Scotland is for Tourists

[Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott]


The Royal Mile in Edinburgh cannot be mistaken for Honolulu's Waikiki (or for Williamsburg, or for Washington, DC's Mall), except conceptually, but concepts can be as strong as facts. So this road of over a mile's length that runs between Edinburgh Castle and the Scottish Parliament, which abuts Holyrood Castle, presents an imagined version of Scotland as surely as the Hilton Hawaiian Village (re)presents a virtual Hawai`i. There are stores that sell kilts, stores that sell whiskey, stores that sell you your family's history for 10 pounds, bagpipers sounding their 8-track repetitions. And there are the tourists, taking it in. Edinburgh feels familiar, precisely because it is full of people like us, wandering the paved roads looking for the vision of Scotland that we have imagined, if never seen. We are tourists of the tourists, as well as of the sights. As I read Stuart Kelly's book, Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation, I realize that the touristic Scotland may be the "real" one. As Kelly writes: "first the book supplanted the reality; then the reality was inadequate to the book. 'Such had been the magic web of poetry and romance thrown over the whole, that it had a greater charm for me than the richest scenery I beheld in England,' Irving wrote. Scotland was monotonous and destitute, Scott-land was magical and hidden. It was everywhere around you and nowhere to be found" (145). He refers to Washington Irving, whose most famous character slept through history and returned to his home a tourist.

That I felt at home in Edinburgh to some degree because it is so tourist-infested was a source of discomfort, and mostly we avoided the Mile in favor of our lodgings north of Holyrood, down an ordinary street (Milton Street was blind, in a usage learned from Dubliners), close to a Sainsbury's and (oh my) a mall of sorts. More to the point, Edinburgh felt uncomfortably comfortable because it and Scotland are haunted by questions of authenticity, language (did Scots come from English, or is the other way around true?), nation, another country's militarism, the oil industry. Sam Kelly, head of the Napier MA in creative writing, told us at our opening dinner that Scotland is a country that is not a nation, a place obsessed with itself, unwilling to look outward because it is so concerned with what it is. Her husband Stuart laid out a literary version of this argument in a polemic he wrote in the Guardian. It ends: "Scottish novels by Scottish novelists for Scottish readers about Scottish stuff is a kind of abyss, an abyss in which many of our writers and critics willingly revel." For that he's doubtless been called names, despite the fact that he otherwise adores writers like Scott, Jackie Kay, John Burnside, WN Herbert and many more. (Come to think of it, those are poets . . .)

There is, of course, a direct link between doubts about cultural authenticity, this turning inward, and renditions of culture trotted out for tourists. Tourists go to exotic locales to find something authentically not their own, not to find the same thing they left. Locals push back in crypt languages, those as local as possible. So it was I found what might be called "the authentic same" appealing to me in Scotland, not in touristic terms, perhaps, but in linguistic ones. When I read Tom Leonard, I find myself in the world of Gizelle Gajelonia, a world of translation that is also parodic. Gizelle takes on Eliot:

The mindless pimps, with their eyes fixed on the Other,
Walked up the strip and down King Kalakaua Street,
To where Dog the Bounty Hunter kept the city safe
With prayer, Beth's breasts, and pepper spray. (27)

Where Leonard takes on the American of William Carlos Williams, who was himself taking on the English poets and their language:

Jist ti Let Yi No

ahv drank
thi speshlz
that wurrin
thi frij

The only words here that escape the clutches of my normalizing spell check are "Let" and "drank," which is still ungrammatical in standard American English. If reading can be thought akin to tourism, then misreading breaks its spell, at least for a while. Eliot was to Williams what Williams is to Leonard, an instance of the dominant poetic culture and, as such, worthy of re-vision.

This push back against tourism and its authenticity is parody-as-translation. It's is not pure forgery, though there is plenty of that in the Scottish and Hawaiian context. On one of our coach tours Stuart Kelly told us that the tartans displayed on the Royal Mile were all invented by brothers from England who claimed to be Scottish royalty but were not. So the 10 pound investment in one's family history may seem a bargain, but it's also a fraud. That it was advertised under a British flag only makes things worse, I suppose.

