tortoise with a passport and a pen

I’m not the most prolific of poets (have a look at the dates on these blog posts if you don’t believe me).  I am the tortoise in that fable of Aesop (although I doubt I’m going to win or that it’s even a race).  For me, poetry takes time – not so much in the writing, but in the living and pondering, the overflow.

I realised a long time ago (but especially when I was co-running the infamous Collingwood cafe Good Morning Captain in the early 2000s) that full-time work takes a lot of energy out of me.  As does unemployment.  So I’ve accepted a kind of never-finally-resolvable “balance” – a mercurial mix of part-time work, facilitating creative writing classes and “open-ended poetry time”.  And that “poetry time” has come to rely (for better and worse) on grants and residencies.

In July, thanks to Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, I’m off to Boulder Colorado USA, for the Summer Writing Program of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.  Four weeks of workshops, talks, panels, readings and collaborations.  I’ve been running quite a few writing workshops recently – which I love – but it’s time now to be immersed and challenged myself.

Recently, I’ve been reading Anne Waldman’s poetry collection Manatee / Humanity (Waldman co-founded the School with Allen Ginsberg and others in 1974).  It’s a wide-ranging, intimate, philosophical and visceral odyssey into humanity’s relationship with animal otherness.  The poetry is compassionate and its experimentation comes out of the real rather than any kind of detachment.  It’s ambitious and angry and has a sense of wit.  One of the four workshops I’m taking at the Summer Writing Program will be with her, which is exciting, as are the other workshops and events.

There’s a certain anticipation which is really useful.  I’ve been so busy of late, but stimulated, so poetry feels like it’s simmering, ready to boil over.  With any luck, being transplanted into another country, and in a place that values poetry and creativity so highly, will be really fruitful.  I experienced that in Chennai India, when I was there 18 months ago.  Which takes me to this quote, which I read last night.

Poetry of the artists’ colony: poems about grass being cut a long way off, poetry of vacation rather than vocation, poems written on retreat, like poems written at court, treating the court as the world.  This is not to deplore the existence of artists’ colonies, but rather the way they exist in a society where the general maldistribution of opportunity (basic needs) extends to the opportunity (basic need) to make art.  Most of the people who end up at artists’ colonies, given this maldistribution, are relatively well-educated, have had at least the privilege of thinking that they might create art…  [Art] produced in an exceptional, rarefied situation like [this] can become rarefied, self-reflecting, complicit with the circumstances of its making, cut off from a larger, richer and more disturbing life.

Adrienne Rich, “Tourism and Promised Lands”

Beneath this window in Chennai, I’d watch people go about their everyday lives – trading, eating, talking, waiting, laughing, begging.  From dawn to dusk and all through the night, they’d be there, the poignant and unsettling sensory overload pressing against the hotel window.  Yes, the hotel window.  In other words, I was there, but not there.

Chennai is not Boulder, of course, and a hotel is not a University summer school.  But I am taking this opportunity because I don’t want to “retreat” – I want my poetry to be stretched, expanded, deepened, all those words you scatter on grant applications but are so much more intangible and profound when you approach the empty page.  And when you approach the “full page” of the world as it is – immensely complex, beautiful, unjust, strange and familiar.  Wish me luck.

many kinds of distance

“Distant Reading” by Peter Middleton is (so far anyway) the most brilliant, intriguing and irritating book on poetry I’ve read.  Yes, all of the above.  And it’s not even that some essays in this book are brilliant, some intriguing, some irritating.  They are almost always all three simultaneously.

While it is a collection of eight discontinuous essays, they are linked by a desire to talk about poetry beyond the “meaning inherent in the text”, which Middleton rightly questions.  He sees a poem not just as a literary product but as an historical, cultural, political artefact, circulating via various means, and being transformed by those means.  This includes the poetry reading – in an astounding essay called “A History of the Poetry Reading”, Middleton discusses how intersubjectivity is integral to poetry.

Performance is a moment when social interaction can study and celebrate itself, and the poet is given significant new materials with which to extend the signifying field of the poem…  The presentation of the poetry in a public space to an audience that is constituted by that performance for the time of the reading enables the poem to constitute a virtual public space that is, if not utopian, certainly proleptic of possible social change as part of its production of meaning. (p.103)

No, I didn’t choose the most snappy, accessible quote, did I?  Actually, Middleton does have a keen literary wit, but he’s nothing if not ambitious in his scope.  Interestingly, though, for all of his depth of analysis and his assiduous care in respecting the complexities of how poetry circulates, there is very little mention of the specific and varied embodiments of authors and readers, of what these might mean for poetry.

I’m thinking of how writers and performers like Antony Riddell, Kath Duncan, and Angie Jones claim a space on stage that is entirely their own, that unashamedly present their own embodied difference as valuable and inextricable from literary meaning.  Simply by being themselves, visible and engaging, they expose the anaesthetics of the usual “author-audience” relationship.   The easy empathy, identification or abstraction that is usually generated by poetry readings is made all the more complicated and (appropriately) fraught.  I include myself in this.  When I got up in a Brunswick pub and read for the first time, “I have a hunch / that curvature / can be aperture…”, I knew that this was my poem, not just as author, but as this body on this stage.  That sharp intake of audience breath is not just the sound of a taboo being broken, but it is the drop of a stone into a pool, the beginning of ripples outward.

