The Randomest of Random Poetry

The diss is finished, submitted, accepted. Which means now, perhaps, there will be time for other writing.

Jon Tuttle asked me to read a poem or two for the Snow Island Review reading on Tuesday the 30th, and I didn't really think about it before saying "Yes." Not that I'm regretting it, but that with this and the Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival earlier this month, I have come to realize just how much I've failed at writing in the last two years.

I've decided to read either two short poems from the Disability Workshop, or two shorter, older, poems that I had polished long before the dense, academic prose took over my brain. In trying to locate these (some of them on this blog), I found some other, really strange, pieces I wrote last year, my first year in Lafayette, and my last year in Boston. So I thought I'd post those here, in an attempt at recovering what was lost. Note that these have not been revised, and at times falter in syntax.

Friday Last

too lofty a word to speak here--love--and yet i do, aware that the "v" goes on to long, that i'll have to lick my lips quite soon. the rain falls listlessly unlike that first time i thought about the concrete ledge of the stadium, when it poured so hard no one knew i was crying until i tried to speak. too close to the rain, to the sidelines, to his breath fogging in time with mine, i fall back to my place on the third tier of seats without hearing a reply. florida, i say to the floodlights that cast our shadows together into one, can be reached by car in twenty hours. the ledge is too far to climb at this hour anyway.


On moving back to the midwest
if this is a sign of retribution, of atonement, nearing me then i’ll look away or look into the sun to blind me. this cloth is scratchy on the shoulder that’s not sweating yet this shoe is digging hard into my heel. the robe around me is just enough—my god, it’s may, and there’s my breath—just enough of a coat and it’s black. this robe cost too much, too much to cut my hair and box my clothes and drive drive drive west, even though the ocean calls me. the strap has blistered me again, flesh welting in accusation, making my cheeks twitch, i’ll give it away now if i blink or smile or raise an eyebrow, this carefully twirled hair will pull the cornerstone out and i want it to. there’s the pole i fell upon, there’s the one that fell on me in the early morning scent of steam and sweet cookies. there’s the track we circled around then around again and never quite met in the middle, the rubber soles and the rubber ground bounding us away from each other.


Solo
The ones my fingers know they've always known
and at this stage, can no longer afford to hazard guesses
this touch was my only intuition once
Pairs of people wander around me in my pretty dress
they come, they always come, to spoil the child
with "babe" and "hon" and "sweetie"
a slippage in the slick sweat on metal
intentional falter, intentional trip over sidewalk cracks
his words are praiseful, bouncing against the raindrops .


The trees come at me--this can't be--but the light is moving and I know I can see North and South at once. The wind slaps like waves, chunks of wind patting my eyelashes down to shut out the marching forests. Blunt wind, sharp sun--they say you can bathe in it, but it's all spikes and rays--speeding the leaves up into my face. It gives us a chance to sing loudly into the roar about the conditions of possibility--meaning, really, hope. To think about definition as the definition of the shadow on the moon. To hum a melody about what we contain, how we curtain it away like a shower, like a dirty room, so that the open space won't swallow everything, so we don't lose our shapes and release the churning infinity within. The strain of forever nips at the bounds we set, the missing fences around sensation.
The setting sun lances with intention this time, opens the pain, pokes holes in the boundaries of my flesh and I bleed freely, without cause, this time. The hole it makes expands, jagged, and infinity seeps out, flooding away words, lines, fences, until all is All and All is one. The trees are marching to staunch the flow and even the simplest question--are you alright?--is a feat of creation, but not impossible.


A vision of the messianic

I see you in the finite,
Which is, of course, wrong.
I see you as a condition of my caught breath,
As a phantasm of a deeper structure.

I ask for simpler words
(Perhaps angry words?):
Something to keep a beat to when the beat slows down,
And to walk to in the new night.

I want to measure a chill in the air.
I see you as a condition of cradles and graves,
Without which I am hungry.
It fed off of the delta valley.

Every other line is empty
Of devotion and vocation to cloister.
Not me, not in context, not in the northeast,
A condition of angrier words.


