Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

PEN Prison Writing Contest Winners Posted


The PEN American Center, a writers’ association that defends freedom of expression and other human rights, offers an extensive Prison Writing Program that mentors incarcerated writers and promotes their work through readings and publications. The winners of their 2007 writing contest are currently online.

I was especially impressed with J.E. Wantz’s first-prize essay “Feeling(s) Cheated“. Part memoir, part political analysis, this piece describes the author’s treatment with the antidepressant Paxil. Wantz asks tough questions about what the individual, and society, gains or loses by medicating the symptoms rather than addressing the causes of sorrow, anger, and shame. When does medication become a crutch, as well a cheaper alternative to rehabilitating the prisoner? What is the true self, and at what cost are we willing to experience its emotional highs and lows?

Wantz recounts a traumatic encounter with a volunteer preacher who denounced antidepressants as Satanic. In this man’s view, mental illness was a demonic possession that would be cured if one’s faith was strong enough. This inaccurate, shaming message cut the author off from a sense of God’s forgiveness, though the challenge also motivated him to wonder what emotions he was so afraid of experiencing without the drug.


When I was a teenager I wasn’t prepared to deal with the emotional quagmire that lay before me like a quicksand minefield. I was too tied up in other people’s views of who I should be. Other people condemned me because I was not like the saints of old. They wanted to shape me into their idea of what a good moral person should be. Their inability to consider that maybe they didn’t know what they were talking about never entered their minds. They were right; everyone at church, at youth group, and at summer camp thought the same way. Everyone in my world, limited as it was, told me who I was supposed to be. How could they all be wrong? My mind and emotions were at war. A war I could not win without help. In the psychiatric field I believe that this is called a cognitive dissonance. Ten years later I was introduced to Paxil. The drug helped solve none of the key issues, it merely put them on hold.

But did I need the drug for ten years? Or would a much shorter time period have been appropriate, maybe the original six-month trial period? A drug that was meant to be a stop-gap emergency measure had become a lifestyle. It had become a habit. Did the Band-Aid become the putative cure? My body consumed the substance daily, building a dependency.

An October 2005 article in The Atlantic Monthly, entitled “Lincoln’s Great Depression” by Joshua Wolf Shenk (adapted from his book entitled Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled his Greatness), examined and found a man who was tormented by melancholy, to the edge of suicide. The author’s argument is that Lincoln’s struggle from within his depression focused his statecraft in ways that were essential to addressing the specific challenges of both the war of secession and the contentious debate on slavery. But, as the author explains, all of that arose from Lincoln’s approach to living with his depression. He did attempt medical remedies that we can now conclusively say did not help, and in fact may have harmed. He tried tablets of mercury, cocaine, and infusions designed to induce violent diarrhea, to name a few. Today we see all these remedies as “snake oil” in the battle against depression, but the medical establishment of the day trumpeted their efficacy, much as the current TV commercials do for every conceivable malady anyone with disposable income could have.

Lincoln worked with his depression and is now, inarguably, considered one of this nation’s best presidents. He didn’t overcome, rise above, or surmount his melancholy. He never gave a glowing testimonial about how he found God or a drug that miraculously saved him from the clutches of the demon depression. No, he had a different approach. The author tells us that Lincoln requested a copy of the eulogy given at the funeral of his 11-year old son, Willie. Shenk says, “He [Lincoln] would hold to this idea as if it were a life raft.” The idea is that “ . . . with confidence in God, ‘our sorrows will be sanctified and made a blessing to our souls, and by and by we shall have occasion to say with blended gratitude and rejoicing’ it is good for us that we have been afflicted.” His depression was not a demon to exorcise; it was a fact of everyday life necessary to live with.

What explains the judgmental attitude that some Christians have toward depression, as described in Wantz’s story and this RELEVANT Magazine article by Laura Bowers? In a culture that is hyper-sensitive to any signs of Christian hypocrisy, where evangelism is met with suspicion or indifference, I for one certainly feel pressure to pretend that my faith makes me happy and functional. Turning to drugs looks like an admission that Jesus isn’t enough. If the product doesn’t work for me, why would anyone else buy it? I’m not just the president of the Hair Club for Men, I’m also a satisfied customer! 

