New Poetry by Conway: “They Have a Cave”

My prison pen pal “Conway” continues to wait for a hearing on his early release petition, three years after California retroactively repealed the “three strikes” law mandating long sentences for nonviolent crimes. If you have enjoyed his work on this blog, feel free to send me a letter of support that I can forward to his attorney.

Meanwhile, his artwork graces the cover of Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s just-published book of political poetry, Imperfect Echoes. Check out her sample poem, “Antigua’s Hope”, at Winning Writers, and read Conway’s new poem, “They Have a Cave”, below the graphic.

They Have a Cave

Have you been in a cave?
Blackened by shadowed bars; strip searched
like a newborn puppy, probed to prove a gender.
Paraded down concrete corridors, jingling in chains
like an untrained beast. Un-named, then re-numbered.

I despise this neverness, this severed distress
from the world of incorporated man.

I have survived too long in this cave,
while they have waved away time (The Administration.)
To claim the one key to freedom’s peace.
To fleece my mind, and control the doors
lashed to the mouth of each cave.

These caves have been built for your poor.
But, no-one they love. Only those
they claim to care about.

You can have my hollow cave.
I have saved nothing from its stark desperation,
from the stripes of separation
that have
stomped out this conversation…

September Links Roundup: The Faults of Forgiveness, Graduating From Church, and Other Radical Ideas

I keep having to come out on this blog. As a gay-affirming Christian, as an abuse survivor, and now as something I don’t have a name for. “Spiritual but not religious” doesn’t fit. I’m finding God in more traditions, even as I loosen my identification with a single one. Christianity remains important to me as one avenue for connecting with God, but I have to confess that I no longer regard it as authoritative.

Don’t put me in the camp of ex-Christian rationalists, or those who proclaim that “all religions basically say the same thing” (they don’t). I believe in magic. What I no longer believe in is all-or-nothing relationships. I used to think I had to choose between tying myself in knots to accept oppressive doctrines, or being cut off from the face of God that I encounter in Christian art and worship. But I’ve discovered that all traditions contain contradictions, a very human admixture of poison and cure, so that staying within the same “brand name” (so to speak) is no guarantee that all the components will be compatible or equal in quality.

If I have a particular doctrinal sticking point these days, it’s the gospel messages of forgiveness and nonresistance to evil. Setting aside all the corruptions of religious texts and institutions, I can’t honestly call myself a follower of Jesus, because my life doesn’t line up with some of his core teaching. Not just that I find it too hard, but that I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Psychologist Sherrie Campbell’s 2014 Huffington Post piece “The 5 Faults With Forgiveness” succinctly lays out the case against the moral-religious command to forgive abuse and atrocities. (Hat tip to the Feminism and Religion blog for the link.) She distinguishes forgiveness from the healthier goal of accepting reality and having all of our feelings about it: “In acceptance the healing is about you. In forgiveness the healing is about the perpetrator.”

I especially liked her fourth point, debunking the catchphrase that “a lack of forgiveness places you in an emotional prison”. I frequently hear this from liberal spiritual folks who want to square the modern concern for personal well-being with an ancient religion that had different priorities. One benefit of having a non-authoritative relationship to Christianity is that I no longer have to twist words out of their common-sense meaning in order to salvage both the doctrine and my sanity. Campbell writes:

Much information is out there about how if we don’t forgive we will only live in an angry, hateful place, and therefore, we have no power and are, in essence, giving our perpetrators even more power. We are shamed for having the naturally occurring feelings we should have based on our circumstances, because if we have them, accept them and express them we are told we are giving the person, situation or circumstance even more power and we are only hurting ourselves. This causes self-punishment. We feel guilty or weak for feeling our natural emotions. In reality there are things in our lives which happen to us which may always trigger a bit of anger as we think about them, but to be told we are responsible for making someone else powerful with these natural feelings only makes us feel inadequate, and it forces us away from the organic grieving process. This forcing of our feelings away creates what we are trying to avoid: a constant state of anger. In trying to keep our power we end up losing our power.

Progressive evangelical Christian blogger Zach Hoag wrote this risky, heartfelt piece this past summer, about the death of his old identity as a church planter and maybe even a church member in the typical sense. “On Graduating” asks us to acknowledge that a spiritual path may be God’s best plan for us now, yet have a natural finite lifespan–an especially bold realization for someone from a Christian culture that prizes inerrancy and universal truths. I identified with Hoag’s revelation that his shame from an abusive childhood was keeping him from growing and moving on spiritually.

