Save as evidence of your voyage

My husband loves the wording on airplane ticket stubs, advising you to save them as evidence you have traveled. There's something wonderful and spooky about the idea that you might, in fact, forget that you had. At 50, however, I find it's often less interesting to think about what you remember than of what you have forgotten. But there's no evidence for the latter, so what are you to do except take sharp intake of breath when someone else remembers.

We have been traveling, a family trip to San Francisco, where we met Radhika's birth sister (and Sangha's sister by affection and fiat) and adoptive mother. We also saw an elementary school friend of mine who was visiting her parents and brothers in California with two teenage boys I'd never met--they had not existed when last I saw her. I spent two days in L.A., reading with Deborah Meadows and attending a Dodgers game with her, Andrew Maxwell, Aaron Belz and son Elijah. Already I've misplaced that internet-generated ticket as proof, but there are photos.

As proof of voyage, some moments, thoughts, in no particular "order":

--The questions. They still catch me off-balance. "Where do they come from?" "You said 'your kids' sister'; what did you mean?"; "Oh, Radhika's sister"; "Was she an orphan?"; "Do you know their origins?"; "How old were they when you adopted them?"; "How did you find her sister?" And on and on. The questions are not hostile, but they are insistent. I choose fluttering like a butterfly or I choose rope-a-dope, and I usually change the subject. I have a vocabulary for our extended family, but no one else does; I only have it because I've developed it. Sangha's two sisters. My calabash sister (mother to my kids' sister). Then realize I no longer care so much about categories; remember that once I did. Somewhere in there an active forgetting of terminology, of names for families that do not fit my own.




--The Bridge. Joseph Stella's (Brooklyn) bridge painting is at SFMOMA, but the bridge that dominates San Francisco is Golden. We biked across it (two tandems and two single bikes) in the fog, rode through Sausolito to Tiburon, returned on the ferry. Deborah Meadows reminded me later that I criticized Michael Palmer for aestheticizing the shoe piles at Auschwitz. Beauty and horror. The emergency phones on the bridge that assure you--no, inform you--that jumping will be fatal and tragic. Call here. I watched, in short sections, Eric Steel's documentary on the bridge in my hotel room. He videoed the bridge for a year, caught (as in filmed) most of the jumpers. Some only witnessed as splashes, others seen pacing the bridge back and forth, those who looked nervous, furtive, climbed over the railing, jumped. Variations on that theme. The bridge in sun, fog, rain, gorgeous. Steel found witnesses, families, friends. The guy who survived assures us he changed his mind as he lept. But my sound didn't work that evening, so I don't know what else he said. So many ethical questions. The act is public as soon as it occurs on the bridge; to film and then show it adds another layer on. The jumpers' odd non-privacy is our own. We don't know what to do with it. I wish he had not ended with the most dramatic jump but with the most banal. But who's to judge that!? What he does best is get at the histories behind symbolic acts. If the jump is as symbolic as it is deadly, it represents not just pain, but long histories of pain.


--At Duchamps' urinal a grandmother leaned over her tow-headed grandson (age 6?) and said, "this is an important work. This destroyed art. If this is art, then everything is art, and nothing is."


--At SFMOMA, Sangha asked me, "what's so special about this?" He did like layers of paint on a canvas.


--Simplicity is an acquired taste. Rothko is not so simple.


--SFMOMA had a Robert Frank exhibit. I saw it there, and again in L.A., where there were fewer rooms of "The Americans." Frank as Whitman, tucked between bride (wrote "bridge") and bridegroom. Frank as bridge. An open casket at an African American funeral in South Carolina in the 1950s; two shoes on a desk at a military recruiter's office (no body attached, just the shoes); horn in front of/ instead of face at a parade; a black couple turning to stare at the photographer (I overheard a guide say this was one of Frank's favorites); the photographer's exhausted family in the front seat of an old car, lights illuminated; from New Mexico or Arizona, photo of the three large photos for sale at a rest stop (1. beautiful canyon, 2. beautiful foliage, 3. beautiful atom bomb explosion); starlet blurred, her fans crisp. More than hints of what was to come. Race, gender, cars, wars. Like Ginsberg, a Whitmanic vision after the fact of optimism. And yet . . .


