I ended up writing five lectures, which
are about photography, confessional poetry, ethics,
wrongness and motherhood.
And I just finished a draft that's
hopefully pretty close of the book of these lecture essays,
as I now call them.
And the book has 13 parts, so the five lectures
and then some interstitial matter and three poems.
And what I'm going to do now is I
want you to pretend that you've got this beautiful big book
of lecture essays.
And you're just flipping through it.
And you're just like reading a few paragraphs here and there.
I wanted to read also a few lines from each poem.
But I don't have time to do that.
So I'm going to do this weird thing where
when there's a new lecture or a new piece,
I'm going to go like this because that's the title.
And then if there's a poem, I'll do this.
I don't know why it seems important to designate this.
And so the table of contents is Antechamber,
the Poetics of Wrongness, which is currently
the title of the whole project, She Who Shall Not Be Named,
or, There's Something I Need to Tell You,
Taking Away, Taking Everything Away, Photo Poetics, Death
Project, What We Talk About When We Talk About the Confessional
and What We Should Be Talking About, Q and A 2016, She Who
Shall Not Name, or, If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, Why
Are You Still Talking, A Very Large Charge, The Ethics of Say
Everything Poetry, Why She Could Not
Write Her Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood,
The Moon is in her Caul Tonight, and Q and A 2018,
which I haven't written yet.
For the Q and As, I'll read one question from the Q and A
and I won't answer it.
Antechamber.
This gallery of thinking, reading, writing, speaking,
and feeling has no beginning, or more accurately,
has innumerable beginnings.
These lecture essays were written across a period
of almost six years.
Each one had several beginnings and, at one point,
stood on its own.
Each lecture essay is as much about mapping its own changing
beginning as it is about its apparent subject matter.
Because the beginnings kept changing
depending on where I ended up.
And where I ended up was never where I set out to go.
To freeze these pieces in time is a necessary part
of bookmaking.
But it makes it difficult to communicate
how the essential considerations of these lecture essays, time,
doubt, ambiguity, unknowingness, circularity, oppositionality
are, by their nature, in motion, relative, and relational.
Two.
The poetics of wrongness, an un-apologia.
A poet is one who feels wrong in a wrong world
and is willing to speak, even when doing so
proves her wrong, broken, ugly, and complicit.
This is not the same as saying, I write poetry to feel better,
or to be forgiven, or that the goal of poetry
is to right wrongs.
Perhaps, some people feel better when they write poetry.
Perhaps, some poems make the world less wrong.
But what I'm trying to explain is
that a poet's athleticism lies in her ability
to stay in and with wrongness, of being
willing to be disliked for being too smart, too stupid, too
direct or incomprehensible, elitist or the lowest
of the low, and for what, for the privilege
of pointing out that everything in the world
is wrong, including me.
Wrongness is intrinsic to poetry,
which asserts with its most defining formal device,
the line break, that the margins of prose are wrong.
Or with its attention to diction,
that the ways in which we've come to understand and use
words are wrong.
I write to talk back, sometimes, to myself,
not to tell you what I think but to figure out what I think,
which is always a process of proving
myself and others wrong.
It is the job of poems to undermine, refute, retort,
recede, disrupt, to tell you nicely or aggressively that you
are wrong, that the world is fucked up,
that all our modes of understanding and expressing
our suspect, and that there is nothing
and no one above reproach or scrutiny.
Poets speak even when it is excruciating,
even when no one is listening.
Often, when the poet believes despite Audre Lord's
admonition, your silence will not
protect you, that she would be better off staying silent.
That's what a poem is, the breaking of silence,
a form that makes and then breaks silence over and over.
Poetry is the language of pain and grief and hurt and love.
And most people in our country hate it.
But often need it.
Sometimes find solace and pleasure in it.
I've learned from being a daughter and a mother
that finding your parent wrong or being told how wrong you are
is a complicated act of attachment, separation,
individuation, and love.
A parasitic kind of love perhaps.
But love.
A way of paying attention, of giving a shit.
The alternative to being wrong is being ignored.
Three.
She Who Shall Not Name or There's Something
I Need To Tell You.
I just want to say I never chose the beginning of any
of these essays.
And only once did I choose the end to excerpt.
I keenly believe in the poetics of wrongness.