Which brings me, by a kind of commodious vicus of recirculation, to Jackie Kay's memoir, Red Dust Road, which Stuart recommended to me after meeting my family of many histories. Kay's book of poems, Adoption Papers, was important to me a decade back. I wrote an essay that included citations from the book, summarily rejected by Jacket because they didn't like the quoted poems. What can I say, content sometimes trumps style? While many adoption memoirs put in opposition notions of origin and history, as if one must trump the other, hers manages to hold them in mind at the same time without fear. It's the most even-handed, cheerful adoption memoir I've read. The prose is breezy, and yet the thinking is not. Kay is at once the authentic member of an adopted family, and a tourist who looks for her families of origin in Nigeria (father) and the Scottish Highlands (mother). She is biracial in a white country, lesbian in a straight one, and daughter to communists in a non-communist country. She's a cultural outsider. Except that she takes on each of her inheritances with equal dispassion. It's a remarkable, if flawed, book, in which she discovers that authenticity can be cobbled together of imagined and historical lives.

While in Scotland, I taught a four-week course on documentary poetry for the University of New Orleans low-residency MFA program. I'll have more to write about the class and the students' final projects later. But, for all the compression involved in introducing a new form of poetry to students and asking them to create not just poems in a new mode, but also entire projects, it worked well. While none perhaps will write in this mode for long, it offers the writer permission to do research, use academic language, to investigate (C.D. Wright's word in her subtitle to One Big Self) the very ground we walk on. While students were writing about place--generally speaking, the places they came from--they became enlightened tourists, doing their research, writing guidebooks. If Sam Kelly introduced many of her students to ostrananie (in fiction!), then documentary poetry allows its writer to practice estrangement from self and origin. It allows us to leave our places and to re-adopt them, to know them as history not as (necessarily mythical) origin. It shows us how to make another family of the family we thought we had. In that sense, and because the students were so game to investigate, cut and paste, think through, the course was successful. The syllabus can be found here.

Poetry Is / Is Not / An Option

[found at Sainsbury's in Edinburgh]


My first encounter with Napier University's creative writing program was not auspicious. I opened their flyer only to see this headline: POETRY IS NOT AN OPTION. Since I am teaching one of the two poetry workshops for the University of New Orleans in Edinburgh, and we are the guests and fellow travelers for a month of the Napier University program, my poetic heart turned to stone. As if poetry were over-valued in western culture! As if all my colleagues taught poetry! As if everyone read the stuff! When I turned to an interview with the founders of the program, David Bishop and Sam Kelly, I found more on poetry's absence.

I read that you took the decision that poetry would not form part of the course. Is this unusual for an CW MA?

DB: Yes. We have a motto on our MA: Poetry Is Not An Option. If you want to explore that, there are plenty of other courses to scratch that itch.

SK: For readers in Scotland, the Creative Writing programmes at Glasgow and St Andrews have outstanding provision for poetry. I admire and applaud, but am resolutely focussed on different ends.

This programmatic slam against poetry is so broad that we're forced to read the word "poetry" in poetic terms: what role does the word serve in this program's self-definition? Why might it be considered an "itch" to scratch, rather than a vocation? The answer tells us what is at once most innovative about the program, and most paradoxical about it. This is a vocational program more than a craft-based one; it's less literary than commercial. It's about making a living with your work. One of its founders, Sam Kelly, comes to Napier from a career as a literary agent, not as a scholar or writer.

Or is it really non-literary? This is where the program gets tricky in a fascinating way. Begun at a former technical college, which lacked a program in the humanities, it dispenses with that tradition right off the bat (the BBC reports laments over Americanisms such as those based on baseball, but there you have it) and opens up study in genre fiction: sci fi, crime writing, fantasy, and so forth. This is an area where we have increasing demand at UHM, but no one much to teach it. Napier's curriculum also opens up more practical areas: how to deal with agents, how to approach publishers, how to do the legwork toward publication and marketing.

But then I attended Sam Kelly's workshop on experimental fiction yesterday and came face to face with many of the techniques I pass on to students: automatic writing, noun plus x writing, invention of language, surrealism, OuLiPo. We had a rollicking three hours of playing around with these techniques. Most importantly, however, Sam demanded that we use our techniques toward ideas, and not in a vacuum. When she'd said to me earlier in the week that she was seeing a lot of creative writing but not much contemporary literature, I sensed that this vocational training was more than seemed advertised. It's vocational training that demands knowledge of theory, and it's training that demands a keen grasp of the avant-garde. It's as if the Buffalo Poetics Program were to trade in poetry for sci-fi, but remain much the same otherwise.

When Sam began talking up the avant-garde, while also addressing the necessity for vocational training and practical results, I asked how the avant-garde's anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist ethos (she loves the Situationists, by gum!) squared with her emphasis on making money with your writing. She held up a volume (or two, or three) of China Mieville and declared that I was talking about the traditional avant-garde. What we need is a new avant-garde, she declared, one that might not fit that mold. That led to a discussion of ways in which writers like Mieville invent--or supplement--languages in order to enact their worlds for the reader.