The flip side of this judgment toward others is shame about one’s self–the exact thing the gospel is supposed to free us from, which should be a sign that this attitude is un-Christian. When I am depressed, I am afraid that it undermines my credibility and makes me unlovable. Depression reveals how much power I’m still giving other people to determine my self-worth, when I “should” be getting that from God’s unmerited love. I put “should” in scare-quotes because these days, that expectation feels like just another demand to which I can’t measure up, i.e. another source of depression.

How do I get from here to there? Maybe I don’t. Yesterday I prayed, “God, thank you for making me a melancholy person, because that is how you made me, and so you must have a reason that is for my good as well as the good of others.”

Do I feel better today? Do I have to?

Jesus Won’t Make Me a Supermodel


As research for my novel (what a good excuse that is), I’ve begun watching the fashion-industry reality shows on Bravo. I’m sporadically following “Project Runway”, since I haven’t warmed up to this year’s contestants, but my real addiction is the ultimate bitch-fest “Make Me a Supermodel“. I could do without the manufactured interpersonal drama, especially this week when they all ganged up on Katy because she was eating carbs. Honestly, I’m just interested in the clothes. (I was pulling for Holly a couple of weeks ago because her Christian principles made her uncomfortable doing a soft-core photo shoot, but since then, she’s been just as catty as everyone else.) 

For maximum cognitive dissonance, I’m currently reading Gregory Boyd’s Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God. Boyd argues that Christians should be characterized by nonjudgmental love, rather than by willingness to make moral pronouncements. Only an omniscient God can truly understand all the factors that go into another’s virtuous or sinful behavior, and only God can pass judgment unbiased by ego-defenses. Since the Fall, we compulsively divide people into “good” and “evil”, but these judgments are always in reference to our own psychological needs, not the truth. We set ourselves up at the center of creation, where only God belongs.

Boyd recognizes that there is a need to hold sinners accountable, for their own good and that of the community. However, he says that the church should not be in the business of listing categories of sinners who are excluded from fellowship (he singles out Christians’ mistreatment of homosexuals here). Instead, accountability should occur within loving personal relationships, such as a small group within a church, where the message and remedy can be tailored to the individual’s needs. 

So what does this have to do with Katy and Holly? “Supermodel” may be an extreme example, but the everyday business of life is all about judging. We choose one book over another, one type of car, one career, one job applicant, one church. And when we put our own creations out there, be they sermons or shoes, we know that someone else will be approving, rejecting, or misunderstanding the value of what we do. How do you function, how do you stay motivated to strive for excellence, unless you judge? But how do you love yourself and others unless you suspend judgment?

It’s awful that Katy’s housemates make fun of her for snacking. On the other hand, leaving aside the unrealistic weight standards of today’s fashion industry, if she wants to be beautiful, she needs to stay in shape. “Fine,” a serious spiritually minded person might say, “this just proves that the fashion industry is stupid and evil.” Well, let me tell you, the poetry world is no less competitive, it’s just that the stakes are so low that the whole thing seems kind of cute, unless you’re a poet. Should I stop writing poetry because in order to improve, I must evaluate my own work harshly and compare it to the greats?

I like Boyd’s preference for interpersonal, individualized accountability. As he observes, moral abstractions distance us from one another, subverting the primary command to love. However, the church also has a social role, which is complicated in a fallen world. Must accountability be confined to the private, individual level so that we can live wholly in grace? Where is the dimension of social justice? As an institution in the world, the church cannot be neutral between good and evil. That would be like hoarding grace for ourselves, preserving the nonjudgmental purity of our interactions within the church at the expense of speaking up for those outside.

Moreover, because sin still exists, we need to have some categories of “sin” and “not-sin” or else accountability has nowhere to begin. This is where Boyd’s approach to homosexuality, though an improvement over the evangelical mainstream, still falls short.

It’s magnanimous of him to say that we should extend fellowship without discrimination to gays and transvestites along with obese people, greedy people, racists, prostitutes and murderers. (Just as an aside, why are “prostitutes” always named as the sinners in that transaction rather than the pimps and johns who enslave them?) But if he’d added blacks to that list, we’d all be offended, even though it’s equally true that churches should avoid racial discrimination.

