On Rage or Righteous Anger / On Letting Go of a Friend

I'm home waiting for a phone call I agreed to take several weeks ago. I didn't sleep in, but I didn't have to race to work to squint at a slew of documents needing copyediting. I like what I do as much as I can like what I do, ie, I'm not complaining. I'm saying.

Having time to wander the Web (after I spent two hours hashing out drafts of poems), I came across an article that annoyed and a photograph that infuriated. The article was on poetry and the photo was of Nicki Minaj; it was on The Atlantic website and intended to depict her as anyone but Rudyard Kipling. Whom to she was being contrasted.

Nicki was eating fried chicken. The photo was out of context. In fact (I am told), she was eating fried chicken on stage at a concert. As performance. Got it. But that wasn't clarified.

Out of my whalish spout on my whalish back I spewed Twitters and a Facebook post. The author of the article responded to me--we conversed as much as is possible in the context of Twitter. The Atlantic didn't respond. I suspect they are a) bemused and b) happy for the attention and c) waiting to see if anyone else cares. I doubt if anyone else will care. It's Nicki Minaj. A rapper. A woman. A Black woman.

A few months ago, a friend made fun of me for being so (relatively) volatile and then said rather cruel things via assessment of me. Though after four years of "friendship" she was finally able to tell me, in a begrudging, shaking voice, that my poetry was of a "High Level," we're no longer friends. Too many put downs. Trust me on that.

This posting is itself a release of steam and water and dross. I'm changing every day but what to change. Is a question. I have no answer but asking helps.

Image is from Frigid Hare, a Looney Tunes cartoon. For more info, click on info.

Rambling thoughts on fear and writing

The great trick of writing is also the great trick of living--listening to your inner self fueled by the spiritual.

I'm thinking about this because a wonderful poet recently commented there are too many poems published these days and that's because poets are forced by requirements of university teaching to publish (or perish).

I'm inclined to kid myself that doesn't apply to me since I'm not an academic, but I feel a little panicky when I realize I don't yet have a new poetry manuscript to follow up my 2009 collection. Some poets produce a huge amount but others, Cavafy, Rilke, Whitman, among them, end up with one generous volume of poems, and those poems last.

So for me, I must listen to the voice in me and of me. Not my dear departed mother's voice, or imaginary authority figures (and nomads--they roam from my right to left shoulder), not editors. Set the work aside for a year and then return to it. I haven't been doing that.

I just heard an artist and illustrator talk about his struggles. He mentioned that it took some time for him to understand "the voice" (my conceit) was urging him to teach art to children for one of his jobs.

The brain says, Stick with adults because adults will help you become famous, but the artist/illustrator loves working with kids. If he'd let his more cowardly brain rule the day, he'd have distanced himself more but allowing a great satisfaction in his life.

Only the work brings satisfaction and a sense of happy completion, and awareness that least for a time, all is well.



ILLUSTRATION: Laurent de Brunhof, I saw it at the Morgan Library exhibit last year; not necessarily relevant here, but beautiful

Rukeyeser: "What does inner security rest on?"

In her essay "Darwin & the Writers," poet Rukeyser nails it. She is writing, as the title insists, on reactions to natural selection. I may never understand why it upsets so many religious people.

(In my simple universe, the Almighty is so beyond description or understanding all we can ever do is theorize, pray and be grateful. She is She, whether She sneezed 16 billion years ago creating the Big Bang or, like a wily Tex Avery cartoon character, played come hither with the apple, snake, human prototypes.) (Yeah, I'm simplifying.)

What do our reactions reveal about us?  According to Rukeyser,

Writers responded in terms of their own security. What does inner security rest on? was the real question they were asking in this struggle. Does it rest on dogma or transformation? If the answer is dogma, then every writer who wants to write with authority, to say, This is the way things are, is threatened.

In the late 1980s I found myself canvasing so a Quaker ceremony of commitment, same sex, would legal as Quaker marriage. In other words, in the state of Washington, legal.

I was a Member of University Friends in Seattle, and did my bit by talking to Members of the community about their concerns, resistance, repugnance.  There was much resistance. After a while, it was pretty clear, to me, anyway, that people who were offended by same-sex marriage were uncomfortable with their sexuality.