Being a liberal in war

Oh how easy it is to die in war,
The fletch of the arrow, the hilt of the sword
To see your own blood and want to see more
To bow to the sky, to scream from the core

Oh how lucky to die before
The panic sets in, they even the score
They burn all the bodies, loot all the stores--
How lucky to die as they blast through the doors

Oh how simple it is to protest
To scrawl on a poster and scream with the rest
About blood, about oil, about the oppressed
To fast and to mourn that we’re overly blessed




Happy

We are one big family
While all the stupid people writhe in agony
With sauntering steps kept to pace
The brush and bend of pulse and pages.
The party blesses one another;
In cold address each does stumble,
Hiding in their fetal poses
As one would cradle rose bouquets,
Cherishing sores from thorn arrays.

The undesirable among us
Chip each edge of memory from us
With emotion sweet as sugared donuts.
We must choose to abuse the past like this
It does not come naturally
It does not leave quietly
It will not be happy till we loose our fits
And miss these bleak displays.

Habitus

Settled in to the hard edge of a chair--it cuts and makes its shape known against my body, and this awareness of sitting skitters at the edge of thought--I'm listening to songs that are substituting for prayer. I'm fairly sure Fiske is misreading the social action of fandom, and I'm fairly sure Burke says it all better in a single phrase: Literature is equipment for living. And I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be reading for--oh, I'm poaching, baby--but the lines of the chair and the shining tabs of fanfic lining the task bar and the sounds of hope and peace and love penetrate the film of pain just enough to shatter my discipline.

This dissertation is being written amid burning and stabbing and weakness and twitching, words in the spaces between pain, theses extracted painstakingly, chaff from wheat, diamond from rock, tumor from breast. And even when I laser focus, pull my mind and soul from the body long enough for clarity of thought, it's there, in the meat; back down in the physical my legs move without consent, my brain registers startling scents, my ears baulk against the pressure of some deep throb of sound: A passing car. It's solid, inside me, a force that my soul shrinks from until I'm nothing but a singularity. How can it not appear in the writing, this pain? It manifests itself in every sentence, tainting my masterpiece with that which I abhor; the thing I hate infiltrating my love, I cannot escape it; we are forever entwined. When I speak of hope, it's never about my own.

"Final" draft of disability poems

When I took The Rhetoric of Access Class in the Summer of 2006, Dr Salvo kept asking me why I could theorize all sorts of things, but couldn't theorize my own disability. Or even seem to conceptualize it in any meaningful way. While I had come to terms with the necessity of the label "disabled" for university purposes, I didn't like to use it except as shorthand for my situation--which, as a Burkeian, I should have realized the implications of this naming, but, then again, I wasn't theorizing it. I struggled to define for myself whether the disability was part of me, or if there was some other core identity outside the illness. As though the illness were a deviation from my True Self.

"You don't let it define you," Lou said today, as I struggled to finish the prose poem. And this is and was and probably always will be the problem. It does define me, but not in totality; it is me, I am it. It colors my language, my bodily movements, my lived experience. It gives me, in Burke's words, an orientation or perspective that prescribes strategies for living. But people, particularly normals, don't want to think about this, because admitting the sickness is (in) you is to admit your proximity to death. We run far, far away from death, if only to return to it in the death drive. Being disabled means being mortal. And that makes people uncomfortable.

Well too damn bad, people. As Mrs Curie told me when I struggled with Weber's Clarinet Concerto, "Make beautiful mistakes"--or, in another orientation, make the mistakes beautiful. Here's me trying to make the mistake of my body beautiful. (Oh, and Jeff, if you're reading this? Thanks, and sorry about the Muppet comparison. And to AHS band members: Yes, I'm aware I was never "cricked." But there was that one time with Kamp's pants, and you know we came close then...)

Twelve Steps Away From Disabled

He wants me to walk like a penguin; I want him to speak to me like an adult. My feet turn ninety degrees without my permission and I waddle triumphantly across the office. No, he says, not looking at my mother. I meant, turn them the other way. My toes face each other and twitch hello.

In the middle of a step, time stops with a high whine, bright and still like a frozen sunbeam. My boot slides in the snow banks; the New Hampshire sludge has a contract out on me. The rest of the class keeps on walking. Thanks, teacher, for leaving me be--I‘ll catch up eventually.

