a boys' and girls' history of the future

I’ve been reading a lot, again, as I often do when I have projects galore, deadlines looming and backwork calling my name.*  While it may appear to be so, this retreat into others’ work is not really a mode of procrastination or distraction. It is an escape pod for when I cannot handle the demands I place on myself; intubation when I feel suffocatingly small and incapable; a message in a bottle written and flung out to sea by another when I am too shipwrecked to muster even an SOS in the sand.

Top of the list has been Gregory Orr’s, Poetry as Survival, loaned to me by the Dark Family.  I’ve also been hunkering down with Raymond Carver’s collected poems in All of Us and Audre Lorde’s, Sister Outsider (I read through this collection semi-regularly).

There is much in these three to set yer watch to and sing yer babes or self to sleep with. Here’s a smattering from each:

“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.”

—Audre Lorde, from “Uses of the Erotic”

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“Where They’d Lived”

by Raymond Carver

Everywhere he went that day he walked
in his own past. Kicked through piles
of memories. Looked through windows
that no longer belonged to him.
Work and poverty and short change.
In those days they’d lived by their wills,
determined to be invincible.
Nothing could stop them. Not
for the longest while.
                                       In the motel room
that night, in the early morning hours,
he opened a curtain. Saw clouds
banked against the moon. He leaned
closer to the glass. Cold air passed
through and put its hand over his heart.
I loved you, he thought.
Loved you well.
Before loving you no longer.

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“What distinguishes the personal lyric from philosophy and religion is that the personal lyric clings to embodied being…Rather than the transcendence counseled by philosophy and religion, the personal lyric urges the self to translate its whole being into language where it can dramatize and restabilize itself in the patterned language of the poem. The personal lyric takes the physical terms of human crisis (the characters, the setting, the sensations) and brings them over into language: it takes body and makes it ‘body,’ takes tulips and makes them ‘tulips.’ Takes the self and makes it ‘I.’ Takes another self and makes it ‘you’ or ‘she’ or ‘he.’”

—Gregory Orr in “Poetry as Survival”