As a poet whose work is "not an option," I hold out for a space in which the writer and publisher are free not to make money, not to write what it takes to get a contract, not to have to thread that needle always between innovation and sales. But I admire Napier's emphasis on the poeticity of genre fiction, of the need to write science fiction, let's say, that intervenes in the culture, its assumptions and ideas. If it does not include poetry, then, poetic thinking is central to this program. If they were to expand, my suggestion would be to include performance poetry and what Joe Harrington calls "creative non-poetry" or documentary work. Docupoetry would make an excellent testing ground for investigative journalists, for example. (Are there any left, in the era of late-Murdoch?) Let me add that Sam Kelly and her husband Stuart Kelly, who leads our bus tours of Abbotsford and Stirling, are wonderful intellects and spirits, deeply engaged in the world and its words. The trip would be much poorer for our not having encountered them.

At the end of our workshop, once Sam had gotten down off the chair she was perched upon (she explained another time that, like the Queen, she is short), she passed out packages to each of us. Large white paper bundles, wrapped in white string. Each one contained an antique looking volume of Sir Walter Scott, along with two small brushes and four little pots of paint. The instructions are to "intervene" in the text, as Tom Phillips did in Humument, and then to surreptitiously place the volume in a used bookstore in Edinburgh. When Sam finds the book you altered, she will email you.

Here is a photograph of my bundle:

Scotland is full of wonders. Here are just a few literary discoveries I've made in our two weeks here:

--Dorothy Alexander. We met her for lunch at a kebab place. She wrote her dissertation as a mixed genre book on dementia, using Scots language and Cage-ian techniques. She recommended--

--Wordpower Bookshop on West Nicolson Street. It's the best bookstore in the city, a combination of Revolution Books in Honolulu and Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. They've agreed to distribute Tinfish Press publications in the UK.

--Tom Leonard's outside the narrative and a cd of his work. Backwards, I know, but he reminds me of a Glaswegian Gizelle Gajelonia, infusing the traditional canon with a heavy dose of the vernacular. The linguistic/cultural/nationalist politics here are fascinating and run parallel to Hawai'i's in many ways. That should be ballast for another blog post soon.

--Scots dialects. I wish Facebook were Earbook, because the images of Scotland do not do justice to its sounds: the seagulls trumpeting in the early morning, the train that runs by our flat, and the Fife accent of our bus driver the other day. I looked to find audio of an accent like his, but the Fife dialect memer was not nearly so lively as the young man from Glasgow, here, who attacked the meme itself, even as he explained insects, Scots culture, and his own way of speaking to the camera.

--Sir Walter Scott as explained by Stuart Kelly, who wrote the book on him. As we stood beside his house in Abbotsford, thunder clapped and hail fell. Enough to make a poor poet turn to genre fiction right then and there.

--My seven students, who come from Vancouver, Kentucky, Madison, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Ohio, Vermont, bearing their own regional accents with them . . . who are eagerly writing on, next to, through, and with documents they brought from home. Maps, a college transcript, an old thesis, Christmas card list, dialysis machine, travel guide: they're opening their lyrical worlds up to the prosaic one. Napier! Let us in!

Documentary Poetry course for UNO low-res program in Edinburgh, Scotland

Syllabus [click for info]

Susan M. Schultz
smsteaching@gmail.com
tinfisheditor.blogspot.com


DOCUMENTARY POETRY

We will be reading and constructing documentary poems in this workshop. These are poems that combine the virtues of lyric, journalism, history, and eye-witness accounts to create work that is at once intimate and public. I will make time to meet with students to discuss poems they are already in process of writing, but our class periods will be devoted to the documentary projects.

Readings:

Allison Cobb, Green-wood, Factory School, 2010 [a cemetery in Brooklyn provides the focal point for this book]

Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [saina], Omnidawn, 2010 [second in a prospective series of books on Guam]

Kaia Sand, Remember to Wave, Tinfish Press, 2010 [the hidden histories of North Portland, Oregon]

William Carlos Williams, Book One of Paterson, 1946, New Directions [WCW's muse was Paterson, New Jersey]

CD Wright, One Big Self, Copper Canyon, 2007 [poems about Louisiana prisons, prisoners]

(Strongly) Recommended Readings:

Muriel Rukeyser, Book of the Dead, 1938 [On a mining disaster in West Virginia]

Susan Howe, Singularities, Wesleyan UP, 1990 [on the Puritan settlements in New England]

Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Graywolf Press, 2004 [response to 9/11]

Kristin Prevallet, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, Essay Press, 2007 [about her father's suicide, in public context]

Susan M. Schultz, Dementia Blog, Singing Horse Press, 2008 [about the fall of the author's mother into Alzheimer's] More recent entries can be found here: search under key words "dementia blog" and "Alzheimer's" to find these entries.

