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The Banality of Death – Marsha Matthews

December 17, 2011 in General with 0 Comments

Marsha Matthews

5.2 poet Marsha Matthews remembers a childhood tragedy.

My poem “Crossing the Dead” draws from a difficult childhood memory. The incident happened in the backyard of my family’s modest ranch home on 49th Street North, in St. Petersburg, Florida, when I was about nine years old. My best friend fell from the top of our old pine tree, which towered several stories high. I remember the sound more than anything: her shriek and the clatter and pop of branches as her body slipped to the ground.

That day, we struggled together to pull my dad’s heavy wooden ladder out of the garage. Without it, we couldn’t reach even the lowest branches. We propped it against the tree, and I was the first one up. I climbed until I could look down on my roof where fluffy gray moss sprawled across the shingles. My friend caught up with me, climbed right on by, and kept going – higher and higher. Boy, did that make me mad! After all, I was superior – prettier, faster, smarter— those attributes came with being a year older. (Seniority was big in our neighborhood.) But the moment she climbed past me, through clumps of green longleaf needles, and into the clouds, I lost my clout.  She climbed so high, I couldn’t see her, except for a bit of her pink t-shirt or a flash of denim. “Come on, Marsha,” she said. “It’s easy.”

I could’ve strangled her. How could she have outshone me this way?  “Are you kidding me?” I looked at the teeny tiny pinecones on the ground. Our patio chairs had shrunk, too. A trembling worked its way from my bare toes, up my legs, into my tummy, and then shot into  my throat. Clutching the soft bark that so easily broke, exuding a wet smelly sap, I headed down, not up.

When I reached the safe, solid ground, I felt better. For about two seconds, that is, only long enough to remember that my best friend had climbed higher than I ever would, and she was still climbing. I didn’t taunt her, as does the narrator in “Crossing the Dead.” I didn’t want her to fall. But I was miffed.

She’d turned me into a scaredy cat. Me! Marsha, tightrope walker of chain-link fences, jumper-offer of rooftops, and spelunker of lake drainage pipes. Me? Sadly, I was too trembly to climb the old pine tree in my own back yard.

Crack! Though decades have past, I can still hear that crisp, deadly sound of the branch breaking under her weight. In seconds, she lay on the ground like a sack of oranges.

Did I cry for help? Did I run inside to get someone? No, I stood there, looking at her, on the ground, unmoving.

All I know is I should have been freaking out, running for help, or at least checking her pulse. What I did was the worst possible thing: nothing. That’s what I find difficult to accept about myself and why the memory has lingered so long in my heart, finally finding some release in the creation and sharing of “Crossing the Dead.”

True, I was only a little girl when the incident happened. A young girl with quite a bit of growing up to do. Back in the 1950s, we didn’t have 911.  But we did have moms who stayed home while their husbands worked. For some reason, my mom had a way of looking out the window at just the crack of disaster.

Marsha Matthew‘s poem “Crossing the Dead” appears in Relief issue 5.2. Read her full bio here. Those interested in reading more of Marsha’s poetry might enjoy reading her book Northbound Single-Lane, which can be purchased at Amazon.com. for $14.

Poetry & Presence – Michael Martin

December 13, 2011 in Faith and Culture, General, Writing and Publishing with 0 Comments

5.2 Poet Michael Martin offers notes on a poetry manifesto.

I used to think that Guillaume Apollinaire was the author of the single greatest line in the history of literature: “I know that only those will remake the world who are grounded in poetry.” I’m not so sure anymore. The word “poetry” has lost its savor. I’m not sure if the aura of professionalism promised by the MFA is to blame, though there is something within me that groans at the thought of poets updating their websites, planning their career trajectories, networking for the big grant money. There must be more to poetry than that.