In “The New Memoryism”, Middleton analyses the role of memory in contemporary poetry.  He suggests that the recruitment of memory acts as a prop to stabilise ideas about identity.

During the past decade the rapid growth of interest in suppressed histories of oppressed, colonized, marginalized, and annihilated peoples led to a new method of cultural and literary study that could be called the New Memoryism.  Recovered histories of individual and collective self-representation make ethical and political demands that require the recognition of the different temporalities at work in recovery, atonement, trauma and forgetting…  The New Memoryism has yet to reflect on the consequences of its indebtedness. (pp138-9)

Interestingly, in this essay, Middleton doesn’t discuss poetry that arises from within any of these marginal communities.  The quote above, to me, indicates that his central thesis – that the internet and mobile technologies have fundamentally altered our way of reading and remembering – would have been even more powerful and nuanced had he examined how feminist and  “disabled” poets, for example, explore identity in an embodied but also strategic way.  Their use of irony, myth, deconstruction, confession and affect operates also upon the media of literature – whether performed live, displayed as text on a screen, as film on YouTube, or printed on a page, each version includes a destabilising reminder of embodiment and difference.  In a way, such poetry “re-embodies” a poetry that (at least in our common conception of it) has been disembodied by technologies.

I’m of course here talking about some of those moments in my reading of “Distant Reading” where I wanted to argue or interrogate.  There is much in the book that I found fascinating – including a chapter written in poetic form but right to left on the page (“The Line Break in Everyday Life”); and an essay (“Eat Write”) divided into two columns on the page, the two columns exploring food intolerance, consumption, postmodernism and capitalism in separate and contrasting modes.

At many points in an essay on J H Prynne, Middleton refers to “more sophisticated readers” or “familiar readers”.  With no “scare quotes”.  Which leads me to think he’s not being ironic.  I can’t decide if this is an accurate vision of what happens to readers (they become more “sophisticated”, less satisfied with more “straightforward” or “accessible” poems), or if this is a kind of elitism.  Middleton also says that “poems that wear their literalism on their sleeves and are bedecked with realist flair may nevertheless be much more secretive and uninterpretable than is usually allowed”.  So are all poems sophisticated?  And am I a sophisticated reader?  Should I be?  Does it matter?

I can say that I have been challenged, encouraged and confused by “Distant Reading”.  I will no doubt return to it later, read it again to see if I or the book has changed.

“Under my skin I have a different name”

The latest issue of US-based online literary journal Wordgathering includes an essay of mine about the writing of Aidan Coleman, Antony Riddell and Mal McKimmie.  Here’s how it begins, but I’d urge you to go to the source, and check out the rest of the issue…

 

If I have one preoccupation in poetry, it is the body — this thing that is continually changing in a dance of regeneration and deterioration, this object that is in fact innumerable objects as well as subject, that generates our consciousness. These bodies are often taken for granted or underplayed, but they always makes themselves known in one way or another in poetry.

I have gathered here three contemporary Australian writers who speak with unique and powerful voices reflecting on embodiment and experience (sometimes directly, other times in enigmatic or convoluted ways). This essay is not an attempt to analyse or categorise them from a theoretical, stylistic or rhetorical perspective. I’m not interested here (though believe me, I could be elsewhere) in where they fit in the world of literature or the world of disability. None of these poets self-identify as “disabled” (one, we’ll see later, has attached a more provocative label to himself). Which I personally find more interesting. The self that is evoked in these poems isn’t straightforward or labeled, but slips between definitions, and in doing so, seduces the reader into places of productive doubt about their own embodied position.

Here, I simply want to place two poems and one novella together, hold them up to my ear, and listen. Of course, how they speak to me is very much shaped by my own experience and predilections, and I am fascinated by where the mind sits in the body and how we reach out towards other bodies, other people — these “others” that are perhaps not so separable from ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If anyone can find a link to more information on Antony Riddell online, I’d appreciate it…. (can’t even find an image of the “Fingerprints” cover…!).

no-one in particular

Let me touch you with my words
For my hands lie limp as empty gloves
Let my words stroke your hair
Slide down your backand tickle your belly
Ignore my wishes and stubbornly refuse to carry out my quietest desires
Let my words enter your mind bearing torches

admit them willingly into your being
so they may caress you gently
within

This poem, “Love Poem for No-one in Particular”, was written by Mark O’Brien.  Mark was born in 1949 in the USA, and six years later contracted polio.  Through his determination, humour and honesty, he became an influential activist and a powerful writer, until his death in 1999.  He is now most known as the inspiration behind the recent film starring John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, “The Sessions”.

Mark O’Brien

The film centres on Mark’s decision as a 30-something man to lose his virginity by engaging a sex surrogate and the emotions, awkwardness and intimacy that these “sessions” stir up.  It’s not without its flaws, but “The Sessions” is funny, humane and a lot more “real” than I expected – there is a matter-of-factness that allows us to see both Mark and his surrogate Cheryl as fully human.  Since I have a (perhaps unjustified) bias towards non-fiction and poetry, I wanted to find out more about Mark O’Brien, to understand how sexual desire, paralysis, faith and poetic expression all found their home in his life, and by extension ours.