--Needle Woman: Kim Sooja. LACMA. A room with screens. On/in each screen you see a woman's back. She has long hair in a pony tail, a light blue jacket on, and she is standing perfectly still looking out toward a river of people coming toward the camera, toward us, around her. Nepal, Chad, Tel Aviv, Havana, Yemen, Sao Paulo. Couldn't always figure out which was which. Kids mugging for the camera. A boy in Yemen(?), one eye directed at us, the other away. Evasion of eye contact. Stares (mostly in Tel Aviv); a man running his hands over his chest and belly (this made the children in the room laugh). The guard--it's his first day, he says--has decided that people pick their noses in all cultures. He's seen at least one nose pick per screen.


--If I answer people's questions about my children, what do they do with the answers? There is a need for closure when someone dies. How did it happen? The answer quiets us, for a time. Is there a complementary need for dis-closure, for knowing the prequel? Those who search their own origins would say yes. But the rest of us, why do we feel we have earned the right to know? The need? [The cat meows loudly. He was found 15 years ago at the Early School in Honolulu, lived 11 years with another family, which disintegrated. The new dispensation did not agree with him. He came to us, a new being in double digits.]


--Installation of hanging plastic ware, many rows of it. Like a garden of Babylon except made of plastic salad dryers, tubs, bowls, cups, hampers. Children thread the cords of it and laugh.


--Installation of street lamps, short ones, middle ones, tall ones. A gray forest with globes on top.


--Buses, trains, cable cars, BART, CalTrain, electric, diesel: San Francisco. Cars cars cars (L.A.)


--Rachel Loden's husband, Jussi, asks me to explain Language poetry. I gather he's asked before, and perhaps often. I do my best. He's skeptical. I try another tack. He's skeptical. I gather he's been skeptical before. Radhika asks for mango ice cream to follow her mango milk shake.


--Omnidawn, Cusp Books. Editors, Rusty Morrison, David Lloyd. To blog about. Both presses are what we call eclectic, though that word resembles "quietude." Rachel Loden says the word demeans silence; she does not like that. We talk about Silliman's categories: location, generation, inclusion, exclusion, avant, post-avant, school of quietude. Then there are the poetic dangers. "You have 7 readers and I have only 5!" 7 deadly sins, at least. Though if we're lucky, only 5.


--Daniel Tiffany tells me that Dementia Blog contains a mystery. What is the relationship of the observer to her mother? I say I tried hard to leave myself out. He says he knows. I'm reading Peggy Schumaker's Just Breathe Normally; she puts herself in. Uses a near death trauma to expand into family narrative. Marvelous exfoliation, in starts and stops. DB so claustrophobic. Six months and nothing else. Two ways of reading trauma. As wide angle, or as microscope. Either angle magnifies. Horrifies.


--Aaron Belz tells me it's funny. Why am I a bit taken aback? He's right.


--Marjorie Perloff says, "at my age!"


--Diane Ward says at 50 we need to figure out how to live with others for the duration. We agree that we think differently at 50. Quotient of remembering, forgetting, and the prospect if not diminished, then put in intense focus. My eyes in the morning refuse their focus.


--Deborah Meadows: "the most interesting poets are not in groups." She reads new letters, and a piece on primate thought, along with poems from Goodbye Tissues. We are at a salon. How Bryant laughed at that word last summer! Americans have reduced it to a word about hair, perhaps.


--I fly back to San Francisco; the plane lands wing to wing with another United plane. I hear my name called; our friends Joe and Hans are in the airport. We fly to Kauai to save money. The clocks there are all at the same time: Bikini Atoll, Honolulu, London, places whose names we don't recognize. Nothing on-line about whose project this is, this bank of clocks running at the same time, the same second. Hawaiian musicians, a hula dancer, Radhika dancing too. Radhika performing a chant for Queen Liliu`okalani as we land in Hawai`i, her hula arms telling part of the story.


[Detail]

Deborah Meadows's Sonnets from GOODBYE TISSUES

Sonnets from the [Abu] Ghraib


I often require my creative writing students to write a Shakespearian sonnet. Hardly a one of them leaps joyfully to the task; one student, years ago, simply refused. His father, he said, was military, and the sonnet reminded the son of all the rules his father enforced. (Harold Bloom had nothing on this guy's Oedipal relationship with poetic tradition!). He was having none of Wordsworth's nuns, fretting not in their convent rooms. And he had a point. If the stanza is a room, then the sonnet can seem a chamber of horrors.

