Poems in Wet Cement Press #1

 Please find here:

https://www.wetcementpress.com/wcpmag1?fbclid=IwAR3nY01OD-al91PTu_Y6GxVzx0V2PbHv2K5ubtF0BtfbZWJE__xuMo2DKaU

It's a fine issue all around--

Wanderer

 

19 January 2022

Light assumes morning

Morning assumes the light, with

Or without a you

The man on the bus

Has been grieving twenty years

Grief generating

Grief as he wanders

Accumulating debts of

Anger--a kind of

Wonderment--he hates

Vegas, hates grifters, voices

Embarrassment for

Us; the masks are now

Real, unmetaphored: Cover

Nose and mouth, driver

Says, drifting back to

See young man with a neck brace

Hospital bracelet

 

As one row in front

A bearded man says something

To me with his eyes.

The man so burdened

By his sanity hands me

Auden’s dive bar poem

“There’s no affirming

Flame now,” he says, no one looks

At you behind those

Things (artifice for

Flame), Achilles shield a smart

Phone, with payment apps

It starts to rain near

Volcano, where I get off,

Knees pink in cold rain

“If you have a place

To stay,” and I do, today’s

Ferns backlit with flame.

Bus to Volcano

 

I asked him where he was getting off the bus, and he said he didn't know, he would when he felt like it. He'd been traveling since 9/11, when he lived two blocks from the trade towers. I saw him first at the Hilo bus terminal, seated one green wooden row behind me. His clear plastic rimmed glasses looked slightly academic; he was wearing a black cloth mask on top of a blue paper one. His tousled hair was flaxen, his arms and calves brown from the sun. He had a backpack and a bag in which I saw a large book about Mayan archeology. Later on my ride to Volcano, he pulled out Auden's poem that starts with the dive on 52nd street and ends with "affirming flame," as well as a review of Joan Didion. "Memories are what we don't want to remember," is what I remember of that, and I do want to. He wanted to know if I'd thought about the hypocrisy of people in the Pac NW who were environmentalists. He wanted to know what I thought of Title IX and people stealing each other's work. He'd traveled all over the world, seen people wearing masks, cultural masks, and more recently people who knew they were wearing masks and put them on deliberately. Then he pointed to his two masks, as if with regret for us all. He asked me a lot of questions, about my students, about what I'd taught. But he said he no longer talked to people much (he noted a couple of times that I was an exception) because they were so nosy about his life. They over-shared, and he didn't want to. He kept talking about projects, those that had been ripped off; was so mad at people in Hilo he refused to go to the library there any more. He had gone to an exhibition in Hilo by an artist who grew up in Brooklyn about grieving. I read the flyer he handed me. He'd lost a lot of people during AIDS, and lamented the loss of mentors for gay and trans youth today because so many had died young. He took down the name of my colleague who had died of AIDS, said he'd look for him (but not on tech, clearly!). "Some people, you know, think they're really open to gay people, but you begin to wonder." He didn't know which were most difficult, his cousins on Kauai or his mother in Kona. (He'd grown up in Santa Barbara.) He really didn't like what had happened to the country during his 20 salary-less years of travel. As I got up to leave the bus, I wished him well in his wandering. "Oh, I'm not wandering," he said, "it's the country that's wandering." It's a different kind of wandering, I agreed.

Micro-plasti-city

 

6 January 2022

Was a suicide

Takes away a syllable

Makes fact a question

Which it always is

Except in retrospect when

A body appears

Where it was not then

When we bathed in denial

Of fact, mandating

Doubt, insurrection's

Theater, death a gambit

Gallows on the mall

Just a joke on Pence

Gallows humor ripe as trash

After-Christmas bin

Where an iphone pinged

And the bad guys were under

Cover cops in hats

From the wrong cities

And we couldn't tell the diff

All remainders doubts

Doubt's authority’s

Barbells: look at those big pecs!

