Dear Poetry, A Conversation with Marthe Reed from 2014

This was originally published on the Conversant, but the site appears to be down, so I pasted it here: 

(em)bodied bliss (Moria Books) by Marthe Reed

Megan Burns:

As a starting point, I think of several things while sitting down with (em)bodied bliss this morning outside the coffee shop on what’s shaping up to be a hot New Orleans day: one, how we seem to have been at war or going to war all my children’s lives and, two, how over the weekend a one year and an eleven year old died in shootings on the streets of New Orleans. I think a lot about how violence infects us, how its presence shapes our every day even when we believe we escape it; and I wonder about our complicity and what it means. I think about how violence kills imagination.

The first poem in your book is titled “this doesn’t exist” and I think maybe we can start there. What is invisible? What do we know and not know or believe to know? And how does this reflect in our every day lives and how is this part of our politics as a nation, as a society? “Resistance amid the rough chatter of definition” (p 7).  How does the clear boundary of the poem shape our ability to define terror: “our tongues are tied” (10) ? And how do we reconcile two worlds, one where there is torture and unspeakable acts and one where we wake in the morning amid the blues and yellows of the day? “language translates into silence/ babel (gate of god) / enters by means of/ a language of flowers (12-13). I see these motions in these poems, can you talk a bit about how you got there? And how you feel these opening poems in the book begin to create a landscape for talking about these ideas?

Marthe Reed:

When Julia Kristeva writes, “what is abject…the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses,” she describes the conditions for which such violence is not merely likely but inescapable. In the abjection of abandonment and erasure, the functional results of poverty and racism, life has no meaning. The deaths you describe deaths are the ad absurdum consequence of a hyper-capitalist ethos where product and profit are sources of value. Ignoring suffering while actively insuring the means of violence, our culture has implicitly asserted that individual lives are meaningless, tokens in the massive production, sales, and consumption of weapons insuring the wealth of their manufacturers and the semblance of liberty (read: power) for those wielding guns. The deaths in New Orleans—or Chicago or Philadelphia or Detroit—are as culturally meaningless (valueless) as the bodies of the tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, the victims of “targeted” drone assassinations, or the lives of U.S. service men and women once released from their military service. Invisible and abject.

The composition of (em)bodied bliss became for me a means of grappling with my own ignorance and unacknowledged complicity in such systems, in particular the Bush administration's use of torture, black sites, and extraordinary rendition to address terrorism targeting the U.S. after 9/11, and the sustained detention said captives, even now five years into Obama's administration. Still people are kept out-of-country, out of sight, buried alive, force-fed when they protest their conditions, in effect tortured. Torture coupled to indefinite detention has resulted in profound despair, suicides and attempted suicides by prisoners who, outside of the protections of both law and compassion, have been rendered invisible, their lives meaningless.

When the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz cabal were having their way, where was I? What was I doing? Angry about the endless wars, the perverse "prosecution" of revenge against Saddam Hussein as a means of procuring and securing access to Iraq's oil reserves and fattening the corporate interests of American companies such as Halliburton, and blind-sided by the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere by proxy. I had stubbornly held to some notion of honor, of "founding principles" (written by wealthy, white, slave-procuring and -owning men -- what can "principles" possibly mean in such a case? Good intentions? It hardly seems possible).  

In those years, like most people, I was caught up in my own life: an international move from Australia to the Deep South, a new job teaching nine courses a year, mostly composition, writing a dissertation, a child dropping out of school at 13, another child nearly as miserable at all the transitions. I largely tuned the wider world out, listened inward to family dynamics, personal ambitions, the day-to-day getting through. What we all do, ho we fail to attend, to listen. To question.

I also delighted in the new environs I found myself in. I traveled, wrote, read poetry. Gave myself over to wonder when I could. In the aftermath of revelation, I could not reconcile such delight, such self-seeking pleasure with the unfathomable traumas of torture, the explicit policy of my country: its lawyers writing briefs justifying rendition, water-boarding, humiliation, starvation, "stress positions," isolation, loud noise 24 hours a day for days on end -- systematic violence applied in the name of "security". Then the official reactions to revelation, reasons, justifications, assertions, innuendo. The slow pulling back of the curtain. Politicians, policy wonks, media coverage: amplifying the noise to signal ratio. The canceling power of white-noise.

Like nearly everyone, I was horrified. And complicit. I had not paid attention, I had not questioned. I had tied my tongue. My ignorance was, of course, thoroughly intended by the white-noise generators, a means of facilitating violence. But I did not suspect either. As I grappled with these revelations and my feelings, I turned to language to untie the knot of violence and complicity, of silence. Peeling away the layers of deception and lies, to address the way language itself was a tool in such violence.

