Category Archives: women

i get all my news from poets

Leave a reply

Time was, I never forgot when it was April, National Poetry Month. Now it’s almost over. I thought I should honor it with some Berryman, in honor of the site’s title: but instead of merely pasting his hilarious Dream Song 14, “Life is boring,” I found some sound.

If you’d rather just read, go peek at my sweetheart’s ghazals:

My eyes entombed with sleep, I need some coffee.

I can’t yet see the bathroom. Where’s the coffee?

She takes the can out of the freezer and the water from the tap.
And when I smell the air has changed I know I’m loved, for she made coffee.

A bag of beans, organic but uncertain.
How much of what I paid was paid to those who picked the coffee?

The line’s too long; I take the train. No cup in hand, I read.
I’m late for class. Be later. Be contrite. Just get some coffee.

This runs in my family. From a Chinese banquet hall on his daughter’s first
birthday, my brother rushes out to find a cup of take-out coffee.

Summer’s coming. When it ends, I will have ridden in its heat
obsessed with shedding winter pounds and gaining coffee

shaded skin (albeit three parts milk to two with some red syrup).
As the summer sweat pours down my arms, I will seep coffee,

eggs, bananas, meat. Along the hills of Brooklyn, dodging dogs
and children, dodging cars, smiling at everyone, I’m seeking coffee.

The Germans say “Not addict. Morphine-seeky.”
When I stop to rest my muscles in Park Slope or Coney Island I’ll get coffee.

On the boardwalk, watch the waves. They sound like steam
and final, gurgling drips; to Rachel’s ear no longer H2O, a pot of coffee.

— Rachel Rawlings, 2005

that’s what you’d expect in a democracy

Leave a reply

I’ve been a huge fan of Jeannette Winterson for more then ten years, ever since her novel Passion knocked me out of any literary or emotional comfort zone I’d ever had. I can’t say I emulate her: her brand of poetry, vision and audacity just can’t be mimicked, though I did tell students they could learn bravery from her fearless descriptions:

One woman who kept a fleet of boats and a string of cats and dealt in spices is here now, in the silent city. I cannot tell how old she may be, her hair is green with slime from the walls of the nook she lives in. She feeds on vegetable matter that snags against the stones when the tide is sluggish. She has no teeth. She has no need of teeth. She still wears the curtains that she dragged from her drawing-room window as she left.

The city in question is the same as Calvino’s, the period early enough that the narrator ends up traveling with Napoleon’s cook.

Admittedly, I’d sort of lost the thread of her work in more recent years, as it focused more on myth than I felt I could. But The Stone Gods, her newest, feels simultanously like yesterday’s news, tomorrow’s headlines, and the kind of poetry that rattles the brain. At first her dystopia, in which humans all choose to genetically stop aging whenever they wish, is hysterically funny as it horrifies:

Making everyone young and beautiful has made us all bored to death with sex. All men are hung like whales. All women are tight as clams below and inflated like lifebuoys above. Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It’s a global crisis. At least it’s a crisis in the countries of the Central Power. The Eastern Caliphate has banned Genetic Fixing, and the SinoMosco Pact does not make it available to all its citizens, only to members of the ruling party and their favorites. This way the leaders look like gods and the rest look like shit-shovellers. They never claimed to be a democracy.

The Central Power is a democracy. We all look alike, except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That’s what you’d expect in a democracy.

I was going to quote a much later section, wherein she explains and describes the apocalypse that put her society into being, “the ugliness of how we had destroyed it, the brutal, stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of a 21st-century world.” But I’d rather you read it in her book — which I first read in an addictive rush, pulled by her well-constructed love story/space opera/reverse-Jonathan-Swift commentary. Then I read it again, to savor the poetry, and the crystal palace Winterson has constructed.

Meanwhile, I do have one question for her. When is the film coming out, inevitably directed by the guy who dreamt up Torchwood?

grace and authority

Leave a reply

As writers we always want both, and smile when someone we know displays both in their work. It’s especially useful when navigating the world of books — especially, perhaps, of those with any magical/SF element, where genius has to struggle for visibility amid blatant trash. I’m happy to report the arrival of my kid sister’s new window into that world.  (She’s not my blood sister, but we realized soon after we met that we were the big/little sister combo neither of us possessed.)  Stop by, bookmark it, comment often — and give her work if you need someone to do such work! 

being raymond carver

1 Reply

Now we find out who that was. And I’m crying, for that knowledge feels long stolen.

It’s a little startling, to see in the pages of the New Yorker, that the code once represented by Carver’s name – code for laconic, tight, minimal prose, Hemingway on cheap beer – was a mirage.

In the late 1980s, if you wanted to be published, prose was supposed to be like that. I (who fashioned myself an emerging novelist, except I never emerged) hated it all– though in retrospect I think I was mostly put off by Carver’s legions of imitators, who cluttered the pages of half the magazines I picked up. Thus began the solid decade (inspired also by Tom Wolfe) when I boycotted straight white male U.S. writers.

