[I've just returned from what I fondly called The Dementia Tour. The Kelly Writer's House gigs had been planned for nearly a year; I'd thought going to Philadelphia would make it easier to visit my mother in Virginia. But as it happened, my reading at the Writer's House included a farewell to the long project about my mother, which became, more importantly, a farewell to her. And so I gave a reading, did a public interview with Al Filreis, and recorded a PoemTalk with Al, Leonard Schwartz, and Tom Devaney on a poem, "Eating Fried Chicken," by Linh Dinh. After going to see my Cardinals beat the Phillies (though Al and I only heard the game as it was ending on the car radio, streaming St. Louis announcers into the bowels of Philadelphia), and spending time with a college friend and a couple of UNO pals, I went on the West Virginia University to give a talk on Alzheimer's writing, meet with grad students, and see old graduate school friends.]
That's the inventory. But what actually happened?
Al Filreis began our conversation by noting that I have written about the Cambodian genocide, and he began to connect that content to the Alzheimer's writing I've done that offers a testimony of witness to my mother's decline. But we adopted our son from Cambodia! I told Al.
Our friend Hongly Khuy was a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. He's come to several of my classes to talk about his experiences. He traumatized that first class of freshmen, talking about what it's like nearly to starve to death, what it's like to see a woman butchered to death for asking for more food (his laughter at the situation's absurdity bothered the students most), how far one had to walk simply to get a few grains of rice. After a couple more such talks, he had grown much more gentle. He talked differently. Al distinguished between "deep memory" and "common memory." Deep memory occurs in the present tense, always. Common memory acquires a past tense verb, assumes a distance between the moment of trauma and the moment of story-telling. It's easier on the teller and his audience, but less "true" to the experience.
That didn't diminish the force of Al's intuition about genocide and dementia. If there are national dementias, imposed from above, then the Holocaust was one of them, enabled by forgetting on a massive scale. The comparison comes at a slant, not directly. Alzheimer's is nature's evil, not humanity's. The disease is not ethical, though our reactions to it are. But the force of Al's comparison hit hardest when I sat in on his Holocaust literature class and his students discussed Aharon Appelfeld's Story of a Life, which I later read on my brand-spanking-new electronic device.
Much of Dementia Blog and what followed on this Tinfish Editor's Blog happened not in "deep memory," but in the "deep present" of confronting Alzheimer's sufferers. Or it may be the "deep demented tense," as it lives in an out-of-time that resembles the surreal in its reality. Appelfeld writes about stuttering. Do not tell the story because you cannot remember it, counsels the child who became the writer. Do not claim to master any language, because you have either lost those you spoke or failed to attain full command of the new language. A mother's loss is likewise the loss of her language, which was German. Hebrew was an imposition, one he molded into a lifetime of work. A mother's loss is the loss of her language into illness. I do not want to overplay the comparison (I spent years furious at Plath's illness/Nazi metaphor), but reading Appelfeld's memoir proved to be an amazing exercise in reading a poetics that works for Alzheimer's writing, as well as Holocaust literature.
--I've carried with me my mistrust of words from those years. A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering, for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me with a feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness (AA, 102-3)
After the war, Appelfeld writes, the memoirs and the books started to come out: "these pages carry a great deal of pain, but there is also within them much that is cliched and superficial. The silence that had reigned during the war and for a short while afterward seemed to be swallowed up in an ocean of words" (104). And then, most tellingly (as it were): "The really huge catastrophes are the ones that we tend to surround with words so as to protect ourselves from them" (105).
The direction of these catastrophes does not follow the same compass, and the silence is not shared between sufferer of Alzheimer's and caretaker or family member, but the sense of writing toward an awkward comfort is familiar to me. Why do I not write down everything my children do? Why instead did I obsessively write down everything I heard in the Alzheimer's home? Why does lack of memory spark the desperate need to remember, while living with other memories does not? The answers may seem clear, but then they blur back into lack of clarity, the stutter. The comfort is in the record, not what has been recorded. (I discovered that while reading some of the material out loud.)