In the poems, I juxtapose two parallel realities, known and unknown, delight and horror, mundane and monstrous, in reconstructing the unfathomable perversion, via "national security" and "national interest," of what we call with pride our "founding principles." Justice, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Because if "we hold these truths to be self-evident," then these rights must fundamentally belong to ALL people, not just those who have not yet had the eye of the powerful turned upon them in malevolence. (Now my government is spying on anyone, everyone, me. Listening in. What do we value?)

"the rough chatter of definition" is the work of reconstructing a past that has been carefully hidden, secured, justified. An archeological excavation of language, of words whose meanings have been reconfigured to perverse inanities. Torture became "exceptional techniques" and extraordinary means: "harsh interrogation practices" is infinitely more palatable than "inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or to force them to do or say something, or for the pleasure of the person inflicting the pain." As these techniques were applied to "terror suspects"—absolutely other, radically excluded—how expedient that they remain nameless and faceless, in no way akin to me or mine.

I read the memos of Jay Bybee and John Yoo, the investigative reports of prisoner abuse by the New York Times and Amnesty International, official reports on deaths while in custody, the history of the tortures employed, reports on the physical and psychological consequences of torture. I directly integrated the language I found in these “texts” into the poems, refusing to look away. I juxtaposed Bybee's language with that of the tortured. I stitched this language and these poems into a patchwork "quilt," alternating the new poems with poems I had written during the period in which torture was being actively pursued by our government, while I blithely "kept faith." Poems of place(s), notions of the sacred, a "book of my days" plays out against the language of a new Inquisition: blood gushed out of his nose and mouth as if from a faucet. The poems for me became a way to hold both realities at once, to return their contemporaneity to them. What I knew, or thought I knew. What I did not begin to suspect.

Megan:

I get that sense exactly from the poems as you say: "The poems for me became a way to hold both realities at once, to return their contemporaneity to them. What I knew, or thought I knew. What I did not begin to suspect."

Elaine Scarry in "The Body in Pain" opens up her chapter on torture by saying: "Nowhere is the sadistic potential of a language built on agency so visible as in torture." She then goes on to talk about the "illusion" of torture's purpose, to extract knowledge again via language. And how, "Intense pain is world-destroying" and how all "made possible by language ceases to exist."  I wonder how poetry can carry these ideas. How did you decide what to give your reader as far as knowledge/ images in the poems when describing these events? And what are your thoughts on how language can be used in these two settings: "poetry" and "torture."  Is there a way that poetry does more than just bear witness? 

Marthe:

The compassion of human-to-human connection, afforded by language, is obliterated by torture, by the infliction of extreme suffering. Without compassion, without empathy we become isolated from one another, lose integrity and coherence, are reduced to an idea: "terrorist" and "torturer", "suspect" and "infidel". A gut reaction whose expression is language but the content of which is reductive, world-obliterating, violently utilitarian. One kind of "thing" does "something" to another kind of "thing" because that first "thing" "deserves" it. What language, what art must do in the face of such erasure is to return compassion to language. Torture can only be carried out in secrecy, or via propagandist manipulation: "bad guys" are causing "us" to suffer; "they" should suffer because "we" have. But there can be no meaningful distinction between “we” and “they”: stuck in the torture chamber together, only chance settling which role one occupies. Torture seals us in isolation, destroying the possibility of (self-)recognition.

When the President's lawyers write, "The President enjoys complete discretion..." the perversion of syntax separates us, isolates each of us into discrete cells of our own. "Anyone" could be a "threat." What does it mean to say the President "enjoys" "complete discretion", an inadvertent and insidious suggestion of the pleasure implicit in torture and absolute power (any action then taken is, by nature, justified). By inserting this language into the poem, the implicit is made explicit. "appropriate and consistent with military necessity"? Necessity asserts a totalizing authority: as organisms need energy for life, the military needs...what? Information? Does it matter how that information is obtained and that the means of acquisition contaminate the information? Torture does not work because it destroys the possibility of trust: if pain is inevitable then the only recourse is to refuse and die or say what is expected. Employing a fatally flawed practice reconfigures its purpose: "military necessity" is then understood to be a euphemism for "hurting those who hurt us." Juxtaposing the bland, authoritative language of policy against the testimony of the tortured and/or the pleasure of being—which torture strips away—challenges the simple binary of "us" versus "them", "good guys" versus "bad guys," makes immediate the suffering of others: while I was enjoying a coffee on a terrace overlooking Lago Maggiore, "A thick plastic collar [was] placed around my neck so that it could then be held at two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against a wall." I/me, my coffee/my neck.

Megan: Thinking about this connection with language, I would like to turn to the poets who appear throughout the book, their words and their connections to your writing. Looking at "Three:    auto(auto)biography" which is "for Lyn Heijinian and Leslie Scalapino" I was reminded of your work with Proust. Could you talk about their influence in your writing especially in regards to self and memory? Following that poem are three poems entitled "Lilith" which all have quotes from Mina Loy, one of my favorite poets; do you recall the first time you read her? And then Keith Waldrop provides a quote for the poem following these titled "Lost Things" and he also provides a quote to the final poem in the book "(em)bodied bliss." There are more quotes and poets appearing throughout, but could you talk about the use of others' language in your own shaping of these pieces.

