The Erin Morrill–Eyed Poetics of Unmotherhood & Anti-Memorial

After hearing and not forgetting this rambunctious, profound, and clear-eyed essay by Erin Morrill at the East Bay Poetry Summit, we're glad to point to it in print. Now up at Entropy (in the Art section): "After I Wasn’t Dead: much obliged notes on unmotherhood, the anti-memorial, the mother of dragons, muita obrigada A Copa" touches on all of the above, with corresponding images.

Do we even know what we're having a moment of silence for? "But I don’t really ascribe to the notion of silence as it is merely an opportunity for deep listening, duh the Cagian. Thus I’m more interested in the antithesis of such gestures, the anti-memorials and subtractive sculptures." Morrill also mentions Anne Waldman, David Buuck, Erika Staiti, Cecilia Corrigan, Paige Taggart, and Brian Whitener, among others (nice communing for the summit). Here's an excerpt from a particularly fruitful, if you will, part of the essay:

I got into a stand off kind of but I don’t think she knew it at the time with Dodie Bellamy once about negative space. . . .

The circumstances>> I found myself in this position of back pedaling clarifying reductions she’d made in a blog post of what I’d tried to articulate to her and Erika Staiti and David Buuck after he and Marianne Morris read at my house in January 2011. I showed great admiration for David’s reading (for I am an exuberant gusher some moments) from an earlier Army of Lovers in which the character is speaking of her flabby hole. Dodie wanted what I was saying to too easily be a reading of the vagina as a negative space there by in a state of lack but that wasn’t what I was talking about at all. So I wrote to her:

I liked David’s piece because it was the flabby hole as you put it, it did not want to obey filling.

I was intrigued by Erika [Staiti] noting it because it comes up in her chapbook that Andrew and I are about to finish getting together as well as Brian Whitener’s. So, my own excitement about negative space is not about rhetoric or theory, but about how these two poets whose chapbooks I have been looking at for so long now are both considering negative space in their work.

She then excerpts from Staiti's poem. Morrill goes on to consider the artistically productive possibilities in what she terms unmotherhood, and in relation to her very personal life:

It was only in the negative space of nobody coming that I was able to call my spirits to me. You don’t need to know, they are for me to know, just as real as anybody, but I can only feel their presencing in the alone spaces.

Thus now my abdomen contains the negative space memorial where my left Fallopian tube is not, memorial to where my child is not. The anti-memorial of my childlessness. How that is posited in heteronormative culture as lack, as the less than whole woman. But ooohh how generative is the negative space of that alleged lack, the space where art, writing, profession can flourish, where there is no subversion of one’s needs or projection of one’s desires onto the offspring. The generative space of unmotherhood. This was finally brought home to me back in April when I was writing a mad fluster of poems for my new poet posse in New York that I assumed would comprise the audience at the next day’s reading I was doing at Berl’s. . . .

It reminds us a bit of Denise Riley's "Linguistic Inhibition as a Cause of Pregnancy" from her book Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. In any case, Read All of Morrill's piece at Entropy. And if you're in New York, you can catch her reading with Lisa Jarnot and Amy Berkowitz at Unnameable Books on Friday, August 8.