Category Archives: Writer and Reader

The Underside of the Tapestry: Reading Christian Books for What’s Missing


Nowadays, more often than not, when I listen to a sermon or read a Christian spiritual guide with friends, a moment will arise when my inner reaction to the text seems contrary to what everyone else is getting out of it. They’re seeing an inspiring picture on the right side of the tapestry, while I’m underneath looking at the loose threads and snarled knots. Like the optical illusion that’s either a vase or two kissing faces, one can at best switch back and forth between these two views, not hold them side by side. Or so I tell myself, those times when I keep my critique under wraps, not wanting to be the death’s-head at the feast who spoils the faith that others need for comfort.

I don’t know that I have less faith that my neighbors in the pews, just faith in different things, and perhaps too little patience with beliefs and attitudes that (in my opinion) distract from our most urgent afflictions and their best cures. Astute readers of this blog will remember that I’ve always been this way, but also notice that my priorities list has been more changeable than my fervor. This awkward mutability gives me another reason to think twice before challenging the group’s consensus.

As far as is consistent with kindness and timeliness, of course, I nonetheless believe every serious engagement with a spiritual text should eventually include the deconstructionist questions, “What is the power position of the author and his/her assumed audience?” and “What perspectives are being left out?”

Advocates of traditional, conservative education (and such a one was I!) have confused deconstructionism with moral relativism. Quite the contrary. The questions above are attempts to bring a consciousness of justice into how we read a text, to take responsibility for our standpoint and our blind spots.

True, in the prideful and competitive culture of academia, these questions have been deployed in bad faith, to dismiss intellectual rivals by labeling them “oppressors”, exactly as their conservative Christian counterparts would exploit the label “heretics”. But the inquiry into power dynamics and incompleteness need not be a bug hunt. It should simply be a nonjudgmental acknowledgment that no text is completely satisfying because the ideal community is always more diverse than one perspective can encompass. This acknowledgment would clarify that members who enter the discussion from an unrepresented standpoint are welcome contributors, not spoilers.

For instance, I belong to a weekly discussion group that’s currently studying the Examen, a daily prayer practice developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola. One of our members, a retired priest, observed that this practice was developed by monastics who had the privilege of contemplation because their daily subsistence needs were met by the community. We have a similar luxury of prayer time as middle-class Americans, if we choose to use it that way, of course. He wondered whether the Examen would be possible or relevant for a desperately poor person such as those he had served in his past congregation–someone whose entire attention was taken up with keeping her kids fed and her house from collapsing.

I found this question uncomfortable in a good way. It added another layer to the repentance and gratitude themes of the Examen by reminding me that my experience was not the center of the universe. It opened the door to other fruitful questions: Is contemplative prayer at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, worth considering only after basic physical security is established? Or is it necessary at every level of survival, so that (as the Buddha would say) we don’t add to our suffering by becoming entangled in fear, anger, and greed? If the latter, how would the Examen best be adapted to be useful and validating to someone living on the margins? To take that question seriously, we would have to work harder to include such people in our discussion group, instead of making guesses about their spiritual needs from our standpoint.

For further reading on these themes, I recommend:
James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Baker Academic, 2006)
John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Baker Academic, 2007)
Crystal L. Downing, How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith: Questioning Truth in Language, Philosophy, and Art (IVP Academic, 2006)

My Poem “The Name-Stone” at Utmost Christian Writers

My poem “The Name-Stone” just received an Honorable Mention in this year’s contest for Christian poets at Utmost Christian Writers. This Canadian website has been very supportive of my work over the years. Read all the winners here. (Some are still in the process of being posted as of today, April 18. Check again in a few days if you don’t see a link to the one you want.)

The poem was inspired by a discussion in my church’s adult education group about a verse from the Book of Revelation: “To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.” One of our members, a retired Anglican priest, said this could refer to the ancient Near Eastern practice of friends making a keepsake at parting. They would write their names on a stone or lump of clay and break it in half, each one retaining a piece that uniquely fit the other.

The Name-Stone

(Revelation 2:17)

I will give you a stone
with a secret under it.

As children in the Galilee
wrote friendship’s names on both ends
of such a shard, and broke it
and went away, each to his own desert.