It’s time to accept fully the experiences that have brought me to this point. It’s time to shed fully the season, the identity, the dream that has more to do with who I am supposed to be than who I really am now. It’s time to allow whatever additional elements of allegiance to an institution or organization or a form of religion to die, so that I will not stay too long, so that this will not need to become a messy(er) divorce.

Lastly, I want to recommend the online theology journal The Other Journal, Issue #25, whose theme is Trauma. It’s so refreshing to find intellectually rigorous work on trauma theology that’s not behind the paywall of an academic journal. Of special note is “The Spirit’s Witness: An Interview with Shelly Rambo”. Her book Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining is now on my wishlist. In this piece, the Boston University professor describes being troubled by the way that traditional apologetics forced survivors’ stories into a single narrative arc:

I was aware, however, that there was this triangle of clinical practice, literary theory, and Christian theology, which I found to be a very unique way of thinking about suffering, a distinctive phenomenology of suffering. I brought it back to Christian theology, and I asked more of those complex questions that my faith tradition had danced around with apologetics. How do we think about suffering, given the Christian plot—the story of creation, fall, and redemption? What happens when the human story and the story of our lived experience doesn’t fit the linear pattern of that Christian plot? What happens when there are certain dominant ways of telling that story which undercut many of our stories? More specifically, I came to believe that it is important to ask why certain ways of thinking about what happened on the cross come to be the one way of thinking. I brought all of the trauma readings, and all of these questions, back to Christian theology, and it led me to my doctoral work on the interdisciplinary study of trauma and to a corresponding theology of Holy Saturday…

…God’s Spirit is never separated from us, but experiences, such as trauma, can render this love—which is the central attribute of the Spirit and which still remains with us—altogether lost. Yet the pneumatology of Holy Saturday says that when all is lost the Spirit surfaces through the textured witness of those who remain. This is where the connection between God’s Spirit and the human spirit is most critical; the witnesses surface this love. Here I am pointing back to my comments about the surface of skin as significant, because I want to emphasize that this work is not just about words or language but, in very concrete terms, about tending to bodies. The theology of Holy Saturday is oriented less to those who experience trauma than to those who accompany others in this journey through the swamp. Finding one’s way in the swamp requires others who can witness it.

What I hope to emphasize about the descent into hell in the Spirit during Holy Saturday is that we have not yet known that Spirit before. And it appears distinctively here, just as the animating breath appears as the breath of life in Genesis. I highlight this distinctive vocabulary for the Spirit, which occurs in the Gospel of John, setting it apart from the Spirit of Pentecost, because it takes a different form. So I mean to demonstrate that it is not just that the Spirit appears in this part of the story but that the witness is a distinctive form of presence. The swamp, as you present it, may be a very real experience of God’s absence, yet the Spirit in hell is discerned not as pure presence but through the witness of the disciples.

And so that Spirit is always present, yet it has to get reanimated. You can go back to Ezekiel and the dry bones. You think these bones are the driest bones ever, that there is no life possible in them, but they just need to be summoned and given life again.

Wag’s Revue Goes Out with a Bang (and Four Poems by Me)

“I feel like someone just gave me some very good news!”

The online literary journal Wag’s Revue launched in 2009 with a manifesto promising to “marry…the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the Internet.” Over the next six and a half years, Wag’s published innovative poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews. Each issue also showcased grotesque, funny, and disturbing contemporary artwork, such as Dimitri Tsykalov’s portraits made of meat and Ana Teresa Barboza Gubo’s strangely romantic painting of a lion French-kissing (or perhaps preparing to eat) a woman.

I was honored to learn that a selection of my poems won their 2015 writing contest, now appearing in Issue #20 (alas, their last). Some of my literary heroes who’ve been published in Wag’s include Mallory Ortberg, George Saunders, Saeed Jones, Sarah Schulman, and Alison Bechdel. Browse the archives for hours of radical enlightenment and literary laughs. The editors’ list of faves is a good place to begin. My feature starts here.

The check is in the mail, but I’ve already spent the prize money. On what, you ask? Read on.