There’s a crucial difference between flaws that we graciously overlook and neutral characteristics. The former, we separate out from the person in order to maintain our relationship with him. The latter is part of who he is. In practice, a solitary gay person may not notice the difference, but it’ll soon become clear that his spouse and adopted children aren’t accepted on equal terms as the other men’s wives and families. Being gay is not something you only do in private. (Then again, in this great land of reality television, what is?)

That’s why I’m rooting for Ronnie.

Jill Alexander Essbaum: “Wednesday, Ash”


Nothing of me will survive.
This body that I wear will die
and my mouth–nevermind its loveliness–
is set to shut itself into a sorrow the size

of restlessness and lack.
The lips go too. They slack
at the corners crying no, no
but still they go. They do not talk back.

And then for every finger I have counted on–
so many times–there is a going, and a gone.
They leave to rest in pieces with once sad and
    pretty hands of grief
waiting for an Easter dawn

(which no one hears approaching when they’re 
    buried underneath the ground).
And my feet cannot quit thinking quickstep,
    swing, the sound
of toe taps or a waltz. Hush. No dancing for the dead.
The ball is done. The slipper? Nowhere to be found.

And my belly, full or no is quiet.
Then it will feast as a ghost feasts–on nothing, a diet
of sediment, sleep, a lily or two.
I shall not fuss, I shall not make riot

or rivalry any, any more. The eyes are vacant, tenantless,
for they have been plucked out. Relentless
death, you have withered shut my heart
like an old rose closing, pungent and motionless

in the closet of the rats and of the bones. Everything
    I am is dust,
or shadows of it, clay unkissed.
Having died in the desert, I do not come back.
Having died in the desert, it is the drought I miss.

How can that be? Nothing, nothing of us survives.
Every inch of us will die,
and not a thing that God can do will stop it.
Even Christ, the very self of God was crucified

and dead three days, entombed.
Angels wept as little children, women loomed
about His bloody, broken body swaddled in a shroud.
And then–He rose. Like Lazarus or bread, or any
    bright moon

which lifts as thunder over mountaintops and homes.
Like that, my God–save me, save me from the groan
and creak of a coffin’s rusty hinge
and resurrect us all, one by one–

all the bodies that no longer breathe or move,
and every soul that reaches but cannot grasp the 
    thing it loves.
Save us to a grace we cannot ever hope to understand,
such that in our dyings–behold–somehow?–we live.

***
    from Heaven (Middlebury College Press, 1999)

Back from AWP: Preliminary Report


My husband and I returned yesterday from three action-packed days at the AWP literary conference in New York City, the largest annual event for poetry publishers, literary journals and university presses. We handed out hundreds – maybe thousands! – of Winning Writers contest flyers, hung around with editors from our favorite magazines, and picked up numerous books that I’ll be blogging about over the next few weeks. (Especially if I give up computer solitaire for Lent.) Some highlights:


Rebecca Wolff from the experimental poetry publisher Fence Books plied us with fortune cookies containing fabulous prizes (I won a free subscription to their journal), but their handsomely designed books needed nothing to sweeten the deal.  After picking up Ariana Reines’ The Cow, winner of their 2006 Alberta Prize, I went back to Rebecca the next day and said, “I just want to stand here and tell everyone to buy this book, it redefines what poetry should do!” I mean, check this out:


from “Knocker”

Acres of wishes inside her. Any liver. To harden the gut. Boys rinse their arms in what falls from my carotid. My body is the opposite of my body when they hang me up by my hind legs. I mean the opposite thing. Not a wall with windows in it and flaglets of laundry waving or being so easy to mouth his so-thick. Sloes and divorcing her miserable eyes from the rumor they stir up in me. Everything on the planet is diverted.