Ironically, more information isn’t easy to find, swamped by this successful film.  Mark now seems defined by his sexuality, which is perhaps unfair or a distortion of his life (see this brilliant article by Wesley J Smith).  Still, I think this intense focus is understandable – sexuality returns us to our bodies, to the unsaid, to the reality of our separateness and our desire to commune.

Near the end of the film, the above poem – which is the catalyst for tension between Cheryl and her husband, but is at that point in the film kept from the audience – is finally read out in full.  Many reviews of the film mention how the audience is moved to tears.  And we were.  Of course we were.  I’d like to look at why.

The poem takes on the familiar tone and structure of a love poem – it expresses a tender and passionate yearning, a dream that desire be conjured into reality by mere wish.  As with all great love poems, it also acknowledges and holds a sense that this dream is impossible – “hands… limp as empty gloves”, the “quietest desires” that “refuse to [be carried] out”.  Yet at the same time, love is expressed and fulfilled by words – not purely within the poem itself per se, but in what the poem does, in the real relationship it refers to (and by implication the other relationships it could refer to).

This impossible/possible paradox is very strongly related to another of the poem’s strengths – it says the unsayable.  This disabled man wants to be sensually and sexually intimate with this woman.  He wants to be generous, enlightening, loving – an agency that our broader culture routinely denies to people with disabilities.

But the poem, as it should, gracefully holds back from saying everything.  It also gestures towards silence and the unsaid.  In its formal brevity and its anticipation of what may or may not happen next.  But also importantly in its title – “… for No-one in Particular”.  This is of course a kind of wry discretion on the poet’s part – not naming her out of respect.  But this title also, in its self-deprecating irony, amplifies the intensity of feeling, elegantly suggesting the depths by speaking only of the surface.

And I would argue that it could even be taken as implying that the beloved in this case is not “particular”, exceptional, disabled, “special”.

I have always loved the word “particular”.  Not only for the spikes and undulations of its sound, but for its meaning – the unique, contextual, the exact individual thing or person that transcends generalities.  The poetry that I love is a miraculous yet naturalistic bridge between the particular and the general, between the other and the self, your life and mine.  Such a poetry affirms our own experience but also allows us to recognise how broad it is, that our lives also contain resonances with other lives.

“Love Poem for No-one in Particular” has this quality.  As does “The Sessions”.  But I would even more enthusiastically recommend Mark’s essay “On seeing a sex surrogate…”  He talks about repression, shame, desire, masculinity, fear, all in an unfalteringly honest tone – he is speaking of his own life always, but the light refracted off him is somehow on us.

In re-reading what I originally wrote, and my old journal entries from the time, I’ve been struck by how optimistic I was, imagining that my experience with Cheryl had changed my life.

But my life hasn’t changed. I continue to be isolated, partly because of my polio, which forces me to spend five or six days a week in an iron lung, and partly because of my personality. I am low-key, withdrawn, and cerebral.

I wonder whether seeing Cheryl was worth it, not in terms of the money but in hopes raised and never fulfilled. I blame neither Cheryl nor myself for this feeling of letdown. Our culture values youth, health, and good looks, along with instant solutions. If I had received intensive psychotherapy from the time I got polio to the present, would I have needed to see a sex surrogate? Would I have resisted accepting the cultural standards of beauty and physical perfection?

Where do I go from here? People have suggested several steps I could take. I could hire prostitutes, advertise in the personals, or sign up for a dating service. None of these appeal to me. Hiring a prostitute implies that I cannot be loved body and soul, just body or soul. I would be treated as a body in need of some impersonal, professional service — which is what I’ve always gotten, though in a different form, from nurses and attendants. Sex for the sake of sex alone has little appeal to me because it seems like a ceremony whose meaning has been forgotten.

I feel no enthusiasm for the seemingly doomed project of pursuing women. My desire to love and be loved sexually is equaled by my isolation and my fear of breaking out of it. The fear is twofold. I fear getting nothing but rejections. But I also fear being accepted and loved. For if this latter happens, I will curse myself for all the time and life that I have wasted.

This was Mark O’Brien’s life.  This is your life.  And mine.  And it isn’t.

~

PS I originally put a truncated version of the poem up.  Thanks “Mechi” for putting the full version in a Comment.  I’ve corrected it now.

poetry and flesh

Sometimes you may not want to know the poet behind the poem (let’s not go into that right now), but sometimes it’s unavoidable.  When I say “poem”, I think of a page – white A4, bound into a book, or some kind of virtual scroll.  Unavoidable and instant association.  And while I know there is a poet behind the page, culturally the page appears as some kind of mask.  The implied contract between reader and writer is to focus on the writing, and that the writing will involve a self or selves that both reader and writer readily identify with – but who is neither of them.  Reality is a metaphor.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between the body of the poet and the body of the reader.  A close friend loaned me their copy of “Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability”.  This anthology of poems and essays, edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black and Michael Northen, is a brilliantly provocative (though US-centric) introduction to the advancing maturity of the “disability poetry” community.  It’s thrilling and confounding.  Because bodies are foregrounded, because the real world is not a metaphor, but unavoidably seeps through the page onto the fingers of the reader.  And, as we all know, skin is porous.

I want to quote two poems.  The first is by Jillian Weise, and also appears in her book “The Amputee’s Guide to Sex”.