Dirt-born,
nothing to give one another
but a ragged edge
that, fit
to its companion, meant love.

Where do the gouged letters lie,
in temple midden or the royal road’s thorns?
What hands crushed the clay?

I will give you a piece
of unmarked earth.

Not the name
your mother pressed onto your lips
to seal the scroll of her sorrows.

Not the name
your father spilled
like an ox-dragged harrow,
a plow with no sower.

They only know the name
that decoy, death,
reared above the spot
where you left this ground.

Granite praises granite,
butchers weep
over the marble lamb,
speak both parts
of the absolving script.

But I will give you a riven rock
to drink from its flood heart,
the rock I broke myself
to fit you.

Monday Random Song: “I Dreamed I Drove the Nails”

Oh, right, I have a blog? Apologies, constant readers, for the infrequent posting. I’ve been keeping my number-one resolution for 2013 to re-start work on the Endless Novel, as well as writing the occasional schmaltzy poem and nurturing the Young Master.

Since traditional children’s music makes me think of murderous clowns, I lean heavily on the Episcopal hymnal and Christian pop songs to entertain us while we are working on our pureed peas. Often, I wind up pondering and/or questioning the theology behind the catchy lyrics. From time to time, I will share these reflections with you, my blog followers. (You’ll have to get your own baby food, though. I recommend Earth’s Best chicken mango risotto.)

Today’s song is the Southern Gospel classic “I Dreamed I Drove the Nails“, performed in this YouTube clip by Greg Treadway and Andy Price. In it, the speaker recounts his vivid dream of crucifying Christ, which brought home to him how great a sacrifice Jesus made for his sins. Episcopalians will be familiar with this theme from the Lenten hymn “O Sacred Head“.

I’ve always struggled with this thought-experiment of identifying with Christ’s killers. I can appreciate the need to reflect on the seriousness of my sins and the magnitude of God’s mercy. This terrible limit case — God would even forgive us for killing Jesus — shows that no sin is beyond repentance. Such a hope can lead us out of self-involved despair and into true transformation.

On the other hand, I grew up in a home where emotional manipulation reigned, where I as a child was blamed for an adult’s depression and psychosomatic illnesses, in order to control my behavior and reinforce my gratitude for her so-called unselfish love. It is hard to feel the difference, sometimes, between “I Dreamed I Drove the Nails” and the stereotypical “guilt trip”. Why does God’s goodness require my self-abasement as contrast?

As I have become more attuned to abuses of power within Christianity, my understanding of Jesus has become more this-worldly and political. Now, songs like the ones above also make me wonder: Shouldn’t we focus on our actual sins and their real victims instead of a thought-experiment about something that never literally happened?

If the “real” wounded party is Christ, and lucky us, he forgives us, we may neglect making amends in the real world. This thought-experiment carries the potential for self-aggrandizing, self-pitying guilt that puts the sinner rather than the victim at the center of the story. Identification with the perpetrator then becomes a dysfunctional way to cement the Christian community’s bonds, like a gang where one has to murder someone to be a member.

Why not imagine one’s self into other roles in the story, like Veronica and Simon who tried to help, or Peter who cut off the soldier’s ear? Or, maybe one hasn’t actually done anything nearly as bad as crucifying Christ. “Sin inflation” creates a false moral equivalence that prevents the church from taking abuse seriously. It instills excessive guilt in people who then can’t speak up about wrongs done to them.

As I remember it, St. Paul exhorts us to imagine ourselves as crucified with Christ, a lot more than he recommends the perspective of the crucifiers. And when he does the latter, it’s because he actually did persecute and kill Christians, and was forgiven by his human victim, Stephen, not only by God.

I would love to hear from my readers about where the “I crucified Christ” trope originated. Is it Biblical? Where do you find support for it in Scripture?

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2012


Greetings, loyal readers! It’s time for our annual roundup of the best books, blogs, and other big events of 2012. As usual, the books listed here are ones I read this year, not all published this year.

The Big Event:

Best Parenting Book:

Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (2005)
Do you know why I have time to write this blog post? Because the Young Master slept 15 hours last night! Dr. ZZZ, as we call him, makes a good case that many behavioral problems seen in infants and young children are really just signs of overtiredness. The doctor tells you how to spot early signs of fatigue in your baby so you can put him down for a nap before he gets too charged up with adrenalin. If the big book is putting you to sleep, Weissbluth’s Your Fussy Baby is a quicker read that covers the same basic principles for infants 0-4 months.

