Happy [M]other's Day

Last year I posted some of my favorite poems about mothers,

but this year I'd like to post a poem about a mother/son relationship. I've got two sons, and my 12-year-old (older) son has suddenly become a teenager. I told him in the past few weeks to stand up straight, and when he did, it turns out he is now taller than me. He's started junior high (in April, due to Japanese school year calendars) and really come into his own. So I want to share this poem by Sharon Olds, which was featured here on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry blog.

My Son the Man    by Sharon Olds

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,

the way Houdini would expand his body

while people were putting him in chains. It seems

no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,

guide his calves into the gold interior,

zip him up and toss him up and

catch his weight. I cannot imagine him

no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,

get over my fear of men now my son

is going to be one. This was not

what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a

sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,

snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,

and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me

the way Houdini studied a box

to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

 

 

The otherness of mothering sons has been on mind for a few years, as has another otherness that situates itself between me and my sons, as it does between the sons of the poets Erika Meitner and Joy Katz and their mothers, as discussed this week on the Poetry Foundation's podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, and that is when the racial composition of mother and son (or child) are different.

While my sons and I talk easily about the difference between me as a woman and them as burgeoning men, talking about our races is more complicated. I ask them all the time if my whiteness is an issue for them, and they insist it is not, but I cannot ever know if this is the truth or if this is what they tell me because they love me. I tell them that it would be perfectly normal for them to be uncomfortable with my race at certain transitional times in their lives, but they insist that they are not. And I don't entirely believe them.

At the elementary school, their white mother was a constant fixture from the start, and while we had to do a little bit of educating of classmates, it all became old hat for everyone quite quickly. And our elementary school has children with family members from 72 different countries, so we are by no means unique (which is why we moved into this school district).

However, at the junior high, which my son has only been attending for six weeks, we have yet to see another Caucasian parent (what I mean to say is that there are reportedly other Asian parents who blend in with the crowd, but as far as parents who stand out as racially different, so far there's me....). At the entrance ceremony, you can bet every eye was on me as parents reunited with their kids afterwards; everybody was dying to know which boy had the white mother. I asked my son if it bothered him and he said no. But when I ask if, despite having to take beginner's English with his entire class, he has mentioned the fact that he's already fluent in English, he says no. When a brand new friend of his (from another grade, as yet unaware of the Caucasian mother) told him that he had published a book, my son did not mention that he has a mother who has published two books in English. He doesn't mention his family in America. Is this about race? Is this about 12-year-old boys not talking about their mothers and family members to peers in general? I can't know. I don't know if I will ever know.

On the other hand, last year I colored my red hair back to its natural brown, thinking to make life easier on me (timewise) and on them (culturally), but my sons vetoed the move and wanted it back red. Because my overall coloring and its ostentatious difference from the norm doesn't matter to them? Or because they've only known me with red hair and blue eyes and are comfortable with it? Or because they don't really care and were trying to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear?

When my twelve-year-old son was in the first grade, his teacher asked me to identify which of the 35 fish pictures hanging on the wall was my son's. I scanned them as quickly as I could, but as they were all modelled on the same storybook fish, I was having a hard time finding any that stood out as my son's. "It's that one," the teacher beamed at me,"the only one with blue eyes. Your son said he made the eyes blue because his mother has blue eyes." And both she and I wept as we contemplated the wall of black-eyed fish and solitary blue-eyed one.

I am definitely these days feeling the otherness of motherhood. Of mothering sons. Of mothering (almost) teenagers. Of mother biracial bicultural children in an environment which favors the race and culture I am not part of.

Here's a poem from my book The Insomniac's Weather Report. This poem is about the otherness of mothering sons; I wrote it some years ago when it was the biggest other in my mind. But these days my [m]otherness seems even more vast.


What You Dampen If You Use Water as a Boomerang

Between mother and son
the body as fact comes
sooner than between
mother and daughter.

I had not counted on this:
the polygon of bearing
sons, I did not know you
would hold it against me,

the body, for its lack
of edges, its fluidity.
I did not know you
could not move beyond a thing

without calling it [m]other. The sea
is not a boomerang, returning
unchanged--who boldly inked this
edge of continent on map? As if

blue roofs of ocean
shift and slap in maneuvers--
familiar and chaotic--the body
and its households recognize.

Reading Projects vs. Poems

So what should appear in my inbox the morning after I post about poems vs. projects from the writing perspective but a thoughtful discussion of the topic from a reader's perspective (and by this I mean not only a reader of poetry but also a reader of manuscripts for a contests) by the talented Erika Meitner over at aboutaword.org.