Marthe: I do turn to other poets as points of entry into writing, particularly when a piece of writing is frustrating or resisting me, or when my reading of other's work calls out to the writing I am working on. Sight, among other things, is about relationship and it was a particular problem of relationship to place with which I was grappling, my dis-location from place: remembering Australia, where I had lived for seven years, from the distance of both my otherness with respect to it and from the vantage of a new place (south Louisiana). Similarly Proust's memoir and my reworking of it, like this particular poem from (em)bodied bliss, actively constructs, refashions, memory and self. Performs a distillation and a permutation. Displacement and dislocation, whether in time or place or within one's shifting sense of identity, seems a constant in my life, and writing functions as a primary means of inhabiting and working through it. The longest time I have spent in a place as an adult has been in Lafayette, eleven years. Always on the move and often outsider to the local culture, I have had to engage in an active practice of building relationship to place -- nesting in by means of learning about the geology, landscape, history, politics, and culture of these places. Wanting to understand how it is this place has come to be what it is, and then writing my way into/through/across those histories as a means of forging a relationship that is not merely a job and a house in the suburbs.

Loy is also an important poet for me, her virtuosic play with language and unrelenting resistance to tyranny. A foremother, much as Keith is something of a forefather: he was my MFA advisor at Brown. He enters the work because at the time of the composition of the torture poems, I was simultaneously immersed in reading his work and finding resonances between it and my project, another form of suffering and loss. The use of citations in the book is an artifact of my reading and an intentional effort to bring a wider frame of reference into the writing, so that it becomes not only my response but, in effect, a kind of choral/communal articulation of resistance. Perhaps it is for me a practice akin to a gathering of the ancestors at the onset of a rite.

Sound and Basin (Lavender Ink) by Megan Burns

Marthe:

I have been reading Sound and Basin and find a correspondence not only in your language of place -- "a tableau in golds: yellowed newspaper clippings, the sunflowers of St. Bernard, dear Eros of no land, in the antecedent of the day, agony of remembered winds" -- but as well in the need to make the unseen seen, to bring into the light the abandoned/hidden/ignored, in your case the devolution of New Orleans, beloved city, orphan of innumerable catastrophes. Composed in four sections, Sound and Basin begins with an excavation of the aftermath of Katrina, the need to "unhook your tongue" and speak when all around you "Everyone is tying on their shrouds" -- dancing at the end times, while the city "burns." Finding a way to write against weariness, collapse, the seemingly unending catalog of griefs, to resist silence or inchoate anger. Another hurricane, another oil "spill", another epidemic of gun violence, another war, another turning away. 

a city talks and talks to no one

a list of complaints]

clears

cleaves

stationed at equal intervals

a bit/ bite/ bitter tongue (49)

Could you start by addressing living and writing in New Orleans, how the city comes into the writing, how the writing takes form from the city? How writing the political/communal is carried into the poetry and how the language holds against the weight of history and loss?

Megan:

I've been avoiding answering this. It's always a double edged sword when I start talking about New Orleans. I love this city so intensely and feel my very self is defined by my relation to it. And in the same breadth, I have so many issues with the neglect of its people and the ongoing gun violence and racial/ class separations that go hand in hand with that violence. I can't talk about writing about New Orleans without talking about Katrina, and that's another subject that still overwhelms me. I think I'll say this about the city; the people who went through Katrina had the unique experience of wholly losing not only their homes and possessions and in terrible instances, family members and friends; but they also suffered this complete loss of place. They lost their past and their memories that are rooted in landmarks and buildings. They experienced for a time an almost complete loss of an entire region and way of life that was in many cases all they ever knew. 

I think that marks us, that knowledge that everything you hold as a part of your days and waking hours could be wiped clean. And for me, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was like reliving Katrina but no longer confined to a city, but now contaminating the waters that we depend on to survive. I felt like it was possible that all could be wiped clean. My third child was born in early 2010, and I remember breastfeeding her and watching the oil gush into our oceans. I wrote to the poet Akilah Oliver telling her that when I read my four year old a book about pelicans, he responded, "covered in oil" and I felt helpless in the face of that reality. I felt like language was not enough. Akilah said: "I don't know about how we will tell of the fracturing to ourselves, to our children, but I do think there must be another narrative in the cracks that is worth telling.  I know that sounds so theoretical, and I am trying out in my own life, relationships, both micro and macro, how to make those gaps whole places that can hold both the lamentation of these times (of my heart) and the possibility of becoming (as the philosophers like to say).  BP has so much slipped out of the news here in the states (still central news in Europe, or parts of it, curiously enough).  I hate politics, the politics of silence and fear, but for me, so much of my own despair (when it rears its ugly head), is around what seems to be a split between the political and the heart.  & what about Obama?  I'm so disappointed in this administration - they are cowards, business as usual. 