But it would be dishonest not to enlarge the frame of that essay
to include the fact that on that particular night,
in my particular life, I had and have
a strong psychological stake in believing
that I could be wrong and survive the guilt
and shame of writing.
I needed to believe that even if I was wrong, in this case,
to have wanted to publish my book Mothers
and to have published it, perhaps,
even to have written it and to have written
all the other things I have written that have hurt others,
I needed to believe I would survive my mother's
curse in part, because there was a value in having been wrong.
To leave this out would be to include
the ways in which the poetics of wrongness
if you know who wrote it and when and why
is also a manifesto of self-righteousness and self
survival.
A desperate attempt to imagine that if being a poet
means saying, I am wrong, and you are wrong,
and I'm willing to say it, then I was right to write Mothers.
I had the right to do it.
I needed to believe in the value of exposing and exploring
the wrongness of self, others, and world,
the value of putting wrongness on display
even if my mother had not wanted me to do so.
I needed to believe in wrongness in order to keep writing,
in order to survive the possibility that I had,
through my writing, been responsible
for my mother's death.
These lecture essays ostensibly written
to explore how I became a poet, and what
I think about poetry, how I understand
the differences between prose and poetry,
story, and experience provocation and offense,
hurt and harm spectacle and witness,
how I became the kind of person who
would upset my mother in this way,
and whether I require or deserve forgiveness.
One way to read this book then is
that it begins by embracing wrongness
and continues with my looking to the history of photographers
and poets who have written about themselves and others
in a documentary mode in order to justify
my practice about writing about real people.
In She Who Shall Not Name, I will
tell the story of the conflict with my mother
and of her death in much more detail
than I have just told it, which is not
to say objectively because such a thing is impossible.
As I will discuss in greater depth in A Very Large Charge,
I cannot tell the story of these lectures without telling
the story of my mother's death.
But telling that story, how I tell it,
when I tell it, to whom I tell it, how I benefit from,
or I'm harmed by the telling of it,
and how it benefits or harms my mother
and my children is both intrinsic to these lecture
essays and part of the problem.
Because telling it is a reenactment
of violence against my mother.
Taking away, taking everything away.
That poem is in The Pedestrians.
Five.
Photo poetics, or, one poet's obsession
with authenticity, sentimentality, activism,
and the ethics of representation.
Robert Frank was aware of the pressure on him
and other photographers of his generation to use photography
to tell a certain kind of story for a certain kind of audience
in a certain kind of way.
And he didn't want to.
I developed a tremendous contempt for Life,
which helped me, said Frank.
He's talking about Life magazine,
which was the prominent venue for photojournalists
of that time.
Frank said, you have to be enraged.
I wanted to follow my intuition to do it my way,
not to make a life story.
That was another thing I hated.
Those goddamn stories with a beginning and an end.
And if I hate those stories with a beginning, a middle,
and an end, then obviously, I will make an effort
to produce something that will stand up to those stories
but not be like them.
This resonated with me.
I love stories but distrust the narrative expectations
of those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end.
And the way that those formal expectations of stories
make it difficult to abide in the complexity of thoughts,
sensation, and experience, which is, I believe, a poet's job.
In all the major life experiences I have experienced,
I felt lied to by stories.
The experience of being married does not
feel like any romcom I've ever seen.
My everyday thoughts seldom have a beginning, middle, and end.
And instead, have a jumbled simultaneity
that would seem to tell the story of mental illness
if one believed that sane people only think
the way they do in novels.
And one of the most significant and defining experiences
of my life, the births of my three children,
were characterized by colliding atemporal states of physical
and emotional sensation.
To feel out of time, to feel both completely inside
and outside one's body, to lose awareness
of the story of the experience, and to need
to be reminded that one is having a baby,
these are common, not universal, experiences of childbirth.
And yet nothing in art or literature
prepared me for this.
If there was something I wanted to be
able to do in my poems, something
I imagined only poetry of all the literary arts could do,
it was this.
It was to describe and enact experience
in the most accurate way possible,
to produce something that would stand up to those stories,
but not be like them, as Frank said.
The fragmented, weird, broken, messiness of a poem,
like the blurriness and sloppiness of Frank's images,
is not a stylistic affectation, but the clearest, most direct,
most accurate way to apprehend the real world that
did not and would never conform to any reproducible or
summarizable trope.