If I don't run now, I might be able to walk later: this is energy conservation in its finest. The gym teacher is unimpressed by my planning skills. He thinks I mean later in the day. I mean later, when I'm middle-aged and sporting a wheelchair. I've got a lot of contingencies to consider. I'm already eight.

My fingers fly up and down the keys, faster than anyone, and my mother looks relieved. Somehow my body knows this, easier than walking, than using a knife and fork, and I wonder if this is what it's like to walk without thinking left, right, lift, push. The concentration of a step is harder than Mozart's clarinet concerto in A.

And hit. Three feet behind again, panting and red faced; my foot is nowhere near the white line--it’s betrayed me again. The bass drum pounds on, and they threaten to throw me in the creek. The doctor’s note stays in my back pocket. I’ll take the plunge instead.

Trudging uphill. The cold feel of frozen meat that is my thigh trips me, breaking the article already written in my head. I can't ask the question I want to (Do you agree with the Senate's decision?) with the noise of pain coating the scene. I go for the easy schmooze instead, and Mom recommends I rethink journalism school. We call the new round of college applications "Plan B."

The word is washing machine, but I'm going with "the thing that gets things clean," which earns me laughter and friends. I smooth over the gaps by speeding in circles around missing words, so it's okay, and no one notices until I try to order pizza and ask for balloons instead. Much giggling ensues. Instant friends for life.

I didn't mean to hit her, but she was sitting too close, and the arm decided it needed to inhabit some other space, so I'm telling myself it's not my fault. When the leg kicks me back from my desk and into the wall three days later, Jeff’s mentoring skills kick in, and he eases my blush with jokes about the spontaneous overflow of emotions. I tell him I hate the Romantics, anyway. I score points for intertextuality.

Jeff’s a mad Muppet-like man, bobbing in his seat, Mennonite compassion oozing from the books on his shelf. You’ve got more options, he tells me. You’d like grad school, because it’s clear Plan B is a bust, and I don’t want to travel too far into the alphabet. I refuse to ask What if I run out of words? What if I get lost? because Jeff has too much faith in me, and I’d hate to ruin his day.

They put me on the top floor, of course, high above the city that breathes for me most days. Fire drills aside, the minuscule elevator carries me faithfully down to the pavement I can pound, inhaling Boston, infusing it in my skin. The stairs stare me down, and I glare right back; I am not lost, for once, in the streets that wind dizzyingly in marshes and fens.

To the prim professor, I say, “The creation of audience identification is necessarily voluntary: But what if they don’t want to feel disabled with me?” The words haven’t gone anywhere, as long as the buildings twinkle at night, and standing in the doorway between here and there seems to suit me.

I'm sitting in the driveway, trying to remember which one is the brake pedal again, and how to get home. Twenty years of failing to be the right kind of penguin has been like the slide of twilight into night. Or like a frog being boiled slowly in water. “Becoming,” I say to the unfamiliar street signs, “is different from being,” tasting Heidegger on my lips. As long as I’m still driving, I haven’t yet arrived.

Sirloin Or why you shouldn't hug me

Please unloose my flesh
To let fly free that which
Aches against my borders.
Like frost on a window
Binds sticky and prickles,
So do your fingers scratch
Against the edge of my skin.

It begins in the spine,
Tracks down and settles
Matching gut for gut,
Meeting stab with stab,
Etching rutted lines
Through pulsing muscle,
Clean Ginsu marks,
But not to stretch,
Not to butterfly open:
It’s not your intent to butcher
Me with embracing arms.

And a bonus poem that I didn't have the balls to read at something called "Disability Awareness Month." "Raising Awareness" is an idea I often rant against, and this poem is to be read sarcastically: Imagine a whiny 13 year old girl's voice, and you've got it just about right. (Yes, this and Sirloin are reposts, but with revisions)

Raising Awareness
Are you there, passion?
Are you yet asleep?
Has hope awoken you on cue
at the end of the end,
where you can sip the most fuel
thrust forward at the tip of the fuse?
Or have you slipped beyond now
infusing the realm of dreams
where you are more easily grasped
where you are not denied a chance
to light the plot to enlighten the world
And make them all impassioned for the cause?