Mark Nowak, Shut Up, Shut Down. Coffee House Press, 2004; Coal Mountain Elementary, 2009 [collaged poems on union busting, coal mining disasters, and more]

Joseph Harrington, Things Come On, An Amneoir, Wesleyan UP, 2011 [a book about the author's death and the resignation of Richard Nixon on the same day]

This list is hardly exhaustive!

Items to bring with you

--photocopies of documents that are important to you: birth-certificate, passport, marriage or divorce certificates, college transcript—anything related to your life that is also an official document.

--book/article/websites about a historical event that is important to you; bring photocopies or pdfs.

--materials on a place important to you, your home town, a school, a house, blueprints, a feature of the land, topo maps, bird-watching or fish-watching manual, etc.

--photographs of any of these items.

--a copy of a good dictionary (again, on-line is fine), preferably something really good, like the OED, which can be accessed through university libraries.

--any other materials (written or otherwise) that relate to you and to which you are attached, however miniscule.


Requirements

--Attendance: unless you have a valid excuse, come to all meetings of the workshop. It's there we will do a great deal of our work and have a great deal of our fun.

--Blogging: write to the blog five days a week. On two of those days, write a detailed response to the readings and/or to issues that are raised by the class. On the other three days, do a poetry experiment (see the "calesthenics" page). You may adapt these experiments to suit your own purposes, if you wish, or simply do them.

--Readings: have them done at the beginning of the week, so that we can see each work as a whole, as well as a series of parts. Bring the day's reading to class, so that we can read closely.

--Workshops: not all of our meetings will be devoted to workshopping your poems, but some will be. Come prepared to talk about each other's work, not as writing that you like or dislike, but as work that can become more effective. Questions to be asked will include: What are the demands that the work is making on us? What are its ambitions? How can it better address and meet those ambitions? The readings will provide us with a toolkit for talking about each other's work. So as you read the books, think consciously about what each poet is trying to accomplish and what techniques they are using toward their ideas, their expressions of feeling, and so on. Get your work in on time!

--I will write you comments and send them via email. I'm also available for one on one consultations and conversations about your work and about poetry, publishing, whatever you want or need to discuss. I will also chime in on the blog, making suggestions for readings and research.

--Guests: please prepare to meet our guests: I'm assuming they will include Hank Lazer, Adam Aitken, and Dorothy Alexander, though again, scheduling is fluid. Look them up on-line, read some of their work, come ready to ask questions and to tell them about your own projects.

--Final projects: you will make a chapbook of your project, one long documentary piece (10 pages or so) or several sections written toward a longer sequence. You'll need to give evidence that you've revised poems you wrote for the workshop, and that you've conceptualized your work as a whole, or a sequence, rather than a series of discrete poems. Note off the Wikipedia entry the following:

• The National Library of Scotland holds a large collection of Scottish chapbooks; approximately 4,000 of an estimated total of 15,000 published. Records for most Scottish chapbooks have been catalogued online.

Also find here instructions on how to make a chapbook (there are other such sites on-line). There are lots of publishers who make chapbooks, including my Tinfish Press. See here for details on our series.

Here's the official calendar, subject to frequent and constant changes.

NOTE: we will also have visitors, so some of what follows may become "homework." At that point, use the blog to communicate with the rest of us, and feel free to see me outside class.


Week One

Reading: WCW, Paterson, Book One

Assignment: Take one of the documents you've brought to Edinburgh and write a poem off of it. In other words, don't touch the document itself, but put it in contact with a poem. Experiment with writing a poem that is either very close to the subject of the document, or seemingly far away. Think of yourself as creating a channel in which the reader can operate as mediator, interpreter, actor, fellow composer of the poem/document.

July 4: Introductions, exercises, close-reading from WCW.

July 5: Discuss in detail how WCW uses documentation in relation to more lyrical passages of poetry. What happens in the interstices between poem and document? Think in terms of spatial relations as well as those composed of meaning or language only. Take the larger view, too. What is Paterson? Why Paterson, New Jersey? What are the poem's ambitions, its effects? What would you like to emulate in WCW's work? What might you rather avoid?