Even though I am a native English speaker,
my own language feels more often than not foreign to me.
I hear the language through the Yiddish inflected syntax
of my grandparents even though they died so long ago.
Learning to read was a painstaking process,
and my illegible handwriting and impossible to decipher spelling
were a source of shame.
Even after publishing nine books,
I have never felt myself an expert
in writing or in anything.
And why would I?
My children and marriage keep changing rather dramatically.
And despite having chosen stability over and over again,
I've never become accustomed to any part of my life.
At the end of my poem, the window is one-sided.
I will not admit I write.
One day, I will gather a story to tell you
what night looked like, what every city vista told day,
and day heat and time was not were no.
I knew you were.
I knew there was you and summer, and never any other season.
It felt true in that moment, truer than anything.
But it is also not true.
There were, as it turned out, many other seasons,
many other stories, not to mention three more
pregnancies and two more sons.
It is not possible that the preverbal
simian being that I address in this poem
as you is now 18 years old, bearded,
having just moved to Miami for five months
to work for the ACLU.
And am I the same I?
Six.
Death project poem.
That poem is in my new manuscript of poems.
Seven.
What we talk about when we talk about the confessional
and what we should be talking about.
And I wrote that lecture here.
It is a mistake to think that M. L. Rosenthal's
"poetry as confession" review discerned or created a school
or movement.
But I do think Rosenthal astutely
noticed a moment in the history of poetry in the United States
in which poets started to sound different,
started to use poems differently,
started to want something different from poems.
But what if instead of spotlighting
the publication of Life Studies as this pivotal moment,
Rosenthal or someone else had chosen October 7, 1955,
the date Ginsberg read Howl aloud for the first time?
What if instead of testifying at the obscenity trial as to
whether or not Howl was literature, obscene, original,
all the big deal professors spent their time,
instead writing and talking about the influence
of jazz on Howl, or the work of Black beat poet Bob Kaufman?
What if Kaufman's Abomunist Manifesto
had become more popular than Howl,
and Kaufman had been the most famous beat
poet instead of taking a vow of silence for 10 years?
What if the pivotal moment had come
before the end of the 1950s?
What if Langston Hughes's poem Let
America Be America, written in 1935,
had been taken up as a rallying cry
by all the people who felt America was never
America to me?
Black people, Native people, immigrants, poor, white people,
just to name those mentioned in Hughes's poem.
What if the swell of that poem's power
had made the 1950s less tranquilized?
Or what if in 1958, after Hughes recorded his poem with Charles
Mingus on the album Weary Blues, no one ever
wanted to hear poetry again without music?
Ginsberg wrote Howl for Carl Solomon who
he met in 1949 in the waiting room of a psychiatric hospital,
where Ginsberg would spend the next eight months not receiving
treatment.
With the help of two Columbia professors,
Ginsberg used the insanity plea as a way of avoiding jail time.
He'd been arrested as an accomplice to robbery.
Because he was caught in a stolen car and discovered to
have stolen goods in his apartment.
Meanwhile, Etheridge Knight-- a Black poet who had served
in Korea for three years and returned home traumatized,
wounded, and addicted to opiates--
was not offered an insanity plea when he was arrested
for armed robbery in 1960.
Ginsberg openly advocated the use of LSD and marijuana,
used both himself.
And although he was hassled by the police arrested many times
for protesting, he was not incarcerated.
In the eight years that Knight spent in prison,
Ginsberg became famous.
While Knight was in prison, Ginsberg and his life partner,
Peter Orlovsky, lived off the royalties of Howl and off
of Orlovsky's disability checks that he
received for his service in the Korean War.
In the 1960s, Lowell's breakdown was
seen by the literary establishment as emblematic
of America's breakdown.
Ginsberg's breaking away was seen as annoying fringe
subculture nonsense.
Langston Hughes's shorter, less threatening poems
were given a few pages in otherwise all
white anthologies.
And as I said, Bob Kaufman was silent, basically, from 1963.
And Etheridge Knight was in prison.
Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for Annie Allen,
Gwendolyn Brooks was not seen by literary critics
as a figure who would disrupt their lives or American poetry.
I think this was in part, because Brooks
was writing about life on the street, which
was as foreign to straight white male critics as someone writing
about another country.