Worse is less bloody pussies to lick. Everything good’s an animal.
…

Meanwhile, the Ayn Rand Institute had deployed two young, cheerful people in nice suits to advertise their very lucrative essay contests for high school and college students. I commended them for establishing a beachhead in what had to be an unfriendly environment, populated as it was by thousands of liberal academic types who were cranky from long restroom lines and inferior tuna sandwiches. I bought The Art of Fiction, a compilation of Rand’s lectures on writing techniques, which will either clear away my plot problems like Howard Roark blowing up an ugly building, or crush me with guilt because my process is so irrational.

As research for the aforementioned novel, I attended three different panels on gay literature, where I got to hear Reginald Shepherd say “buttfucking” and met the sublime Carl Phillips, who expressed a refreshing impatience with the constraints of identity politics. On a more serious note, Shepherd’s recent autobiographical essay in Poets & Writers resonated so deeply with me that I purchased his latest nonfiction collection, Orpheus in the Bronx.

Other writers whose work I intend to explore as a result of this conference are Brian Teare, Marcia Slatkin, Jeffrey Harrison, and Gregg Shapiro. I picked up the latter’s book Protection at the Gival Press table, where I was also directed to the literary journal Bloom: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More.


The biggest idea I took away from AWP was “permission to speak”. This concept came up several times during a panel honoring feminist poet-theologian Alicia Ostriker. The panelists were talking about how Ostriker recovered women’s voices in the Bible and led the way for women poets to write about our own experience. For me this week, the permission I needed was to write outside my experience, to take on the voices of characters outside my own gender, sexuality, values and personality, without feeling afraid that I was appropriating someone else’s culture or being “inaccurate”. Even on panels defined by that old PC trilogy of race, class and gender, it seemed that the defensive fiefdoms of the 1990s had given way to a celebration of cross-pollination and role-playing.

Paradoxically, another benefit of this experience was a new permission to be myself, as in not comparing my writing to anyone else’s. I came away with a notion of “talent” capacious enough to include Reines’ furious, scatological, disintegrating prose-poems, Phillips’ finely crafted, melancholy lyrics, and Rand’s rationalist polemics and potboiler plots.

Just remember the cautionary words of Ed Ochester: “There are many mansions in the world of poetry, but some of them are McMansions.”

Mark Doty: “At the Gym”


This salt-stain spot
marks the place where men
lay down their heads,
back to the bench,

and hoist nothing
that need be lifted
but some burden they’ve chosen
this time: more reps,

more weight, the upward shove
of it leaving, collectively,
this sign of where we’ve been:
shroud-stain, negative

flashed onto the vinyl
where we push something
unyielding skyward,
gaining some power

at least over flesh,
which goads with desire,
and terrifies with frailty.
Who could say who’s

added his heat to the nimbus
of our intent, here where
we make ourselves:
something difficult

lifted, pressed or curled,
Power over beauty,
power over power!
Though there’s something more

tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.

Here is some halo
the living made together.


Read more poems and essays by prizewinning author Mark Doty on the Academy of American Poets website.

Book Notes: Get the Rollax Replicas You Watned, Vermin


The uniquely contemporary art form known as “spam poetry” — amusing, occasionally creepy “found poems” assembled from phrases in junk emails — has spawned numerous fan sites such as the Spam Poetry Institute, Spam-Poetry.com, and the Anthology of Spam Poetry (notable for the fake bios of the poems’ “authors”). I find this art form so fascinating because it captures the absurdity of the competing messages hurled at us by mass communication, a random data stream of tragedies and trivia in which all information has equal (and therefore no) significance.

As someone who has tried in vain to appreciate some of today’s more experimental poets, I also appreciate the questions spam poetry raises about language and meaning. Can a poem be enjoyable even if it has no “meaning”, no narrative thread or logical connection leading from one phrase to another? If so, what characteristics distinguish interesting nonsense from inanity? Good spam poetry, I think, does more than joke about Viagra; it teases us with the ghost of meaning, triggering our minds’ compulsion to “make sense” of any string of words we encounter.

So I was excited to discover an entire chapbook of spam poetry, E.V. Noechel’s Get the Rollax Replicas You Watned, Vermin: Poems, Directly Marketed (Assume Nothing Press, 2007). A quick and entertaining read, these poems also have a sinister tone, like secret communications overheard by the wrong person, or dream conversations that seem terribly important yet impossible to retain. Perhaps spam poetry taps into the paranoia of the Internet age, where information is plentiful yet unreliable, and our privacy can be violated without us ever knowing.