I realize I can't accuse any and everyone who disagrees with my views as simply being afraid, but I note that fear is a factor often unexamined. Always examine fear. It is the common enemy. Transformation is the promised land.

_____________
"Darwin & the Writers" by Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980), was published in 2009 by the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, LOST & FOUND series, CUNY Grad Center.

Yet More on Perfectionism: meds & poems & fear

I remember my post here about Kristin Prevallet's [I, Afterlife].*  I was sleeping maybe two hours a night by Fall 2008, and searching the streets of Manhattan for one prescription for one antidepressant I knew would help. Of course I had no insurance.

The story had a happy ending with me getting the pills (outpatient), and accepting, finally, I had to stay on them, or similar. Between the meds and being laid off, more woolly baa-ing sheep have frolicked in my bedroom in the past two years than romped in my crib (of the variety harboring infants).

Enter perfectionism, Stage Right.  My past two or so postings, by me, showed me refusing to finish one novel and two novellas, my perfectionism being a manifestation of a fear (of not being perfect or "God's perfect child" as Barbara Wilson wrote in her memoir God's Perfect Child about her Christian Science childhood).

Back to the pills.  Now that I had them I where should I store them?   I've debated--since I my twenties--delivery systems to guarantee I took daily vitamins.  Why not buy a rectangular Monday-through-Sunday pill box available at my friendly pharmacy? I'd been studying them over the years but found one far too capacious for my puny intake; another just not cute enough or too plastic or the wrong color or colors.

The above debate ended a few months ago. On a Sunday morning I shook out seven antidepressants and slapped them on the dusty top of my cranky refrigerator, then ingested one. There were six left, each of which disappeared into my waiting mouth, one-at-a-time, Monday, Tuesday and so on through Saturday. The system is no fail and has helped to regularize my vitamin takeage.

When interviewed on Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg said:

I remember I was thinking, yesterday in fact, there was a time that I was absolutely astounded because Kerouac told me that in the future literature would consist of what people actually wrote rather than what they tried to deceive other people into thinking they wrote, when they revised it later on. [Ginsberg]

Of course Ginsberg is referring to our Utopian future in Shangri La.  On the Road was a ten-year edit.  Ginsberg's poetry wasn't "automatic."  I continue to write and print out, edit, input, print out, edit, rewrite, edit, print . . . my poems and stories. And of course there's me and my pills.

I know I'm not the shining light of the poetry world, fiction world, of pretty much any world. Maybe I'd have published more earlier if I were less fearful (because that is what perfectionism is, fear . . . of mistakes, scorn, dismissal...). 

Regardless of output which is no measure of quality, I'd have lived less fearfully if I was a bit more of a perfectionism conqueror. A less fearful life?

Who deserves anything less. 

*Click on the link to read Lovingarms's posting on Kristin Prevallet's [I, Afterlife]

Finish it, Sarah: fear and writing

Since I don't have the level of compulsion I once had I have to coax myself to keep at it. I refer to fiction. I'm this close (close) to completing From the One Side of Heaven (2 novellas). And balking.

A few months ago I had a deal with another writer. I emailed him every day after I'd put in two hours. By return email I got a Fabulous! or Keep it up! This didn't need to know anything about what I was writing, which helped as getting into it would detract from the simple reward. It was great and I rarely missed a day. However, after thirty days, my remarkably generous friend threw in the towel.

He wasn't angry or put out but suggested it was time to move on and I couldn't disagree. I imagine it would be hard to keep getting those emails while working on your own stuff, a novel in his case. He went off to a writers' colony. I maintained the momentum for a bit then lost it. The holidays set in.

Then I wrote a Facebook status about my fear of finishing the novella. The support, by way of friends' encouragement to keep going, is there. I'm back to writing two or so hours most days. I'm not quite as assiduous as I was last year, but I'm doing it. I don't know what I'm afraid of--seeing it's a bad piece of fiction or the seeming impossibility of selling it. "Because cells in the brain are constantly transferring information and triggering responses, there are dozens of areas of the brain at least peripherally involved in fear."* There must be various areas involved in success and stamina too. Odds are overcome daily. My finishing doesn't even qualify as an "odd." I'm a writer. A smartie.