Deborah Meadows's new book from Shearsman Press, Goodbye Tissues, contains “Sonnets' Four Seasons,” a meditation on contemporary America, and especially on the Iraq war and the U.S. government's use of torture (which happens in chambers). As with any sonnet sequence worth its salt, this one is equally a meditation on the form itself: “array marked / more shutters and paralysis echo / toward parity, fourteen lines, more or less” (71). These lines conclude the first of 12 sonnets (after a verse preface that includes two quotations from Tom Raworth). Within this first chamber we find a growing lexicon of Iraq War-related words (“provisional,” “indictment,” “state”) and of literary terms (“realism,” “procedural text,” “lines”), as well as words that cross over the border between them (“blueprint,” “build,” “body”). The body of this text will likewise address the body politic, the bodies of prisoners (a.k.a. “detainees”). Here we also find the language of theoretical science (“pollen's Brownian descent”) to mark randomness. A procedure in poetry results random outputs; so an ideology that leads to violence erupts into chaos. This is a danger to poetry, as it is to governance, and Meadows intends to examine the danger under her microscope, even as she avoids the trap. The work has an ethical design that points past formalism and into a history that is also prophecy; the last lines of the final sequence promising “the sum of retaliation,” a blown-up bridge that is also “of self, brush the hyphen, its sectioned plane.”

Meadows's work is nothing if not difficult; I cannot claim to have these sonnets adequately in my sights. But I'm immediately drawn to them because they open out into a public politics. Words, too, are private and public: throughout the sequence, her sometimes hermetic lines effloresce into phrases like “evaporation of memory” (a reference to what one sees from the Capitol in D.C.); “engulf the war”; “intelligence it's called”; “troop deployment”; “fear”; “The many vanishings/ of the subject”; “General Electric”; “brave new world”; the “FCC”; and “Catholicism now fed on GOP.” There is even a brief autobiographical interlude in sonnet 11, which may allude to Meadows's move nearly two decades ago from western New York State to southern California. This opening up of the text to the poet's life seemed significant, as well, pointing to the poet's own stake in the language and politics of the poem, her relation to the nation whose rotting ethos it diagnoses.

What in poetic terms exists as a split between the machine of proceduralism and the resulting randomness of poetry is laid next to the abstract ideology of the nation that tortures and the chaotic retaliation that ensues. Sonnet 3 brings up the subject of torture:

the bed and pillows are
not had at the train station, electric
sensations abstracted to principles--
go sense the same eternal smell anytime.
An unethical practice to save lives?
Our vanishing point recession:
state house a tiny dot. (73)

What works in poetry's chamber cannot work in the torture chamber, where abstract thinking sets up conditions of pain without the “saving.” The Brownian descent of pollen is one thing, but the state house reduced to a dot is quite another. “The secretary assigned a machine / precarious sentences,” she writes in the 7th sonnet. The secretary might be Donald Rumsfeld; he is surely not Jackson McLow, or Jacques Roubaud, to whom one of the sonnets is dedicated. The poet is “fully aware of coercion” in her own work, which is often procedural, but the coercion that comes with shock and awe, or what Naomi Klein calls “the shock doctrine,” at once economic and military, that renders us citizens helpless: “Nation, our item today during these / shells beyond infantile sensation shall not” (8, 78).

Meadows calls a spade a spade, attacking the president (Bush) and his speech writer for “a prompting 'On evil,' a moral /term [that] helped the president gain favor” (just the other night in his farewell speech, President Bush told us that there is good and evil—and nothing, apparently, in the ceasura between). But when she moves to “The many vanishings / of the subject” (80) she is writing not simply of those who have died because of the president's policies, but also to those tortured, and to the very notion of what makes us subjects, rather than objects, in the first place. To Bush's “philosophy” she responds that “Not all hypotheses are utopian / as well as logical” (81). Our state is “General Electric,” but there is little light. Instead, even “Sonnets / now pose” and everything is for sale.

If “our medium is language not belief,” then by the end of her sequence Meadows is calling for a language that is at least honest, ethical, not mechanized (like form, like tortured) but freed into meaning (like pollen, like text). While the methods of poetry and governance may differ, their goals need to be joined in a social and linguistic contract that unevaporates memory, offers us non-consumable words such as those we find in poems like these.