The Old Questions

When I asked you to turn off the lights,

you said, Will you show me your leg first?

 

I heard Rachmaninov through the wall,

a couple making love without prerequisites.

 

Do you sleep with it on? I forgot

there would be this conversation.

 

Do you bathe with it on?

I need to rehearse answers to these questions.

 

Will you take it off in front of me?

I once steeped into a peepshow in New Orleans.

 

Over the door, signs read: Hands off our girls.

Is it alright if I touch it?

 

I am thinking of a hot bath, a book.

The couple on the other side of the wall laughs.

 

She has found the backs of his knees.

What I love about this poem is its revelations and its withholdings, how it turns the usual mix of discomfort and furtive empathy that sex usually conjures into a productive and open encounter with another person.  I was going to write “encounter with the other”, but this poem proves such a phrase abstract and almost absurd.  We are reminded that sexuality is an encounter between particular bodies,  bodies that desire, but also can’t escape their history, politics and positions.  It begins with a moment of iconic intimacy, but its trajectory is interrupted – by the “old questions”.  She is pulled back into self-consciousness, memory and the allure of easier sensualities (a hot bath, a book).  The reader is taken, too, from this scene of intimacy into a peep-show, from the private to the (male) public, where broader questions of spectacle, exploitation, entitlement and ownership are opened.  And it is also no coincidence (I think) that Rachmaninov is the composer who seeps through the walls – a man who suffered depression and (arguably) Marfan Syndrome.  Bodies and their unerasable traces.

Weise is revelatory here.  She takes risks.  But while the poem ushers us into her private, bodily space, it also pushes us back out into the world, into ourselves and our own positions.  It re-presents us with the complicated, beautiful weight of our bodies.  Interestingly, “The Old Questions” is also an intensely visual poem that absorbs and refracts the gaze.

John Lee Clark’s poem “Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain” engages with the visual and otherness in another way, both witty, mundane and sublime.

 

Deaf Blind: Three Squared Cinquain

BARBARA WALTERS IS IN AWE

of a deaf- blind man

who cooks without burning himself!

Helen Keller is to blame.

Can’t I pick my nose

without it being a miracle?

 

AM I A NOBODY, TOO?

I am sorry to disappoint,

but I am.  But nobody

would let me be one,

not even when I catch

a bus stinking of Nobodies.

 

ONE AFTERNOON, I FOUND MYSELF

walking with my cane dragging

behind me but still knowing

the way.  There was nothing

to see.  Everything saw me

first and stayed in place.

Again, one of the things I love about this poem is that Clark has placed himself firmly in the center of the frame (and I do mean this visual metaphor deliberately), but uses this turn the reader’s gaze back on the broader society – on stereotype and othering – and finally on our own subjective sensory worlds.  Not only do we find ourselves in a bus “stinking” of Nobodies, but we’re also drawn empathically into the experience of negotiating city streets as a blind person.  Knowing most of his readers will not have had this experience (and that some certainly will), Clark writes with a lightness and vividness that brings the poem close to a sense of epiphany, while never allowing his experience to be anything but everyday.  His embodied life cannot be appropriated, but it can be appreciated.  Like Weise, Clark uses honesty, movement (both poetic and physical) and discomfort to open up some vital questions.  The answers, like our bodies, our lives, are always ultimately outside the poem.

I said earlier, I’d been thinking about the relationship between the body of the writer and of the reader.  But it’s broader than that – I’ve been thinking about how different art forms affect us differently, how bodily presence is sometimes viscerally communicated, while at other times the body is theoretical, abstract, conjured but not felt.  Recently, I visited ACCA to see “We are all flesh”, an exhibition of sculptures by Berlinde De Bruyckere.   In the cavernous main room, two huge bodies hang suspended from industrial structures – they are horses and yet not horses, corpse-like yet somehow they have the weight and presence of life.  In another room, a museum cabinet displays branches and blankets.  In another, a lump on the floor becomes as you approach it a human figure, curled in on itself, as if wanting to escape a world of grief or terror.  Sticks, bones, flesh, intenstines, hair, history, colonialism, war, animality and humanity.  What sounds on paper grotesque is in presence beautiful and sympathetic (while always remaining viscerally and philosophically challenging).

It’s not a cop-out on my part to say that it’s hard to communicate the power of these sculptures, but it’s at the heart of what I’m trying to get at here.  After going to the exhibition, my partner and I looked up more images of her work online.  In a short span of time, I found myself fatigued – the sense of empathy I had in the gallery had evacuated, leaving me with a sense of discomfort in the spectacle/spectacular, the freakish otherness of these bodies.

We have a visual culture, no doubt.  But there is a huge difference between the digital screen and the breathing body, between the reproduction and the original.  In the presence of a something or someone, you are in a relationship.

What’s that got to do with poetry?  I’m still unsure.  But I have an instinct that moves me towards readings – where poets take to the stage or microphone or just stand up and project their poems to an audience.  I don’t want to play that off against the page, like some contest.  I just know that when a poem is lifted off the page by a voice, pushed across the space between people, landing on bodies with skin, organs, hearts, histories and desires, the poem is changed and our relationships to each other are re-vital-ised.  Anyway, I have spent enough time now with this computer, thinking, typing, erasing, rewriting.  Maybe I’ll see you out there.

this bubble will burst; or, Jono’s Dilemma

all through my life, I’ve felt like I’ve been in my own little bubble, my own world… and no matter how hard people try, they can’t get into my bubble…  I think having my own family, this bubble will burst…  I want a child and nothing and no-one’s gonna stop me achieving that…

Jono Lancaster, “So what if my baby is born like me?”