They’ve waited, passion,
those banner-makers and slogan-writers
They who walk for cures with posters held high
They’ve waited on you and upon you
waited for your arrival at the darkest night
triumphant in trumpet blares at blastissimo,
For you to burn the untouched souls
And inflame them with compassion.
But you snuck in quiet to the back room
and tied them up in our own pink ribbons
till they are furiously still at the keyboard
passionately aware, the standard of awareness raised.

Are you still here, passion,
Now that the worst has floated downriver?
It seems they can't remember
how this is supposed to end--
is it a tragedy or comedy?
A romantic gesture?
A single rose on the fifteenth of February?

Vines (A meditation on consubstantiation)

In working with the "Writing the Disability" group, I've been contemplating what Burke has to say about disease. It's not positive, of course. In Burke world, disease is dis-ease, and is what we are always/already acting against; we are "rotten with perfection" or at least the motive to perfect, and that means constantly expunging the disease around us. But what happens when the diseased is a person, not an idea or situation? What does that do to Burke's motive of identification: He says we all want that communion with each other, but do we really? Do you want to share substance with the ill and dying? That would mean admitting that you, too, are ill and dying, and we Americans don't do that well.

So, thinking about Burke and disease and about his brief comments on consuming ("you are what you eat" being his example of how changes in substance can occur) and thinking about the latest episode of Supernatural, in which Famine perfects the desire to consume which leads to death (insert Lacan here), I came up with this. This Whatever.

Vines
To be consumed,
to share in substance
to stand on the same ground
to emerge from the same soil like spider plant offspring
Springing off away from each other
soaking in the same rain
under shadows, one withers
the other bears fruit amid glittering rays: This is brotherhood.
It falters against the wind
it leans against its brethren
it steals all the nitrogen
just to stay till spring
just till May, not greedy enough to hope for summer.
To be ensconced
to huddle together for warmth and shelter
to bear down to the root
to find the common branch
and kill it: This is brotherhood, too.
Free from earthy tethers
from the lines of fathers and mothers
from the what was consumed together
the fruit bearer bears itself away
takes no part in the disease
of yellowing leaves and barren pods.


And, now I've managed to depress myself. Lovely.

Functionalism (WIP)

[That which washes the other in a holy palmer's kiss]
scratches and twists
[structures which twitch and make things tap].
they used to run up and down
keys blinding [they who listen and clap]
sliding up [the spaced line that gaps a chord]
with joy bursting from the tip.

Sirloin cut

the glare of hope
begins in the spine
tracks down and settles
matching gut for gut

meeting stab with stab
tearing rutted lines
through pulsing muscle
butcher knife sharp

On Pain, or Amy thinks too hard lately

Apparently, I've been thinking about things without knowing it, again. I remember the first time this happened; I was taking yet another exam at Johnathan Daniels School in Keene, NH, where experimental education programs were running rampant (my first grade classroom had no walls--literally). I was taking the exam, some kind of math test with word problems that I would later recognize as testing pre-algebra skills. The test, like most of these government-sponsored standardized exams, was multiple choice. I read the problem, and instantly knew the answer was B. It was quite clear that there would be three chickens left, although when later asked by the teacher, I couldn't tell her why or how I had come to such a conclusion. Or how I had come to any of my conclusions. Something was working subconsciously or even unconsciously in my brain, and I let it happen.

I let it happen a lot, actually. When Mom was studying aloud for nursing school, droning on about rhizomes and the Kreb's Cycle, I listened while playing Tetris. And then aced science tests without studying for them straight through Anatomy and Physiology. When I hit college, this ability became less important as an English major--reading aloud helped my brain memorize things, but understanding why was often more important than knowing that and I ended up studying like normal kids. It wasn't until I got into heavy literary theory that I realized my brain was still doing its thing, just on a different level. I read Foucault and Derrida and Cixous out loud, I read them silently, I read and read the same passages until I thought my eyes were going to bleed, and still didn't understand them. Then I'd go to bed, or get up to get more coffee, and the answer would be so clear, skipping me past several steps of logical inquiry right to the end. I think that annoyed Lou and Kari, because I got it, but couldn't tell them what I meant.