I think we are our hope, the artists and writers, the brave ones and fools, the mothers and awake ones. 

“Hold your children tight, and for now, yes, I think we have to keep trying to describe this, the New Orleans, the BPs, the holes in the world. "

So, I am doing what she told me to do. I am writing about the holes in the world. For me, that starts here in the city, here in the landscape that we are threatening with extinction and here in the home where we hold our children. They are all intertwined for me. I don't know if the language holds, but we hold against the silence of not saying it, of not simply allowing things to pass without our knowledge. I'm particularly interested in specifics, in naming because I believe we cannot be blind to what we know in particulars, to what we recognize in detail. So, it is not a body of water or a bird or a way of life, it is a very specific name and detail applied to each instance. We must be aware and make note of it before we lose it forever. 

Marthe:

In the poem "Hewn," the first in the section "Bone," you write: "a city complacent in its loom" (38), "this is the starving cradle" (38), "there is no natural fall / its been rehearsed / stalled and gaining momentum" (41) and later, in the final poem of the section:

flesh to bone to morning wake

bury this tender plot

bone on bone circle a rite:

inside this

little calcified artifact: (writ hope)

This section reads as a dark elegy for a lost city, a "reading of the bones" of the already dead. Is this New Orleans now for you? Or the inevitable end of a city that enters the national consciousness only in the midst of ecstasy (Mardi Gras) or catastrophe? Could you talk about the figure of the bone that structures this section of the book?

Megan:

Shortly after returning to New Orleans after Katrina, I became interested in the infrastructure and the metaphorical anatomy of the city. It's an interesting situation to be able to quite literally see the break down of a city and its struggle to pull back together; I became obsessed with ideas of what makes a city as far as the collective memory of its people combined with the realistic needs of being able to support the modern conveniences afforded cities such as roads, police protection, hospitals, sewage & garbage as well as mail systems. All of these conveniences that we take for granted are part of what makes a city and yet, and maybe especially, in a city like New Orleans, there is an idea of what the city is: its music, its food, its celebrations, its culture and history that live in the locals. I began to correspond poetry to this idea of words providing a type of infrastructure to language, so they, in a sense, are the anatomy.  And a fleshing out of these bones occurs in the ordering of the poem and a collective sense and consciousness emerges in the communion of language. "Hewn" is a type of elegy that recognizes in this millennium an emergence of disasters that results from long periods of neglect and destruction wrought on this planet. I end the section "Bone" with the poem "Scapula" that does recognize the circular nature of life and death, destruction and renewal, and within the bone, finds the "calcified artifact: (writ hope)." Bones are like our world; we forget to care for them until disease or damage occurs then we realize the whole system depends on this internal structure. Anatomy is intriguing to me because within endless variety there is this somewhat consistent structure that binds us, and I think language provides this same infrastructure, so that meaning emerges from endless variety but the internal system of sound and syllabics remains contained. I've heard these limits of language called "failures" but we wouldn't call the human skeleton system a failure because it can't fly; we simply recognize what it is intended to do. In the same way, language does not fail, it does what it is intended to do. It remains up to us to close the gap between the structure and our desires. 

Marthe:

In the third section of Sound and Basin, a distinct formal pattern manifests, a pattern of frequent gaps in the lines, most prominently in the five "Anniversary" poems. Interruptions, pauses. A struggling for breath or words? The difficulty of speaking about what happened. These are poems written in the aftermath of the BP blowout in the Gulf. "Anniversary 1:3" takes me back to your earlier mention of the birth of your third child at this time and reading to your four year old son.

source to species:  song

a little soul worth            new day

for baby eyes     discovery         world slips

open     a chink luminous

to be a people of water        not a choice       a stain

boot heels of modern sinner           weightless

These lines are not only puncuated with gaps, they are also double-spaced, heightening the openness of the page, creating a ragged texture on the page much like the coastal wetlands where they are criss-crossed with oil-field channels and the encroaching salt destroys the roots of the anchoring grasses. Could you talk about the ways you have opened up the line and the page in these poems and their relation to this section of the book?

Megan:

I like how you compare the space of the poem to the coastal wetlands; it reminds me of your work with images and words in regards to the geography here as well. I don't think I was mimicking the landscape as much as allowing for more pause in the line and a contemplative breath in between the words. The "Anniversary" poems of which there are several were all written on the one year anniversary of the spill, and in a way they too are an elegy to the lives lost and the destruction that occurred. I think that sometimes the sentence holds too much together, and in the face of some things, it is only words or even syllables that emerge to really capture the trauma. I'm thinking of mourning and the rituals of sound regarding loss, sounds that begin to take on a physical presence in our world if we consider the "Wailing Wall." And so, too, the poem is a physical presence that attempts to capture the stunned realization of what has happened. And narrative and cohesiveness become less important while rhythm and syllabics shore up our sense of what is happening in the space of the poem. I actually always find it hard to read these poems out loud because the spacing is unnatural and requires too much pause, and so the actual voicing of these poems becomes a space of discomfort not only in subject but in how the poem is asked to be read; it forces the speaker or reader out of a normal rhythm of reading. 