Tell me you don’t want

The boot in your face

Just a ballet shoe en pointe

Stalin danced the reel

Real films on fake news

Persuade us otherwise like

Fictions making fact

At Kahana Beach

I took photos of surf spray

Through pine needles, sun

In rolling surf, brown

Closer in as it always

Is, micro-plastics

Scattered, beauty

That won’t die as truth can do

Blue shard, bubblegum

Dispenser—engraved

Styrofoam chips from

Crushed coffee vases

Time’s remnant step-child

Still lives inside a poem

Re-use, re-cycle.

New Year, New iPhone

Ambiguous light

This first of January

Mountain eye, absence

Of pervasive cloud

Claude outside hides behind plant

It fails to hide him

From Maeve, who growls, rain

Recommences nattering

On green and brown fronds

My unpoetic

Palm, neither metaphor nor

Face plant on this day

We devote to mean-

ing, action not result,

Always the same thing:

History’s erasure

Necessary, too simple

Not to run the wheel

Again: I love them

“To the moon and back” though no

Moon shows in portal

So I have faith in

Moon, memory reassures me

It’s there like the star

I can't imagine

In the space between the eyes

So I remember

Looking at the real

Sky, its pixel of light shifts

To the inner-verse

That counters facebook’s

Claim to multitudes of verse

Or algorithms

Where was the lyric

Crash when we needed it, mass

Media broken like

Instruments of Christ-

mas on tile floors slick as ice

Stark as burned grasslands

Our houses are grass

No flag of dispositions

Just American

Fascist pole dancers

Clank of rope against metal

Post, same word as post-

War, post-pandemic,

All the posts you shall salute

As flags come down, half-

Staff is par for course

When everyone’s sick, cannot

Fly the plane, drive car

Friend’s daughter attacked

In elevator by mask

Denying woman

Friend’s daughter wrestled

In high school, sex assumptions

Presage the coming

Uncivil conflict

I sit in my closed room while

Claude washes right paw

Outside the glass door

Nothing’s broken yet this day

Post-firework, post-tra-

Socially Engaged Buddhism: essay for Upaya's course

 

Susan M. Schultz

Socially Engaged Teaching and Writing: Mental Health

I retired this past June. Since then, I have worked with NAMI support groups on zoom to extend the mental health work described below. But the year was mainly devoted to writing about the activism I did at UHM. In that sense, my engagement was both retrospective and prospective, as I’m looking for a direction to go with mental health activism. This essay links to two others I wrote during this past year, as well as to attention exercises I had my students do during my last decade of teaching.

I only walked out of two classes in my 31 years of teaching at the University of Hawai`i. The first time had to do with student nastiness, the second with apathy. In the second, as in all my creative writing classes, I assigned readings to discuss and then to use as models for poems and vignettes. I grew more frustrated as the semester wore on. One day I pointedly asked each students if they’d done the reading. Only one student had, a veteran, older than the others. I felt anger rising from my gut, said something about how I couldn’t teach if no one did the reading, and left the room.

And then I wondered why they weren’t reading. I wrote a brief questionnaire asking how many hours a week they worked, how many they studied, what else was going on in their lives. What I found was that most of them worked many more hours than they studied. I also discovered the following: one young man was caregiving his grandfather; a young woman’s father had died in California earlier in the semester; a young man who acted out a lot in class had tried to kill himself in his car. (He wrote an email to say he was going to miss class because he was feeling suicidal, but the email came after the fact.)

J. composed a song for our class, played it via zoom on her home keyboard. She was a gifted writer, as well, and kind to other students across the boundaries of zoom boxes. When she began to miss classes, I asked what was going on. Her roommate was drinking herself to death, she said, which was even more awful because J. was an addict and trying to stay clean. She wrote about a sexual assault she had suffered a few years ago.

The class I walked out of had been centered around “attention.” This was one of the first I devoted to seeing and hearing the world as it is. What to do when no one had the energy or the stillness to attend? And how could I guide them, when they were so tired and stressed out? How could I change my own way of being with them, taking into account this new world of overwork and overstimulation?

