Alicia Ostriker: “The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog”


The column below is reprinted by permission from American Life in Poetry, a project of the Poetry Foundation. Sign up for their free weekly e-newsletter here . I was enticed by the fairy-tale sound of this poem’s title, and then nourished by its deeply joyful and embodied spirituality.

American Life in Poetry: Column 274

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of our country’s finest poets. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey. I thought that today you might like to have us offer you a poem full of blessings.

The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God’s love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended skirt

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other
dogs can smell it

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog” from The Book of Seventy, by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, © 2009. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Introduction copyright ©2010 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Straight Allies of the Week: Rev. John Makokha and Anne Baraza Makokha


Being a straight ally isn’t easy. Even in a diverse, open society like America, we sometimes find that people close to us will reject us or question our faith in God. Imagine how much harder this is in African countries where speaking up for gay rights can also get you arrested or killed.

Other Sheep is an outreach ministry to GLBT Christians in the developing world. Among other projects, they help persecuted members of sexual minorities gain asylum, and they bring affirming theological resources to churches and schools in many countries.

Rev. John Makokha and his wife Anne Baraza Makokha are Other Sheep coordinators in Kenya. Their stories can be read on the Other Sheep website. Anne began reexamining the Biblical evidence on homosexuality when her beloved older sister came out as a lesbian but continued to be a devout Christian. Despite resistance from her professors at her evangelical college in Nairobi, Anne kept up her studies and now teaches seminars on affirming theology. Her husband John, a minister in the United Methodist Church, also works tirelessly to educate his fellow clergymen in Kenya about sexual orientation and faith.

Needless to say, this is not the kind of work that is conducive to career advancement in a homophobic society. Other Sheep’s coordinators do amazing work on a very small budget. Please donate to help them with their living expenses so that they can continue to protect our GLBT brothers and sisters in Africa.

TC Tolbert Interviews Performance Poet Sonya Renee Taylor


The blog Persephone Speaks is a project of Kore Press, an excellent feminist literary press based in Arizona. Persephone Speaks features interviews with authors and performers about the creative process, gender issues, social justice and antiwar activism, and much more.

Their latest newsletter introduced me to the work of performance poet Sonya Renee Taylor. Her first full-length collection of poetry, A Little Truth on Your Shirt , has just been released by GirlChild Press. See this video of her powerful and heartbreaking poem “Still Life” from the National Poetry Slam:

TC Tolbert, a genderqueer feminist poet and educator, recently interviewed Renee for Persephone Speaks. The two artists talk about sexual identity, the difference between poetry written for the stage and for the page, and the challenges of telling difficult personal truths in a way that is also healing and respectful toward the people in your life. Here’s an excerpt:

TC: How do we, as artists, – or, do we – consider the reader or audience? At what point do their needs influence what we create?

SR: It’s difficult. Nothing starts, for me, with the reader. It starts with me and my place in the experience, in the observation, in the thought process. That’s where it starts, for me. My decision to share that is about where I believe the reader exists in the work. There are things that I have written that I feel very clear that the reader does not exist at all in that work. And I feel very clear about that. Usually the poem will tell me if it is for more than just me. And if the poem tells me that, then I share it.

TC: A personal question I found myself wondering – has her mom read this? Has her dad read this? How do the folks who are very much present in this work, how do they respond? How do you navigate that?

SR: They know that they are in the book. There are a lot of pieces that they have heard already. I read “Penance” to my mother long before I considered publishing. We were having a conversation about how I could establish boundaries around her drinking and what I could do that does not re-traumatize me and I didn’t know what to say so I said let me read you this poem. Just yesterday I read the piece, “Dreams for My Father,” on the radio in Portland, Oregon and my father called me b/c he had heard me read it and he said, “When I hear the poem it reminds me that I need to call and tell you I love you unconditionally. So I’m calling to tell you I love you unconditionally.” And this is its own art in that experience b/c that is not where we started when I wrote that piece. The piece, “Fragility of Eggs,” I read to my mother when I first wrote it and she cried and asked me to never do it publicly. I obviously didn’t honor that. And here is my perspective. Whenever the experience impacts me, it becomes my experience. And as an artist, I want to honor the space where that came from. And I’m not going to not tell my truth b/c that makes you uncomfortable. Because it is mine. But what I feel committed to doing is writing from a space that honors, that doesn’t exploit, that shows the humanity in the experience. I can do that. I feel committed to doing that. But I don’t feel committed to keeping other’s secrets, for their sake. Not when it makes them my secrets too.

TC: That is interesting as it relates to other kinds of writing, like memoir, and the expectation that everything that is written is factual. I wonder what is the line in your work between what is factual and what is true?

