While I work on an essay about gender (I’m switching from “they/them” back to “she/they,” for reasons I’ll make clear and which, yes, have significantly to do with the rampant misogyny engendered by this abhorrent administration stacked with rich dudes implicated in the Epstein files and which has led to the mess roiling my little town of Ithaca), I thought I’d share this bit of old prose which seems, somehow, pertinent.
Before #MeToo there was VIDA, taking literary outlets to task with their annual tallies showing the gender imbalance in whom they published (which the editors at first attempted to excuse away, and then largely figured out how to rectify).
All of the problems we’re facing now have been brewing since before Trump, including rape culture. But he has exacerbated every one, and especially that. Fascists and their ridiculous obsession with the gender binary and exaggerated masculinity and femininity: it would be laughable if it didn’t cause such harm.
Anyway, I wrote this ages ago for one of VIDA’s online publications, I don’t remember which. It goes a long way to explaining how I ended up, poetically, like this. I hope you enjoy it. And yes. Just call me Cassandra.
ANGER CLOGS MY THROAT
It’s true. When I get angry enough, I don’t scream around. I clam up. Same goes for grief. If you don’t hear from me for a while, there’s a good chance I’ve retreated into the darkness, chewing on some bone of rage, some injustice. Hardly ever a personal one, but more likely some injury to my wider sense of self that includes the whole shebang. Don’t worry, I’ll come out of it eventually. Usually with something to say.
After graduating from college, I got married (which was nice) and took a job in DC working for lawyers (not so nice). The guys I worked for were nice enough. Like so many people working for the monstrous machine that is the corporate world, they were decent people who had somehow rationalized what they did for the almighty dollar. Just as I was doing, working for them, though I had trouble ignoring the guilt and felt constantly like some kind of double agent (I joke that much of my activism is simply karmic cleanup for the time spent working in that office). One was a lobbyist for the banking and oil industries, the other was a white-collar-criminal defense attorney. In the course of typing up their letters and briefs, handling their phone calls, setting up dinners and parties for congress-critters complete with brandy and cigars, sitting in on senate hearings taking notes to report back to clients hoping to block Superfund legislation included in the reauthorization of the Clean Water Act that would require polluters to pay into a fund from which expenses could be drawn to clean up toxic spills, etc., I got way too close a look at how things work inside the Beltway. I had a ringside seat at the misogynist joke that was the confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas. And I didn’t write a poem for three and a half years.
The first one I did write, after unsticking the works with a few haiku, came to me entire, while I showered in the tiny bathroom of our basement apartment in Georgetown. I scribbled it down still dripping. I called Peter Meinke (my former poetry prof and mentor) in St. Pete from the office (by that point I was working for lawyers for the good guys) and read “An American Poet’s Manifesto” to him over the phone. And he said, “Oh. So you’re a political poet.” This coming from the author of “Atomic Pantoum” did not sound like an insult. In fact, he sounded pleased, like someone who had successfully passed a baton.
The Buddha, Gandhi, and the saints tell us that anger’s no good, that it burns the one who holds it; and I get that. I try to live it. But Edward Abbey makes sense to me when he says, “Love implies anger. The [wo]man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.” I care about everything. I care about people, I care about the planet and all its inhabitants, not just the human ones. And I’m not in the habit of turning a blind eye. I’m not even capable. The world is so fucked. And so tender. Beauty crowds us and calls us to turn from the worship of ego and greed. Who listens? The cacophony of modern culture provides endless cover, distracting us from the sweet song of the real world, that world which has nothing to do with bottom lines or the GDP. But walking the dogs, past the old trees on my village street, I hear it. It resonates with the moving water, provides accompaniment to the birds of spring. And knowing that so much could be different if everyone listened to that world that’s calling us, and seeing how that call is constantly ignored, I get angry.
There’s so much for me to get angry about. Rape culture. War. Economic inequalities. The destruction of the natural world. The power of our spiritual traditions being hijacked by the stupid and the mean and being used to manipulate and divide people, making them easy pawns in the games played by economic elites. Systemic racism. For-profit prisons. The scapegoating of LGBT+ people and immigrants. And it’s all one big meatball. Pull on any one thing in this litany and you’ll find it’s connected to everything else. So where does one begin?