This class had come at around the same time I started doing mental health advocacy on my campus. In the classes that followed this one, I talked openly about mental health issues (I always had) and gave students “attention exercises” each week, along with a requirement that they do nothing for 10 minutes a day. (Hard one to judge, I know.) These exercises emphasized randomness, wandering, staring, eavesdropping, and other skills underutilized in college curriculums. Here are the first five exercises:

1. Look at a raisin for eight full minutes, then eat it very slowly.

2. Take your dog on a walk and notice what your dog notices.

3. Spend 15 minutes watching and listening to your cat. (Any animal is fine, including geckos, lizards, guinea pigs, and so on.)

4. Spend 15 minutes sitting in a public place (bus stop, mall, etc.). What do you hear and see?

5. Spend 15 minutes with a photograph or a still from the television. Describe exactly what you see. You might also draw what you see, if you wish. Then write about the process of drawing what you saw.

You can find the full list of these exercises on my blog: https://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2019/12/judgment-calls.html We also read Harryette Mullen’s Tanka Diary, and Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, as well as haiku translated from the Japanese. I set the stage for this deep immersion in nothing-in-particular on the first day of class, when we did a meditative walk on campus, slowly around a small pond. (“At first I hated it, then by the second time around, I was enjoying noticing things,” was a typical comment.) One student’s final project was a blow by blow record of what happened in class: who said what, what we wrote, how we walked with my dog Lilith in one of our class outings, noticing what she noticed.

R. was an older student from Canada. She’d lived in South Korea, where she spent time at a monastery. A bad car accident had left her with brain damage; an ex-husband had raped her; her family, which was far away, had not been kind, though she wanted to see her mother who was dying of cancer. She was living in a room in a house whose walls were paper thin. She had biofeedback treatment for her frequent headaches and trouble concentrating, but any more treatment than that was inaccessible to her. She made it through one of my classes with great effort, and with flying colors. She didn’t finish her second semester with me. I think she returned to Canada.

My academic career turned, finally, away from knowledge and toward wisdom. Rather than teach students about the rules that ordain a sonnet, I taught them how to think like a sonnet, based on their direct experience of the world. I also spent more and more time advocating for better mental health resources, suicide prevention, and openness about the deaths of students and faculty. I wrote an extended essay on my activism here: https://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2019/12/judgment-calls.html This essay gets at the unfortunate fact that improving mental health care at my university (and many others) has more to do with PR than with actual care. The university knows its audience is not its students, but their parents and especially the legislature. Arguments based on ethics or morality (students are dying of despair and we owe them our support!) fall flat. Only financial considerations matter, along with desperate attempts to avoid appearing in the local media or in court. I hear Roshi Joan quoting Roshi Bernie Glassman on getting up every day and doing one’s work, without expectations for “success.” This has been a difficult lesson.

A. was a lively, active student, alert to others and to the work we were doing. Her father, a veteran, had killed himself. Another woman in that class had a father who threatened to kill himself; my discussion of suicide prevention triggered her. A third woman’s father was a binge alcoholic; when he was drinking, she stayed home to watch over him, missing classes. She got a quick appointment at the Counseling Center (on my recommendation, I told her to say she was in crisis), was told she needed therapy they couldn’t offer, but that her situation was not a crisis.

Along with the essay I cited earlier, I wrote a long solicited post for the University of Pennsylvania blog, Psyche on Campus: https://web.sas.upenn.edu/psycheoncampus/2021/12/04/loving-yourself-workshop-a-poem/ In this short essay, which includes a poem, I write about a flyer UHM that advertised a “Love Yourself Workshop.” Among the many deep problems with the flyer, and the workshop it advertises, is the idea that loving oneself as an individual will bring you better mental health. It’s the mental health equivalent of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps when you have no straps, or boots. If you attend the workshop, however, you might get some balloons. (I hated the Counseling Center’s balloons, which they pulled out for their rare appearances in public spaces. But one such day I was taking the public bus home, when I saw a young man clutching his balloon; on it was a tag with mental health resources.)