What I’d Do With Mine

Breasts are for public feeding,
lose your dirty mind.
So says La Leche League and town law agrees.
Well, I say the penis too is not always for sex.
My penis came in a box.
It was plastic like a president.
I wore it like a secret on national television.

This is not true yet.
So far my penis, like a 1975 Barbie Townhouse on eBay,
only furnishes my dreams.
Somewhere my future penis is riding up and down the elevator
of the cardboard house my mother threw away
because it was unfeminist and too big for the hallway.
It is peeping out the little heart-shaped window.
And it is exactly 11 1/2 inches tall in high heels.

I promise that my penis will fit into our daily existence.
It will not ring the doorbell of your vanilla manpussy.
I wear loose pants anyway.
My penis will not show up at family weddings.
The bride can keep the spotlight on her baby bump,
the little penis growing inside her.

But when my penis arrives, in its shiny pink wrapper,
happier than a tea party in a Christmas catalog,
I might walk down our street scratching an itch I don’t have.
Used to be, I had to go shopping for that.
I might pull it out like knitting during the sermon.
It’ll make me less threatening to the Reverend Mother,
who can sing her welcome solo
uninterrupted by other trebles.
I might use my penis as a mouthpiece
for all my novel characters.
How do children feel? Why do women lie?
It’s like a thumb drive with Wikipedia on it.
Men and women agree,
my penis is a likeable protagonist.

At night I’ll sleep with you, of course,
and my penis, after a useful day
of driving cars and explaining baseball statistics,
will sleep on my desk, in the warm spot the laptop makes,
lazing in the afterglow of news.
While you dream of nipples, and I, of deep-fried shrimp,
my penis may dream of returning to the woods
where the stag leaps beneath a horned moon.

Tarot Spreads for Novel Writers

The Tarot, in the school of thought that I’m currently studying, is a tool for asking questions and receiving insights from one’s own intuition, from a higher consciousness, from the psychological emanations of other people, and/or from spiritual beings. This is also how I write fiction. So naturally, in working with Tarot, I haven’t confined myself to asking questions about my own life. I’m even more interested in Tarot readings for my characters.

More so than craft-based writing prompts, a randomly (?) drawn card has a Zen quality of surprise and mystery that confounds my intellect and jolts me out of the well-worn groove of my plans for the story. In addition, combining my writing exercise with a spiritual practice reminds me to stay open to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. After a year of final revisions on the Endless Novel, which were challenging but predictable, I am entering the wide-open space of the Endless Sequel, where everything is up for grabs except the main character dynamics. Tarot helps me enjoy that freedom of unknowing, while making some concrete progress in filling in the space.

Not every card produces a fruitful or understandable clue. The confusing cards nonetheless serve a purpose. They encourage me to explore plot twists that I hadn’t considered, though I may ultimately reject them as dead ends. (This is an advantage of Tarot over my Christian Writer phase: no guilt or fear about disagreeing with, or misunderstanding, the Message From Above.) The hard work of interpretation flexes my creative muscles. Sometimes, weeks later, in the light of other readings, I’ll finally understand why that card was in that position.

For instance, in my first Tarot reading about the Endless Sequel, I asked “Who is the narrator?” and was flummoxed by the answer, the 8 of Wands reversed. Traditional meanings include blockage, confusion, too many choices. In the standard Rider-Waite deck, it’s one of the few cards with no human figures on it at all!

I knew that my main character had a dis-integrated personality because of trauma and that a major plot thread would involve him reconnecting and healing those parts. But a narrator with fragmented consciousness generates a confusing, overwhelming experience for reader and writer alike. I never could get through those kinds of experimental novels in school, and I didn’t want to write one.

Perhaps the card represented my own failure to make a decision, offloading too much responsibility onto the cards or the character? I was afraid I didn’t have the skill to coax this secretive, self-deprecating character to talk about his feelings in a way that sounded authentic to us both. It would also be a challenge to differentiate his voice from the narrator of the Endless Novel (his boyfriend), whose campy, chatty style was almost too easy for me to slip into. Below these intellectual concerns was a non-literary one, the primal fear that I would lose myself in his “parts”. The first few years of the Endless Novel were written deep in PTSD territory, so my gut memory associated first drafts with losing my pony in the Swamps of Sadness.