July 6: First workshop: exchange work with other students in a round-robin; read and critique each other's poems after we set up a series of questions, expectations, values. Once we've finished looking at each other's poems, we'll have a more global discussion of issues raised among you. Also come to class prepared to talk about the project you've chosen to work on this month. (It's damn quick, I know.)


Week Two


Reading: Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave & Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory [saina] Photographs of Sand's walk can be found here (among other sillies): http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150199594483662.375032.654553661&l=887418b9c1

Assignment: Take one of the documents you have with you and compose a poem on or with the document. Use the document's language, use its space, appropriate it for your own purposes.

July 11: Talk about the ways in which Sand uses documents in her work. How does she construct a kind of narrative out of these discrete documents (as if to create linearity out of syncopation)? What is her work's ambition? What would you like to take from her example? What might you rather leave behind?


July 12: Talk about Santos Perez's argument, how he makes that argument through documentation, use of space, research? What is the process you learn that makes it possible to read this book (and Sand's, WCW's)? How does the book teach you to read it, in other words?



July 13: Second Workshop. See July 6 for the workshop plan. If you have concerns about your own work that you would like to have addressed by the group, please note those on the blog in preparation for the workshop.


Week Three


Reading: finish Sand, Perez, & read Allison Cobb's Green-Wood

Assignment: Do some research on your subject. Use whatever resources you have at hand, mostly the internet, but anything else you can find or remember (memory is always an excellent resource). Build a poem/section out of the building blocks of research, using Cobb as a model.


July 18: Talk about the claim Cobb's book makes on its reader, and then about the form she uses to convey information & meaning to you. Concentrate your attentions on a section of the book, and be prepared to walk us through it in class. How does the poem work, formally and conceptually?


July 19: Think about the poems in the text, found and composed by the poet. What is their purpose? Why are they placed where they're placed? Think about the notes. Why include them? (If you hate them, say so, but also say why.) Think about the poet's use of italics. Think about the empty spaces between paragraphs, poems. Think about the white space.


July 20: Third Workshop. By now the method should be clear, and we should have tweaked it to our own purposes.



Week Four


Reading: C.D. Wright's One Big Self
Assignment: Write a poem/section based on an image, video, photograph, painting. Be sure it's related to your topic, but use the image however you wish.



July 25: Talk about Wright's use of photographs (there are more in the original edition, but this is what we've got). Also think about how she uses voices, how she makes sure they sound local, how she works to avoid appropriating persons into art. (OR: is that a problem? OR: how do we negotiate the seeming divide between art and life, between other people and our own work as poets?)


July 26: Fourth Workshop: This will cover your poem on an image, as well as your final projects, so expect to be busy today!


July 27: Final session. Bring your chapbooks to class and be prepared to read, perform, present them. You don't have to do a formal reading: you may also do a power point or a performance using someone else in the class as another voice. Whatever works. Then we'll adjourn for lunch, drinks, whatevaz.

Farewell to Dementia Blog

Dementia Blog began August 1, 2006 with this:

--Shown a photograph of herself and Sangha (2 or 3 years ago), she doesn't recognize herself. That's my mother, she says.

It has ended with the contents of her drawer at Arden Courts of Fair Oaks in Fairfax, mainly photographs she could not identify by name, place, or time. There were lyrics to songs she did not sing, part of a novel she doubtless did not read.