In the late '60s and early '70s, Plath and Sexton's popularity
was considered evidence of the poor reading
taste of hysterical girls and strident feminists.
The rising tide of poets of the women's movements
were dismissed as political and, therefore, aliterary.
The what if game gets increasingly
harrowing the further we stray from the privileges
and protections that kept someone as ill as Lowell
able to survive, and often thrive, able to keep writing,
keep being published, widely read, discussed, appreciated,
and able to change the course of American poetry.
Without money, whiteness, maleness, straightness,
educational privilege, without the wives,
and close literary friends who were
able to care for Lowell and for his legacy,
such a breakdown would not have been
seen as representational or deeply significant.
Most poets who strayed from the mainstream
because of who they were or because of their radical use
of form or inclusion of previously taboo content
were neither seen nor heard.
These voices were silenced by incarceration,
illness, poverty, and violence.
Q and A 2016.
Christine Larusso.
Rachel, you recently mentioned to me
that the lectures have changed your thinking, particularly
with regards to feminism and the social function of poetry.
Can you elaborate?
My answer is online, at the Bagley White--
Wright website.
Nine.
She who shall not name.
Not read from that.
Ten.
A very large charge, the ethics of say everything poetry.
Let us imagine a kind of poetry that
must abide by the following ethical standards.
One, it tells the truth.
Two, it offers the opinion of the poet,
and as such, the poet assumes responsibility
for both the content and the form of speech.
Three, it punches up and not down.
Four, it has a purpose to ensure the well-being of the citizens
and the community and to prevent or overthrow
tyranny and oppression.
Five, its content engenders significant risk
to the speaker.
Whereas, confessionalism traffics in shame,
say everything poetry is speaking truth to power.
Say everything poetry requires personal risk,
but risk is not the same as shame.
Whereas, confessionalism is inexorably
connected to original sin and the fallen nature of man,
say everything poetry is predicated on understanding
and wisdom, on living the way one believes
is right and rational.
The task of writing these lectures
forced me to write into the silence that descended upon me
or that I imposed upon myself after my mother's death.
I've recently composed some of the most
boldly or problematically confessional poems of my life.
I still don't know whether my decision
to publish Mothers and my many confessional narrative poems
are acts of say everything poetry or not.
But I'm grateful to have worked my way
towards a set of ethical guidelines
that feels useful for me.
I am no longer interested in writing that is only
about the self, nor am I interested
in writing that attempts to exist without self.
To write with no self is irresponsible.
To write with only self is irrelevant.
Eleven.
Why she could not write a lecture
on the poetics of motherhood.
Also, she told James, she was afraid.
She was afraid to write the lecture
on the poetics of motherhood because too
many of the women she was talking about were white.
The Black mother poets except Toi Derricotte, Lucille
Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove
seemed to be doing something else in their poems.
Their poems were shorter, more direct, urgent
in ways that made Bernadette Mayer and Alice
Notley with their long, rambling, domestic, epic,
anti-epic shadiness seem like she was not actually observing
a poetics of motherhood, but was,
perhaps, observing a poetics of white hetero motherhood.
Was the poetics of excess actually a poetics
of privilege?
She had come to a similar conclusion about the whiteness
of confessional poetry.
Was she going to inscribe racism and homophobia
like the straight white feminists had
done when they tried and failed to invite Black women
and lesbians into their movement?
If she did not do the real work of entangling race and gender,
and maybe even if she did, she was
going to inscribe racism and the damage done
by white feminists to Black feminists,
and by straight feminists to lesbian feminists.
And this she did not want.
She felt that part of this problem
could be solved if she asked Isaac
what he thought, and more importantly,
if she re-read Sonia Sanchez.
She suspected that in the work of Sanchez
was the key to an observation of motherhood
that was as diverse and inclusive and complex and
beautiful.
But she had not had the time.
And what about the Latina and Asian-American and Indigenous
mothers?
Not having the time was no excuse at all.
At the same time, not having time
was perhaps the most single unifying aspect
of the poetics of motherhood.