Meanwhile, to refresh my writing skills while I haggled with myself over plot, I started working on a completely unrelated short story, and remembered why I loved that form. I can deal with unknowing for 30 pages, better than 400. It’s publishable now, not 10 years from now. I can see all the way around the structure: it’s a statue, not the Parthenon.

“Oh!” I said in the middle of the night. “The Endless Sequel is a novel in stories.”

Thanks to this working hypothesis, all the questions that had stopped me from writing lost their importance: Where should I begin in the story? Who is the narrator? If there’s only one narrator, how can I depict things that happen to each of the main characters when the other is not present? Just start anywhere! It’s possible that one of the stories will take on such momentum that it becomes a single book-length narrative, with material from the others as flashbacks or interludes between chapters. Or it could become a multi-vocal, multi-genre work. Whatever happens, I won’t be wasting my time by experimenting with different points of view. And I don’t think this solution would have hit me with such clarity, if part of my mind hadn’t continued to work on the enigma of the 8 of Wands reversed.

Want to try this for yourself? Here are links to some useful layouts I found by Googling “Tarot spreads for novel plotting”. Barbara Moore’s Tarot Spreads shows you how to adapt or design your own spreads. For meanings, I rely on Rachel Pollack’s 78 Degrees of Wisdom and Mary K. Greer’s Tarot Reversals.

The Tarot Parlor: Basic Plot Development Tarot Spread

Happy Fish Tarot: Tarot Spreads for Writing

Write to Done: The Tarot as a Tool for Writing Your Novel

(From my new favorite deck, So Below Deck: Book of Shadows, Vol. 2. The contemporary settings make it helpful for plotting a realist novel. Multi-ethnic characters and a few who could be interpreted as lesbian. Interpretations of traditionally sad or violent cards, like the 10 of Swords, are more upbeat than in Rider-Waite. In general I find that modern decks prettify the no-nonsense medieval toughness of the RWS images, so it’s good to keep the old standby around for balance.)

Two Poems from Mary A. Koncel’s “Closer to Day”

The prose poem is the perfect form for surreal vignettes that combine the tell-it-slant quality of poetry with the relaxed unfolding of a prose line. As in fables, the first sentences establish mysterious happenings as the new normal. There is no time for technical explanations of this strange world that waits inside our own. Mary A. Koncel’s assured voice convinces us that we live in a place where farmers burst into flames, lusty women smell men’s ripeness in the air, and horses wait prayerfully for their owners to fall back in love.

Koncel’s debut chapbook of prose poems, Closer to Day, was published in 1999 by Quale Press, one of the numerous small presses that enrich our Western Massachusetts culture. The editors have kindly given me permission to share the work below. For more of her work, check out her 2003 full-length collection from Tupelo Press, You Can Tell the Horse Anything.

The Neighborhood Man

A dog is rolling in the grass. A man walks by and thinks the dog is drowning. But the man’s not sure because he’s just a neighbor. The dog is very convincing, turning over and over, its long legs kicking up clumps of grass. The man strips off his suit, drops to his knees, and rolls in after the dog. He hopes the dog can hold on just a while longer.

The man is having problems. He’s getting very tired, barely able to keep his head above the grass. It’s very late. He hopes this will be over soon. But the dog is getting smaller, the grass much deeper.

****

Bless This Night

It’s almost like heaven out here. Ten miles of angel-pin turns, glittering blacktop, then a pair of straight yellow lines leading right to sweet soul of opossum, twin spirits of skunks.

Driving home, I think about Saint Francis, imagine him wandering through the woods, a flock of swallows buzzing his left eardrum, a raccoon or two draped over his shoulders like a favorite cardigan. A tall, awkward man, he had hands with white palms and strong straight fingers.

Out here, under these brooding stars and stark moon, animals are just as abundant. Cut loose from fur and body, they languish along the road: rabbits begin to hurry but stop in mid-air, a fox sniffs its blood, surprised by its cold, exquisite beauty, while tree frogs swallow deep, vaguely tasting the last sounds in their throats.

“Keep still,” Saint Francis would warn if he walked among these animals. “Keep still.” One hand pressed against his lips, the other held in blessing, he would stop at each one that raised its head and wanted more.

I could stop. I could stop, drop to my knees, and hold out my hands like Saint Francis, tell these animals that they have been good, good and wild. It’s time to surrender their hearts to me, their long and mournful howls, their hunger. Bless this night, bless this road and all that makes it heaven.