I was supposed to be going. Of course they did. The trail is a loop; the trail markers need to be visible to people walking in either direction. I decided to keep going in what I thought was the right direction. Maybe I’d misjudged how long I’d been walking. Maybe I’d misjudged how long it takes to walk 1.6 miles. When driving, my husband often thinks we’re lost. Every time he starts to panic I insist we keep going in the same direction and see what happens. This is almost always the right choice. We haven’t gotten to the turn yet and are the kind of people to think we’ve done it wrong before we have.

I kept walking.

Soon I came to a steep rock scramble. I had to sit down and shimmy a little and at one point I had to jump from level to level. Whether from exertion or from thinking about what I’d do if I landed wrong and broke my ankle, I was sweating pretty hard by the time I got to the bottom. But, really, I was relieved. There was no way I’d come this way. I definitely would have remembered that! Each time the path became at all dangerous (anyone who’s done this trail will be embarrassed for me that I used the word “dangerous”) or unusual I was glad; I was in unexplored territory, which in this case meant I was on track.

I said in a previous entry that a poem might be a keepsake or a record of experience. But, of course, it isn’t. It may be made for the sake of “keeping” an experience, but it can’t keep it. The poem, if it is honest, is the experience of going back, in the other direction towards something already traveled. At times it may break free and give us a view of the ocean so clear and compelling we feel we (writer and reader) are really there for the first time ever, that we opened our eyes for the first time upon this sight. But this, then, is a new ocean and not the ocean of experience and not the ocean arrived at by retracing the steps of experience’s journey. The markers will be other markers, the trees and stones might be the same stones but they always look different from the other side. There are always dangerous or intense moments that reassure me that I am not wandering in circles, that something real and important and “memorable” has happened, but even these moments are impossible to “capture” in writing as they happened. If I am lucky I can go down a path in my poem that also leads to danger and makes the reader have to slow down and sweat a little but it’s not by describing having done so earlier this week. I can’t even find that place. That spot and that story are changed by what came before and afterwards and by my perspective and attitude and whether I ended up with a broken ankle or simply made it back on the beach to be greeted by a cranky-cold-tired-hungry-nasty-having-to-pee husband and two beautiful little boys who were crazy enough to play in the 48 degree surf and have, I will soon discover, bathing suits impossibly full of crushed shells that look like sand.

On 06.21.06 mrsvejk wrote: “With all due respect, I think the autonomy of the poem is bullcrap unless I am missing something.”

I could spend many happy hours turning over and (mis)reading your sentences.
I like your use of “bullcrap.” I like thinking about how much (or how little) respect is “due” me and why. (I like thinking about the economy of respect which is owed and due and paid.) I like thinking about what it might mean for a poem not to have autonomy, for the poem to be a mini-me or slave or shadow, a draught. I like thinking about what it might mean for a poem to have autonomy and for that autonomy to be made of bullcrap. (If it were bullcrap methinks it would be impossible to miss.) I like thinking about whether it is true that you don’t care if my poems are true. I want to believe you; I’m not sure I do. I like to think about what honesty sounds like. If there were a recipe for an honest-sounding poem, what would it be? I often tell my students that a poem needs to be honest (which is different from sounding honest) but doesn’t need to be true, certainly not autobiographically true. Confession: I’m not sure I believe this. I’m not sure I understand what I mean when I tell my students their poems need to be honest.

And your most provocative comment—“what happens to life when it is lived so self-consciously”—ah, that is a question that fascinates and confounds me.

Nothing, I think, happens to life, but something does happen to us, to the way we experience our lives, and I’m not sure at all if what happens is good or bad. On the one hand, I belong to what might be considered a cult of living in a state of high self-consciousness; I hardly understand the alternative. My closest friends are super-self-aware, introspective, and perhaps as a result, full of self-doubt. At the same time, I often wonder if living in a state of heightened self-consciousness is always good for me (or my friends). It’s hard to fall asleep at night, hard to make decisions, hard to take things at face value. For example, I went on the hike with the express purpose of not “making anything” out of it. I didn’t bring my camera; I didn’t bring my notebook. But what did I do? I turned the experience over and over in my mind and couldn’t get the whole path-from-the-other-direction epiphany out of my mind. Then, when it came time to sit down to the blank screen, I made what my husband called a “sickeningly perfect metaphor” out of my hike. I dissected the experience and got all self-conscious about it. It makes for fascinating interior and exterior conversation, but it’s also easy to get quagmired or quicksanded in this kind of thinking and looking and being. Everything seems to be caught up in everything else and the only way to untangle the multi-dimensional web is to embrace a nothing-matters, existentialist attitude. Either everything matters all the time, one’s life is a story full of significant details, the world abounds in evidence and meaning, or nothing matters and we are animals stupidly obsessed with the state of human existence.

Perhaps there is a perfect middle-ground somewhere: a way of being aware and alert to life without being obsessed with one’s own “self” and the storyness and story-makingness of human experience. I’ve rarely, if ever, stood on that kind of solid ground. On my wedding day I was aware, as a butterfly flew under the chuppah, that this butterfly moment was part of the “story” of my wedding and I tried not to think about the word “ephemeral” or of a painfully convoluted paper my husband had written about linear and non-linear time in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (something about the cart and the river and the womb of time), but I did think about these things. And, a few months ago, when I was trying every medical and alternative therapy after the first D & C failed to do what it was supposed to do and the miscarriage was getting scarier and scarier I went for a Mayan abdominal massage and the woman asked if she could put on music and I said yes and she asked if she could chant and I said yes and she asked if she could pray and I said yes and she asked if she could sing to my uterus and I said yes and I thought, if you are going to do this, then do it all the way and really just be here and believe in this and experience this and go with it, give yourself up to this, be a body, be in your body and get your body right again and let whatever needs to pass pass, and I said yes and lay there listening to the music and the chanting and the praying and the singing and then she said “now take a moment to listen to your uterus and see if your uterus has something it wants to tell you” and I thought, “oh my God, I’ve got to remember these exact words” and she went on “now, if there is something you want to say to your uterus…” and I thought “…because I have now entered a surreal realm of utter new-age bullcrap this is just too much to take, there is no way, no WAY I’m not going to write about this!” (Guess what? The massage didn’t work.) And whether the writing (or thinking of my life as a story (worth) telling) is a defense against despair or sign of great neediness or a personal shortcoming or a diagnosable disorder, it’s certainly a habit I’ve never been able to break. Even when I tried the medication that stops the thought cycling and noticed how much easier it was to get things done, well, then I wrote about that.

It’s late and I’m a bit overwhelmed by the ideas swirling overhead that I meant to write about and didn’t get to.

*“Fodder” for poetry, what a horrible term. My children as “cannon fodder” for my poems. The poem as a cannon, as a war, people/experience as “expendable.”

*Tom Thompson’s question about imagination. I think I don’t believe in imagination. If I do I think it is God. I’m not sure. I do believe in Fancy.

*Fancy

*Why Lashon Harah (“evil tongue/language,” bad mouthing others) is such a serious sin. How this type of talk must be, by definition, “true” and different from gossip. The personal experience poem as Lashon Harah.

*The difference between engaging personal experience (DA Powell, Arielle Greenberg, Miranda Field, Joy Katz, Katie Ford, Deborah Landau, David Trinidad immediately spring to mind) and “exploiting” personal experience. Complicating personal experience: Katy Lederer, Mary Szybist, Larissa Szporluk. Abstracting personal experience: Michael Palmer, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Lubasch. The usefulness, validity and implications of these distinctions. Where to put Jorie Graham? Brenda Hillman? Joe Wenderoth? The pleasure of listing. The ridiculousness of lists.

*Spalding Gray, David Antin, Allen Ginsberg.

*“The Prophet” by Alice Notley. “A Few Days” by James Schuyler.

*How the incredibly handsome waiter at Café This Way where I ate dinner tonight had parentheses tattooed around his Adam’s apple.