Marthe:

We both grapple with psychic and social dislocations that result in paralyzing alienation of the felt/embodied/desired and the enacted/imposed/effected: Kristeva’s “radically excluded” “jettisoned object,” whether a city and its people, or the prisoners of Guantanamo, or the material ground of our being, the environmental imperatives that make life possible. Seeking through poetry and poetic language, asserting again and again, the inescapable obligation of compassion. “out of the normal rhythm” of reading—and thinking. Language (poetry) can afford modes of re-encounter and reconciliation, if we, writers and readers alike, let it.

Dear Poetry, boated to grief

Dear Poetry,

Do you ever run out of words for a breaking, the way language falls short yet we squirm inside the telling, desperate, a can-you-pull-me-free from the container of loss plunging under.

Do you know how a sibling will slip so birthdays become times of both where did I meet you and some stranger takes your place, touching me.

Do you remember the weight of a child laid on your chest, the sweet scent of you emerged from the cocoon of a place I considered land mine, a terror, the horror show of riddled fate.

Do you know how seduced I was by longing that I swallowed my name, went long silent in the draught of learning to speak double edged, forked tongue, spells loosed the swept hysteria of she screaming whose voice I can't echo.

Do you recall whole cities disappear, the past washed under watercolor, all of it traced as heart shapes in the sand near the coming tide.

Do you know that I looked for love and couldn't see it around me, my shame I held before me blocking my view as if good enough even existed, as if the notion of deserving was no more than a fiction.

When I controlled the poem, I thought I was writing my truth. I was writing a death sentence because my cells coded that lust in the making, what I grew into as legacy, mud and dirt of country houses held up by secrets names.

For you to have kept me in your sight.

Lined to the castaway. Even now I think what life carved into by love, the fissures of sound knifing beneath even bone.

-M

Dear Poetry, Now I lay me down

dear poetry,

to poet is less about language and more about sacrifice
to say i will look so you don't have to
at the atrocities of life, the damage of this place
the cruelty, the blatant disregard, the aches the heart breaks against
look, i will peer deeply into the horror and pull back up
underworld of my very sound, hooked skin to lipped tonguing
so be it.

so be it.

make the terror beautiful, it won't hurt
as much when i hand you truth
i have wrapped it in my love, here take it

do we move closer in the gaps
the dead make

we keep believing separate
we keep believing
difference
we keep believing in I vs us vs me vs us vs them

and to poet is to say: wake up
to use your body and your life to say: wake up

every program you've been handed doesn't matter
every code that says suffer, that says less than, that says not enough

to say I would give my life is not to say I will lay down and die for you
to say I would give my life is to say I am here minding the changes
to say I keep coming here, I keep taking on this pain and this hurt and this loss
to say while we are here, let us sing
are you listening?

to walk each other home
quiet and still enough to recall
we are nothing

nothing but vibration
without end

Dear Poetry, the old brag

Dear Poetry,

for Marthe Reed 
      who I found out an hour after writing this poem had left us earlier in the morning 

on the algorithms that run your life
on the screen shots we fed to discern
on the amount of busy work designed to architect what we call surviving
on the edge of this where I can't even meet
on the teeth marks of blame
on the shame you suckle

if I give you my life
if I give you my wanting never filled
if I give you this trap I keep to cage
I think of what hasn't ever happened
& what has happened
& everything in between

I remember this life and this life
pale of this space as if a word,
as if on the pluck of a word
root me, think much of

and it is an old moon, a rusty car, or a spring in the mattress
or it is the bee box, the dead women, the waterfall in a city
hook in the eye of a gone missing, accident of holy holies,
I am the bomb, I am become the shored missive, I am this water too
a lineage of images hoarded into the sprawl
and it is look: I am crawling out under, it is look: I am crawling

to the lip of the wound
where you promise me light
I am flinging in
who needs poetry
I am not afraid to lose you

Dear Poetry, a list of reasons...

Dear Poetry,

1:   inside of   (say ear

                                (say dream

                                        (say, insert pronoun, we digress

2:  fingers slipped, the poet reads a poem about war & insects   

                        (drones a diagram of how we arrived:   once i was alone

    you, outside time                         appear (how ghosts continue

3: sound edges, a fingerprint identifies,                               (of what handled

            touch in place of genocide, touch in place of where the bullet carved

4: clearly not, the treble of sound, or images rising in a throat of huddled, we secret, unsaid pressure of caught      (and to not fly, or this not skied vision, i have no idea if that’s the way it works, you reveal) 

5: once i made a promise. it went like this: i won’t kill myself until i have seen every Bergman film  

6: your thumb is never fair in the language of undoing how sure i am.