Having a child is not a simple decision for anyone.  Of course, in the past, it was rarely “a decision” – it just happened or it didn’t.  Now, not only are we in the contraceptive era, but we are also in the DNA era.  Which means for most people, the whole process involves some serious thinking and feeling.  Last week, I watched “So what if my baby is born like me?”, a BBC documentary, which followed Jono Lancaster and his partner Laura, as they decide if and how to proceed.  As you’ve probably already guessed (from the above photo, or from knowing what this blog tends to cover…!), their situation is especially complicated.

Jono suffers from Treacher-Collins Syndrome, a congenital disorder characterised by cranio-facial deformities and related medical complications.  Jono discovers he can undergo genetic testing, to see if the defective gene can be identified – if it is, they then have the option of going through IVF and selecting the “best” embryo.  To be clear, this is not just about appearance and social discrimination – someone born with Treacher-Collins potentially may have trouble breathing, faces early death.  And, just as is the case with many genetic conditions, there is a 50% chance of passing the gene on, but no way of knowing how severe the syndrome will be for the child.

The documentary is worth watching not for these medical facts, of course, but for the human story – as Jono and Laura talk together and with genetic counsellors, with other parents, and with a children with the same condition, the viewer is taken into the heart of an acutely personal and contemporary conundrum.  It’s what I’m calling “Jono’s Dilemma” – and it’s common to everyone with genetically obvious conditions.  If you decide to abort a foetus (or not select an embryo) based purely on it having the same genetic condition as you, is this some kind of betrayal, of yourself or others with your condition?  Is it a kind of personal eugenics?  Or is it, rather, the only sensible and compassionate choice to make?

At one point, Jono almost loses the power of speech when considering the idea that if his parents were able to decide to abort or select, he may have never been born.  It’s a dizzying philosophical question – how can I will the non-existence of someone like me?  Or, from another angle, if I didn’t have this condition, how different would I be?  Or, again, fundamentally, if I didn’t exist, don’t questions like these become completely moot?

When Laura says to Jono, with great frustration and love, “you’re not a genetic condition!”,  I couldn’t help also thinking of my own ambivalence about Marfan Syndrome (the genetic condition I have).  I have oscillated over the course of my life between resentment, pride and nonchalance, and everything in between.  I still think it’s almost practically impossible to be neutral or to separate yourself from your condition, I do think that what Laura says (and what all the other caring partners and parents in the world say) is totally right.  We are, and are not, our genetic conditions.

Jono is a smart, sensitive and charismatic young man (who, heartbreakingly, the documentary reveals, is mocked online in response to his appearance on TV).  So, yes, on one level, he’s easy to identify with, but on another, his dilemma is not mine, nor is it yours.  And the very fact that they are being filmed and broadcast, means that their decision is made to carry an extra, political weight.  It’s no wonder he says “I feel like I’m disrespecting or offending [people]…”.  Genetic screening and decisions around people with disabilities are intensely politicised – every action is seen as influencing future decisions, giving momentum to one side or the other of a polarised debate.

The various ethical frameworks that we have drawn on for centuries are now facing immense technological, social and information changes – changes that affect the very nature of the decisions we are making.  And these changes are happening at an incredibly fast rate, whereas our ethical systems evolve slowly.  We still intuitively grasp for them for support or guidance, but I’m not sure they function so well anymore.

When I was younger, I was very attracted to a radical position.  But now, increasingly I feel that the debate is best left to the private space between partners and inside their particular minds, hearts and bodies.  Ironically, So What If My Baby Is Born Like Me? allowed us the privilege of seeing inside that private space – but it also reminded me that making that private decision-making process public doesn’t make the process any easier.

Marfan lives

There’s nothing like waiting for the results of a funding application.  I’m in the habit now of expecting nothing.  Which makes it all the more celebratory when the letter actually says “yes”.  Thanks to Arts Victoria, I’ve begun a poetry project very close to my heart, figuratively and literally.

“Marfan lives” (ambiguity accidental originally but deliberate now) is a series of poems based on the lives of people with Marfan Syndrome, both historical and contemporary, well-known and everyday.  I’m thinking of the allegedly Marfan-affected, like Abraham Lincoln, Akhenaten, Paganini and Osama bin Laden (?!), but also of people such as Edith Sitwell, John Tavener, Jonathan Larson, Vincent Schiavelli, Robert Johnson and Joey Ramone.

Antoine Marfan

But I’m also currently seeking to interview regular people, from all backgrounds and histories.  Because this project is about diversity and variety, how a genetic condition can shape people’s lives, sometimes dramatically, other times in a very subtle way – how it may make life hard for some, but how it may even give some people exceptional abilities.  It is a condition I inherited from my father.  He died when I was 2; my particular manifestation isn’t of the heart but the bones, particularly the spine.  So, it’s not just academic or aesthetic for me.

I’m interested in the stories of anyone with Marfan Syndrome, especially first-hand, but also from family members and friends.  If that includes you or someone you know, please contact me through this blog.  Thanks!

literature’s deformities (part 4 of 3, or: oh, and another thing…)

What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?