Below, samples from the chapbook:

Drugs Advised for Rape Victims

I decide to tender you, perfectly fresh.
What would happen
To your family if you died?
Please don’t think it’s an easy question, wastrel.
Nude angelfish, buttercup, Libya,
Breathtaking image: no place like home.
No place like home.

Soap and water, best germ-fighters.
Should the Government be Involved?
Woven ketosis, Polaroid convoy
The squeaking wheel doesn’t always get
The grease. Sometimes it gets replaced.
My friend, you are in trouble. You
Have nothing to lose.

I think this will intrigue you, mournful
I hope you are doing okay. Are you hurting?
I’ve been depressed with my magnitude
Lately. What and you.

        first published in Blotter magazine

****

Don’t Forget Your Superman Pill

Major Loophole,
Do you want your dick to be wallpaper for a computer?
Surely you only dream of it, delight in
Wartime sorbet
Charisma, violent
Pop quiz hardship,
Orthopedics,
Orchard grass
bamboozle, good-tempered
Masquerade.

My oh my,
Anastigmatic, I’m
Feeling thin,
Vomit news.

It’s heroic to be mammoth,
As clean as beef?

Increase your testosterone
with this new Caucasian.
Why didn’t you
Refuel?

Those college chicks don’t know anything.
Vyaghra.
(Tiger in Sanskrit)

You have a pretty house,
Sleep soundly and awake rested.

****

Visit Noechel’s website at www.evnoechel.com . Read her Honorable Mention poem from the 2006 Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers here; Jim Neill’s second-prize poem is another fine example of spam poetry.

Ding, Dong, [Your Name Here] Is Dead


From the Springwise retail trends newsletter comes our latest Sign of the Apocalypse: Requiem for You, an Austrian company that will compose your personal requiem on demand, to the tune of 20,000 Euros and up:


Just launched last year, Requiem for You offers services on three levels, the most basic of which is the composition of an individually tailored requiem. The firm represents a network of composers, librettists and musicians who will write an individual requiem in advance, capturing the client’s unique personality and accommodating preferences for balance among vocal, instrumental and textual components. Styles available include baroque, classical, romantic, jazz or Broadway musical, with text in German, Latin or English. A personal laudatio is also available.

In addition to composing the piece, Requiem for You can also produce an audio recording of it using a team of freelance artists, orchestras and recording studios, once again honouring the client’s personal tastes in the CD’s cover art. Finally, upon request the company can arrange a performance of the requiem, using anything from an audio presentation of the recorded version to a live performance with orchestra and choir. Prices reportedly range from EUR 20,000 for the requiem’s composition to EUR 400,000 for the all-out live performance.

As vanity projects go, it’s more space-efficient than building gold statues of yourself, but for that price tag, I’d want a wider range of musical choices. Death metal? Hip-hop? For sheer memorability, there’s nothing like a nursery rhyme. Personally, when it’s my time to go, I hope my heirs hire Weird Al.

MassEquality Unveils “Equality Agenda”


If you’ve ever heard right-wing commentators denouncing the “gay agenda” and wondered “What’s that? Why didn’t I get the memo?”, worry no more. MassEquality, the grass-roots activist group that helped secure equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians in Massachusetts, has just announced its “Equality Agenda“. These policy initiatives represent the next steps toward full equality for people of every sexual orientation and gender identity.

Proposals include: Add gender identity and gender expression as protected categories under the state’s nondiscrimination laws. Increase funding for “safe schools” (anti-bullying) programs. Pass the MassHealth Equality Bill, which would give married same-sex couples the same Medicaid benefits as straight married couples. Increase funding for HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, and for domestic-violence prevention services that address the special needs of GLBT couples.

In a separate initiative, MassEquality will be partnering with Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) to organize for equal marriage rights in Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine and New Hampshire.

If you think this is a good idea, click here. If you think the end of the world is at hand, click here.

