Mother's Day

I'm a good girl. I've always been a good girl. For most of my life, it could have been me that Mary Gordon was thinking of when she wrote, "There is no seduction like that of being thought a good girl." But recently I have definitely not been good, in my family's definition of the word, or what I thought was my family's definition.

This is what I mean: I have written about subjects we don't even talk about. And I have published a little bit of what I have written. And it's about my mother's family, her brother, his accidental death. I emailed her before publishing the poems, and we had an email exchange, and things went much better than I had expected. My mother said she hoped I would write about her brother's life, since she didn't want only his death remembered. And that seemed like a reasonable request. But a difficult one, since we don't talk about my uncle, and so I know very little about his life.

I know he was a good guy, and it was the surprise and pain of losing a 22-year-old that made my mother's family shut down on the subject. I have a little bit that was written by my grandfather about his son, and I'm going to talk to my mom about him and about their childhoods when I visit her this summer. And then I'm going to try and comply with my mother's request.

But in the meantime, I feel a little strange, having broached a topic largely considered taboo in my family. And I have brought up pain that has been for a long time pushed down. Or at least unexpressed. Despite my mom's apparent acceptance of what I've done, I feel odd, and will probably continue to do so, until I do as she has asked. After all, I am a good girl. Or was.

And tomorrow is Mother's Day. I feel like the relationship between me and my mother has been changed by what I've done. And this is the first Mother's Day when I haven't been sure what my mother is thinking of me. My first Mother's Day not knowing if I am still a good girl in everyone's books.

And I feel more free as an artist than I ever have, and more relieved than I did as a child unsure of why there were things I was not supposed to talk about. But I feel that I have made [m]other[s] pay for my freedom.


Happy Mother's Day, everyone.

Blog Tour Update

If you haven't checked my blog tour post recently, please do. It's been updated to include three more poets (yes, I went a little crazy and invited three poets)!

You won't want to miss the musings of Tara Mae Mulroy, Drew Myron, and Shawnte Orion, nor miss seeing which poets they have invited to join the blog tour next! It's an international bonanza of poets, so don't delay!

The Insomniac is Available Now!

The new Isobar Press edition of The Insomniac's Weather Report is now available at Amazon, Amazon Japan, Amazon UK, and directly from me. If you want a signed copy, please contact me via the contact link at my website, or leave me a comment on this blog with an address or URL by which I can contact you. (The first 20 people who contact me directly will get free shipping anywhere in the world.)

In the meantime, you can download an excerpt from the book here.

Thanks!

And thanks to Paul Rossiter of Isobar Press for making this edition available in almost no time at all!

[Backstory: Some of you may recall the The Insomniac's Weather Report was first published in 2011 by Three Candles Press, as the winner of their First Book Award. Unfortunately, Three Candles closed abruptly only months after beginning to issue copies, so this book languished in a state of suspension until Paul Rossiter rescued it earlier this year, winning my true gratitude. Poets whose manuscripts have suffered similar setbacks, have hope!]

Single

Beautiful, mysterious images are static. Too many such images clog a poem. A mysterious image is a holy, wonder-working icon. How many of those can you have in a single poem?

Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, p. 48

*******

...now I understand about the comfort to be found in fear; also the power. Sometimes now I think it is the fear that keeps me safe; sometimes now I think the fear is all that keeps me safe. When I am scared of everything, the fear becomes a gauze bandage around me and I am convinced that if I stop being afraid, if I let my guard down for just one minute, all hell will break loose and fly apart in my face like a shattered windshield. On airplanes, I am so scared that I think If I relax and let myself enjoy the flight, the movie, the drinks, the conversation of the interesting woman beside me, we will crash for sure. It is my fear alone that keeps us airborne. All the other passengers can do whatever they damn well please: they have no responsibility and so no power. I realize there is a pumped-up vanity in this, a perverse delusion of grandeur in the belief that I could single-handedly avert disaster and save these smug, stupid strangers, not to mention myself.

 The power of fear lies in its conceit or the conceit of fear lies in its presumption of power.

 Diane Shoemperlen, from the short story "The Look of Lightning, The Sound of Birds" from the collection Red Plaid Shirt

******

Vocabulary of Dearness                           Naomi Shihab Nye

How a single word

may shimmer and rise

off the page, a wafer of

syllabic light, a bulb

of glowing meaning,

whatever the word,

try “tempestuous” or “suffer,”

any word you have held

or traded so it lives a new life

the size of two worlds.

Say you carried it

up a hill and it helped you

move. Without this

the days would be thing sticks

thrown down in a clutter of leaves,

and where is the rake?