I don’t write poetry for the sake of having a career or for satisfaction of writing “poet” on my income tax forms. I write poetry in order to wrestle with the problem of God in the only way that seems to work for me. The academic study of theology, of religion, or of hermeneutics, I think, generally avoids the problem of God. This avoidance comes about primarily through the tyranny of the thesis statement: the need to come up with an argument. Poetry doesn’t need an argument. In this, it is not unlike negative theology, which also refuses to be forced to define, abstract, and, above all, name that which cannot be named. So perhaps I come to terms with God by not coming to terms with God. The poems “Visions of Vladimir” and “Words written during the suffering and subsequent death of John Paul II, the Pope of Rome” both figure ways in which I try to contend with this problem.

The best poetry can hope for, I think, is to open us to presence. This is why I am so interested in religious poetry, which, in the best cases, opens us to the presence of God, to the mysterion. I am very fond of Simone Weil’s story about reciting her translation of George Herbert’s wonderful poem “Love” every time she had a migraine. She wrote to a priest she knew about this experience, explaining, “I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”

I do not pretend that my two offerings in Relief 5.2 will figure that for the reader. Rather, they are documents of my attempts at discovering God’s presence through a phenomenological attendance to the world which I then try to render into language. What this betrays, of course, is that my view of the world is underwritten by a belief in the sacramental participation of God in creation. God is not purely transcendent. Christianity, in addition to affirming God’s transcendence, tells us that God is also immanent: that God abides in all creation. But remaining aware of this presence is not always easy. We often read about God’s “absence,” but I have the feeling the absence is mostly on our account. In these poems I try to make myself aware of God’s presence in the midst of my own absence.

Michael Martin‘s poems “Visions of Vladimir” and “Words written during the suffering and subsequent death of John Paul II, the Pope of Rome” appear in issue 5.2 of Relief. Find his full bio here.

The Unspeakable in Poetry: A Love Story

December 10, 2011 in Author News, General, Writing and Publishing with 4 Comments

Julie L. Moore

5.2 poet Julie L. Moore explains how her poem became the occasion of our first printing the word “vulva” – and it turns out to be for the best of reasons.

Back in July of 1975, when I was just ten, a nurse carted me into the operating room of West Jersey Hospital. My parents walked along at my gurney’s side, my dad, holding my hand. At the O.R. door, the gurney stopped, my parents kissed me, and I looked at them and said, “Don’t worry. God is going to take care of me.”

In May of 2009, a nurse rolled me into the operating room at Kettering Medical Center in southwest Ohio for my eighth surgery and the removal of my fourth organ. My faith, scarred as my abdomen by then, was no longer blind or simple but hard as a dog’s big rawhide bone. When it fell, it clattered as it hit the floor. It was also vulnerable, capable of being devoured in one sitting, if I let it, by the sharp teeth and strong jaws of pain. And it wasn’t the kind of faith you cuddled up with.

It’s fairly easy to talk about losing body parts. I’ve received phone calls from friends and emails from readers I don’t know who find themselves in my uncomfortable shoes:

I have an ovarian cyst. Didn’t you get an ovary removed because of this? I’m going crazy here. Can you help me?

I’m having all kinds of trouble after having had my gall bladder removed last year. I heard you had trouble, too . . .

And I answer them.

Some, too, have contacted me because they endure unimaginable pain, the kind of long and deep suffering I had no idea existed when I was just ten. The kind that digs into their bones, their backs, their bellies. And that, too, I have talked about.

But there is one area that, until now, I found to be unspeakable. I knew I wasn’t alone, that other women endured what I was experiencing. But write about it? That just seemed wrong. On many levels.

Level One: I’d embarrass my family and/or myself.

Level Two: I just shouldn’t talk about that. Some things should remain private.

Level Three: If my readers know that, they’ll focus only on that and not on my work. (Maybe that’s not a category of “wrong” but rather a category of “ego.” But still.)

So I wrote about enduring pain, about making sense of suffering. I was vivid in my descriptions and clear about the temptations intractable pain brings, like overdosing on medications from well-meaning doctors. When pain stabs, shoots, tears, claws, shocks, and yes, feels like “fifty pins embedded” in flesh, who can stand it?