In the middle of that period, admitted to being was startled when my friend Ralph read aloud Carver’s last story, “Errand.”: It felt different, and I wondered if I’d misjudged him. But I was in those days singularly tunnel-visioned, and busy trying to keep up with the work of other novelists I was working to emulate. Then, when I began to teach undergraduates, I discovered stories like the iconic “Cathedral,” and others that slayed me. Add having been wrong about Raymond Carver to my other mid-life discoveries.

Now, I learn that the stories I liked better represent who Carver was from the beginning. That the “Kmart realism” touches editors loved and I loathed came not from Carver but from editor Gordon Lish, who I’d long learned to hate (or other reasons) in San Francisco. And that his widow, Tess Gallagher, is now fighting his publisher for the right to publish the stories un-redacted. as as he wanted them.

Late as always to the party, I learned it only this week- when the New Yorker ran *Beginners,” the story that legions of readers (including my former students) know as “What we Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Initially confused — don’t I know this story? – I went to the Web site and learned what it was: I sat down, read it and cried. Not just because the story itself is moving, though it is. But because his vision, his full-throated way of conveying emotional truth, was distorted for so long. And of no fault of Carver’s, a generation was told to distrust such instincts.

That story Ralph read to me was about the death of Chekhov, a writer to whom Carver aspired to be, Not Papa, with his booze and misogyny, albeit brilliant prose. And in a weird way I wonder if Lish, who after all was editor of Esquire, was acting out some weird counter-feminist desire to turn the working-class writer into Papa, along the way giving all male American writers a bad name.

unexpected gifts

Leave a reply

Like everyone,Im often too busy spinnng my wheels to see even of the people I love, and then get myself to the round of Christmas parties just hoping to connect with a few. When Rachel and I went off to the home of Barry Wallenstein, one of my best senseis from CCNY, all we wanted was to touch base with him and with associated folk, like the towering and deeply funny Angelo Verga, the glamorous and hardworking Doris Barkin, the gently brilliant Yerra Sugarman.

But thanks to Yerra, who seeing her reminds me I miss quite a lot, we also ended up in extended conversation with Alicia Susan Ostriker, who for years was to me One of Those Iconic Poets, one with am incredible range – from funny to deeplu enraged to allusive and questioning. I used to scare my students with one of the latter, “Reflections on a Line By Fitgerald/Hemingway.” A few figured out it was about the Holocaust, though the cultural product that stimulated Ostriker’s long, multilingual rant was already too far in the past for most of them. (perhaps if I teach it again, I’ll challenge them to watch the film, write their own response, and then look at Ostiker’s again….)

We talked about everything, from the election (oy!) to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference to her Princeton neighbor, the Nobelist Toni Morrison. (Her rendering of a Morrison reading of a bygone MLA conference was hysterical.) I almost didn’t mention my own work – it seemed beside the point – but when she asked, I suddenly realized and said to her: “You’re one of those that will get why I’m doing this.” She did, even asking a kind of duh! question I need to explore about Cummings and Wilfred Owen; though that wasn’t the main gift of the evening.

I love hanging with journalists, but I think I agree with Andrei Codrescu: I get all my news from poets.

many mazeltovs to a giant

1 Reply

When the Macarthur Awards were announced this spring, I can’t believe I missed it;  that one went to Dr. Jonathan Shay. Luckily,  Lily was more attentive, noting it on her own invaluable blog, Healing Combat Trauma. The debt owed Shay by so many of us is hard to quantify.

HCT has the links to several recent appearances; but spend some time while you’re there,  The bibliography alone is worth the click, let alone all the analysis.

And speaking of combat trauma, I just finished 1968 by Joe Haldeman, better known as author of The Forever War. Writing that good makes you want to either give up, in the face of a master, or dare yourself not to settle.

the arguments and the songs

1 Reply

I miss California far less than I’d expected to when I moved back here, after 10 years in San Francisco; but that still doesn’t mean I don’t miss  Julia every single day, or wish Ericka were closer. And I’m further reminded of the latter when Ericka writes something like this.

Her column “Red Diaper Dharma” gives memoir back its good name, combining truth, vivid language and smart analysis in a way that — as Jonathan Franzen said of The Great Gatsby, doesn’t have to show off but “goes down like whipped cream.” This particular essay struck me for its evocation of an era and sensibility that’s so often left unnamed (and certainly never was in my right-wing Republican household):

My family were union leaders and leaders in the community. For them, this wasn’t an idle spouting of opinions. My great uncle took these arguments, honed at family parties, into union negotiations that went all night. My great aunt took hers to meetings, rallies, demonstrations. You cannot make social change and revolution if you doubt your position — at least in public.