C., who was from out of state, suffered PTSD. The Counseling Center’s wait list was over 80 souls long. She reached out to a therapist back home (this was the pre-zoom days). In the same class, another young woman missed class because she had to pay her own rent and that of a roommate who wasn’t able to pay. Late in the class, she revealed that she’d only recently gotten out of an abusive relationship. I do not teach poetry as therapy, but there were tears at the end of that semester; not all of them were hers.

My anger at my non-reading students was matched by my rage against the university’s administration. More than once I performed my anger in front of an audience (twice in front of members of student government, another time in front of the college senate executive committee). I am half-Irish, after all, a bit of a pugilist. But there’s a limit to what rage can do, and there was a severe limit to what administration was willing to accomplish. What I discovered then, and was amplified greatly in my time with SEBT, was that real changes were made from “below.” My department began to have more conversations about our students’ mental health; connections were made by way of my Compassion Hui across campus; students came forward more to talk about their issues.

Talking about mental health issues doesn’t solve them, of course, nor does any number of “attention exercises.” But what I’m working toward now, during and after this course, is a consideration of how to create closer communities. As a wise friend of mine told me that “we all need to feel protected.” Expressions of care are a start. Students my last couple of zoomed semesters told me they were happy I checked in with them before every class. No one said a lot about their situations in front of the others, but a space was opened for them, and some spoke to me directly. In an odd sense, this past year has made me less ambitious in my activism, if “ambition” can be said to lead to structural changes. Instead, I’ve learned how difficult it is to change institutions, but how effective one can be in organizing small groups around care for themselves and their group.

One of my colleagues, who left UHM after four years, said he knew of graduate students who were homeless. UH has released information that 40% of its students suffer from food insecurity. My colleague organized talking sessions, where students shared their problems in turn, no one interrupting anyone else. I often wonder how students can learn anything, when they’re trying so hard simply to survive. My colleague said he’d talked to other young faculty who said they’d never seen such high levels of trauma in their students at other schools.

During the past year, I’ve sat in on support groups for people dealing with the illness of a family member, along with one peer group meeting. Participants talk about daughters and sons and partners with bipolar illness, personality disorder, schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, addictions to meth and/or alcohol. Pervasive anxiety and depression bring up the rear. Some hope that their family members will get arrested; it’s the only way for them to get care. Others wonder whether they should throw their son or daughter out of the house. They all suffer in the presence of so much suffering. It’s a lot to expect people so burdened to support one another. During one meeting a man whose son suffers schizoaffective disorder talked about how angry he used to get with his son. They fought constantly. He and his wife went to a therapist who told them never to get in fights with their son. “Approach only with love,” they were told. According to husband and wife, that advice has improved their situation immensely. He delivered the message of G.R.A.C.E. in a single sentence. This year has been filled with such connections for me, and I greatly appreciate the teachings and fellowship.

A year after the class I walked out of, I ran into one of the students parking on a street near campus. She hailed me. “I saw a shama thrush the other day,” she said, “and I watched it for a long time.”

Found wandering in Mililani

 

27 December 2021

Someone loved Murphy

Before he became Murphy

Dog, one-eyed gimpy

Legged flat-faced dog

Head half-shaved, white fur on nose

Two seniors discount

“I’m a free dog,” he

Might have said, like guy in grave-

Yard who wears no mask

When he sells flowers

“No need,” he told me; and he’s

The one foretold 1/

6 last December

Anne calls her dog Murphy Mouse

After her father

Marie Murphy my

Late friend, why not early friend

Who left before me?

Wanted his ashes

Put down the can at Dublin’s

Theater instead

Scattered on bar floor--

In Cork all stores had Irish

Names which surprised

Me oddly, town rich

From Viagra, one man tells

Me, another glad

An Englishman asked

Him for a job, that was years

Ago, irony

Is historical

Time, no fun in forever

It flattens us out

Less contour fewer

Potholes, her nephews wouldn’t

Get shots for father

With cancer, waited

Until restaurants opened

To those with vax cards

Family folded in

Self folded like bananas

Batter up this age

Of suicidal

Ideation in place of

Ideals which offer

No discounts no ad-

options reductio adds

And life cashes out.