Last week I ran into a woman I hadn't seen for a few years. "Sarah." She grabbed my arm. "I have to make an amend." I had not a clue. "When you gave me those stories to read---" (I'd given her copies of two of my published short stories a few years back and she'd never said a word about them) "I thought they were beautiful." She writes for magazines. Good magazines. We hugged. On my way home I broke down crying twice. It would have been good to hear that a few years ago but I have a feeling it helped me more to hear it now.

I mentioned I have short story collection I want to publish. "You'll do it this year," she promised.

All I have to do is show up. And when I don't, get support. And when I don't, ask someone else for help. Or follow Berryman's advice [From "Berryman" by W. S. Merwin, in Opening the Hand]:

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he

said he meant it literally,

The next step will become evident. Thanks for listening.

*"How Fear Works" -- http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-nature/emotions/other/fear.htm/printable

The Craft of the Gum

I am afraid of dentists. While it's not a particularly original phobia it is a phobia with repercussions like a snare drum's vibrating crash when it falls out the van of some tanked musicians wearing T-shirts and jeans cleaned the year before they were asked to leave high school. (To their credit the musicians got their GEDs; but they do lug that snare drum from garage to garage.)

The sound of repercussions? Jarring and painful. I have yet to warm up to shiny exquisitely sharpened metal implements of silver tones, near, on, or boring into my tender gums, themselves small and shiny though wet and of a pinkish hue.

Through a serendipity which is part of a recent and larger massing of good will on behalf of the universe toward me, I found a dentist I could bear. A periodontist. I scrambled to my insurance website the week after I was laid off and made use of the dentist finder device.

"How did you find me?" Dr. Hecht asked. He has been practicing for many years, and probably in the same inauspicious office on the first floor of an apartment building - a New York City phenomenon, as far as I know (small medical offices that aren't part of snazzy professional complexes).

"You're in my zip code." I mentioned my dental squirminess.

He was calm and genuinely interested in gums, gum pockets and all that. If all we poets were as dedicated to our craft as he is to his, poetry could be a whole different thing neither better nor worse but different.

Hecht did, however, use small shiny sharp instruments, some motorized. I saw him Tuesday - second time - for surgery. He had that morbid perspective of dental aficionados. He thinks it's a hoot.

"Usually the X-rays make it look worse," the dentist said to his nurse Marianna. "Look at this stuff [I'm taking out]!"

Her nonsequitor was a reference to a failed X-ray of his teeth: "Ees my fault if your cheeks they are lined with lead?" Marianna is Russian.

My arms were tightly crossed on my chest, as I gripped and pinched myself in fear and tried to remember where Dr. Hecht matriculated. Was it the Sir Lawrence Olivier Royal Academy of Periodontal Surgery? Pinch pinch. Was he going to ask, "Is it safe?" Would the anesthetic take effect in time?

Marianna saw me white knuckling. "I am havink the mark on the arm myself. Pinchink. Donn like the surgery, me neither." Marianna reached behind her. "So." She handed me a stuffed brown bear usually offered to younger patients. I squeezed. "Ees helpink, yes?" Yes.

Hecht suspects a poppy seed infiltrated a pocket, as periodontists call fissures in the gum. I was infected and ready to abscess. Hallelujah - I didn't.

When he was troweling over new "bone" replacing gunky old bone dissolved by infection he mentioned a cousin of his who had cosmetic surgery on her chin. This was in the late 1940s. I believe his curiosity centered on the composition of the new "bone." Somewhere along the line he and Marianna veered from talking about real bone (not favored by patients because it's kinda creepy) versus fake bone; silicone (which led to the reflections on his cousin's chin); and just how much putty she should mix up to cover my stitches.

He complained she made too much and when it proved she had estimated correctly he told her that was because he was right all along.

I kind of forget where I was headed with all this although I hoped I would find a poetry tie-in along the way. Well, there was that comment of mine about poets (some) versus workmanlike professionals (some). I end with a moment of sympathy for Dustin Hoffman, who didn't know what Olivier meant when he asked "Is it safe?" - held up that whirring drill - gave dentists such a bad name.






photo from Marathon Man, starring Sir Lawrence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman.