"Apologia"

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Originally published in a journal that I asked to remove it. A poem that I love. A poem that meant the world to me.

Apologia

At 22, I disappeared for a minute. 

I did not respond when you called me. 

I wanted the death Alabama didn't offer. 
I did not want the local D & C option. I refused
the twilight sedation, the succor of a specialist 
doing the deed for me. 

I have no excuse for what 
I needed: to be 
guilty.

After visiting a former lover in Manhattan, 
I entered the Liberty Clinic, swallowed the first pill,
its origins French as the famous
green statue.

I swilled Mountain Dew to swallow
the final pill on the train for Coney Island.

I say Coney when I mean 
destination, the termination of pregnancy, the train ending 
in a carnival, apart. 

The gulls witnessed
everything. 

I stood on the boardwalk, marveling, 
dumbstruck by dizziness as something left 
this body, its warmth flooding my jeans. 

My hands shook like toy airplanes.

No doula or doctor or nurse or friend intervened.

No expert stood between 
my breath and the sky,
my breath and the clouds, clotting,
my breath and the unwanted baby,

my life

and the blood
on my hands, the certain solace,

a choice
I made with myself.
I did it all. I did everything.

I wore the silver mermaid necklace for years,
a souvenir.

Melissa Febos on writing trauma

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Earlier this week, Lidia Yuknavitch tweeted Melissa Febos’ essay, “The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma As a Subversive Act”, and gave me a reason to focus on the gendered discourse around trauma and memoir. Febos sets a familiar scene:

At a recent writers conference, during a panel of literary magazine editors, a female audience member posed a question about the potential audience for her story of trauma survival. One of the male editors rolled his eyes and shrugged. “I mean, I’m not sure we need any more of those stories.” The other panelists nodded in consensus: Stories like hers belonged on Oprah’s talk show, not in the hallowed realm of literary prose. Everyone knows we don’t need another one of those. The genre of victimhood is already so crowded. So gauche.

As if anything could be more gauche than the male writers who compliment female-identifying writers by describing their prose as “muscular” or dropping comparisons to Hemingway. As if we haven’t spent decades parsing the traumatic boredom of the American male novelist, studying its specific cocktails and alcoholisms.

Febos wrote this essay in January 2017, prior to the release of her incredible memoir, Abandon Me (in which she does exactly what she urges female writers to do, namely, tell the story that will kill you if you keep it). As Febos points out:

That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all associated with the female spheres of being is not a coincidence. What I mean is, this bias against “personal writing” is a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.

Shame is at its most effective when urging silence. And shame comes to mind when I think of George Sand, who adopted the male pseudonym at the suggestion of her younger male lover, Jules Sandeau. George Sand, who dressed as a man in order to see without being seen. To protect herself from the predatory gaze leveraged against females by custom. After her death, Ivan Turgenev said: “What a brave man she was, and what a good woman.” 

Febos ends her essay by sharpening the pencil and preparing it to speak. Like Dorothy Allison, she offers encouragement as antivenom to silence.

We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to one another.

What I mean is, tell me about your navel. Tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair, how you forgot and then remembered yourself. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go of. Tell me about your drunk father and your sister who lost her mind. Give them whatever names you want.

Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.

You write it, and I will read it.

I need to hear this. And I’m heartened by this amazing episode of Brian Gesko’s Antibody Reading Series now available online. So we can all hear Lauren Van Den Berg, Melissa Febos, and Tracy O’Neill talk about writing, living—and writing.

Sun in strange places: A few notes on writing motherhood and consent

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1.

We learn the world through body language. Toddlers absorb the physical gestures quickly, the socializations of averted eyes, pointed fingers, stiff smiles. Time is a character on the stage, an unspoken protagonist. Maybe time is also the narrator we write around.

2.

Here’s the thing: motherhood is the mantle of knowing your death will be devastating. Slow or sudden, there is no way to repair their world once you leave it. How many unkissed knees?

3.

From our mothers, we inherit lived minutiae. I learned how to fold shirts, make cobbler, clean the rim of a bathtub. Like Marguerite Duras, I inherited my mother's fear, her particular blend of worry, her relentless stoicism, her fear of germs, the need to disinfect. Also the "hysterical love" I pour on my children.

"We separate ourselves from people by writing," Duras observes. Our mothers represent a madness, a lunacy "that doesn't preclude love" in the child's role of witness. Growing into a mother whose fear is familiar.

4.

"I think motherhood makes you obscene," writes Duras. "A mother indulges all of her games." A mother, like her child, must survive the act of mothering.

5.

In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich articulates less gendered family roles for the future. She fleshes out a concept of community in which the child can be integrated into work, including a “new fatherhood” in which a man nurtures more. 

Seeing childcare as “enforced servitude”, Rich maintains that it can only be improved by acknowledging its value rather than debasing it. By elevating its status to something that even the high-status humans can do. 

Rich touches upon the solitary confinement of “full-time motherhood” and the “token nature of fatherhood” which gives a man rights and privileges over children toward whom he assumes only minimal responsibility. Her discussion on the “burden of emotional work” reveals the way rigid gender binaries prevent social change from happening--a nurturing father is seen to do “mother’s work”. And a mother's work is nothing.

Things have changed a little since Rich wrote this book, but only in the margins of heterosexual partnerships where this is made explicit, where this is a conscious effort.

6.

Borrowing from Barry Lopez's discussion of interior landscapes, I think Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus can be seen as an attempt to interiorize the landscape of expectancy in a world where female bodies have been rendered a form of public space.

7.

Then there’s the anger towards our mothers for looking to their husbands to fulfill their needs and making their own needs seem irresponsible or “emotional” . Examples of self-hatred include women who want sons, women who prefer male friends, women who can’t enjoy their bodies. We are steeped and socialized into this self-loathing because it is profitable. The way women hate themselves is a thriving market.

My obsession with cruelty. Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and others. A religious impulse that flowered after having children. To know that love could be Kali, eating her children. Or Medea, killing them to protect them from the father's lack of love.

8.

Jacqueline Rose: “Motherhood is not knowledge or control. It may have to make non-stop decisions, but not according to some fetuses' logic of mastery.”

The mother’s right to life and experience is challenged by the cultural assumptions of what childhood should or should not include. The crime of exposure--of abandonment of a baby--is no longer limited to the infant but now extends into the entire developing life. There is no maternal instinct--there is the choice one makes to mother. There is the ongoing seesaw of it.

9.

In Beloved, Sethe kills her daughter out of love. Toni Morrison insisted on this. She insisted that it was love to kill a child in a world that conspired to kill her slowly, torturously, for entertainment.

10.

Elena Ferrante: “Men insert their thingy inside you and you become a box of flesh with a living doll inside.”

Was this the task of Freud’s hysterical patients--to exhibit all the fear and anxiety for a family who can then go on acting as if they are superior? And fine. Someone has to carry the terror and anxiety. Every family has its designated vessel.

11.

I need to write against the naturalistic fallacy that often undergirds patriarchal thinking. None of this is ordained by a god or by gravity—it is, like war, a choice humans make to normalize and accept certain patterns of behavior. It is also a choice that we must make to undo the damage.

A woman hides her body, hides her pain, hides her fear, because she is guilty. Because she asked for it. She is a mother. She is learning to live in the division we’ve established.

12.

There is no virtuousness in being a mother--there is merely a road one travels which changes the idea of destination, or destiny. As Jacqueline Rose observes: "it is the demand to be one thing only--love and goodness incarnate--that is intolerable for any mother and tears her mentally and physically to shreds."

13.

Obligatory childbearing and sacrifice is what Rose calls “the slave-owning version of motherhood,” an institution that has changed little over time. The decision not to mother is a basic question of consent--to have one’s body be used as a vessel. It is many other things as well, but it is never not this one: a question of consent.

14.

I love D.A. Powell for saying: “If the poet doesn’t risk absurdity, he’s not even in the game.”

Writing motherhood is this dance with an absurdity so astonishing one is tempted to call it God.

A reading of "Lust Is Grief"

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First published in the beautiful Virga, with so much gratitude to editor Laura Page. I’m including the text so that everyone can hear it.

Lust Is Grief


"Lust is grief that has turned over in bed to look the other way."

Donald Hall

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Poems for broken things

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I can’t get over Carl Phillips’ “Dirt Being Dirt”. Here it is in its entirety:

Dirt Being Dirt

The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly walking
straight into it, shirtless, you can see where the flames have
foliaged—here, especially—his chest. Splashed by the moon,
it almost looks like the latest proof that, while decoration is hardly
ever necessary, it’s rarely meaningless: the tuxedo’s corsage,
fog when lit scatteredly, swift, from behind—swing of a torch, the lone
match, struck, then wind-shut…How far is instinct from a thing
like belief? Not far, apparently. At what point is believing so close
to knowing, that any difference between the two isn’t worth the fuss,
finally? A tamer of wolves tames no foxes, he used to say, as if avoiding
the question. But never meaning to. You broke it. Now wear it broken.

In a note, Phillips says: “I think this poem is circling the idea of refusing to change the self, even when it’s understood as deeply flawed, given that we have to believe in something…”

I love the way the poem circles around the point where belief and knowledge converge into something that feels essential. And I love the short syntax of the final line, the command whose tone is almost reassuring or encouraging rather than distant. I think that tone is the most difficult to capture—the tone of a voice complicit in human intimacy, in the brokenness and resolve of that.

How is staying whole part of coexisting with one’s ongoing brokenness? Why is the temptation for redemption such a strong narrative trope in poetics, and how much more do we risk by refusing it? I don’t have answers. But here are more poems about broken things….

“What’s Broken” by Dorianne Laux

“Broken Things” by GC Waldrep

“Broken Things” by Sara Teasdale

“I Will Keep Broken Things” by Alice Walker

“The God of Broken Things” by Yusef Komunyakaa

“Ode to Broken Things” by Pablo Neruda

And then, as an adage, as a mantra: Carl Phillips’ “Gold Leaf”. One of my favorite poems to share with my teen son when he is dancing with despair. As one must in this world sometimes.

Mutilations

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  1. Over 5,400 immigrant children have been separated from their families and placed in detention camps or foster care for the crime of crossing a border. And the sun continues to freckle my daughter’s nose, and loosen the shoulders of my son.

  2. A plaster Virgin Mary with her arms outstretched sits near a bird bath across the street. Every day I seek the poem in her gaze. Today I find nothing. No poem in any of this. I can’t find words unaccompanied by the knowledge of not doing enough.

  3. I sink into Zagakewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”.

    “You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
    you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.”

  4. “You must praise the mutilated world,” Zagajewski says. I praise the ordinary dignities, the bits of life I’ve been given to live—”the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns.”

  5. There is Matthew Zapruder: “I’m not sure I would say that poets have failed. For better and worse, we have been forced by horrifying and terrifying circumstance into feeling as if the only things that “matter” and are “worth writing about” have to do with generally agreed upon issues of importance. Of course we feel that way: just look at the world.”

  6. I look at the world.

  7. I look at the world in my head and how it differs from the world others experience.

  8. I study the mutilations. The intimately-mutilated include those moments when my son’s rage at the world unmelts entire glaciers, the color of unpoured concrete, the apple core on the nightstand, an aubade for the calm of last week and that long night in bed with Audre Lorde, the look in his eyes across the room and the swell of desire, the fact that the look is still a hinge, a door he knows is open, a crack in the cosmos he recognizes.

  9. A tear in the fabric of everything we know is re-cognizing of each other.

  10. Try to find the beloved in a gun show stocking up on ammo. This is the most difficult space.

  11. But there are other spaces as well. There is Shaindel Beers trying to help local pets find homes and bring comfort to those who are alone. There is Pidgeonholes, providing free online workshops for writers (and I’m so grateful to get to share one), and you won’t believe some of the generosity that is to come in that space. There are free online ebooks from Verso asking questions of the present moment. There are online literary happy hours with incredible readings. There is Reginald Dwayne Betts speaking directly into the silence of US prisons, where countless human beings are trapped in a vector where viruses thrive. There is unbelievable injustice alongside fear and desolation and hope. There is rumor and gossip and cruelty. There is humankind, for better or worse.

Sometimes I kiss my idols

Like this poem by Czeslaw Milosz, written in Warsaw, 1944. One of those poems that walks with me.

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And today I was fumbling through another project, needing a breath, a step back from it, and what better way to stroll than to copy Milosz’s stride? It’s one of my favorite ways to stretch into spaces I don’t know how to write. To try on a voice and see and what happens.

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And now back to the page….

The third day of nightmares with mom

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We talk about how to love
the dead without killing them
again, and again in our
minds, with our mouths.

I swear we will love you
as you were, and not as we
made you in our wishes
for the average
accommodation, that
american sitcom mom.

We will love you without
erasing the unpopular
hysteria of your embrace

or the final foaming
followed by silence—
and those sirens
we couldn’t hear
across an ocean.

That nothing
did not spare us.

Open Letter to the Trustees of the "Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Travelling Abroad"

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William A. Lowell, Esq.
Charles A. Cheever, Esq. 
Choate, Hall & Stewart
Two International Place
Boston, Massachusetts 02110

October 10, 2019

Dear Mr. Lowell and Mr. Cheever,

One of the greatest things about America is the fact that, as citizens, we pledge our allegiance not just to a flag but to a hope of a better future, to building that future over this country’s history of racism, enslavement of Black persons, and native erasure. Since recent years have demonstrated reactionary regress inspired by xenophobia and America-First mentalities, I am writing this letter in the hope that you will consider the legacy that the Amy Lowell Scholarship leaves by basing it's application criteria so intensely (and profusely) around defining "Americans" as those citizens who were "born here."

As a child of defectors who was born in Romania, my experience growing up in Alabama was that of being told no matter how much I learned, no matter how passionate my academic and intellectual engagement, I could not be President of this country. My thoughts on leadership didn’t matter. My citizenship, itself, reflected my second-class status. Meanwhile, my neo-Confederate friends could lead the Chambers of Commerce and state governments with an eye to the Presidency.

I've been inspired by the poetry community's dedication to human rights, equality, and justice, and I am concerned about the way that huge funding is still off-limits to poets who were not born here and yet have paid their lives, their tax dollars, and their dreams to this country.

The "Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Travelling Abroad" seems, on its surface, to be driven by considerations of merit. It asks for a poetry submission without focus on byline or academic background. It also states, clearly, "preference" will be "given to those of progressive literary tendencies". 

At no point does it ask about financial disability or previous travel (which would be appropriate questions if the intent of the scholarship was to reward untraveled Americans citizens without means to go abroad).

The application process is free and simple. All that is required is:

  1. Two copies of the completed application. You may also, but need not, submit a 2 to 3 page curriculum vitae (again, two copies).

  2. A sample of your poetry, consisting of either up to 40 typed pages (two copies) or two copies of a printed volume of your poetry and two copies of no more than 20 additional typed pages.

I don’t understand how a traveling scholarship intended to benefit underprivileged American poets doesn’t require any of the following: 1) a listing of their prior travels outside the country 2) a statement of their economic need 3) any evidence tha…

I don’t understand how a traveling scholarship intended to benefit underprivileged American poets doesn’t require any of the following: 1) a listing of their prior travels outside the country 2) a statement of their economic need 3) any evidence that they are better qualified to represent “Americans” than the sheer luck of being born here.

When I downloaded the application, I discovered that it asked for a birth certificate and that the primary information culled on that one sheet of paper had to do with where a citizen was born. As stated in your FAQ: 

"Any poet of American birth who is able and willing to spend one year outside the continent of North America. There is no age requirement, and there is no requirement that applicants be enrolled in a university or other education program. While many recent winners have been published poets, there is no requirement that applicants have previously published their work."

Past recipients of this fellowship include several of my favorite poets--writers whose work I cherish deeply. But past recipients reflect a very narrow view of “American”.

I believe that Amy Lowell would not be on the side of human beings who currently agitate to diminish the value and rights of naturalized US citizens and immigrants.

I believe that Amy Lowell would be disgusted by the Birther conspiracy around President Obama and its resonance in our popular culture. If I am wrong in these beliefs, Amy Lowell's poetic excellence would not be enough to enable me to overlook a definition of "American citizen" that excludes naturalized citizens.

At first, I considered suggesting a more appropriate title for this fellowship. Maybe it’s the title that feels jarring. For example, "The Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship for Native-Born Americans"--but that's the rub, isn't it? See, those who are actually native to America are not centered in this Fellowship. (I could be wrong, but it seems that fewer than 5% of awardees have a tribal affiliation.)

