Catherine Wagner OXFORD, OH Cathy Wagner’s three-year-old says she is a “nurse-cow.” Friday: 12.15.06 | Permalink | Comments (20)

Hello strangers and friends. I will be fronting the poetry borg for this week. I mean flabbing the poetry blog. Welcome!

I am flying to Boise from Ohio today, to drop off my son with his dad. While my son’s away, I’m supposed to finish up working on an anthology of poems on mothering. “Go away, son, so I can think about mothering.”

ON THE AUSTRALIAN SOCIAL SPIDER

“After laying her eggs, an Australian social spider (Diaea ergandros) continues to store nutrition in a new batch of eggs—odd, oversized eggs, far too large to pass through her oviducts, and lacking genetic instructions. Since she breeds only once, what are they for?

“These eggs are for eating, not for laying. But to be eaten by whom? As the spiderlings mature and begin to mill about, the mother becomes strangely subdued. She starts to turn mushy—but in a liquefying rather than a sentimental way. As her tissue melts, her ravenous young literally suck her up, starting with her legs and eventually devouring the protein-rich eggs dissolving within her.” From Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

Thank evolution, we are not Australian social spiders. The situation for the contemporary U.S. mother is different.

ON BEING CAUGHT BETWEEN A COCK AND A RAT RACE

I don’t mean to sound strident. It can be very enjoyable there. Wondering whether that should be the name of the mother-poem anthology (it is supposed to be called Not for Mothers Only).

I’ve been uncomfortable with the idea of the anthology ever since I agreed to co-edit it with Rebecca Wolff (whose Fence Books is going to publish it). I wanted to do it because there are so many discomfiting interesting mother poems out there right now, and more connections available between mothers who write (via listservs). I wanted to think about the permission that poets like Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer and Fanny Howe and many others gave us to write poems on mothering.

But I was nervous about the project, and felt defensive when explaining the project, especially when I spoke to men about it. I’m now realizing that’s because despite my feminism and my own experience with motherhood I’ve swallowed the following cultural givens: Mothers are embarrassing. They’re sentimental. Their soccer-momness deserves to be reviled. They sacrifice themselves and are thus not worth listening to because they exist only in service to a larger good (or a larger evil, the patriarchy, depending on your point of view). At any rate, they can have little to say, unless they’re mouthpieces nauseatingly repeating cultural conventions about motherlove.

I didn’t want to make an anthology that moms would use to gain comfort and a sense of solidarity with other mothers—picking it up in the store and flipping straight to the section on miscarriage or on adoption. I think I wanted the book to collect wild fantastic writing by mothers, innovative, activist, experimental work, not necessarily poems that addressed a particular subject. I’m not used to categorizing poetry in terms of subject matter. Yet our solicitation letter requested poems on motherhood. Would our anthology be like those horrible anthologies of poems on cats, or (I really did see a solicitation for this) poems on one’s vacation home? If I were cool I’d be sending out a request for cross-genre collaborative butt-splicing. Poetry isn’t about subject matter, right, hence the familiar objection to so-called “identity poetry”?

But wait a minute, the objection to “identity poetry” can be a secretly bigoted way to hold on to power, to avoid engagement with other points of view, to unfairly smear a whole nonwhite or nonheterosexual group with the tarry brush of a failure to linguistically innovate. My embarrassment about this anthology makes me realize I still buy into a horrid sexist perception of motherhood. Enough with self-hate. I’m a human mother, not an Australian social spider. I can talk. Mothers can talk. They can write wildly and fantastically and they can do so on various subjects. The subjects can include motherhood and I want to show them working that category over, experimenting with poetic practices that emerge from the conditions of motherhood, using those practices to interrogate the category of motherhood.

Hi y’all, what do you think? Thank you for letting me think through this with you. I hope you comment. The comment feature is the coolest thing about bloggery: that fourth wall gets broken down: the audience talks, the audience is part of the show. The weird thing about screens is that your intervention, your comment, is immediately subsumed seamlessly into the Web page. It’s as if you tried to put your hand through the puppet-theater and suddenly found yourself gazing out from it, or if you tried to kiss or punch somebody and quickswitch turned into them. Oh well. Talk anyway.