Kirk Lee Davis: “Jubilee at the Liberation of the Senses”


Lookout Donkey—It’s a shining corporeal supernova!
Mr. And Mrs. Political have got it together again!

Je suis en retard, Mr. Circumflex?
Let the poppy seeds eat their spongeycake!

The Luftwaffe is happy to see me!
Dance the whiteboy!

Okay now, everybody: barrel-roll those hips?
Simon says pin the quail on the pattycake man!

And helloooooo, Misti Applepants!
The Lord is willing and the flesh is Yahoo!

All free! All free!
What robot abdicator could forego?

Get up, Chipdog! Lock the backdoor!
The giant teeth! The torture wagons!

The fun is here to stay.


Reprinted by permission from DIAGRAM, Issue 7.6

Open-Mindedness, Exclusion, and Religious Commitment


Open-mindedness, like tolerance, is a paradoxical virtue for liberal-modernist thinkers. Using science as their ideal, they argue that the search for truth requires continual openness to revising your views, which is incompatible with a settled religious commitment to any particular doctrine. Of course, as Micah Tillman points out in a recent Relevant Magazine article, this way of thinking isn’t really “open-minded” toward religion. He notes that our culture’s main alternative is post-modernism, which touts dialogue among people with different belief systems, but doesn’t see this dialogue ever resolving itself into a consensus on the truth. Tillman, who teaches philosophy at the Catholic University of America, suggests a third option:


As a teacher of philosophy and a thinking Christian, I have struggled with the choice between modernism and post-modernism. Instead of finally choosing one or the other, however, I live with a philosophy in between. On the open-mindedness question, I find it to be superior to both.

This middle philosophy is called phenomenology. To be open-minded, it claims, is to believe that the more angles from which you see something, the better you will understand it. It does not assume, however, that you can see a thing equally well from each angle. Some views are clearer and fuller than others.

From studying phenomenology, I learned that even incomplete or distorting ways of seeing a thing may tell us something about it. If a thing tastes sweet to one person, and sour to another, we know at least that it is probably some kind of food.

True open-mindedness, I discovered, is neither passive nor anti-Christian. It is the practice of getting outside your head—so as to get inside the heads of others, so as to understand the world better. And for the Christian it means trying to have the mind of Christ. After all, He has the clearest, fullest view of all.

In my experience, when people bristle at the idea that all worldviews are not created equal, it’s usually because they’re afraid this means all people are not equal. This problem is partly the fault of Christians who have behaved pridefully about their faith, as if they alone had picked the correct answer on an exam. Catholic theologian James Alison here shares some thoughts about how we can proclaim the uniqueness of Christianity without bragging about the specialness of Christians (emphasis mine):


I’ve proposed a way of drawing close to a real, dense, presence, which brings along with it real human associations, and which is, in as far as it is possible for us to speak like this, the way in which the Triune God manifests in our midst. This seems to me to be something absolutely unique. That is to say, this network of associations through which God has projected his self-manifestation in our midst, exercising his strong protagonism in this weak presence, giving himself to be known by means of a completely new criterion, has no parallel, that I know or have ever heard of, in any other part of human knowledge, culture, philosophy or narrative.

The first question which this raises for me is as follows: How should we speak about this quality of absolute “uniqueness” without that uniqueness being a form, however well-disguised, of human “exclusivism”? And my first intuition about this, and it is no more than that, is that we have to stop being concerned about being considered exclusivist, as if that which is unique were in some way our property. Instead we have to refine our understanding of the protagonism of that which is unique and rediscover our relationality with others as part of what is received from and through that unique protagonism.

To grasp the full significance of this passage, one needs to read the whole essay, “Strong Protagonism and Weak Presence: The Changes in Tone of The Voice of God”, which is somewhat technical but worth the effort. Alison’s main idea, in this as in all his other writings, is that God’s identification with the sacrificial victim in Jesus totally relativizes all the hierarchies and exclusions that we generate from the fact of differences between human beings. Our relative merits are negligible compared to the gap in righteousness between us and God, whose forgiveness offers us the only kind of self-worth that does not depend on comparing ourselves to others.