James Baldwin says, “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world…The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way…people look at reality, then you can change it.” Still, it’s a tall order. Nobody wants to read a rant, especially one that implicates them. And we’re all implicated. Unless you live in a cave somewhere sustaining yourself on bugs and worms, you’re in on it. I’m in on it. Though I’m trying to do better, trying, with the choices I make as a consumer, to do at least less harm. And trying to raise my voice, in person and in writing, against those things that insult my soul. And trying, when I meet people, to extend to them the love I feel in the abstract. To recognize that the face looking back at me looks at me with the same divine consciousness that looks out through my own eyes. “Namaste” means “the divine light in me recognizes and honors the divine light in you.” Pretty cool way to say “hey,” and though I don’t use the word itself (do I need to fulfill that perfectly the stereotype of the hippie poet?), the approach remains.
So what does an engaged poetics look like? Usually I try to wait until the anger has cooled. I don’t spew so much as simmer. Slow cooking. To be spooned out after the fact, often with a dollop of humor, which not only makes it go down easier, but keeps me from getting ill with bitterness. But when, while hot crude was still jetting out of the cracked sea bed in the Gulf during the BP ecocide, Amy King asked me to write a poem to submit to Poets for Living Waters, I had to figure out how to temper my anger and despair and write something in the moment. I chose the haiku stanza in the hope that by constraining myself in that way I would be forced to hammer the hot steel into something that would cut to the heart of the matter and not just flow all over in some mess of spit and tears. The result was “Pallinode,” from which comes the title of this bit of prose. Fat lot of good it’s done, I know.
In another, unpublished poem I write, “So what that nothing written in the form/ of a poem will ever budge another’s/ suffering the width of a gnat’s wing./ We write for the same reason we pray./ Not because we think it will do anything./ But because it changes us.” [This was written during what I refer to as my “religious derangement,” while I had returned to the Church I had soundly rejected in my 20s, and after coming out of it, not praying left a void, for this reason; and so I’m so grateful to be connected now to a group of Indigenous women where I can pray in a decolonized way.] And I guess that’s all I can hope for, really. But still, some part of me hopes for more. Hopes that through some ripple effect I can change things, I can alleviate the suffering that is everywhere so present and persistent. Hungry people. Girls walking miles risking rape to fetch water. Walking ever farther as water becomes more scarce. Cancer clusters being hushed up so that the frackers can continue to pump toxins into the water table. Smokestacks and pipelines choking communities of color whose very existence is denied in environmental impact statements. Gun fetishists. Rape apologists.
At the AWP bookfair I made a beeline to the VIDA booth because I wanted to thank the ladies there for the work they’re doing, and I told Cate that it’s not just a matter of fairness that we achieve gender equity in publishing, that it’s a necessity. Because women’s voices will save the world. It’s not a coincidence that the natural world is considered feminine. Mother Nature. The Earth Goddess. The systematic dismantling of the systems that support life on this planet is the logical end-point of misogyny. Of patriarchy. Feminist Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson writes that the patriarchs have made of God the Father an idol that obliterates the wide horizon of the truth that divinity is. And I believe it. In *Half the Sky* the authors point out that sociological studies show that if you leave the men in charge of the money they spend it on alcohol and prostitutes, whereas the women, given the chance, spend it on food and the education of their children. This is, of course, not to say that there are no sensible, sensitive men, or that all women are saints. But just that it is in the nature of women, who, thanks to biology, bear children and often the sole responsibility for raising them, tend to plan for the future. And guess what? The future finds us, whether we’re prepared for it or whether we’ve spent our time drinking banana beer and paying for sex with girls.
The future that looms for us now, that I can’t turn a blind eye to, involves widespread drought, the failure of our food supply, poisoned aquifers, and war-and-oppression-as-business-model. And so, as a woman, as a mother, as a poet, as a citizen of the biosphere, I will continue to get pissed off and scribble against the status quo. And hope, against all reason, that it does something, that if nothing else it wakes up some small number of readers to the presence of both the balm of beauty and the injustice that calls for action. If anger clogs my throat, I will hawk it up, spit, and speak. And also hope that, thanks to VIDA, someone will publish it.
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