Linh Dinh detests the poetry world; according to reports from that world, he has renounced poetry, as well. It does no good, he says. There is no audience. Use photographs, use Counterpunch, use means that arrive at more doorways than does any line of verse. His anger is sublime. He has taken on all the hurts of our age. I want to say to Linh, be easy, remember also to love the good. Appelfeld did. Some of the most moving passages in his book are about the goodness he felt in the midst of total murderousness. Hard to remember the day after the murder of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia, but. Leonard Schwartz spoke repeatedly about "big anger" and "little anger," about the importance of persuading readers not through direct action, but unconscious influence. Not sure I go all the way with that idea, but agree that deflection (and to my mind, the carnivalesque) work better than onslaught.
In West Virginia the reunions with two grad school friends were good. They'd been married for most of the time I've known them, and now they are not, but thrive in different ways that are lovely to see. John Ernest has written several important books on African American literature, history and theology of the 19th century, and now has an Eberly Chair at WVU. Justin Legleiter, whose lab just got a $100,000 grant to study Alzheimer's, came to the talk and a dinner afterward. I wish I understood his language better. He got interested in Alzheimer's not through family experience, but because the problem so resembles a problem he started from in working on nano-technology. Yes, that too becomes clear in the Alzheimer's world. We are technologies, and our controls (remote or not) often do not work as planned.
Appelfeld's book is about the power of the stories you cannot tell. In so many ways, I identify with that problem, finding the stutter more eloquent than the speech, the search for memory as powerful as any memory your mind claims to hold to. On returning home, I discovered in the mail pile a beautiful note from our department secretary Gayle Nagasako on the loss of my mother. In the note, she mentioned also being an only child, and imagined the loneliness of the loss. My mother spent her last years anti-social and then ill. Her friends and neighbors fell away. Without making too much drama of it, I am her last witness, the remnant of her memory. It feels a burden, but as the man at Gate 8 alerted me, it is also, at times, a (loving) responsibility.
[The reading & conversation with Al Filreis will be on PennSound soon, and the PoemTalk will come out in good time.]
Showing posts with label Al Filreis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Al Filreis. Show all posts
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Report from the academic front-line
Semesters are forces of discombobulation, competing force fields of teaching, meetings, more meetings, soccer practice pick-ups, reports and write-ups, grading . . . so the blog threatens to implode from the sheer energy of scatter. So, some notes from the front:
--Foundations of Creative Writing, 625D, is intended to get incoming graduate students to think about writing. It's a poetics course. Last week we started from Plato's Republic and moved forward through Sir P. Sidney, P.B. Shelley, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Bernstein. I wish I'd been in Adam Aitken's section of the course, because he knows about Shelley. In mine, we lingered over Riding's attack on writing poetry; I framed it as a discussion of professionalism, apt because incoming M.A.s are beginning their own journey into the workplace (a chimera in this economy). Do we write to publish, to get jobs? If so, what does that do to our writing? Or do we write to look for some truth outside of the marketplaces of wages and competing ideas? Do we dress up (I was wrapped in a blue fitted sheet, which substituted for a toga)? Or do we peel off the layers, render ourselves unmarketable, and call it a day?
A subset of these unanswerables is the one about defending what we do to those in power who don't answer to inherent value, but only to the bottom line. One student, who works in politics, suggested we argue to the Speaker of Hawai`i's House, Calvin Say (what a good name he has!) for new positions in creative writing. What struck me, as we came up with our arguments, is that there is always a leap of faith. Yes, students are less literate than they once were, but how does a new hire in creative writing (someone with a big name, say) help us to make them into readers and writers? Don't we need more low-paid composition instructors for that purpose? Yes, thinking creatively is a good thing, but how does one translate the writing of poetry into a "useful" technical skill? (I love how "useful" includes such things as the invention of video games, which sell better than do poems.) If we make the argument on Say's terms, we fall into the market driven economy. More students write fiction, therefore we need a fiction writer. But who needs fiction, when our problems are so real?! If we make the argument on Shelley's terms, we pose a threat to Say, because we, too, are legislators, albeit unacknowledged. It's a no win situation. Which may be why Riding threw in the verbal towel. But we are stubborn. (I waved signs for Neil Abercrombie on Friday; he is running for governor on a strong pro-education platform.)
--English 100A: a lively class of students who are driven, responsible, considerate, and--on some level hard to define--scared to death. Scared of failure, mostly, of bad grades, of authorities who will not judge them well. Question: how to teach them the value of failure? Another institutional problem: inside the structure of grades and judgment and especially within the larger structure of a terrible economy, how to say (it's easy for me to say!) that the best thing you might do for your writing is to compose an astounding failure that stretches you, a compositional yoga position that hurts like hell, but limbers up the muscles later on?