SR: There is a difference. Truth is often conceptual. Knowing isn’t about detail. It is about core and spirit and synthesis. That is not about detail. That is not about making a left turn instead of a right turn at two in the afternoon. In my work, knowing and truth are about destination. And facts are about roads. How did you get there? Sometimes I absolutely believe in factuality. I am interested often in how do you make fact poetic. Fact is newspaper and newspaper isn’t often poetic and I’m interested in that line between fact and poetry and where do you create that. But I think poetry is about creation and creativity and nuance and language and I feel free to utilize that when I need to. And I feel like the truth in my work is always present. The other thing is that truth, in my work, is never about exploitation. I have read work that is more about exploiting the subject, reader, or audience to get the reaction you want but I never want to exist in that space. My story is about truth and people’s ability to find their own truth in my truth.

Here is a concrete example. In the Bonus section “Liking Me” it is about me and an interaction with a guy who does not want to use a condom. Did that scenario happen in that exact way? No. Have lots of scenarios similar to that happened? Yes. Have those always ended with me being super strong and saying “Get the fuck out of here – I’d rather masturbate.” No. Sometimes I’ve bent. But the truth of my spirit is that I know that I am more important than someone who is getting me to compromise my safety. That is my knowing. And that work is a vehicle to get me to live in my knowing and to get other people to live in their knowing.
…


Read the whole interview here .

Susan Stinson: “Tell”


Susan Stinson is the new poet-in-residence at Forbes Library, our public library in Northampton, where I recently had the pleasure of hearing her read from several of her books. Her published novels include Martha Moody and Fat Girl Dances With Rocks, and she’s also working on a novel about the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards.

The poem below is reprinted by permission from her chapbook Belly Songs: In Celebration of Fat Women (Orogeny Press, 1993). Stinson says that it came out of the process of writing Martha Moody. Like her, I sometimes find that the best way to get inside my fictional characters’ heads is to step outside the narrative, let them write a poem, and see what comes up.

Tell
 
   I realized I had to tell Martha.

   She’d given this gift to me: sex and an outpouring ofwords. I wanted Martha to be an adamant vision in theworld, with her low-slung belly swaying in the morning ofa culture. Martha: the woman standing on the scallopedshell emerging from the sea. Martha’s hair is red foam, herfist is tight, her knees are dimpled. She poured water on myfeet, and there’s no part of me that can forget that.

   I changed under the water and under her hands to anoutspoken woman. It was inspiration. She brought me tosex and to voice. She gave me a mouthful of wine. I drank,oh, I put my tongue along her tensed lips.

   The way I feel when I’m moving the words is so closeto what she gives me with her knee between my legs, herfingers spreading me.

   Please and thank you.
   She’s talking.
   Rich. Reach me.
   Reach inside me.

   My uterus has tongues and they are lapping at her knuckles.
   My cervix swells a story.

   Her own breasts fall, cascades of fat and nipple, over herpadded ribs. She is mammoth. She haunts me. My soul ismy own, but when I write I find Martha, the miracle,riding a golden cow. Much moaning and lowing, manysmall hairs.

   There are three forces. One is the body and my move-ments, need to eat, desire for Martha. Another is the spiritand the leaves and the way it moves in the leaves. Anotheris the spirit and the words and the way it moves in thewords.

   It moved me. It woke me. It caught me. It disturbedme. Then I had a moment of absolute presence. Martha.

Straight Women, Gay Romance: Bridging the Gender Gap?


There isn’t a name for us (yet) but we’re out there.

I discovered my inner gay man four years ago when I began writing literary fiction. It wasn’t a “choice” to write about certain “subject matter”: he was just there. And I liked him, sometimes more than the woman named “Jendi Reiter”, that persona assigned to me by biology, life circumstances, and the strange sense of humor of the Lord.

However…not only am I not “Julian”, I am not even a real gay man writing about “Julian”. I don’t want him to sound like a chick with a dick. (No offense to my intersex friends.) And I worry that when he tells me what’s in his heart–when he admits to caring about something other than casual sex and sarcastic put-downs–our readers will say to both of us, “You throw like a girl.”

Until recently, I didn’t know there were others of my obscure species, apart from the slash fanfiction subculture (you know, Kirk ‘n Spock in luv). But apparently, according to this Dick Smart column on the Lambda Literary book blog, we straight female writers of gay male romance/erotica even have our own publishing niche, “M/M”, with specialty presses and everything.

On one level, this is encouraging. I’m relieved that I haven’t been afflicted with a unique (and unmarketable) kink.