Yet, I avoided describing all my medical conditions for a variety of reasons. One, I didn’t want readers getting distracted by terminology and two, the most important thing was never what went wrong in my body but how, and why, I endured it.

After I’d published poems about my experiences, however, there was still a voice, sounding an awful lot like Elizabeth Bishop, that kept saying, “Write it!”

And “Prayer Shawl” was born. “Confession,” a poem I’d written several years ago, was the only poem that came close to naming the body parts that hurt, the incredibly feminine nature of my pain. But that poem was cloaked in biblical narrative, the hemorrhaging woman whose labia throbbed.

How to say vagina in a poem. Or vulva. With the possessive pronoun my.

But there it is in “Prayer Shawl,” a poem wrapped in the story of others, dear friends, who have likewise suffered, felt the temptation to throw in the towel, experienced the unrelenting grief of permanent loss. Yet endure.

And my poem is wrapped in the story of my marriage, a husband who has also endured pain and anxiety and the threat of premature death. How terrifying to live through such experiences together in our early forties. This wasn’t the way our story was supposed to go.

And how agonizing to realize that the love we shared, and yes, the making of that love, could not heal me. That I experienced such tremendous pain off and on for six years stood to threaten the very fabric of our marriage. What’s a love story without good sex, after all?

Except that sex isn’t the only way spouses can express love. Except that love can transcend even suffering. Except that prayer to a God who hung himself on a cross, while nails, no less, simultaneously punctured his tender flesh, really has sustained me.

This is my story, pain and love on multiple levels, a story that, as I’ve lived it, has often struck me dumb.

Julie L. Moore‘s poem “Prayer Shawl” appears in issue 5.2 of Relief.

The Story Is What It Is

December 5, 2011 in General, Writing and Publishing with 0 Comments

Maryann Corbett

5.2 Poet Maryann Corbett takes us back to the beginning of “Knowledge”

A great many narratives, fictional and real, turn on the unexpected discovery of a document. I suppose that when such a discovery actually happened to me, even in the turmoil that brought the document to light, I recognized the event as a narrative crux, something that might tie together frayed ends in the story of myself.

I found my mother’s annulment papers almost as my poem describes, but a few more details may be helpful. In 2008, my sister died of cancer. She had been the one who lived near our very elderly mother; I lived a thousand miles away. My sister’s care had made it possible for Mom to live independently, and now that care was gone. We tried home help; it wasn’t enough. After several crises, it was clear Mom would have to move to assisted living. In the course of taking over her affairs and moving her belongings out of her apartment, I found her personal papers, and in them the details of a marital history that she had told me almost nothing about, but that explained a great deal.

Learning those details at that overwrought time—after decades of living far from my childhood home and of being happier away from it—forced me to analyze all over again our family’s discomforts, many of them caused by the secret-keeping the poem explains. But the ferocity of my resentment, once I had a particular villain to focus on, surprised me, and I needed to work out its reasons.

I didn’t write immediately. The stewing stage that many poems need went on for some months. I often begin poems simply by turning on the spigot of blank verse—I’ve talked about the process elsewhere and used the image more than once before—and that was what I finally did. My most important help with the poem came from two women poets, one a practicing Catholic (as I still am) and one a nonbeliever. I wanted to know how the poem came across to both.

Then I waited. I waited a year.

I waited, because I wasn’t sure the poem should be published at all while my mother was still with us, and she is. But she’s stopped reading even weekly newspapers and women’s magazines. Computers are beyond her. I believe no harm will be done.

It’s important to me that no harm be done. In particular, it’s important to me that the poem not be read as laying blame—not on my well-meaning parents, not on the starchy foreign-born Irish nuns who taught me, not on the Church as a whole. It’s tempting to believe, when one has been unhappy, that a wrong has been done, but my most important discovery in this process is that, after the first wrong move, most parties had no choices.