7. in your story, the woman fades. it’s not clear which of us is her. we both want and fear permanence and so, we are clearly both him, the artist painting desire into folds,       looping eyes on  (& here we churn waters deep enough

8.                                              (press into me where we mimic           your grasp shutters

9: i’ve been in this story so long, i think i am the poet, am the girl, am the one held, am the one trying to disappear, am the other pushed aside, am inside you whispering, can you hear                (i am the instrument with the mark of

                                    –you, transparent quartz

10: duality of poem’s staccato & squeezing the tip of my finger between your own

                                    (i hear what those around us secret but

                                                  w/ you           i am afraid   of what holds 

11: and the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound

12: puncture wounds caress along inseams of doubt         (touch the string softly 

                                                                                                                i stop moving

13: un/sound  :: dark eros links form, you warm against & don’t lie, i can pocket anything unnoticed, even sing memory into being, even sing a discarded collapse into light

love still, 

Megan 

Dear Poetry, Cloak & Dagger

Dear Poetry,

The cup of gratitude is always full and washes away other projections. It is always full. When you talk to the dead, you spend a lot of time examining doubt. Am I my skin or the failure of my skin? I'm looking down a deep well at what I believe is the surface of water but is really emptiness. I have trouble with domestic life. This island is where you get one caress, one caress only. Use it well. A poem is like a peck on the cheek usually until hunger for another's mouth on yours swallows all sense of decency of taste. We are the accident of nature disobeying its own laws. What you show up for every day that no one sees: That is who you are. I have as most do an appetite towards what harms. I think it is suffering that means I love or that I love means I must know suffering. That code keeps us. Here is the secret: When you see me I am loving you. When you read to me I am loving you. When I read you I am loving you. When you are in the room with me I am unconditionally loving you. I am clear channel to open heart seeing you as you step onto the stage, into the shape of the word and what carried you there. I am in there. We are on that field. It is all the same path. Where there is poetry: There is this without condition. That is the bargain I made.

M

Dear Poetry, Post-Sorry

Dear Poetry,

remember sweetness,


first sound strum in the womb where dark you world
and water carried across, warmth the held spark
inside being, inside a no break from other culling
song less dense abyss


remember opening,

skinned nerve jump a field of no remorse
outside containers of trapped times spun tales
lipped start thrum a trap till sprung you
slip past rooted noun

remember spurati,

chanted whirl to discern where you capture
to suffer your choice you draw close a kiss
simply we worded a bride of drift
wash foam dusty lens

remember a-joining,

slick wet of edge jointed when you enter to meet another
a retelling you forge slow plant of gross
intent, hunger jawed this grasp till netted a duality
sick shape swollen light

remember rupture,

life leaking time's rift to constellate
matched patterns in every story familiar
come again, come again, come along here
we alway be infinite

not congruent, your name brushed aside
broken ash consumed a biting

always,

M

Dear Poetry, Each A-Muse

Dear Poetry,

this life has been a learning of what you can't ask for/ like i can't ask for the safety of other people to touch me/ i can't trust anyone to be near me for any reason other than their own absorption/ i watch other people navigate the space of relationships/ where someone cares if you get home safe/ where someone thinks of you throughout the day/ where someone really wants to know you/ and no one wants to know/ except you, poetry, where we travel/ or the dead who keep us never alone/ or the way even when i don't want to/ and i never want to/ that's the trick of it/ don't want to know before knowing/ it's over before it begins/ don't want to read scenes so clearly/ i don't need you to explain/ don't need you to context/ i don't need to be more than 6 inches from you/ and scented i can smell where you break/ what you hide/ what you take/ there is a-nothing hiding from me/ so i can't swallow/what hurts most/ the minute i am happy/ in the space with you/ the minute it rises up from inside me/ and what you don't realize/ is long before days later of abandonment/ i read the regret inside you/ i read the fear and doubt/ your own insecurity/ the confusion of being not enough/ of wanting a back to sleep life of repeat necessary/ who can blame you/ i don't as you tamper it back down/ unconscious of your own designs/ i play nice/ act like nothing's happened/ and walk to the car/ there is the life we lead surface sided in our bodies where almost two more weeks go by before you leave/ but for me, inside the energy of what broke/ i tightrope the unreality/ barter the borrowed time of slippery joy/ it's all i know of tenderness/ a stolen object/ not designed for me/ not made for my hands/ i scavenge what i can/ i horde what i know isn't even a shadow of what i imagine/what exists inside a space of ignoring what is true is what i call care/ but close as close i museum this land that wonders/ we look like anybody else who has someone/ and i can pretend/ poetry keeps me caught in plenty/ i can imagine a just about anything i will never know/ the best part of other people is never what they are/ but the lesson they give


sometimes i think enough.    


but you don't care how much it takes.