At the same time, I feel a little sad that traditional male-female divisions persist even in queer culture. Some editors quoted in Smart’s article suggest that the difference between gay male fiction and female-written M/M is that the latter is more romantic and sentimental. Men who want lasting love, who talk openly about their emotions with and for other men–are these still mainly a female fantasy, scorned by other men regardless of sexual orientation?

It wouldn’t surprise me if, in a sexist and homophobic society, gay men police each other for not acting macho enough. I would be more depressed if I had to accept that the difference is innate–that even among gay men, there will always be someone of lower status, namely me, who gets the low-prestige job of doing the emotional work for both genders and is excluded from the boys’ treehouse by virtue of that “weakness”.

There are many reasons why I write M/M. I’ve posted about the more high-minded motives on this blog: I’m proud of my queer family, I believe in radical equality, blah blah. Yeah, and I also think naked men are hot, and the more the merrier.

But, to get back to the high-minded stuff for a second, I have an agenda for everything I write. Spiritual, political, ethical–it’s all of those. I believe (or at least hope) that people are more alike than they are different. We all need an intimate connection to God and to one another. We all need dignity and a safe place to be honest about who we are. I believe that gender roles that restrict our emotional range (men get lust and anger, women get empathy) are oppressive illusions. I want to dispel these illusions by writing in the voices of characters outside my demographic, and reaching readers outside that demographic, too.

Lesbians Raise Good Kids (If I May Say So…)


CNN.com reported Monday on a study that concluded that children raised by lesbians were better-behaved than their peers. Naturally, I find this flattering, though some might say the results have worn off with age.

A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers.

The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children’s well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews.

Funding for the research came from several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups, such as the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association.

Dr. Nanette Gartrell, the author of the study, wrote that the “funding sources played no role in the design or conduct of the study.”

“My personal investment is in doing reputable research,” said Gartrell. “This is a straightforward statistical analysis. It will stand and it has withstood very rigorous peer review by the people who make the decision whether or not to publish it.”

Gay parenting remains a controversial issue, with debates about topics including the children’s psychological adjustment, their parents’ sexual orientation and adoption restrictions.

Wendy Wright, president of the Concerned Women for America, a group that supports biblical values, questioned the legitimacy of the findings from a study funded by gay advocacy groups.

“That proves the prejudice and bias of the study,” she said. “This study was clearly designed to come out with one outcome — to attempt to sway people that children are not detrimentally affected in a homosexual household.”Gartrell started the study in 1986. She recruited subjects through announcements in bookstores, lesbian events and newspapers throughout metro Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California, and Washington.

The mothers were interviewed during pregnancy or the insemination process, and additionally when the children were 2, 5, 10 and 17 years old. Those children are now 18 to 23 years old.

They were interviewed four times as they matured and also completed an online questionnaire at age 17, focusing on their psychological adjustment, peer and family relationships and academic progress.

To assess their well-being, Gartrell used the Child Behavior Checklist, a commonly used standard to measure children’s behavioral and social problems, such as anxiety, depression, aggressive behavior and social competence.

The answers were coded into a computer and then analyzed. This data was compared with data from children of nonlesbian families.

The results surprised Gartrell.

“I would have anticipated the kids would be doing as well as the normative sample,” she said. “I didn’t expect better.”

Children from lesbian families rated higher in social, academic and total competence. They also showed lower rates in social, rule-breaking, aggressive problem behavior.

The involvement of mothers may be a contributing factor, in addition to the fact that the pregnancies were planned, Gartrell said.
…


Read the rest of the article here .

I have just one objection to CNN’s reporting. Can we please not call the anti-homosexual position “Biblical values” without a qualifying phrase, as if there’s only one legitimate or mainstream interpretation of the Bible on this issue? That’s how Concerned Women for America uses the phrase, but it’s hardly uncontested.

Compare how major news outlets cover another equally controversial topic. Reporters understand that the phrase “partial-birth abortion” is a value-laden description of a medical procedure, crafted by its opponents to stir certain emotions. Instead of endorsing this description uncritically, the paper will say something like “the procedure that doctors call intact dilation and extraction, and opponents call partial-birth abortion.” The disagreement in nomenclature reflects a disagreement in values, and so an objective journalist will refuse to take sides by omission.

In the story above, a more accurate and neutral description could be “Concerned Women for America, a group that interprets the Bible to condemn homosexuality” or “…that opposes same-sex relationships, based on its interpretation of the Bible”.