Lately I've been reading about Burke and ontology, Burke and subjectivity, Burke and epistemology--none of which really relate to my dissertation, but there are a few things I can pull. Somewhere in the fog of synthesizing all of this, namely Monday night, I saw how the pieces fit, and wondered at my earlier confusion. What the hell, Amylea? Why was it all a mess before? I set to rearranging my chapter into something more reflective of my major concerns and moved on to cleaning it up.
Then, in the middle of reading about Burke and various social theories (from Marx to Althusser to Foucault) by Robert Wess, I started thinking about pain. It seemed kind of random, except that I'm hurting--but that's not unusual. But I wasn't dwelling on my own pain, but on the language of pain, in a Burkeian sense. Is not, I wondered, pain the ur-motive? Isn't "pain" really what we are talking about when we discuss "dystopian" fiction--the stories of pain? Thus I began putting forth some propositions:

1. 
   Pain is the name for a situation, or more accurately, an agon to a situation.


2. Pain is not an action, but motion, forced response to stimuli that moves us.


3. The discourse of pain shows us the dialectic of the body--what is inus and what is of us, what we have, and what we are. Pain itself is dialectical; it divides as much as it unites.


4. Pain is scenic: it is the grounds of (for some of us) our existence.


5. Pain is a habitus in the Bourdieuxian sense. Thus those who are pained have a different orientation, different bodily lived life, and thus must have different rhetorical motives.


6. Pain is thus a subject position.


7. Society at large provides us with narratives for overcoming pain, but inasmuch as "society" does not come from the grounds of pain, it cannot encompass for us (provide equipment for living) the situation.

Now, what these exactly mean, that's a project for another time.

The Rhetoric of Hope

Hope, I posit, is not an emotion, but a critical perspective attained after evaluating current conditions. Hope is thus constructed by our orientation to our experiences and our critical interpretation of sensory input. As a construct, hope is rhetorical, constructed by language, the result of the application of a terministic screen.
This orientation of hope is entelechial, or at least teleological. We hope for something; a desire that is to be fulfilled at some future date. We hope for some end result of the unfolding of history. That desire--a utopian yearning to eliminate hardships and conflict--is grounded in our interpretations of the current state of affairs and what we see as possible or probable outcomes. In this, we can also hope against something, position ourselves opposite of the possibilities inherent in the present.
When we hope, we construct, through imagination and through the logic of cause and effect, the future. When we hope, we provide a vision made manifest through humanity's symbol-using abilities. The future, an absence made present through our use of symbols as abstracted referents, can be evaluated as something to be hoped for or hoped against, and this prescribes a course of action.
The hope of a text, thus, does not have to remain within the world of the text; a text can be hopeful in its projection of future action for or against onto the readers. The most hopeless dystopian novel (in which our hero dies without resolving anything, and the dystopian culture seems to extend infinitely beyond the end of the text) may in fact be hopeful in its relationship to the reader. In positing the future, in making it manifest (enacting the crime, as Burke would say), the text prescribes actions for its readers, actions which will (with hope) prevent the future it describes.
"Action" of course, for Burke, may be first appear as "attitude." In changing attitudes of readers, a text may, in fact, effect change by changing the scene; the instant readers change their orientations and approaches to their own scene, the scene itself has been altered, thus altering the grounds from which the first entelechial extrapolation the text provides. We might even say that the very writing of the text is itself a revolutionary action in that the act of writing changes the author, who is part of his or her own scene.
The rhetoric of hope is always that of change; even those who hope against change recognize the ambiguities of their situation that would enable the transformations they hope against. Hope is syllogistic in its argument: If, then, else. Hope is dialectic in that it positions the present against the future, thesis and antithesis, denying neither their importance, negating neither in favor of the other.
The dystopian motive, the way of seeing that prescribes action, is essentially hopeful. Because it is a motive, Burke would ask us to examine what it means when we say why people are doing it--to look at the language used in dystopic rhetoric and/or the rhetoric of hope. In Chapters 3 and 4 I take two of the most celebrated dystopian narratives as examples of how we talk about dystopia and the implications made when we would imagine disaster; how authors tend to form their narratives, repeated ideas that become tropes, how dystopian writers feature scene over all else, what we can learn about our understanding of endings and ends from the entelechial principle enacted in these texts.