This Scholarship is not about First Peoples--it's about the people who replaced them. It's about the stories we tell about the country we can only honor through progress, restitution, and acknowledgement. Amy Lowell's efforts to portray the lives of First Americans in her posthumously-published Ballades for Sale reveals the way in which primitivist stereotypes can underlie even the most progressive intentions.

As a naturalized US citizen whose parents risked their lives (and me) to flee Ceausescu's dictatorship, I cannot accept the sort of nativism which makes that citizenship somehow inferior to that of those who did nothing to gain citizenship. Being born in the USA is enough of a privilege without institutionalizing this privilege in a poetry scholarship intended to preserve the legacy of a powerful female poet whose struggled to be accepted in a country that rejected her sexuality.

I don't believe that any law or wrong is immutable.

I don’t believe that any foundation cannot change. I don’t believe a will or a trust housed in a law firm cannot evolve or develop under changing social conditions.

I don't believe that we are hostage to bad ideas from the past unless we deliberately choose to replicate and extend those ideas into the future.

I understand--and was reminded when protesting President's Bush's war in Iraq with a son incubating in my womb--that standing for the GOOD in one's country, as opposed to the bad, may render one "un-American" in the mouths of those whose institutions depend on historic preservation. If we spent as much money caring as we do bombing, this world would be so different. So very, very different.

What I believe conspires with what I understand in hope.

I hope more for the legacy of the "Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Travelling Abroad". I hope more for how this “America” extends itself into the world. And I hope more--so much more--for this country.

Yours in poetry and hope,

Alina Stefanescu, minor writer

P. S. If this fellowship is modified to include all US citizens, I promise that I will not apply for it at any point in time. I want to be clear about my intentions—though I discovered this fellowship when looking for assistance, my hope is that fellow “second-class citizens'“ do not discover this and experience the nativist rejection (which already leaves deep scars in most naturalized citizens). I don’t want this for myself—I want it for what it means to be “American” at a time when that meaning is associated with anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, xenophobia, and committed disregard for human rights. I want it, also, for Amy Lowell’s legacy, which I know can be revised to include what we know now rather that to perpetuate ad-infinitum the cruelties and inequalities of the past.

Flashback on flash from what I was thinking in 2016

Flash, depending on the definer, can set its upper word limit anywhere between 500 words and 1,750 words. Usually any ceiling below this is classified as microfiction. Regardless-- and given that I'm in position to debate genre with those who know better-- here are the flash fictions I've been looping lately.  

"A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room" by George Saunders (Hunger Mountain)

"Break It Down" by Lydia Davis (The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, and Elevators)

"Cutting Edge" by James Purdy (The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy, Liverwright, 2013)

"On the Edge of the Sidewalk" by Dumitru Tsepeneag (Waiting, Dalkey Archive, 2013)

"The Mariner: A Static Drama in One Scene" by Fernando Pessoa (The Brooklyn Rail)

"The School" by Donald Barthelme (Sixty Stories)

"This Person" by Miranda July (No one belongs here more than you: Stories)

"Tweet" by Sabrina Orah Mark (The Collagist)

"X unequals Y" by Susan Daitch (Storytown, Dalkey)

Also enchanted with Deb Olin Unferth's Minor Robberies published by McSweeney's. This book is my Mobius strip at the moment. 

Now for the super shorties, some of which might be classified as "micros", others which exist as just really excellent compressed fiction:

"Crazy" by Ron Hansen (She Loves Me Not, Simon & Schuster)

"Death and Life in the City of N." by Ron Gibson, Jr. (Noble Gas Quarterly)

"Exercises" by Bruce Taylor (Vestal Review)

"Marriage" by Anna Lea Jancewicz (Matchbook Lit)

"Wants" by Grace Paley (Electric Literature)

"When I Lose Track of the Children, 5 & 7, Near the Magazine Section at Costco" by Christopher Mercer (Smokelong Quarterly)

 

It's difficult to convey my gratitude to every daring, innovative, lyrical, difficult, and fascinating writer I discover on Twitter or in literary magazines which span the globe. Gratitude is abstract and heavy as Hallmark card stock paper.

On the other hand, it's not difficult to say this: You are my MFA. You are my teachers, my guides, my prods, and (sometimes) my provocations. I am so grateful for you. I am also beholden to my sweet wi-fi connection. Imagine all the writers that might exist given a laptop and a little wi-fi.