Crystal Lil, “Geek Love”, Katherine Dunn

In Dunn’s audacious, grotesque and surprisingly moving 1989 novel, Lillian and Aloysius Binewski revive their flagging carnival by deliberately creating a family of freaks.  They experiment with various combinations of drugs, insecticides, and radioisotopes to induce deformities, endure the heartbreak of children born unviable or (shock, horror) normal, all to build a family of confident, talented and astounding children.

Oly, the narrator, is a bald, 3-foot-tall albino hunchback.  Iphy and Elly are Siamese twins.  Their firstborn Arturo has flippers rather than limbs, an awesome ego and a malevolent charisma.  Their youngest, Chick, appears to be “a norm”, but is anything but; his peculiar gift is an integral part of what propels the family into their outlandish fame and risks their demise.

So, while I thought that this series of little essays on deformity in literature was over, I knew as soon as I started Geek Love that I would need to write part 4, to respond to it in some way.  (Just a warning – there are some spoilers coming up…)

Dunn apparently was drawn to write this book out of two dilemmas – the rise of genetic engineering, and the persistent power of cults.  So, where else to centre the book but the family?  But the Binewskis are not a parody of the archetypal American family.  This is the archetypal Western family in-extremis – inverted as much as perverted.  The other side of the same coin.

Dunn’s talent as a writer is to portray these apparently extreme characters in their full humanity, while also showing the complexity and variety of their responses to freakishness, the peculiar power they have over “the normals”.  While the novel certainly stirs a whole caravan-load of provocative ideas, those ideas emerge out of the very genuine (albeit inconsistent) connections we forge with these characters.  There are moments, arguably entire scenes, where I sensed Dunn getting carried away with her own grotesquerie, where the writer’s own pleasure in acting as a kind of tour-guide through perversity overwhelms her compassion for her characters, and an underlying voyeurism creeps in.  In a way, though, with this premise, it was inevitable the dynamics of exploitation would come in, and the reader should feel implicated.

It’s to Dunn’s credit that she is able to depict extreme Otherness in the bodies of some deeply familiar and sympathetic characters.  This is a world away from Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo (see my post here), where the human is barely visible beneath the hump.  Geek Love extends freakishness out beyond the body into recognisable psychological territory, while also foregrounding its roots in the body and in social interaction.  For example, here’s a few of Oly’s astounding, off-hand insights (which this book is littered with).

A small child looked into my face and wanted to stop but his mother dragged him on.  Sometimes when I felt the eyes crawling on me from all sides, I got scared thinking someone was looking who wasn’t just curious.  I knew it was my imagination and I got used to it, learned to shunt it away.  But sometimes I held onto it quietly, that feeling that someone behind or beside me in the crowd – some guy leaning on the target booth with a rifle, or some cranky sweating father spending too much on ride tickets to keep his kids away from him – anybody could be looking at me in the sidelong way that norms use to look at freaks, but thinking of me twitching and biting at the dirt while my guts spilled out of the big escape hatch he’d cut for them… a feeling like that is special.  Sometimes you hold onto it quietly for a while.

She talks.  People talk easily to me.  They think that a bald albino hunchback dwarf can’t hide anything.  My worst is all out in the open.  It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.  They begin out of simple courtesy.  Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities.  That’s how it starts.  But I am like a stranger on the bus and they get hooked on having a listener.  They go too far because I am one listener who is in no position to judge or find fault.  They stretch out their dampest secrets because a creature like me has no virtues or morals.  If I am “good” (and they assume that I am), it’s obviously for lack of opportunity to be otherwise.  And I listen.  I listen eagerly, warmly, because I care.  They tell me everything eventually…

It seems to me that one of the key ideas that the novel explores is Normality – which is not merely an idea, but an imposing reality, a system of experiences which must be responded to in some way.  Each person in the novel has some intense relationship with normality, each embraces and rebels in their own way.  And it is also clear that the Binewski children, having been bequeathed their peculiar bodies, which ensure they can “earn a living”, are restricted to the intensely isolated world of the carnival.  They know how to spruik and seduce, but they seem entirely ignorant of geography, history and politics – and this isolation shapes their response to normality as much, if not more, than their bodies.

Arturo is arrogantly disdainful of “the norms” – a chance encounter with a heartbroken obese woman during one of his performances begins his career as a cult leader of sorts.  Paranoia and cynicism haunt his position of power.  The twins (while less complete as characters), in their desire for parenthood, in their awareness of their sexual allure, and in their perennial arguments, wrestle with how to exploit the normal world – also revealing how much they are a part of it.  In a mysterious section of the book, Oly has a brief romance, and realises she cannot join the normal world – too much of her identity is tied up with the family, with Arturo.

While most of the novel is told in the past, there is a series of interwoven chapters set in the present, where we meet Miss Lick.  She is a wealthy heiress whose secret project is to “transform” young women – to pay them to be mutilated or deformed, to have the beauty that would “hold them back” surgically or violently removed.  Oly, knowing that her daughter Miranda is next in line to be “transformed”, cultivates an intimacy with Miss Lick, while planning to kill her.  It is in the interactions between them where the novel’s pathos and ethical complexities are tragically and painfully heightened.