Best Children’s Books:

Stephanie Burks & Kelli Bienvenu, While You Were Sleeping (2004)
This picture book makes me cry every time I read it to Shane. A lesbian couple get the phone call that a birthmother has chosen them to adopt her newborn boy. (I do wish the birthmother appeared as a character, but perhaps that would be too complicated for this age group.)

Anna Pignataro, Mama, Will You Hold My Hand? (2010)
A gentle, poetic picture book. Mother Bear reassures her child Sammy that she’ll be there through all their adventures. Similar to The Runaway Bunny but not so triggering.

Sandra Boynton, Happy Hippo, Angry Duck (2011)
Whimsical board book helps children learn the names for different feelings, and that it’s okay to have them. Bad moods don’t last forever. Good training for little Buddhists.

Best Poetry Book:

Nancy White, Detour (2010)
This poetry collection explores the breaking apart and remaking of a woman’s identity in the middle of her life, through a son’s birth and a painful divorce. Subject matter that in a lesser poet’s hands would be merely confessional here takes on a haiku-like precision and open-endedness, intimate yet unbounded by the confines of one person’s experience. This feat is accomplished through White’s use of the second-person voice and the way she narrates major events obliquely, through peripheral details described with quiet beauty. (Full disclosure: Nancy taught English at my high school, though I wasn’t in her class.)

Best Novel:

Kathie Giorgio, The Home for Wayward Clocks (2011)
An abused boy becomes a recluse who lavishes all his human warmth on the clocks he rescues and repairs for his museum. But a disabling accident, and the arrival of an abused teenage girl who needs his help, compel him to reach out to his neighbors and learn to trust again. His storyline is interspersed with the stories of the clock-owners. Look for the sequel to this beautiful novel, Learning to Tell (A Life)Time, from Main Street Rag Publishing in 2013.

Best General Nonfiction:

Bernadette Barton, Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (2012)
Sociology professor examines how LGBT people in the American South survive the fundamentalist “panopticon”. Thoroughly researched but never dry, the book strikes a good balance between outrage and hope.

Best Memoir (tie):

Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012)
This gripping memoir recounts a young woman’s escape from her family of Satmar Hasidim, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect living in the Brooklyn neighborhod of Williamsburg. Feldman depicts a repressive, patriarchal community where women are deliberately kept uneducated and forced into abusive marriages. One quibble: the final section of the book felt rushed. Follow Deborah on Twitter for a feminist watchdog perspective on Orthodox Judaism.

Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Left the Mormons and Found My Faith (2005)
Do you see a trend in my reading habits? Part memoir, part religious history, this compelling, controversial book by a Harvard-educated sociologist describes the fallout from her recovered memories of sexual abuse by her father, a leading Mormon scholar. Her anger is leavened by compassion as she delves into the complicity of a secretive church culture in creating and shielding abusers with split personalities. Though the topic is a dark one, readers who accompany Beck on her healing journey will be rewarded with her account of her strengthened connection to God’s love and her own inner truth.

Best New Theoretical Framework for My Life (tie):

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992, updated 1997)
This groundbreaking book shows the common patterns underlying private and public trauma, from domestic violence and child abuse to war and genocide, as well as the cultural conditions that determine whether such stories are shared or repressed. The Amazon blurb says it best: “The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context.”

Sylvia Brinton Perera, The Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt (1985)
Jungian analyst interprets scapegoat themes in the family and society. As in Johnny Cash’s song “The Man in Black”, the scapegoat is a priestly yet despised figure who takes on the burden of others’ psychological dark side (or has it thrust upon them) in order to heal the social system. But this role, formerly expressed through public ritual, can be too much for mere individuals to bear. This brief but dense book discusses how to appreciate but also break free from one’s scapegoat characteristics.

Blogs You Should Know About:

Be the Change (Dianna Anderson)
Christian feminist critiques rape-enabling myths and other harmful beliefs about gender and sexuality. She has a good sense of humor.