Against Compulsive Revision


Before I entered that zone of Sisyphean torment reserved for writers of novels-in-progress, I used to say I was a poet because I have a short attention span. I can see my way around all sides of a poem at once: it’s like carving a statue, rather than building a house. It takes me about an hour to write, and once it’s done, it’s pretty clear to me whether it sucks or not. If it does, I generally abandon it. When the tone is off, it’s off. None of that “parts of the omelet are excellent” wishful thinking.

If the poem smells OK, I don’t do much to it after that. I’ll tinker with a line or two that might have concerned me the first time around, but I don’t approach my drafts with the presumption that more input will always make them better. By contrast, it’s common for creative writing workshops to silence the author while the other students critique her piece, an approach that troubles me because of the potential for peer pressure to stunt the development of her own internal smell-o-meter.

Even outside a group setting, the self who writes the first draft is not the same person who revises it. You are, in a sense, your own peer pressure. You’ve got to be careful that the anticipation of judging-self’s criticism doesn’t stifle creative-self, because creative-self is the expert and needs to be trusted as such.

A Facebook link posted by the poet Rus Bowden led me to this satisfying screed by Art Durkee , a writer, musician, and visual artist, who goes off on his fellow poet Mary Karr’s advice to students that “every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it”. Durkee thinks, as do I, that bragging about how many reps you did at the revision gym says more about your ego than the quality of the poem. Some choice quotes:

…Rewrite after rewrite after rewrite after rewrite is a completely alien way of working, for me. I literally cannot imagine doing sixty drafts of a poem. I cannot imagine doing endless rewrites without the process itself literally killing every good thing in the poem, including the impulse that originally caused me to want to write it. The spontaneity and freshness and surprise and life will all be killed, each phrase will become so overly-familiar that all the life will be sucked out of it merely by repetition. You can’t bring a poem back to life, after killing it with rewrites: there are no zombie-poems (although one can make a case for there being some living-dead poets, in certain instances). I’d rather shoot the poem and put it out of its misery than subject it to such pointless and endlessly painful surgery.

If I can’t get it in four or five drafts, sixty drafts won’t make any difference: one reaches a point of diminishing returns. Far better to start over, because—in my case at least—endless rewrites will not magically repair what a few drafts cannot. It’s magical thinking—or worse. The definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same behavior again and again, each time hoping for a different outcome than that which the previous hundred repetitions provided. In the case of obsessive rewriting, I’d want to see some evidence that the last twenty drafts made any noticeable improvements to the poem. I remain skeptical until presented with such….

…Poets constantly suffer from an insecurity, inherited perhaps from Romantic stereotypes about tubercular Writers wasting away in starving garrets, that other members of the literary clan won’t respect them if they don’t appear to be working hard enough at their “craft and sullen art.” Certainly every poet wants to appear to the non-poet as hard-working, as if they must work hard, to achieve what they’ve achieved. Poetry is, after all, specialized language, intensified and heightened speech, with more meaning packed into a few words, compared to every other literary artform. Yet poetry is a verbal artform, with no physical component to it, so one might well understand how a poet might feel like a slacker when standing next to a construction worker: although both are building things, only one makes tangible things that one might actually trip over. I myself would argue that poetry at its best is a tangible thing one can trip over, and have one’s life changed thereby—but it’s easy to see how some poets might be insecure about their art’s lack of apparently physical results, especially in a consumer economy wherein the dominant measure of intrinsic value is monetary and physical utility….

…I can conceive of no worse hell than being forced to follow a creative process so alien to one’s own, natural process.

The point here is that there are many different ways of working, even within similar creative processes. We may have fundamentally different working methods. I’m fine with that. I’m not okay when the disbelieving try to impose their values, or their working methods, on others.

Read the whole post here .

Signs of the Apocalypse: imachristian.com


Summer is here, and the smell of roasting meat offers enterprising Christians new opportunities to start those all-important conversations over your backyard barbecue. The imachristian.com store’s “Gifts for Father’s Day” page offers this lovely apron that shows which side of the grill you’re on. What better way to impress upon your guests the urgency of escaping hellfire?

For those of you with a mote in your eye, the fine print says “(“It is a burnt offering to the LORD, a pleasing aroma” – Ex 29:18, NIV)”

If Father’s Day is not your thing, other designs include “I’m a Christian Empty Nester Single”. Sounds like that person needs a hug.

Tranifesto Asks: Is It a Choice? So What?


Trans man Matt Kailey recently posted this timely and well-reasoned piece on his Tranifesto blog: “It’s Time to Lose ‘I Didn’t Choose’ (to be Transgender)”. Kailey writes that he gets tired of hearing GLBT folks defend themselves against social prejudice by saying “I didn’t choose to be this way”, as if their orientation or gender expression were some kind of disability. If being straight or gender-conforming feels preferable, that’s because of stigma and discrimination, not because there’s anything wrong with being different.