The story is what it is. It’s far from the first story of people’s struggles to live with the difficult words of Jesus, about marriage and other matters. My best tools for dealing with the pains caused by the Church are still the words of the Church, words addressed to God in the Eucharistic Prayer: In the midst of conflict and division, we know it is you who turn our minds to thoughts of peace.

Maryann Corbett‘s poem “Knowledge” appears in issue 5.2 of Relief.

Avenues of Grace: On Writing “Four Counties”

November 29, 2011 in General with 3 Comments

5.2 Poet Timothy E.G. Bartel traces his poem’s long journey from inspiration to quasi-completion.

Some poems come in a rush of inspiration. Henry Longfellow claimed that “The Arrow and The Song” rushed fully formed into his mind one day as he glanced toward the morning paper on the breakfast table. Others require that long slog of work that Helen Vendler calls “our secret discipline.” “Four Counties” began in the former way, then continued in the latter. The entire first section, or “county” of the poem, “Ventura,” spilled out on a cloudy afternoon, a year after I graduated from college, while I was browsing at Borders bookstore (R.I.P.) in Southern California. As the first lines of the poem hit me, I snagged the last empty chair at the cafe and fluttered my pen across the page till “will we ever be human again?” Then the torrent stopped, and I realized what was smeared and scrawled before me in my Moleskine was something like a miniature, psychological Odyssey of my college experience.

A lot of young writers I know are really eager to write about the phenomenon of their undergraduate years, whether the hung-over buzz, the pregnant girlfriend, or the academic ennui. I guess that for a while after college I had assumed that I would escape that desire—I went to a small, Christian, liberal arts school with a dry campus and no football team where everyone is required to minor in Biblical studies. I didn’t think I had much to process. But I did, apparently. After writing the first section, I sat on it for a few months, then timidly work-shopped it at a summer arts conference. The feedback all pointed to one thing: it wasn’t done.

So I kept adding to it—scenes from post-college life. “Los Angeles” is largely inspired by my slow turning toward liturgical worship and sacramental theology in my own spiritual life, only to find that most of my friends were doing so as well. It was like we all woke up one day and realized that Southern California is haunted by Saints—their names are on practically every road sign and highway marker. “Riverside” contains scenes of my long commute from LA County down the 15 freeway to Temecula, in Riverside County. Soon after I finished “Riverside,” I decided to join the Eastern Orthodox Church.

I work-shopped the poem again, and still the feedback was: you’re not done yet, Tim. I had been working on the poem from the spring of 2006 to the summer of 2008. So I called the poem “Three Counties” and put it away again. Then I got married. My wife and I joined the Orthodox church. I wrote other poems and decided that “Three Counties” was an odd piece of psychological juvenilia.

But “Three Counties” kept snagging the attention of my mind, like a painting that hangs crooked on the wall, or a hangnail that catches on every jacket cuff. The poem was indeed unfinished; there were longings recorded there—for holiness, for forgiveness, for (I’ll admit it) a girl. As my first anniversary drew near, I opened a new draft of the poem, and decided to try writing about something like closure. The problem is, of course, that the long-lined free verse poem has not often been used as a form for closure. It’s a form for longing, as we learn from “Song of Myself,” or from “Howl.” As I worked on “San Luis Obispo,” I realized that the poem wasn’t just about guilt over sin, or becoming an adult, or really wanting to get married, it was also about about a desire I didn’t realize had been driving myself and my generation: the desire to learn to pray.

I finished “Four Counties” about 4 years after I began it, or maybe it’s still not done. Maybe not till I have a son, or lose my parents, or die myself. For now, it chronicles a search for lots of indefinite things and records the finding of a few definite ones, or what you will. I sometimes don’t know what I think of it. Maybe it is psychological juvenilia. But I know I discovered, through writing it, what it means to live with an unruly and unfinished poem and learned something about being committed to a craft that promises no answers, but can sometimes be an avenue of grace.

Timothy E.G. Bartel‘s poem “Four Counties” appears in issue 5.2 of Relief.

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