Sarah Over the Moon
Another Christian feminist and survivor of evangelical purity culture who lived to tell the tale.

Ana Mardoll’s Ramblings
Ana wittily deconstructs pop culture for classism, disability prejudice, fat-shaming, and other forms of oppression. Some idols are toppled (C.S. Lewis) and some unexpected tales are championed (Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”).
 

Rachel Power Reflects on Art and/or Motherhood

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last blog post. I’ve been busy lying on the floor and squealing and kicking the coffee table. (I like to share Shane’s interests.) This excerpt from Australian writer Rachel Power’s anthology The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood eloquently expresses the conflict that women seem to feel most acutely: What should I do with my scarce time? How do I balance the interiority of creative work with the outer-directed availability of a mother for her child? In the introduction, Power writes:

…While on the surface motherhood triggered in me a frantic need to grasp onto any minute that could be called mine, I was also opening out into a newfound sense of infinity. It was strangely liberating to have my children’s needs overtake my own. My ego shrank back to its near-invisible place in the cosmos and with that came an unexpected relief, a sense that I could die knowing I had done all I needed to do.

In a matter of months, what had been the centre of my world — namely, my passion for art — became so flimsy and irrelevant it seemed close to total collapse. I didn’t know if I had what it took to demand all that I had to demand of myself, and of everyone around me, in order to write. I had to rail against my own instinct to admit defeat.

Sometimes a thrilling sense of lightness washed through me: finally I was being given permission to retreat into a ‘normal’ life, free from the burden of the artistic imperative, of that constant desire to record everything almost before it’s happened. Together my babies and I floated around the house, equally delighted by their small discoveries, me vicariously reliving my own babyhood and feeling humbled by the insight that someone had cared for me with this same constancy and devotion.

As they got older, I became more and more aware that those days when I sank into my children’s routine without resistance — when I spent hours building sandcastles or reading the same book over and over again; when I let them cook with me no matter the mess, or turned off my ‘adult’ radio station in favour of Raffi and Patsy Biscoe — were our happiest. Not just their happiest, but also mine. But it was a state reliant on the denial of that niggling compulsion to always be turning my experiences into something else, something more.

A year after my first child was born, I wrote in my journal (the same ‘writing’ journal that has as its first line on its first page in red texta: ‘Whole house — clean!!’):

It is what is sustained in our life — through hard work — that creates fulfillment. It’s the stuff we don’t give up easily. The stuff we have to fight for. Day-to-day is easy; I can get caught up in all manner of small tasks. And these could make up a life. So why can’t I be happy with that? What is a life worth living but one lived attentively, with a passion for the small things? Some days those things are good. Baking a cake. Planting a herb garden. Making a picture for my son’s room. But they feel like small asides — distractions from the bigger picture, from the things I really want to achieve.

For the first time in my life, I envied women without strong ambitions outside of the home. Art was like a monkey on my back and I resented its skittish hold on me, the way it caused me to strain away from my babies, to live a split life, be a split self. I was burdened by the knowledge of what it would cost my family (financially, but more so emotionally) for me to keep writing — just as I became aware of how much it would cost me not to.

More than anything, I longed to plunge into the job of mothering in all its fullness, to wake up each morning needing nothing more than this daily existence: a life for life’s sake. It felt greedy, selfish, unworkable, to try maintaining an identity which seemed entirely at odds with the characteristics of a devoted — a ‘good’ — mother.

While motherhood was calling on me to find ever-greater resources of patience, empathy and composure, art felt like an opposing force — an uncompromising, masculine domain. By this logic, to be an artist would mean putting my babies at risk, starving them of their foremost source of attention and stimulus…

…To be an artist means a compulsive process of self-realisation, a struggle toward the ideal that lurks at the edges of our vision. In spite, or perhaps because of, my battle to find time for creative work after having a child, I began to value it like never before. More than that, I began to write like my life depended on it. Art was the only way I knew of coming to terms with the psychic shock of becoming a mother — a role that uncovered the angriest, weakest and most self-seeking, and in turn the most tender, gracious and devoted parts of myself.