-
M

Dear Poetry, I Took My Life

Dear Poetry,

This is where I thank you for saving my life.


Thank you.


Do you remember the bargaining?

believed in silence then/ the way the world hurt/ touch me not this cutting is a way of keep me here/ i will dissolve/ i will explode/ i have no wor(l)ds...

What you did was rearrange the game: The price was high. Such a jealous lover. Such a one. Such a possession, you hold me like no other held.

pulled me up from sleep of dying/ washed dreams for new skin/ no lovers tread here/ take this shatter and swallow/ what you make beautiful/ unbreakable girl thing/

I paid the toll. Go into the poet, go into the poet, go poet into the land of neglect and keep your wits about you. Go poet the deep crevasse, pluck naming poet, create these beastlings, wage war against what love. Make a doll of it, and they will take everything you cherish. And I will be all that you have left, is what you told me. And it all came to pass, truth dribbles.

I trust you like I trust nothing else in this space of suffer.

this lively/ underwater singing/ watching it burn/ in the tinder aggregate/ to say/ i built this/ i built this life/ with nothing/ but what you told me

committed/ i fold down my fiery wings & listen


-Love

Dear Poetry, I Draw Damage

Dear Poetry,

I draw damage to me. No matter how the story starts, ends some same. Now when they close in on me, I play how long till I can see you for what you are. The poem I wrote last week has a hole in it. When I look at it taped to the wall, the white space is screaming. It's my heart. It's the wrecked space of what it should be. Or it's the warped space of what it has become. It is so quiet between the end of one word and the next syllable sharpening.                                                                                                              What they give me is silence. and what they don't know: I have enough silence to fill lifetimes. I say thank you anyway for the lesson and keep to the page. Come here where you tender. I pay the fee to cross with what I break apart, how artful to come asunder. You never say you love me, which is safer than all lovers who say it and not one meaning. They think they can handle language in front of me, the way they think they can handle me. We are inside one another, and I don't need to hear you coax me, love. When I wake up, the poem is on the wall, the hole in the text is visible across the room, the guesswork is gone and my heart doesn't have to wonder where you'll take me. There's no hope for girls like me. We signed off & what you get is a revolving door of lovers where only half are even good for a poem. It takes an incredible amount of damage to make it sing; I never tire of packing my bags to wander. I will go so far for you, so far under: Can you see how the light dances. I was trying on this narrative of being human for you; it's been nothing but disaster. I'm near the edge looking for escape routes, but we all know you took death's caress from me too.


Megan

Dear Poetry, You Don't Tell Me I'm Beautiful

Dear Poetry,

I wanted you to be some other kind of lover: a ledger of sounds lapping. You go off, I get off on the nerve of language where stringed you trip against smoothness. Snap baby, way you pucker up under the image: Sliding into your finger tips. Screen dream of make my grief holler, I'm willing to bet I can take whatever you have to give. When someone says, manage your feelings what they mean is: i don't, i can't, i need you to be smaller b/c i feel so small. I've lived too long to be scared, tempt me with the twinning of barb wire round my throat, silencing: that action ghosts me most. You never asked that much of me, you wanted to watch it go in. You wanted me to perform under dissection, the hollow of warring myself into a shape you would contemplate. I was in love with you before I was in love with a device I could hold in my hand. I was in love with you while other lovers tried to wear your face & shove their hearts inside. I was in love with you because you stayed but mostly you were all I could stand to have stay. And you used me as best as any, I had to jump, I had to fit, I had to follow your lead and what you took as payment for the boat ride was to never turn away: called it save your life and then save someone else's. But you wanted me under you, wanted me to fight my way up as you pinned me. I could take all of these beautiful dreams called other people and smash them into a narrative that colored this truth: My life like any life has been two choices/ you can make your way out of anything.

xoxo,

Megan

GHOST: ménage à trois

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In the infamous "GHOST" pottery scene, Demi Moore’s character, Molly, and Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam, have a seductive moment while both shaping a phallic mold of clay on the pottery wheel. The “other” in this instance is the phallus on the wheel, which they both grasp. And it is the most seductive source of the scene, not the later images where they fumble through clothes groping each other as The Righteous Brothers croon in the background. It is the initial moment when their hands, wet and covered in clay reach out to grasp and hold the phallus, to stroke and mold around the head of it: That leaves the impression.

The subtext of the cuckolding of Sam is woven throughout the film. Or the reality of the triangulation of desire, that the ultimate state of seduction is not on the body but is on the mind’s knowledge that desire is being witnessed.