__________

My mother's dementia preceded the blog, and my memories of her will postdate it. But the blog was a place of paradoxes, an obsessively-kept record that memorialized her forgetting. What it did not call forth was a woman who told wonderful stories about her adventures in North Africa and Europe during WWII, who married late, who became a mother later than that, tried hard not to replicate the patterns of her own growing up (succeeding, failing). It did not offer evidence of her wry wit, her sarcasm ("if this plane goes down, all the fish in the sea will be drunk" she said before one trans-Atlantic flight; "you'd have to be awfully sober to find your house in this neighborhood," she said of a suburban cookie-cutter community). It did not tell the story of her childhood in an alcoholic family (hence the jokes). It did not tell of her work for the rich old woman in Meadville, Pennsylvania, Mrs. Kidder, or of the black man named Lincoln who sang about the caged bird. It did not tell of her M.A. in Speech and Drama from the University of Iowa ("Oh, I do a little Speech," she would tell people, lest they think her one of those students). It did not tell of her work at Grinnell College for a stern older dean, where she hid students' illegal animals--pig, chicken--in a basement until they all got busted. It did not tell of her time at Northern Michigan, where the president of the college had hair dryers installed in the women's bathroom six feet off the ground, where only he could use them. It did not tell of her adventures in north Africa, where she worked for the Red Cross and ducked in a ditch to avoid a bombing raid, where she saw a dead body stuffed in a trash can in Algiers. It did not tell how she invaded Italy with the US Army (in her function as administrator of entertainment to US troops), how she witnessed battles, met men who never came back from their own bombing raids, got a pair of small combat boots from one of the "Neecy boys" of the 442nd. It did not tell of her experience of the Battle of the Bulge, or of how she was at Dachau when it was liberated, of how it took her several days to even know what she had seen--all the bodies on the train cars, bodies everywhere, men in pajamas making shelters for themselves out of anything they found around them. It did not tell of how she chanted "war is hell" the one time (she says) she got drunk, in Bad Neuheim, Germany, where she told them either to fix her dripping toilet or take it away, so they took it away, or of how she danced naked in the moonlight in north Africa after drinking spiked wine, had to be restrained by several grown men. It did not tell of how a soldier greeted her every day with "when will you marry me?" til she got the chaplain to come along; when the soldier asked next, she said, "how about now?" and that was the end of that. It did not tell how she almost told stories about her friends' abortions. It did not tell of how she met my father and pretty much tackled him, of how a psychic had told her years before who he would be, or of the hearts she broke before she met him. It did not tell of the rainbow she saw as she drove over the Scottish border once, which made her happy she did not have a camera because then she could really see it, the green grass and the sheep. It did not tell how fierce a mother she was, protective and sometimes vicious. It did not tell how she would get angry and withdraw, sometimes for days, refusing to speak to her daughter, or of how she would mysteriously reappear, softening over hours. It did not tell how that happened at Lenin's Tomb in 1981. It did not tell of how we would sometimes lie in bed and giggle hysterically. It did not tell of the pianist she'd seen at a concert once with enormous sleeves, who swoooped and swoooped over the keys like a huge bird. It did not tell how she would eavesdrop on conversations and then repeat them better than they'd happened, or how she met a Swiss woman in a cafe in Basel (?) and, without any shared language, learned the story of the woman's son. It did not tell how she had survived amoebic dysentery in north Africa (was it?) only after a doctor suggested she use mineral oil, or how she demanded mineral oil when she got sick on a trip in Norway. It did not tell how she communicated her need for tissues by vividly pretending to blow her nose outside a shop. It did not tell how she settled in to suburban life, filling her houses with bad furniture and art. It did not tell how she told me to listen when Martin Luther King came on the large wooden radio because he used English so well. It did not tell how she would recite part of "Captain, My Captain" or the poem about being master of your fate and captain, as if it were possible. It did not tell about how she promised herself at age five that she would never be hurt again, and tried to live by that idea for decades too long. It did not tell about how she suffered anxiety, worried silly, arriving at meetings early, fretting over every detail. It did not tell about how much she wanted control. It did not tell about how she drove to New Haven when I said I thought there was something wrong in my head, then took to her hotel bed. It did not tell about her oddly charged relationships with my friends, or with neighbors, how she took people in and disowned them with the same passion. It did not tell about how she cancelled her subscription to Time when they published photographs from Last Tango in Paris, of how she resented the condescension of their reply. It did not tell about how we drove the Pennsylvania Turnpike in a snowstorm in search of colleges, how the rental car agency wouldn't rent her the car because she didn't have a job. It did not tell how she and my father withdrew behind a closed door to eat peanuts because I am so allergic to them. It did not tell how she tried to learn to play the piano, Christmas carols in August, but got no better than first or second year. It did not tell how she did a needlepoint on her grandmother's pillow. It did not tell how her grandmother, Mama, died in her arms in her late 80s, as she and Martha and her brother Joe laughed over dinner. It did not tell how Mama wanted to be a conductor, made large motions with her arms to the radio. It did not tell how she said she would never care for a grandchild of her own, and then how she offered to watch Sangha when we knew she could not. It did not tell how her life was woven in with historical time, how one woman wandered through wars and kitchen appliances and rights movements and elections. It did not tell how they named their cars Marfred and Heidi and TJ. It did not tell how she and her classmates were allowed to get up and look out the window when an airplane flew past. It did not tell how she loved to do crossword puzzles with her neighbor, Ernie, until he died and her mind escaped. It did not tell about how angry she was that everyone had wanted her to act, be artistic, when she should have been an accountant. It did not tell how lovingly she kept her books, down to the penny. It did not tell how she made monkey faces (yes, it did!), or how the acting teacher at her college said he had just the part for her--a monkey on Noah's Ark. It did not tell of how, as the smallest student in the class, she had her feet radiated over and again on the x-ray machine. It did not tell of how she used to smoke, until she married. It did not tell of her encounters with Al Jolson or with Marlene Dietrich. It did not tell how she showed the latter a tent in a field where she could stay and how Dietrich swept her hand forward and said, "I vill go on to Berlin!" It did not tell how she could not grieve when her husband died. It did not tell how she grieved for a Navy officer who killed himself, because he too was short, "like Fred." It did not tell how she resented her own family, her husband's family, but wanted one for her daughter. It did not tell how she was bitten by a raccoon in her own house, how she said "it just does you in" of the rabies shot she had to have, of how it got in the local newspaper. It did not tell how she asked questions like, "why do you like Modern Art?" or "do you write only for other poets?" It did not tell how she'd adored George Bernard Shaw, how she went to see the Bronte's house and Shelley's "grave." It did not tell of the set of Shakespeare Mrs. Kidder gave her that she got rid of when my father died, along with his clothes, his gold watch, his shoes, her decorative Nazi sword. It did not tell about the big pieces of pie she cut, or how she refused to borrow money or take on mortgages in Monopoly. It did not tell about the wavy brown hair she grew down to her waist, wrapped up in a bun with bobby pins. It did not tell about how, when my father died, and the young doctor entered the room she said, "I trust you're not going to ask me how I am." It did not tell how much she loved hotdogs and ice cream sandwiches, or how she ate a hamburger in Frankfurt and a frankfurter in Hamburg. It did not tell how she sat down one day to write her friends to say she was not Smokey any more, she was Marty.