The argument goes on. But after a while, we segue into the singing, and even here, it’s political — we sing strike songs and Spanish Civil War songs and old Negro spirituals used to communicate in slave days. “We are not free until we are all free.” The arguments and the songs all tell us this.

I told Ericka that the piece’s dialogue reminded me of the great John Sayles story later turned into a play, “At the Anarchists’ Convention.” But I asked her about her grandfather, and she told me that he was this great man, an organizer for the needle trades (part his oral history is below), who’s often overlooked when people write about his wife, the great writer and Ericka’s grandmother. I’ll think of him now the next time I write about the garment folks I’m covering in the District.

The ILWU consistently took positions that were left of where other unions stood. I think the Communist clubs made a difference here. The presence of Communists helped put Local 6 miles ahead of the rest of the labor movement in things like opening up to Black members even before World War II. But we also had to think about our limits. For example, had a Communist club come to a meeting and said, “We want an endorsement of the Soviet Union,” we would have had our ass ripped off.

I joined the Local 6 Publicity Committee, helped with a big organizing drive at the Lathrop army depot near Stockton in the late 1930s, spoke out at union meetings all the time and got the reputation of being a red-hot. During the major 1938 warehouse lockout in San Francisco I was down at the union hall and out on the picket lines every chance I got. Several CP people felt I ought to bid for leadership. The guys in the ice houses were pressuring me to run too. So in 1939 I ran for business agent and got elected. I took office in 1940.

The first arbitration I had was against the Paris Beauty Supply Company of San Francisco. We’d dispatched a young Black woman and a young Black guy to the place. The employer was a southerner. He didn’t want to keep them. His excuse was, “I’ve got nothing against Black folks. Why, if I could afford to build them separate toilets, I’d be glad to have them working here.”

The local put on a lot of pressure against that sort of thing in 1939-1940 and the Communists made an extra effort issue of it. You can point to many things about the Communist movement that aren’t so honorable, but its early insistence on racial equality and its idea that Blacks and Whites should unite was one of the most honorable things it did.

And if you ask me (though no one did), he was quite the looker, too.

and so it begins.

Leave a reply

Deep breath time, exhale, and find the reserves you didn’t know existed.

Eighteen months after I started doing actual reporting for this book, I had a long talk with my editor at Cal last night, and came up with a tentative plan — one that gets her a draft of a first chapter by October 1 or thereabouts. Not the introduction, where I will blather about my ground rules, and not the prologue, but a full-fledged chapter, beginning with the aforementioned moment in 1781.

A chapter like that is about 8.000 words. All properly sourced and grounded, revised to make it feel not like a novel but like stepping into events. This in addition to my obligations to Chelsea Now (where I’ve sworn: no new big stories, ha!). All while, at the moment, shaping begging letters — excuse me, grant letters — to the discretionary funds of any foundation that might help this project end well.

I do not have the luxury of time that some of my role models had, time to spend three years on a dissertation and THEN two years making it sing (yes, Mr. Moser, yes, Mr. Joseph, I mean you). But by June 30, 2008, all these important and compelling stories, from William Bowser to Ricky Clousing, have to coalesce into a document that speaks to people. Which means, given my penchant for unglamorous first drafts, I have to get serious.

Thus the title of this post, its words to be pronounced in a deep voice, as close as possible to that of the late great Andreas Katsulis. Though at least I’m not fearing that if I screw up, something that looks like this will get me.

Or maybe I am. Only Carl Jung knows, apparently.

rape dimly recalled but not so gray

Leave a reply

I almost never think of my fiction these days: the real-life struggles of folks like Chelsea tenants, like the urban school principals I met this week, like the Committee of Sergeants are absorbing enough. But reading in Salon about this blog controversy, and a Cosmo piece calling certain kinds of encounters “gray rape,” brought me back to a memory I actually put into this story. My thinking on the use of the term can probably be summed up in a line from Susannah Moore’s The Whiteness of Bones that has always haunted me. I can’t locate the book this second, but it was something along the lines of:

It occurred to Mamie that the power equation between men and women could be contained in one fact: that he could, if he liked, lean over and snap her slim wrist in two.

That rule holds even if you’re drunk, like the women under Cosmo discussion, or just numbed for other reasons.

His body shaped like a guitar, thick honey-colored hair and tattoos on each ankle: I dove for both. …Carl raped me one lazy Sunday morning, as I shut myself down rather than wake the landlady’s kids. He turned out to have some other name entirely, which I only learned after I’d made a key for him. Jerzy, who had broken up with me the week before because he felt too bipolar, showed up with power tools and changed the lock so Carl couldn’t get in.

Even though I wasn’t under the influence one bit, it took me until 2002, a full 11 years after the events described, for me to use that word even in my head. I can’t imagine why anyone, especially writing for a magazine that supposedly speaks to sexually empowered women, would want to make it harder for young women to sort that out.