I knew that if I buried that creative urge in myself, it would only re-emerge in some ugly and distorted form; that it would not, in fact, make me a better mother but one full of bitterness and frustration — a recipe for martyrdom. Or, perhaps worse, turn me into a monster whose own thwarted ambitions have been transferred on to her children. Sometimes I looked at my baby and experienced his gaze as a challenge, as if he more than anyone would recognise all my terrible failings. I did not want his mother to be a woman who gave up, who didn’t strive to become all she might have been.

Numerous feminist texts have examined the long struggle against educational and institutional barriers that, among other things, considered art an unsuitable occupation for a woman. Many of these books have counted marriage and motherhood among those institutions that serve to limit women’s sphere of influence to the private and domestic. It hardly needs repeating that, by and large, women are still given almost total responsibility for the rearing of children without the cultural recognition of the difficulty and importance of this role.

We seem no closer than 30 years ago to creating a system that genuinely enables women and men to share equally in raising their children. Yet, despite all it demands of women and the inequities that remain, motherhood cannot be reduced to a mere institution of control. Mothers and their children are bound together in ways that defy all simplistic definitions.

In a comment that has stayed with me, writer Helen Garner once talked of ‘the terrific struggle for women’ striving to fulfil destinies beyond being wives and mothers. ‘It’s terribly sad, it’s a very sad thing — a woman trying to be an artist and a mother at the same time. It’s a tremendous clash … ’ She trailed off, perhaps aware of having innocently stumbled into one of those quicksand zones, where the implications of what you are saying are so enormous and unwieldy that you risk being swallowed up. ‘Sad’ was the word she used. It’s a terribly sad thing for women trying to be an artist and mother at the same time.

It is a good word, because sadness is a problem of the heart. And as much as motherhood is a political issue, it can never be only that; the predicament of the artist–mother moves well beyond the boundaries of policy and the expectations of society.

As Susan Rubein Suleiman wrote, perhaps the greatest struggle for a woman artist who has or desires children is the struggle against herself. No amount of money, no amount of structural change, can entirely resolve the fundamental dilemma for the artist–mother: the seeming incompatibility of her two greatest passions. The effect is a divided heart; a split self; the fear that to succeed at one means to fail at the other.

Buy the anthology here.

Poetry by Amberle L. Husbands: “You Heard What?”

Apologies for the blog hiatus, loyal readers. It’s been a busy month at Winning Writers and I had some tech support issues. For your reading pleasure, here is a memorable poem by Amberle L. Husbands of Georgia, winner of first prize in the adult category of the Spring 2012 Odes to the Olympians Poetry Contest (theme: Ares/Mars, the God of War). This free contest is sponsored by Victoria Grossack and Alice Underwood, authors of The Tapestry of Bronze series of historical novels about ancient Greece. The current contest, seeking poems about Venus/Aphrodite, is open through November 30. Thanks to Amberle and Victoria for permission to reprint here.

“You Heard What?”

Ares is dead?
I don’t believe it.
Not in these modern days.
Just yesterday, I swear,
I saw his face going down into the subway.

Or outside some church in Lebanon,
eating ice cream on the steps of the Pantheon,
his mouth Cherry Garcia red–thinking of something dire.

Ares is sketched as bloodthirsty,
written in as the ne’er do well
likely to appear at any time;
distinct from all the races, but he’s everybody’s friend.

Ares is still in business, keeping all the stray dogs fat,
and so is the hateful guru, with his basement napalm lab.

Ares is one who revolves,
strolls from the pent house down Pauper’s Lane.
The insane, and the beaten, all know his shadow,
they know that peace is fleeting,
and they know when to go underground.

Ares is dead?
I don’t believe it.
I saw him just now, down at the Hinge for a beer.
Had a whole crowd with him,
men in suits, wearing gold chains, heavy boots;
Ares dead? Think again, friend–
Think twice and fear–
Ares is here

“Julian’s Yearbook” Published in Chapter One Promotions Anthology

Back in 2008, I was excited to learn that my short story “Julian’s Yearbook”, featuring the protagonist of my endless novel, had won the Chapter One Promotions International Short Story Competition. You can read the first page here. Four years later, the long-awaited prizewinners’ anthology is now available for purchase. Titled Infinite, it features an evocative cover photo that complements my tale of a young man’s yearning for freedom and intimate connection.