In an incredible beyond the dead cuckold scene, the ghost of Sam witnesses his former friend now murderer, try to seduce his fiancé. Carl makes a move spilling coffee on his shirt in order to remove it so that he can display his masculine chest, a nod back to the opening scene in the film where two shirtless men, Carl and Sam, flank a diminutive overall wearing Demi Moore as they sledge hammer a wall down. Three bodies, some partially clothed, covered in sweat and grime wielding heavy tools as they demolish a wall. The question of desire here is whom does Carl actually desire? Does he desire to possess Molly or to possess Sam whose life he will take or both? Is Carl metaphorically the phallic mold on the pottery wheel that if Sam and Molly could have reached out to grasp would have changed the arc of the story? Did Sam and Molly take Carl to bed after this initial renovation scene and we missed it? Is it the missing link as to why Sam’s best friend seemingly went off the rails, murdered Sam for a measly 80K and then preceded to follow it up by attempting to murder two women.  Or is it because they couldn’t take him to bed, they couldn’t enact the unspoken desire created by their triangle because their heteronormative coupling outline did not allow it.  Or are we to believe Carl is just evil and this is just the evil men do?

Sam ends the cuckold scene where he is silent witness to Carl’s seduction of Molly by knocking over a picture, essentially finding his ability to enact his will upon the scene even without his corporeal body to stand in place. This is pivotal because the other underlying desire in GHOST is belief.

Does desire occur in the body or the mind? Does love lie in language, actions or in our will to believe in it?

Parameters of desire: Demi Moore’s body versus Whoopi Goldberg’s body

what is the fluidity involved in the traditional ghost story as transitional from here to there, alive to dead, between worlds… corporeal or spirit.

The most complicated threesome in the movie is enacted on the women's bodies. 

Of course it is.... the most complicated threesomes in every movie are enacted on women's bodies. 

Whoopi Goldberg's character, Oda Mae Brown, agrees to allow Sam to inhabit her body in order to have a physical form to touch Molly.  The complications of a white man inhabiting an African American woman's body in order to enact desire on a white woman's body is such a nesting doll of political and ethical difficulties that I would have to dedicate another blog post just to this one scene. 

The way that this scene is filmed speaks to how difficult the subject matter is: Once Sam inhabits Oda Mae's body, we never see her body touching Molly's. We instead enter a fantasy where we bear witness to Sam, now incorporeal again, having a tender scene with his wife. This heteronormative fantasy is so powerful, we literally suspend the reality of what is happening. 

Think about that for a minute: We forget what is happening when we are presented with a powerful hegemonic fantasy. 

This is how culture works.  Thankfully, Goldberg won an Oscar for this role, because the amount of emotional labor she probably had to do to perform this scene is beyond language. The suppression of self to be more palatable is never not vicious.

“And I won an Oscar because of Patrick Swayze,” Goldberg said. In her 1991 Oscar speech, she thanked Swayze, calling him “a stand-up guy.”

The first time I touched a penis I cried. Surely, this scene holds some meaning.

"Mimetic Desire" as Rene Girard explains it is the desire for objects or people influenced by others. So our desire then is not our own, but influenced by the other's desire. We enact and are subjected to mimetic desire every day endlessly. It is the basis of all advertising and marketing, but how does it then slip into the language of love? 

Online dating is the epitome of mimetic desire in the domain of romantic desire. An endless scrolling of available choices dilutes the possibility of specialized desire to nothing. When confronted with endless possibility, we believe the fantasy. We forget the reality in order to believe the slip of the camera, which shows us we have choices and options; we are indeed in control of our relations with others. The opposite of freedom is actually the possibility of infinite choices that don't feed us, but in fact deplete us. See Capitalism. See Consumerism. See what we have done to the place we call home in the name of being an "urbanized" society. 

How do we confront risk when faced with it all? And/ or if we do dissolve the notion of specialized love are we as a species actually ready for the idea of unconditional love. 

I'm fascinated by the changes in the conversation from when I began dating as a teen in the early 90s to today with options in contrast to monogamy that exist now. But what I find is the conversations and ideas around open/ poly/ ethical nonmonogamy are leading before the practice. And perhaps this is how it must go. Perhaps the idea must be taken into the community, disseminated and then practiced before the actual concept can take root. 

Most people I've met who either successfully or unsuccessfully practice any of the above rules of relationship parameters seem to still operate in the sphere of specialized love and the sphere of specialized love requires hierarchy, and hierarchy then leads to power struggles. 

Srećko Horvat in his book: The Radicality of Love states: 

This is the meaning of "falling in love." We take the risk, whatever the consequences might be. Even if we are aware that this fatal encounter will change the very coordinates of our daily lives, we insist on it precisely because of that. What else is there to be done?

What can be done?

What can be done?

Perhaps we could remember we were a species who did not always fall for the trap of specialized love, perhaps we can remember as a species that control of people begins in the roots of how we are taught to love and how we receive love. And that no equality or freedom exists when we love one above another. 

Perhaps...

The Righteous Brothers’s 1965 cover of “Unchained Melody”

Oh, my love
My darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea
Yes, lonely rivers sigh, "Wait for me, wait for me
I'll be coming home, wait for me"

Oh, my love
My darling
I've hungered, hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me