Hello from Boise, where I used to live and where it’s supposed to be sunny, and it’s not, crap, I have been looking forward to the sunshine because Ohio is gray like inside the brain.

Yesterday Nick Twemlow, who is the poetblogger’s sensitive interface with the Poetry Foundation, asked whether I was going to talk about another anthology I’ve floated an idea for and don’t have time to do yet. That gave me an idea to post every day about a different anthology I’m working on, laying out a defensive poetics for each—my Etch-a-Sketch poem anthology and the anthology of poems written while on the pot and the online anthology of YouTube poetry reading films run backwards so that all the poets are sucking their words back in. Instead I will get velly serious and write

ON POETRY’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE WORLD

I recently bought a book on home repair called How to Fix Everything for Dummies. The dummies need help, and everything can be fixed for them, and we will do it, through poetry. LOL (for those of you who don’t know Internet jargon that translates to “leaving on lunch break”). Really though I don’t believe poetry accomplishes nothing. It makes me think; it makes other people think; when I read it and make it, I’m examining and playing around with the coding of the interface. The interface could use recoding, right?

But I am suspicious of any argument for poetry as salvation of world because as poet I have a vested interest in claiming that it can save us. The claim asserts that I am valuable to the world. I don’t trust any of us to make an argument for poetry’s efficacy that isn’t simultaneously part of our own urge to claim power.

At the moment the trend is toward saving the world not through reorganizing the variously organized ink squiggles or phonemes commonly labeled poetry, but through the context in which those ink squiggles or phonemes are presented. Two examples: Kent Johnson’s fetish for heteronymity: stop using your own names when you publish your work, you bunch of egotists! says Kent. Be like Fernando Pessoa, or like Kent Johnson. If you don’t use your own name, you don’t claim ownership of the work; you short-circuit the possibility for you to claim and build up such power as is available to poets. There’s a new Web site up ( http://oncompanytime.biz) on which anyone can post reviews anonymously—this discourages puff reviews, of course, but also seeks to avoid claims of property: when you say “this is mine” by signing something, you are attempting to accrue value to yourself. Anonymity purifies us by forbidding us dirty self-promotion. Private property is the root of all evil, and if we can evade private property in poetry production and distribution, we can presto change-o world. The trend everywhere (in the poetry communities I’m alert to) for collaboration (see the magazine Pom2 ( http://www.pompompress.com/index.html), erasures (http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/index.php), Flarf ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf) and publishing collectives (Ugly Duckling, Krupskaya, Subpress) are other ways to avoid being smeared with the stink of ownership and to diffuse power among a group, to avoid traditional hierarchies.

A separate fetish for altering the modes for poetic production and distribution: alternate publishing methods, alternate ways of getting the work into people’s hands/ears. Alternate methods include performance, digital works, handmade books, and chapbooks.

All right, tomorrow I want to talk about the political efficacy of all this and what I value about the trend and what makes me suspicious about it. It is getting late in the morning and I am staying at my friend Tamara’s house in Boise and I need to get out of bed and go be a good houseguest. The last time I was her houseguest I sat down on the edge of her tub on top of the shower curtain draped over the edge, pulling down the shower curtain and rod on my head and in the process bending the shower curtain rod into an attractive C shape so they would remember that Cathy did it. (I still sign my work.)

I think I’ll talk more about all that tomorrow. Getting too heavy. Plus I’d like to talk about some poetry. Unfortunately I don’t have my books with me here in Boise. I brought one book, Barbara Guest’s selected. Am having a blast here. Oxford, Ohio, where I live, doesn’t offer many dining options, though I love our weird little bagel sandwich shop, which offers about 200 sandwich options and is papered with posters of customer-invented bagel sandwiches, such as the Salty Hor. I don’t have a car so Oxford is pretty much where I stomp. So I was pleased to be visiting Boise, which has a shiny yuppie gloss to match its shimmery river and has as many restaurants and bars per capita as Las Vegas, someone told me last night. I ate sushi for lunch with my former colleague poet Janet Holmes, who is thriving and getting ready to put out some hot books by Susan Briante and Kate Greenstreet from her Ahsahta Press, and her own book F2F is getting excellent attention. For dinner I went with my beautiful mama friend Catherine Jones (she’s a fiction writer) to my favorite, El Pueblo, a Mexican butcher shop and deli, and had a big plate of carnitas and tortillas and beans and rice. Oh my freaking god. And then met my lovely mad ex-housemate Kelly Morse for a gossip session at the bar of a fancy restaurant and ordered a recommended glass of wine without looking at the price ($10); spending too much money. Meghan and Tyler are an item. And someone finally turned down the opportunity to sleep with Guillaume.

At home in Oxford I was reading: Alice Notley’s Alma, or the Dead Women. Alma is a grumpy old woman and she’s dreaming the world. Notley’s writing here is like a buzzsaw, it hurts, it sets me on edge, I can’t stop reading it. I’ve been looking at very early work by Notley for the mother anthology, and I love that work too, and if her writing hadn’t developed much beyond it, it would still be valuable work; but she dug further, her writing kept pushing at the boundaries of itself, it just gets bigger and bigger—she takes on anything—the whole structure of our culture, the skeleton of it lights up terrifyingly. Just bought Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia, a reprint of S*PerM**K*T, Trimmings, and Muse & Drudge, which I think are contemporary classics.

Hey, would you like to end this war already? Terrific article by Nir Rosen in Boston Review this month. Also a rather frightening pro-gun article (by a guy who otherwise shares a lot of my views) in the same issue that says there are times when citizens don’t get listened to by the govt unless they’re armed. We aren’t getting listened to and haven’t been, for a long time. I have to say, when I think about how useless protest has been, I feel a crawling under my skin that wants to out itself as violence. I want to pick up a rock. The violence that is the rule of the day is in me.

Hi. Back to what I was talking about Tuesday—as a political act, does the current focus on the context for poetic activity (avoiding traditional hierarchies, collaborating to produce work, finding new channels for distribution and publication that refuse to engage the wicked power-plays of Barnes and Noble) accomplish anything? Oh sure; even if reverberations outside the immediate community in which the act takes place are infinitesimal, the immediate community is a real place in which real change can happen, and any community, however small, is a place where we can try to enact fair structures. But the urge to power isn’t completely squelched by these practices; it’s displaced onto the group or process, which can’t help trying to gather power to itself by publicizing its practices. Kent Johnson gains cultural capital by publishing about not publishing under his own name; the Flarfists gain notoriety by association. But perhaps ego is deflected, a little? And the participants are hopeful, engaged, hurray.

As for me for awhile I have been trying to write didactic poems, though I don’t know whether they will be recognized as such. Not poems that know ahead of time what they are going to say and in what form, but poems that acknowledge my accountability for what they say and that set out to engage an issue. I understand “me” and “I” here as categories in flux; nevertheless, instead of trying to evade the categories of “I” and “author” (as various experimental traditions have tried to do) or attempting to diffuse the “I” or author’s efforts to claim power (as collaboration, for example, seems to me to try to do) I want to engage those activities and shine a light on ‘em. Hmm, I am trying to think of poems that do this kind of work. Jennifer Moxley’s.

Thinking more about what I said about the mother anthology. I was in a grump when I wrote it, having recently heard some young women say they never wanted to be mothers because mothering is a waste of their time and they have better things to do. And in fact I hope they don’t have kids right now, they’re too young, they do have better things to do—but the wholesale dismissal of mothering as a worthy activity upset me, mainly because I think it’s not motherhood the girls were objecting to, but the cultural context of motherhood. The real focus of the young women’s disdain ought to be a culture that makes mothering into a situation to be despised; mothers represent and appear to uphold a system in which they have little power, so they’re easy to target. If parenting were supported as it could be in our culture, with sufficient help available for the nuclear parent who’s now often forced to raise small children in a near-vacuum (the necessities of capitalism move many of us away from grandparents and others who might help), the decision to adopt or bear children might not be so fraught.

I don’t mean to imply that men don’t participate in the work of parenting; of course many of them are the primary caretakers, and I know of a number of couples in which workloads are shared evenly. But many couples find that somehow, even with the best gender-neutral intentions, women end up with the bulk of the work. If the woman nurses, the workload is necessarily and immediately skewed. I love nursing, and it’s best for the child and good for the mother, but it’s biological slavery. I just started a job in a large English department; about half the faculty are women, and most of these are single and have no children. The men are mostly married with children. Hmm, how’d the men pull that off? Women who pursue careers make decisions that many men aren’t forced to make. I am saying the obvious here, everyone knows this stuff.

I want to say before I leave the topic: the pleasures of motherhood are enormous cosmic transcendent. I would not go back to my life pre-motherhood; my son is the best thing in my life, and I love my life. But my joy in mothering is mimicked and represented every day in TV ads; the focus on motherhood’s satisfactions creates a context in which one fears to complain because one will be seen as a bad mother, in the same way that ads’ focus on female slenderness creates a false, guilt-producing norm. I think of our anthology as part of an ongoing set of questionings of and interventions into the limitations and power of the category of motherhood. Our anthology will have its own problematic and limiting assumptions. I hope it gets kicked around hard, because that will mean it is doing its interventionist job, creating debate.

My last morning in Boise, at Catherine Jones’ and Michael Fitzgerald’s, thanks guys. I’ve been on the porch trying to catch some wireless off the neighbors. Got my first blog comment from a woman yesterday—thanks Danielle Pafunda. I was starting to feel weird blogging about motherhood and having only guys respond. Moms, are you busy or something? Michael is making French toast. His first novel, Radiant Days, is about to come out. He’s nervous I gather but it’s good; hope it does well. Ignatius Fitzgerald, who is three, wants me to put an O here. There you go, kid. Eamon is here too; he’s a sack-of-sugar baby with a blissed-out open-mouthed grin as if he hadn’t been up every two hours all night.

I want to close with Barbara Guest, a poet whose poetics were self-consciously apolitical; I think she thought poems were here to do a kind of work that was not political work, and that we should let them do that work. She created fantastically beautiful objects in which the passages have a mysterious relationship to one another, an invisible pull, like the relationships between objects in space. The magnetic field is active and silently ringing. I only have Guest’s Selected with me. Guest was so productive in the last part of her life that the Selected seems bizarrely unrepresentative at this point, though it came out not much more than a decade before she died last year. I hear that a Collected will come out soon, and it will be a treasure (and some of her later books, such as The Red Gaze, are still in print). It’s useful to me to look at Guest when my head starts spinning as I try to think through the relationship between politics and poetics. I don’t believe it is possible to be apolitical in one’s writing; I disagree with Guest about that; one is always espousing a politics, a view of or view to power, unconsciously or not. But to abandon intent, to work in the material, to make something that is alive in its response to itself, active in all its attentive parts—that’s what Guest did in all her writing. A serious engagement with the material we’re working in can jar or unfold the categories we use for thinking. I’d call such an effort political, but perhaps, for Guest, understanding the effort as political limited the activity.

From “The Screen of Distance”:
…Narratives are in
the room where the screen waits suspended like
the frame of the girder the worker will place upon
an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with
a plot or a quarter inch of poetry to encourage
nature into his building and the tree leaning
against it, the tree casting language upon the screen.

Here is the beautiful death image from an earlier poem, “Red Lilies,” in Moscow Mansions. Onward Barbara, and all, thank you for being here.

The pilot light
went out on the stove.

The paper folded like a napkin
other wings flew into the stone.