Order a copy by mail using this form, or online here (more convenient for readers outside the UK).

Winners of the 2012 PEN Prison Writing Program Awards

The PEN American Center, a literary organization with a human rights focus, sponsors writing programs in U.S. prisons and gives annual awards for the best submissions of poetry and prose by incarcerated writers. This year’s winners were posted on their website in July. Here are some highlights of my reading so far.

Christopher Myers’s second-prize poem “Tell Me the Story Again About the Frogs and the Seeds” is a poignant and hopeful message from a father to his young son about the future springtime when he will be released.

In Ezekiel Caliguiri’s gorgeously written first-prize memoir “The Last Visit from the Girl in the Willow Tree”, the girl he loved as a teenager remains in his heart as a radiant image, like Dante’s Beatrice–a bittersweet reminder of the life he could have had, if he hadn’t yielded to fatalism and the desire to appear tough.

Atif Rafay’s first-prize scholarly essay “Bleak Housing & Black Americans” indicts American prison policy as a disguised return to segregation and disenfranchisement of African-Americans, and asks why our prison system is more brutal and ugly than either crime-prevention or fair punishment require. Because racism is irrational and covert, rational appeals for reform have a limited impact. In addition, he argues, “The argument from racial disparity ultimately scants the crucial point: present policies are wrong because they are destructively harsh…An argument that invites human beings to regard themselves as part of a ‘race’ and to think of compassion for the Other rather than to think of justice for all will ineluctably break any promise it might seem to hold out.”

Leonard Scovens’s honorable mention memoir “How I Became My Father” takes us inside the struggles of a fatherless young black man seeking male role models. “You grow up without a dad and you dream his ghost into a god. When Luke [Skywalker]’s phantom god was smashed and broken across Vader’s confession, he lost his grip. If Vader was his father, what did it mean for his fate? The sins of the father, after all, are visited upon the son.”

40 Years of Book Love: The 1980s in Prose


Continuing my tour through the formative books of my youth, today I’ll talk about the prose writers who guided my middle school and high school years.

Some of these choices may raise some hackles. They certainly did for my teachers. I won’t defend, as an ideal, the horror of weakness that characterizes both Rand and Nietzsche. I didn’t take it uncritically even then. But I also didn’t feel that adults had a lot of credibility to criticize my attempt at psychological survival, if they weren’t going to protect me from the bullying and ostracism that I endured pretty much non-stop from 1st through 10th grade. Smart, lonely, funny-looking teenage girls love Ayn Rand for the same reason that small children are obsessed with superheroes and dinosaurs. Adults who are gratified by innocence, but don’t want to bear the burden of having it themselves, sentimentalize the helplessness of children. But we just want to get out.

Yes, I was mad, and so was my hair.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
My mother read this to me, and I think I’d read it again on my own by the time I was 11 or 12, and at least twice thereafter, most recently this year. Everything I believe about the dignity of the human soul, the importance of speaking truth to power, and the equality of all people before God, is all in there. Jane is the anti-Dickens heroine. Chaste and modest, but fiercely self-possessed, she doesn’t suffer in silence in hopes of melting the abuser’s heart. She survives because she knows she deserves to, and she would rather brave the world on her own than be dependent on someone who doesn’t respect her. Hooray, Jane!
****

The Collected Dorothy Parker
I remember two things that terrified me in the summer of 1983: the sudden appearance of cellulite on my thighs, signaling my transformation from a pretty little girl to a flabby, awkward adolescent, and Parker’s story “Big Blonde”. The protagonist plays the role of the pretty, lively, “good sport” girl who never imposes her feelings on others, because that’s how she needs to be to catch a husband. Once she gets one, she feels she can relax and have her true feelings, and so she cries all the time. This alienates her lumpish spouse, who leaves her. By then she is no longer young and pretty, so she cries some more and becomes an alcoholic, unsuccessfully attempts suicide and has to pretend to the nurses (once again playing the good sport) that she feels lucky to be alive. I have always lived in dread of becoming this woman. Though drink holds no appeal, I come from a long line of women who drowned in their own tears. I’m only now beginning to unravel the false beliefs that make me afraid of my emotions.
****