__________

Search "dementia blog" and "Alzheimer's" to find the rest of Dementia Blog on-line, or rather the sections of it that came after the book was published in 2008.

Tinfish Retro Chapbook #4, by Kenny Tanemura

MAO'S PEARS

In Kenny Tanemura's rendering of him, Mao is hardly an all-powerful leader, or icon. Instead, he walks down the street, encounters the poet in his kitchen, offers a friend romantic advice, thinks about Filipino literature, suffers from indigestion. He is muse to a poet who thinks about many of the same things, who reports on conversations with Mao as if they were as ordinary as pears. An assemblage more than an historical figure, his figure shadows everything that happens in this collection. Tanemura writes with a deft wit, in whimsical but pointed verse.

from "Requiem for Mao":

Mao walked by me on North Street,
the sleeve of his shirt brushed against mine.
While I was working at the computer,
Mao roller-skated around my kitchen,

knocked on the wall with his knuckle.
He let me figure it out slowly:
why he wanted a homeland
and a mother tongue to keep

his adolescence in a perpetual
state of calculation. But Mao knows
that the checkbook on his desk,
and the honeysuckle on the side-street

around the corner from my place
are more than a reflection. The basket
on the tabletop and the anemones
are on the same plane, winners and losers

both play with a racket.

Former member of the Junior Young Buddhist Association and the Palo Alto Buddhist Temple, 2.5 generation Japanese American, ex-Obon Festival volunteer, Dharma School educated, West Coast writer. Tanemura is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. His poems have appeared in Volt, The Sonora Review, Xconnect, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, and elsewhere.

You can purchase this chapbook for $3 at Tinfishpress.com; there's still time to order all 12 for $36. Designed, like all of the Retro chaps, by Eric Butler.

The contents of my mother's drawer

At the end of her life, my mother had hardly any possessions--some clothes, an ancient television, a couple of pieces of furniture (were those even hers?). But she did have the contents of a bed-side drawer, where I found all of these items except a photo of my dad, which was perched on a ledge above her. It appeared to have been folded and injured, probably by her: one of her neighbors is infamous for destroying family photos unless they're contained in the sealed box outside her door. There are photos we sent her of the kids; a Ph.D. graduation photo; some birthday cards, the most recent of which was 2007 or so; there are lyrics to religious songs, including "Mansion Just Over the Hilltop," which begins: "I'm satisfied with just a cottage below, / A little silver and a little gold; / But in that city where the ransomed will shine, / I want a gold one that's silver lined." Finally, there's a small ripped out section of a novel that belonged to another resident, namely Hobgoblin by John Coyne. (This resident turns out to be one of the lovebirds.) The first page of this copy, which is page 277 of the book, has quite a sex scene on it; at the bottom, etched into the page from an earlier one, can be found seven question marks.

A shadow-talk with Roland Barthes on mourning

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard.