But when she had tried to explain this
to Isaac, this thing about the most unifying aspect
of the poetics of motherhood being a lack of time, Isaac,
who was also her student and who was now
becoming a great scholar and poet,
and had a very kind way of chastising her,
Isaac replied, it might be useful to think through
how the experience of not having enough time
is not evenly distributed across all mothers,
and how historically, the labor of women of color,
denial of their role as mothers, especially Black women,
has made possible the ability of white mothers
to inhabit the category of motherhood
even as inhabiting that category is itself exploitative.
Yes, she thought.
Yes.
How much of what she thought might
be a poetics of motherhood was just
another codification of the protection of white women,
which was one of the greatest weapons of white supremacy.
She had been planning to talk about Rich's use of the word
"unifying."
The fact that Adrienne Rich had not written universal.
Motherhood, she was planning to say, is not universal.
And one of the greatest things about motherhood
is that it accomplishes, if one is paying
attention and speaking with a mother mind and a mother voice,
the way in which motherhood subverts the entire concept
of universality.
The pregnant body, for example, is not a machine and not
a broken machine.
It is not a deviant variation of the male form.
But how could she even write "the pregnant body"
as if that meant any one thing?
How could she talk about the unifying experience
of motherhood when her experience of it
and the institution of it was so vastly different for her
as it was for other mothers?
The poetics of motherhood is always
what is knowable and unknowable, she wrote on her phone
in the dark.
It's like the Academy Awards was like, you're done now.
She wrote on her phone in the dark
when she was wide awake, trying not
to write her lecture because, really, it was not safe.
It was not safe at all to be so tired
and have to drive her son to soccer in the morning.
She tried listening to a podcast instead of making notes
on her phone.
On the podcast, Marina Abramovic said,
if you make the bread in a bakery, you're baker.
If you make the bread in the gallery, you're artist.
She was lying awake in her bedroom listening
to her 17-year-old son sob as the results came in.
She was not looking her sons in the eye.
How could she?
She was crying on the subway on the way to teach,
watching the other white women on the New York City
subway crying and loving them and hating them.
She was crying through her undergraduate workshop,
crying her white woman white fragility
tears as her female undergraduates
cried occasionally running from the room
to take calls from their mothers, one sobbing
and speaking in Farsi, a Black student
refusing to take out a pen.
She was trying to stop crying.
She could not stop crying.
And she could not stop apologizing.
People were tweeting poems.
People of color were saying that her shock and despair
were offensive.
And that they were a mark of her privilege and her whiteness.
And that she had failed to recognize that things
had always been this bad for marginalized people
and for people of color.
People were tweeting facts and maps.
And there was no way to look away from what she had never
imagined.
The majority of white women had not
voted for the first woman president,
for the first mother president.
They had, instead, voted for a racist, misogynist,
anti-intellectual, rapist, lunatic.
She felt a precipitous hatred for white women
of which she was one.
She felt hatred for white people of which she was one.
She felt hatred particularly, but not only,
for white men of which her husband and her beautiful sons.
Oh, how would she ever untangle this hatred of hatred
with anything other than hatred?
It was two days.
It was one day.
It was the day.
It was the next day.
It was no day.
It was night.
It was not night.
It was not the same night the night
that she had nursed the first, the second, the third,
or the night nights that she had lost the baby
between the second and third.
The night nights of bleeding and waiting.
It was not the night or nights that she
had laid in bed with the husband, or the night
nights that she had stayed awake writing or worrying,
or the night the doctors in Taiwan
had turned off the heart lung machine.
And she had listened to the sound
of the sound of the change of the room
without the heart lung machine that
had been forcing the blood and oxygen
into and through her mother's body.
And then the long single sound and no sound.
It was not the night of her mother's death.
It was not the night of her baby's first cries.
It was not the night that she had conceived new life.
But it was that night.
It's that night, all those nights.
For the poetics of motherhood, if there is one,
and she believed there was one, began
before recorded time is larger than our human understanding
of time.
The poetics of motherhood may be the birth
of what we call a theory of mind, intercept activity,
and empathy.
The poetics of motherhood may very well
be what makes us human, not our use of tools,
not our walking on two legs, not the ability to use language.
It is the song of being born, of caring for another
over oneself, of needing help, of a lost goddess,
of the long night of love and pain.
Twelve.
The moon is in her caul tonight.
Thirteen.
Matthew Zapruder asks, what do you
think this will mean for you as a poet going forward?
Thank you.