--This past week's department meeting was one of the best in years; we sat in a large circle and hammered out a couple of big issues, some detailed language, and left the room more or less in one piece. But finding myself defining "mixed genre" to members of a group of English professors who think of it as someone who writes poetry and fiction, felt frustrating (as all these f's testify). Anyone read William Carlos Williams's Spring and All (1923!!!!). Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1980)? Now part of the thrust of the question was strategic; it came from a colleague who knows better, but doesn't want to truck in such things. But others?
--As this semester's Director of Creative Writing, there are some perks in the form of quirky notes and phone calls. The first came as a telephone call from a local Vietnamese man who runs a hair salon. He wants to work with a ghost-writer (that's where we come in) on a novel about the afterlife of Lady Diana. And then there was the hand-penciled letter from a prisoner in Ohio who wants to correspond with students in an effort to improve his writing. The letter was a full two pages long, and included his prisoner number, lest someone want to look him up. It all sounded fine until he got to repeating that he only wants to correspond with "ladies."
--I've finished three sections of a new series of Memory Cards, each 10 poem set working off phrases and lines by a poet whose work is meditative, open. Lissa Wolsak, Norman Fischer, Wallace Stevens. In the midst of thinking again through and about memory, I opened Al Filreis's blog this morning and found this. We had been talking through Charles Bernstein's "A Defence of Poetry" in my Foundations of CW class this past week, with its amazing last lines, from Karl Kraus about how the closer you look at a word the stranger it appears to you. After struggling to read the poem out loud (it's written in "typos"), those unscrambled words at the end seem themselves to come out of an alien place. To see my own words on Filreis's website, from an interview with Leonard Schwartz about Dementia Blog, is itself an exercise in memorying. My recollection of my words comes in reading them back as they were spoken into a telephone a year or so ago. I would not know them otherwise. Rememory, as Toni Morrison calls it. The urban dictionary weighs in here.
--Having asked my graduate students to write their manifestos about literature, an exercise developed with Adam Aitken, I asked them to render them anti-absorptive, and for a purpose. One student rewrote hers in columns, as if in Chinese; another wrote in jejemon, a Filipino "dialect" based on mangled English, texting, and Pokemon monsters (in that order?). I can't recall what their purposes were--it was 8:45 p.m. and all of us exhausted--but the results were exhilarating.
--Finally, a shout-out to Jaimie Gusman, a Ph.D. student at UHM, who has a fresh poem on Ink Node, here. Some of my favorite lines here:
The last glint of humility
among the bank-lines of humanity.
I borrow your eyes from time to time
and from time to time I can see myself
--PS of sorts: I have given up the St. Louis Cardinals for the season (after over 40 years of fandom), since Tony LaRussa and Albert Pujols attended Glenn Beck's (and Sarah Palin's) rally on the Mall. As Joe Harrington put it on Facebook, they refuse to rally otherwise. I called the Cardinals' front office to express my displeasure, only a momentary stay against confusion on my part. If I am not a Cardinals fan, then who am I?
--Foundations of Creative Writing, 625D, is intended to get incoming graduate students to think about writing. It's a poetics course. Last week we started from Plato's Republic and moved forward through Sir P. Sidney, P.B. Shelley, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Bernstein. I wish I'd been in Adam Aitken's section of the course, because he knows about Shelley. In mine, we lingered over Riding's attack on writing poetry; I framed it as a discussion of professionalism, apt because incoming M.A.s are beginning their own journey into the workplace (a chimera in this economy). Do we write to publish, to get jobs? If so, what does that do to our writing? Or do we write to look for some truth outside of the marketplaces of wages and competing ideas? Do we dress up (I was wrapped in a blue fitted sheet, which substituted for a toga)? Or do we peel off the layers, render ourselves unmarketable, and call it a day?