…Being trans, in and of itself, is not a curse. Neither is being gay or lesbian. It’s the society and the culture that decides whether such things are negative, positive, or neutral. If, as in some cultures, we were revered as powerful, knowledgeable, spiritual, and blessed human beings, would we wish that we weren’t trans? If our family was proud, if we were deemed as special — or even if we were just treated matter-of-factly — would we wish that we weren’t trans?

The “I didn’t choose to be this way” argument paints us as victims. It paints us as tragic figures with an external locus of control — life has done something to us. We have no control over it or over ourselves. We have no “choice.”

I understand the purpose of the argument, because, truly, none of us did choose to be transgender (or gay, lesbian, or bisexual). No one chooses to be straight or non-trans, either. But you don’t hear straight, non-trans people arguing that they didn’t choose to be that way. They don’t need this argument, because they have the power. We don’t. That power makes their particular existence the “right” way to be. We feel as though we have to make the “no choice” argument in order for those in power to accept us, to grant us our rights, and to quit killing us.

But I think there are better arguments — arguments about equality and dignity and human rights — that give us a stronger position and make us stronger as people. To say, “It wasn’t my choice” is to say, “I wouldn’t be this way if I could help it” — which is to say, “This is a bad way to be.”

But is it such a terrible way to be, or is it only terrible because of the way we are looked at and treated by society? Why is straight better? Why is non-trans better? We have been brainwashed into believing that this is so, and we have been brainwashed into believing that we are “less than,” so we have to come up with an argument that excuses our deficiency — and that argument is: “I didn’t choose.”

We come to the table as victims, we sit at the table as victims, and then we wonder why we have no power. It doesn’t matter whether I chose to be this way or not — what matters is that, by virtue of being a human being, I deserve the same rights as everyone else.
…


Read the follow-up post here. Excerpt:

…please remember that I am not saying that sexual orientation or gender identity is a choice. It’s not. What I am saying is that, in my opinion, the “I didn’t choose” argument causes us to relinquish our power. The “no choice” argument says that we are deficient — but it’s not our fault. It says that there are other ways to be that are better — but we can’t be them, because we are “like this.” It hands the power over to those with more “desirable” characteristics — characteristics that we are supposed to want … if we had the choice. And it diminishes the concept that all human beings are worthy, simply by virtue of being human. Some are not more equal than others.

If we say it enough, we might convince ourselves (and others) that nobody would choose to be us — not even us. And honestly, if given the choice, I would choose to be me.


I say “Amen!” to Tranifesto, because I believe that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all other forms of prejudice arise from our unthinking acceptance of arbitrary value judgments about the differences between us. Transgender rights may seem like an obscure and low-priority fight to some people. But actually we have a lot to learn from people who occupy a liminal space. They are living proof of the unreality of the boundaries that oppress us.

In Memoriam: Rane Arroyo


The acclaimed poet Rane Arroyo died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 7, at the age of 54. Arroyo taught creative writing at the University of Toledo. Read a tribute to him in the Toledo Free Press:

…“His death is a great tragedy and loss for poetry and Puerto Rican literature in the United States,” said Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a Latino studies and Spanish professor at the University of Michigan.

Arroyo was a mentor to La Fountain-Stokes, who said Arroyo was very generous with his fellow writers and fellow poets. Arroyo visited La Fountain-Stokes’ classes for presentations.

“He was an incredibly funny and warm person who was gifted as an artist. He had an ability to translate his experiences as a gay man and a Latino from Chicago, and the experiences with his family and with his partner. He was able to translate all of that into poetry that was accessible and that was in the grade of the great American and English poets,” La Fountain-Stokes said.

La Fountain-Stokes said Arroyo used his poetry to share his experiences as a gay and Latino man in the United States and show that Latinos have something to say in American Literature.

“In the U.S,. where gay and Latino people have been looked down upon, his work is very pertinent for our political atmosphere,” he said.
…


Sample poems from his collection The Sky’s Weight (Cincinnati: Turning Point Books, 2009) are posted on the publisher’s website . They’ve kindly given me permission to reprint this poem:

Come Back, Blue Jay

Let the cats interrogate far birds
to be forgotten after the sun returns to

its black hole throne. Daylight keeps me
safe from forever. No one has quoted

joy in years and yes it hurts
to be so jauntily human. Look!

A bluejay: blue, sky blue, like sky.
Clouds are slow period marks

in a profound letter to Now.
Why do we ever feel unloved?

****
Update: Read a tribute to Arroyo by editor Gloria Mindock in the June 2010 Cervena Barva Press newsletter.