And it’s precisely this intensity of engagement, in the midst of its outlandish tide of events, that makes Geek Love‘s overall relationship to “normality” so complex and intriguing.   Early in the book, it’s said “Freaks are not made, they’re born”.  As it progresses, an ambivalence builds, the suggestion that freakishness is also about power dynamics, enlarged by isolation and a desire to exploit others.   The novel ends with Oly revealing to Miranda the truth of her belonging to the family.  While the genetic and familial bond is undeniable, exactly how Miranda responds to this truth is left open – it exists beyond the novel, outside of fiction. 

Geek Love revels in the fact that there are many kinds of freakishness, and birth is only a starting-point.

poetry is an utterance of (the) body

Poetry is an utterance of the body.  Not the best utterance – which is pre-linguistic and made of salt water – but the best a body can do given it has language.  It is language in thrall to the corporeal, to the pump and procession of the blood, the briefly rising spirit of the lung, the nerves’ fretwork, strictures of the bone.  Poetry is matter that can string itself between the pulse of a life and the silence of its death…  Those who reject form in poetry, reject form in body.  What they do is alien to what’s human…  Take the iambic pentameter for an example.  Its regularity shadows the poem: something must shadow the poem, and that something must in some way make the sound of the body at rest, so that the body in thought, at play, when it is heard can be believed…  The arrogance of obscurity is medieval, is of the cloister.  Obscurity cannot be poetry because the body is not obscure.  It may be interesting, it may be exciting, but only until we need oxygen.

Glyn Maxwell, from “Strong Words” (ed. WN Herbert & Matthew Hollis)

When I read this, my own body made a little joyful shudder of recognition.  Yes, poetry is an utterance of the body, and that is how it travels from one person to another, across the gulf of difference and experience – through its biological affinity.  Then, one word stood out, awkward and almost arrogant – “the”.  Is there such a thing as “the” body?

Arguably, there is a human body.  But what of variation?  Male, female, intersex?  The disabled and the TABs (temporarily able-bodied)?  Does poetry travel seamlessly across all of these distances in the same way?  Or, to look at the question from another angle, are there as many poetics as there are bodies?  Is there such a thing as “women’s poetry”?  “crip poetry”?  And I don’t just mean in terms of content, subject-matter – I mean, in terms of rhythm, flow, metre, the way the words appear on the page and in the air.

Recently, as a result of Pi O urging me to check out the poetry of Larry Eigner (by the way, this video of Larry reading poetry is great), I came upon a fantastically provocative and sensitive essay by Michael Davidson – “Missing Larry: the Poetics of Disability in Larry Eigner”.  Davidson explores why it may be that Eigner’s cerebral palsy is so rarely mentioned in critical discussions of his work – why that “blind spot”.   But he also reminds us that this omission isn’t just a biographical issue, but a poetic issue.  Eigner’s use of space on the page, his compression and brevity, his use of indentation and double-columns, the meticulous intensity of his poems – this is the way he chose to write, but it is also inevitably influenced by his physical condition.  He only had effective control over his right index finger, his body leaning on the (manual) typewriter, eyes close to the page, each word painstakingly pushed onto the page, each tap of the space-bar an effort.

What we write is shaped by our embodiment.  Not determined, but certainly shaped.  And this isn’t just about those bodies that are more visibly and obviously “disabled”.  Think about this -

What would it mean to think of Charles Olson’s “breath” line as coming from someone with chronic emphysema exacerbated by heavy smoking? Robert Creeley’s lines in “The Immoral Proposition,” “to look at it is more / than it was,” mean something very particular when we know that their author has only one eye (125). To what extent are Elizabeth Bishop’s numerous references to suffocation and claustrophobia in her poems an outgrowth of a life with severe asthma? Was William Carlos Williams’s development of the triadic stepped foot in his later career a dimension of his prosody or a typographical response to speech disorders resulting from a series of strokes?

Michael Davidson

These are big questions.  I’m just starting to think them through…  You, in your body, may be way ahead of me…

literature’s deformities (part 3 of 3)

[Below is the final, 3rd part of an essay I wrote a while back, but revised recently.  I'm currently looking at the position and impact of the unusual body in contemporary poetry - this essay looks at the role of these bodies in fiction.]

Even within the Magic Realist novel, perhaps especially within it, we find the extraordinary body laden with meaning. As a counter to the typical Western association of illness, curse, error or problem, there is the unusual body as a site or catalyst for transformation. In Erri De Luca’s God’s Mountain, a coming-of-age story set in post-War Italy, a young boy befriends a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust. Rafaniello has a hump on his back which will reveal wings to carry him to Israel.

Rafaniello is so light you can pick him up. His bones must be hollow. There’s air in his jacket. I see the curve of his folded wings and pass my hand over him to cover them better. In Naples people call the hump a scartiello. They think that stroking it brings you good luck. People are always putting their hands on Rafaniello’s hump without asking permission. He lets them. “In my hometown they called me gorbun and no one would even brush against me. Here I like the familiarity that people have with my hump. I don’t think I’ve brought anyone good luck, but all those strokes have helped me. They’ve awakened my wings”.

A body that, in its particular time and place, appears strikingly unusual will have meanings attached to it. Arguably, this could be some kind of recurrent tendency of ours to attempt to resolve intense anxiety over the results of capricious nature or of human evil.