*******

Anyone involved with the institutions of poetry would do well to remember this. With all the clamor in this country about the audience for poetry, a veritable barnyard of noise into which I myself have been known to bray, we shouldn't lose sight of one of poetry's chief strengths: how little of it there is. I don't mean how little there is in the culture, but how little there is at any one time that is truly excellent. Poetry's invisibility is deplorable and worth fighting. Its rareness is admirable and the chief source of its strength. Indeed, I sometimes think that if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently. Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry – rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.

Christian Wiman, Poetry, Dec. 2006

*******

Tread-softly (Cnidoscolus stimulosus)             Sarah Hannah

Hell, this is a field without end,
Wider than a gate, athrum with
Insect wing and Squawk. I might as well

Go swim in flame, but I can't swim,
So I'll just walk: bramble, spike,
And blame, without a single quenching

Drop of dew. Not a field—a ravine—
I mean a raving: You. And I'm
On double shift: daughter, nurse,

In double oxymoron: home hospice.
Some have said it's not worth saving,
This tiny family of Spurge: we two.

The hooks go in, the rash is swift, and
There's no poultice, only spur and spurned.
Even the milk sap burns. I've the urge to turn

And quit, but there's simply no one else to do it;
No one could or would—tread softly, that is—
Open the hand, toss the shoes and step back in,
Knowing what I know.

*******

She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul            Young Smith

(Mrs. Morninghouse, after a Sermon Entitled,
"What the Spirit Teaches Us through Grief")

The shape of her soul is a square.
She knows this to be the case
because she sometimes feels its corners
pressing sharp against the bone
just under her shoulder blades
and across the wings of her hips.
At one time, when she was younger,
she had hoped that it might be a cube,
but the years have worked to dispel
this illusion of space. So that now
she understands: it is a simple plane:
a shape with surface, but no volume—
a window without a building, an eye
without a mind.
                         Of course, this square
does not appear on x-rays, and often,
weeks may pass when she forgets
that it exists. When she does think
to consider its purpose in her life,
she can say only that it aches with
a single mystery for whose answer
she has long ago given up the search—
since that question is a name which can
never quite be asked. This yearning,
she has concluded, is the only function
of the square, repeated again and again
in each of its four matching angles,
until, with time, she is persuaded anew
to accept that what it frames has no
interest in ever making her happy.

Two Tokyo Readings (Plus Four Random Things)

Tokyo friends, two poetry readings you should know about:

1) 'Taking a Line for a Walk': The Pleasures and Surprises of the Poem
At 6:30 on Sunday 18th May at Good Day Books, Paul Rossiter will be talking about some of the pleasures, surprises, fascinations, and frustrations of reading and writing poems. In the second half of the talk he will introduce and read some poems from From the Japanese, his book which collects poems on Japanese themes, ranging in time from his first visit to Tokyo in 1969 (the era of Vietnam and Zengakuren) to the post-tsunami Japan of today. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion.

ADMISSION: Purchase from Good Day Books one copy of From the Japanese, or one copy of any other Isobar Press book (all at ¥1,500 + sales tax).

Good Day Books, Tokai Bldg. (big-b shoes building), 2-4-2 Nishi Gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-0031. Tel: 03 6303 9116.

Five minutes walk from Gotanda station; click below for a map.

http://www.gooddaybooks.com/contents/home/new_location?language=english


2) Launch of the second four Isobar Press books:

The launch of the second four Isobar Press books will be from 6–9 p.m. on Friday 6th of June in room 403/404 on the fourth floor of International House of Japan in Roppongi.

http://www.i-house.or.jp/eng/index.html

Royall Tyler will read from A Great Valley Under the Stars; Andrew Fitzsimons and Nobuaki Tochigi will give a bilingual reading of A Fire in the Head; Jessica Goodfellow will read from The Insomniac's Weather Report; and Paul Rossiter will introduce and read from Whispers, Sympathies, and Apparitions: Selected Poems of David Silverstein.

And now for some random things:

1) Each week, the Poets.org website will feature a different entry from Edward Hirsch's A Poet's Glossary. This week's word is 'poetry.' Sign up to get the weekly newsletter. 

2) According to Slate, Pennsylvania (my home state) is the most linguistically diverse in the union. I admit to missing the Philly accent, and to subscribing to two podcasts recorded in the Philly area in order to listen to the accent every week while living far away in Japan!

3) Slate also introduces us to the website Something Pop. It's a mathematical algorithm for helping you make decisions. I was intrigued but doubtful, so I used it on a decision already made but about which I feel ambivalent, and I was pleased to find that what I did chose was the (mathematically determined) better choice (the other option came in as not a bad choice either though). Believe it or not, that actually gave me some comfort.....though I continue to be intrigued but (slightly less) doubtful. 

4) Tapastic brings you Abstract Madlibs for PhDs and academics. If you're one of these (or partnered with one of these) you'll find this amusing. (Hat tip to Diane Nagatomo.)