RB's mother died 10/25/1977, which was my mother's 60th birthday. I found his mourning diary at Bridge Street Books today. Many entries do not resonate for me, but some do quite profoundly. He wrote his notes on index cards; they were only published in 2009 in France, and in 2010 in the US. I want to talk back (the belated talking to, when one party is unable to speak in the present) to him about many of his notes.

So, RB like this, SMS like this. We're at a cafe somewhere, calling and responding.


--I don't want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it--or without being sure of not doing so--although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths. 10/31

The strange phrase here is "without being sure of not doing so," but more so because the full sentence turns on that pivot between the fear of literature and acknowledgment that this is what it's made of. Why the fear of literature in the face of death? Or is it the too-sudden emergence of literature, before the mourning period makes it somehow appropriate? When I began my blog, I had no idea it would record her death in some near-present tense; had I thought toward the moment . . .


--A strange new acuity, seeing (in the street) people's ugliness or their beauty. 10/31

This rhymes with my experience, though usually without the suffix of "ugliness or beauty." I simply notice them more, when I notice something other than my thoughts--not distractions, except when I'm driving (or riding my bike). Altered states are not states so much as wobbles, the inside of a balloon as the air comes in and then exits, quickly. Pfffft.


--What's remarkable about these notes is a devastated subject being the victim of presence of mind. 11/2

Again, I don't think that the word "victim" sings to me, but the rest of the sentence does. During her last hour, her hand seemed to be melting, mottles into skin, skin into nails, fingers into fingers. When my urgency was not to save her, but to send her on as well as I could.


--henceforth and forever I am my own mother. 11/4 (which was the day of my father's death in 1992)

And henceforth this writing about my mother will be writing about me. And that is some of what makes me feel nervous, awkward. Until now, I was not the story, the story was my mother's dementia, that of her colleagues at the Alzheimer's home, the story of care, of pain, of memory jostled, necessary, in the face of forgetfulness. To what extent can writing about grief be about the person who is gone? Or are we now left with ourselves as subject, object, verb? During dementia, there were losses but there was not Loss. Grief is official now. But whose is it? Hers, mine, that of the cloud in which our information is stored?


--Struck by the abstract nature of absence . . . Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better; it is absence and pain, the pain of absence--perhaps therefore love? 11/10

Abstraction used to feel like a place of refuge. Like the place you could go when the kapu was broken, and you'd be safe. Now it is not only a spirit (instead of material person) but a spirit that is moving away. Not public transport, nor private, but transport nonetheless, and not (necessarily) solitary. I must follow the track of the Tibetan Book. I lost it on Tuesday. Bard, bardo. A soul in search of her next incarnation. One hopes she's not in northern Virginia's traffic pattern, blocked arteries on a Saturday afternoon.


--Mourning: a cruel country where I am no longer afraid. 11/17

The mind softens, the Buddhists say. Every blow makes us more pliable, more liable to adjust, not to duck but to face forward, absorb punishment as something more loving than that. When Barthes writes of not being afraid, he means that he has suffered until he knows how. It's not alleviation of suffering, at least not at first, but the promise it will at once go and be our guide. In the middle of the woods and all that.

and especially:


--[Status confusion]. For months, I have been her mother. It is as if I had lost my daughter (a greater grief than that? It had never occurred to me.) 11/19

She was neither mother nor daughter at the end. I have a daughter, who is not powerless, says what she means to say. But she was not my mother, either, except as the living memory of her. The body is memory, even after the mind checks out (extended stay is not home). She was like the spirit in Beloved, at once a person and a ghost. But those who stop visiting Alzheimer's patients think ghost, not person. Person is there to be seen.


--What I find utterly terrifying is mourning's discontinuous character.

In my stupor today I watched golf on television. There is a new golfer; he's Irish. He was wearing a baby blue shirt, an ad on his white cap. But to watch golf is not to know where you are in time or place. It's not on a field you can take in, the players all in the same space, time. Instead, the game discontinues, from hole to hole, frontwards and then back. It's grief without the affect, merely the motion of grieving, the arcs that are not yet circles, the holes that have not yet been filled with flags (mom died on Flag Day at the home). It's important to die at home, they told me.


After that point, Barthes' entries replay themselves, a circling that fails--that does not try--to close. Love for mother becomes love for grieving over her (perhaps). He's not reached mourning; he's at the many stations of melancholia. At some point in late 1978, when he is still taking these notes, I attended one of his talks at the Sorbonne. I remember nothing of it, except a solitary man sitting in front of our semi-circle of seats, audience rapt in its devotion for him.