Gunter Grass’ central character in The Tin Drum is both a magnet for such significances and ultimately manages to elude them. On receiving a tin drum for his birthday, young German boy Oskar decides not to grow up, retaining the stature of a child throughout World War Two. The drum remains his cherished possession and means of communication, along with his piercing wordless shriek which can break glass at a distance. After the war, while burying the body of his presumed father, he suddenly decides to grow again; the growth is so quick that he is deformed. Later, he earns an income and fame as an artist’s model.

Professor Kuchen led me to a studio, lifted me up with his own hands on a revolving platform, and spun it about, not in order to make me dizzy, but to display Oskar’s proportions from all sides. Sixteen easels gathered around. The coal-breathing professor gave his disciples a short briefing: what he wanted was expression, always expression, pitch-black, desperate expression. I, Oskar, he maintained, was the shattered image of man, an accusation, a challenge, timeless yet expressing the madness of our century. In conclusion he thundered over the easels: “I don’t want you to sketch this cripple, this freak of nature, I want you to slaughter him, crucify him, to nail him to your paper with charcoal!”… These sons and daughters of the Muses, I said to myself, have recognised the Rasputin in you; but will they ever discover the Goethe who lies dormant in your soul, will they ever call him to life and put him on paper, not with expressive charcoal but with a sensitive and restrained pencil point? Neither the sixteen students, gifted as they may have been, nor Professor Kuchen, with his supposedly unique charcoal stroke, succeeded in turning out an acceptable portrait of Oskar. Still, I made good money and was treated with respect for six hours a day.

For readers, The Tin Drum is almost infinitely interpretable. Oskar’s child-size body is a rejection of the duplicity and cruelty of the adult world, and his sudden deformity is his body’s own reaction to taking on that world again. His body may be the physical expression of the inability of language to express the atrocity of the War. He could be symbolic of Germany’s guilt, or perhaps of Germany’s economy. Oskar’s body has by some been conceived as a Freudian reflex. Even as the Twentieth Century itself.

Perhaps it is all of these interpretations, or even none of them. Oskar tells the story from the bed of an insane asylum, flips between the first and third person, muddies the narrative waters in innumerable ways. Grass evokes a strange kind of alienated sympathy for Oskar in his readers, but he does not want us to have confidence in Oskar’s story, and certainly not in any larger historical or national Narrative. Like the drum and the shriek themselves, what The Tin Drum speaks is both devastatingly critical and irreducible to a particular ideology. Grass offers us the truth of the inconclusiveness of reality, its essential ambiguity. The extraordinary body is certainly still a spectacle, but it also has its own uncontainable meanings.

Exceptions unsettle. They mock our sense of certainty, our familiar and comforting associations. They provoke a rupture in the mundane. Deformity can be arresting, fascinating, confusing, awe-inspiring, even spiritual. All the same, with Medicine’s accelerating ability to alleviate or remove deformity altogether, the unusual body has become even more invisible, especially in the West. This adds another layer to the archetypal response – the sense that a body has slipped through the medical net, the unnerving possibility that Nature is still uncontrollable.

The body I inhabit, or perhaps I should say, the body that I am, is visually extraordinary, due to a condition known as Marfan Syndrome. I am six foot three, and weigh around sixty-five kilograms; I am slender, with long limbs. My spine curves dramatically from side-to-side and front-to-back; I would be perhaps six foot six if my spine were straight. In a way, my body has easily adjusted to this shape. But in another way, this is the shape of my body, and it is normal. I do not experience pain or physical difficulty, as some people have assumed. My body experiences its shape in much the same way as any body experiences its shape. Except, at times it seems little literary micro-ghosts hover over my shoulder.

I was born one hundred and forty years after Quasimodo, into an immensely different era, in terms of medicine, media and social structures. Yet I have been called by his name many times, mostly from the windows of passing cars, by men in their twenties. They are gone before I can conjure an appropriate retort; ensuring I remain, for them, a body. They are not interested in the speculations of a French paediatrician Antoine Marfan, whose intense and close observations of his patients in the late nineteenth century led him to describe the key visual features of the syndrome.

Interestingly, the most common parental response to the curiosity their children display, is an embarrassed injunction not to look. I suspect this looking-away, this leaving-be, is common in many cultures, but is acutely expressed in Australia. There is a profound caution about the way we relate to each other, which reflects our political history.

In celebrating the fair go, Australians portray themselves as fundamentally relaxed about the doings of others, as tolerant. The very need to paint such a picture, however, reflects less its veracity than a wish for projecting an image. The image is defensive. “We are patient in the judgement of others” means, really, “Do not judge us”… Such an ethic is self-protective and concealing, amounting to an agreement not to discuss one another’s sins. Extending the right to a fair go amounts to an injunction to each mind their own business.

Daniel Ross, “Violent Democracy”,  2004

Everyday public speech is the very opposite of deconstruction. It leaves things, efficiently, alone. This is not just about people’s right not to be questioned about their behaviour or inheritance, but also about their bodies and the meanings attached to them. Our culture has evolved a plethora of ways of describing the other. Yet we do not seem to have grasped a way of apprehending the world, a way of speaking together, that is able to adequately deal with variety – that is able to recognise the other within the self.