A subset of these unanswerables is the one about defending what we do to those in power who don't answer to inherent value, but only to the bottom line. One student, who works in politics, suggested we argue to the Speaker of Hawai`i's House, Calvin Say (what a good name he has!) for new positions in creative writing. What struck me, as we came up with our arguments, is that there is always a leap of faith. Yes, students are less literate than they once were, but how does a new hire in creative writing (someone with a big name, say) help us to make them into readers and writers? Don't we need more low-paid composition instructors for that purpose? Yes, thinking creatively is a good thing, but how does one translate the writing of poetry into a "useful" technical skill? (I love how "useful" includes such things as the invention of video games, which sell better than do poems.) If we make the argument on Say's terms, we fall into the market driven economy. More students write fiction, therefore we need a fiction writer. But who needs fiction, when our problems are so real?! If we make the argument on Shelley's terms, we pose a threat to Say, because we, too, are legislators, albeit unacknowledged. It's a no win situation. Which may be why Riding threw in the verbal towel. But we are stubborn. (I waved signs for Neil Abercrombie on Friday; he is running for governor on a strong pro-education platform.)
--English 100A: a lively class of students who are driven, responsible, considerate, and--on some level hard to define--scared to death. Scared of failure, mostly, of bad grades, of authorities who will not judge them well. Question: how to teach them the value of failure? Another institutional problem: inside the structure of grades and judgment and especially within the larger structure of a terrible economy, how to say (it's easy for me to say!) that the best thing you might do for your writing is to compose an astounding failure that stretches you, a compositional yoga position that hurts like hell, but limbers up the muscles later on?
--This past week's department meeting was one of the best in years; we sat in a large circle and hammered out a couple of big issues, some detailed language, and left the room more or less in one piece. But finding myself defining "mixed genre" to members of a group of English professors who think of it as someone who writes poetry and fiction, felt frustrating (as all these f's testify). Anyone read William Carlos Williams's Spring and All (1923!!!!). Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1980)? Now part of the thrust of the question was strategic; it came from a colleague who knows better, but doesn't want to truck in such things. But others?
--As this semester's Director of Creative Writing, there are some perks in the form of quirky notes and phone calls. The first came as a telephone call from a local Vietnamese man who runs a hair salon. He wants to work with a ghost-writer (that's where we come in) on a novel about the afterlife of Lady Diana. And then there was the hand-penciled letter from a prisoner in Ohio who wants to correspond with students in an effort to improve his writing. The letter was a full two pages long, and included his prisoner number, lest someone want to look him up. It all sounded fine until he got to repeating that he only wants to correspond with "ladies."
--I've finished three sections of a new series of Memory Cards, each 10 poem set working off phrases and lines by a poet whose work is meditative, open. Lissa Wolsak, Norman Fischer, Wallace Stevens. In the midst of thinking again through and about memory, I opened Al Filreis's blog this morning and found this. We had been talking through Charles Bernstein's "A Defence of Poetry" in my Foundations of CW class this past week, with its amazing last lines, from Karl Kraus about how the closer you look at a word the stranger it appears to you. After struggling to read the poem out loud (it's written in "typos"), those unscrambled words at the end seem themselves to come out of an alien place. To see my own words on Filreis's website, from an interview with Leonard Schwartz about Dementia Blog, is itself an exercise in memorying. My recollection of my words comes in reading them back as they were spoken into a telephone a year or so ago. I would not know them otherwise. Rememory, as Toni Morrison calls it. The urban dictionary weighs in here.
--Having asked my graduate students to write their manifestos about literature, an exercise developed with Adam Aitken, I asked them to render them anti-absorptive, and for a purpose. One student rewrote hers in columns, as if in Chinese; another wrote in jejemon, a Filipino "dialect" based on mangled English, texting, and Pokemon monsters (in that order?). I can't recall what their purposes were--it was 8:45 p.m. and all of us exhausted--but the results were exhilarating.
--Finally, a shout-out to Jaimie Gusman, a Ph.D. student at UHM, who has a fresh poem on Ink Node, here. Some of my favorite lines here:
The last glint of humility
among the bank-lines of humanity.
I borrow your eyes from time to time
and from time to time I can see myself
--PS of sorts: I have given up the St. Louis Cardinals for the season (after over 40 years of fandom), since Tony LaRussa and Albert Pujols attended Glenn Beck's (and Sarah Palin's) rally on the Mall. As Joe Harrington put it on Facebook, they refuse to rally otherwise. I called the Cardinals' front office to express my displeasure, only a momentary stay against confusion on my part. If I am not a Cardinals fan, then who am I?
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