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
You know who else was afraid of emotions and hated being a girl? Ayn Rand! But through rational introspection and artistic excellence, you too can grow up to have hot sex with the guy who fixes your fireplace! Actually that part of the book did nothing for me. The two lessons I took away from Rand’s novel, which were the beginning of my adult strength, were these: (1) It is possible to live mindfully and responsibly, by knowing your values and comparing them to your actions, rather than being at the mercy of unexamined emotions and heedlessly hurting yourself and others. (Since none of the real adults in my life modeled this for me, I had to learn it from a book.) (2) Sometimes people hate you for your strengths, not your weaknesses. You don’t have to internalize their contempt.
****

The Valley of Horses, by Jean M. Auel
Conversation, when I was 11, went something like this:
“Mom, I just read this book and I have a weird tingly feeling.”
“That’s sexual arousal.”
“Oh, so that’s what that feels like! What do I do about it?”
“You can masturbate.”
Seriously, my mom was that cool.
****

Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Again, I didn’t have much interest in the “Ubermenschen” aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that became disreputable because the Nazis claimed him as an influence. Like Rand, he championed the prophetic, creative, innovative individual against the jealousy of the herd. I also valued his critique of asceticism as a psychological splitting mechanism, where a person denied certain aspects of his life force (e.g. sexuality, aggression, unconscious wishes) and pushed them off onto a scapegoat. My favorite quote from him went something like this: “In every ascetic morality, man worships one part of himself as God and demonizes the rest.”
****

The Book of the Dun Cow, by Walter Wangerin Jr.
And just to counter-program all the others, this Christian allegory of Jesus as a goofy, despised barnyard dog! Wangerin’s storytelling gave me my first personal experience of God’s love in a Christian context.
 

40 Years of Book Love: The 1980s in Poetry


My impending 40th birthday has occasioned this look backward through the decades at the books that shaped my identity. The first post in this series can be found here. (Update to that post: Adam read it and bought Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeliah for me for only $36.95 on Alibris. What a guy!)

My book consumption ramped up in my middle-school and teenage years, so I’m going to cover poetry and prose in two separate posts. I was a lonely, precocious young person with a smaller budget and more time to reread books than I have now, so my relationship to those favorite volumes had an intensity that gave this budding writer a good training in close reading. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about my main influences: Anne Sexton, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden. Below are a few of the lesser-known collections that found their way into my soul, with excerpts.

There are no acceptable photos of me from this period.

Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Teasdale (1886-1933) was an American lyric poet, a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I stumbled upon her final chapbook, Strange Victory, in the Stockbridge, MA library when I was about 10 years old, on summer vacation, and was thrilled and stirred by her tragic yet unsentimental voice. She used rhyme and meter in a well-patterned but not rigid way. The darkness in her poems is pregnant with a spiritual presence that will endure while our little lives come and go. It’s a consolation for those sober-minded enough to face it. Perhaps that was the terrifying yet desired presence I sensed just beyond the looming nighttime trees and star-clustered sky of Western Massachusetts, where God seemed a lot closer than in the city. This poem says it all for me.

Return to a Country House

Nothing but darkness enters in this room,
Nothing but darkness and the winter night,
Yet on this bed once years ago a light
Silvered the sheets with an unearthly bloom;
It was the planet Venus in the west
Casting a square of brightness on this bed,
And in that light your dark and lovely head
Lay for a while and seemed to be at rest.
But that the light is gone, and that no more
Even if it were here, would you be here,–
That is one line in a long tragic play
That has been acted many times before,
And acted best when not a single tear
Falls,– when the mind and not the heart holds sway.
****

Rupert Brooke: The Poetical Works, edited by Geoffrey Keynes
Romantic poet who died young in World War I. Plus he was smokin’ hot. What more could a teen girl want? Though the first half of this poem seems a little cliche to me now, the second half still raises goosebumps. That’s the kind of love I always wanted, and have found: a comrade in arms who marches with me, jauntily, into the great unknown that waits for us all. (Adam might not appreciate the implication that he has “scarlet lips”, though.)

The Wayfarers

Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place
  
Made fair by one another for a while.
Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
  
The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
Ah! the long road! and you so far away!
  