Meitner has been reading manuscripts for an unnamed book contest, and mentioned her preference this way: "...a poet-friend...posited that as an initial screener dealing with sheer volume, I would be influenced by the apparent coherence of ‘project books’—that I would gravitate toward sequences of poems because they seemed automatically like books...though both of us agreed that we...prefer books that offer the reader a variance in sensibility and approach. Which leads to my first (potentially false) dualism in here: there are ‘project’ books, and there are ‘mix-tape’ books." (She then sites a  post by Katrina Vandenberg at Poets & Writers where she got this musical metaphor originally, and where Vanderberg eventually offers the following advice: “Don’t get wrapped up in a book’s concept at the expense of its poems. We’ve all seen books so focused on a theme that their individual poems are as bloodless and forgettable as the songs on an Emerson, Lake & Palmer album.”)

Meitner says of her own work, "I am not a project-book poet. Part of this has to do with my own peripatetic sensibilities—I want to write about what feels most compelling to me at any given moment....And while my poems often hash over recurring themes (women’s bodies, consumerism, sex, loss, Judaism, etc.), they do it via constantly shifting subject material and landscapes."

This is, I think, inevitable for most writers, and I cannot find the quote I wanted to put in here, so if anyone recognizes it from my bad paraphrasing please let me know. Basically it was something like "Lucky is the writer who has an obsession. He has his life's work cut out for him." We write precisely because we are obsessive; it's difficult to find a poetry book that doesn't have recurring themes, so the question isn't whether a book has some cohesiveness but how much of it is there by design and how much of it is there by temperment, I suppose, and whether that split is obvious or carefully crafted enough not to be glaring.

And in that design lies the strength or the weakness. Or as Meitner says, "While having a project can certainly make a manuscript easier to grasp and remember from the start (“Oh, the villanelles about the life of Joe Namath—I remember that one!”)....More varied books can withstand a few weaker poems without the entire concept of the book being called into question. With more loosely structured books, there was always the possibility that I might turn the page, and find something totally different, shocking, or compelling."

Which doesn't mean the shocking and compelling poems are completely divorced from the previous ones; they are just not so tightly bound by the form of the book to be there only to serve the book, and not on their own merit.

If you are interested in this topic, Meitner cites an interesting post by Joel Brower over at Harriet the Blog, in which a long list of published books with themes is provided, with Brower concluding  finally (after a long and interesting discussion that would be well worth your time to read), "My question is this: Which comes first, the poems or the project? Do you write poems, and then try to figure out how/whether those poems are talking to each other in such a way that it might make sense to collect them all under one book’s roof? Or do you think of a project you’d like to do...and then write the poems to fulfill the promise of the project? Because the poems on that list up there could have come about, I suppose, either way."

And he talks about receiving the following advice from editor Stuart Frieberg when he told him about his project to write a book of poems with 100 words each, "Write 500 of them and then send me the best five to consider for FIELD.”

Which is, I think, the right answer. Yes, obsess. Yes, redo and redo as long as you are compelled to, and then winnow only the best out of the pile for publication. And if the book structure falls apart because there aren't enough poems to support it, then that's how it goes. You might not really be done with the manuscript yet.Or you might need a new structure (don't despair--Meitner cites the following two articles below that show you a myriad of different ways to organize a manuscript.)


1) Natasha Saje at Numero Cinq, where she states, "Asking contemporary poets how they begin the process of ordering their books produces a surprisingly uniform group of answers. Some principles of structure are balance and contrast; dynamic energy; surprise; breathing space/white space; a dialogue between intent and serendipity, or in Annie Finch’s words, between “tension and inevitability” (Heginbotham 113)." And she also cites Elaine Terranova as saying, "For me putting a manuscript together is a reductive process, somewhat the way I write a poem. I’m always flinging poems aside, once I’m convinced that they ‘do not get along well with the others.’"

2) Albert Rios at his own website has 19 ways to organize a maunscript, including schemes he calls Mosaic, Convergent Narrative, Last-line-First-line Dialogue.

Writing related poems as a strategy doesn't mean publishing related poems is the best strategy. Publishing only the best poems, related or not, is the strategy, while writing poems however you can to get the best poems is the strategy. And if writing related poems is what it takes to do that, great. But that doesn't necessarily mean publishing related poems, and it doesn't mean not doing it. Process is about creativity; publishing is about marketing. It would be naive to think they are not related in the long term, but counterproductive to think that they have to be, at least from the get-go.

Or anyway, that's what I take from this discussion.