Oh, I’ll remember! but…each crawling day
Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
  
Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

…Do you think there’s a far border town, somewhere,
  
The desert’s edge, last of the lands we know,
Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,
  
In which I’ll find you waiting; and we’ll go
Together, hand in hand again, out there,
  Into the waste we know not, into the night?
****
Contemporary Poetry: A Retrospective from the Quarterly Review of Literature, edited by Theodore and Renee Weiss (1974)
Lest you think my tastes ran entirely to Edwardian schmaltz, this anthology was also a close companion of my high school days. It may have been a gift from St. Ann’s School classmate Alissa Quart, or one of the precious freebies I picked up as an intern at the Poetry Society of America, where my tasks included returning improper submissions in SASEs and shelving their burgeoning and disorganized collection of review copies. This book gave me glimpses into modern subcultures and ways of speaking that were new to me, all the more fascinating because I lacked the context to understand them fully. So much of the content looks unfamiliar to me now, that I suspect I focused on a few favorites and reread those while skimming the rest. Some of those old friends were:

Yehuda Amichai, “As for the World”
Edith Sitwell, “Dirge for the New Sunrise”
Richard Wilbur, “The Good Servant”
Charles Tomlinson, “Mad Song” and “Obsession”
W.S. Merwin, “Song With the Eyes Closed”
Raphael Rudnik, “A Letter for Emily”
Howard Nemerov, “Brainstorm”
W.D. Snodgrass, “Inquest”
Richard Hugo, “Keen to Leaky Flowers” and “Bluejays Adjusted”
M.L. Rosenthal, “Liston Cows Patterson and Knocks Him Silly”
Harvey Shapiro, “National Cold Storage Company”
Herbert Morris, “The Neighbor’s Son”
Michael Hamburger, “Friends”
Frederick Feirstein, “The Anti-Life: A Fantasy”
Phyllis Thompson, “The Last Thing”

You can buy this book for one cent on Amazon. And you should.
****

Darker, by Mark Strand
My 9th-grade English teacher introduced me to Strand’s koan-like poem “Reasons for Moving”, after which I snapped up this early collection at the sadly now-defunct Gotham Book Mart. (First published in 1968, the 1985 reissue by Atheneum, which I own, appears to be out of print, so I’ve linked to a Strand compendium that includes it.) This book seemed innovative to me because the weird, horror-movie images were not mere poetic similes, but were actually happening in the narrative of the poems. A more predictable writer might say his neighbor’s face is menacing like a hawk’s, but Strand says this, in the apocalyptic final poem, “The Way It Is”:

…My neighbor marches in his room,
wearing the sleek
mask of a hawk with a large beak.
He stands by the window. A violet plume

rises from his helmet’s dome.
The moon’s light
spills over him like milk and the wind rinses
  the white
glass bowls of his eyes.

His helmet in a shopping bag,
he sits in the park, waving a small American flag…
****

The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, by Richard Hugo
I’ve always been sensitive to the vibe of a place, and Hugo was a master at putting those intuitions into words. His free verse has a stately, compact quality that feels like formal poetry, an echo of iambic pentameter holding up the poem like the indestructible old girders of the abandoned factories he elegized in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”.
****

Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987, by Diane Wakoski
I won the high school poetry award from the Poetry Society of America the same year (1988) that this collection won their William Carlos Williams Award, and we both read at the award ceremony at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park. What a head rush! Wakoski’s talky, vulnerable, raw, female voice was a good balance for the high-modernist male poets that mainly influenced me during this period. At the ceremony, she read the powerful poem “Joyce Carol Oates Plays the Saturn Piano”. I remember feeling awed and discomfited that a writer so much more famous and old than myself would still be haunted by self-comparison to other writers, and by the feeling that she had let time slip away from her — ironically, because her younger self cared more about external validation than about devoting herself to art. “I promised myself/that if, by 40, I had won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry/I would let myself play the piano again,” she begins, going on to say that when she reached that milestone with no Pulitzer in sight, her hands had forever lost the flexibility to play as she had done at 20. Upon hearing that Oates has taken up piano, the speaker feels:

…Envy?
No. Past that.
A sense of failure?
Perhaps. For I gave up something
I loved/ to attain something
unknown, and now I have neither.

Wakoski was 45 when she wrote that poem. That seemed a lot older to me in 1988!