January 2022 // Dispatch #2
LOVE, WHOSE PRONOUN IS WE, COLLECT ME
Photo by Naima Green
Hi friend.
We're alive. It's a new day. Let's dive right in, shall we? Why not start with a Lucille Clifton poem? She was such a baddie that she actually had the nerve to title it:
Is this not what we show up to poetry for? To be thrust headfirst into the dark water we have been so afraid of only to find, thank you poet/m, that the very dark is teeming with jellyfish. Iron light, dancing.
I love that she writes about her realization in the third person, allowing some distance so that she might more accurately access the enormity of it. There are many days I'm tiiiiiiired & I too close my eyes, afraid to look for my own authenticity. I love this poet for teaching me that no matter what I do "the light insists on itself in the world." It gives me a little extra encouragement & juice to believe that light seeks me out, in fact is insistent––& that the truth, too, is knocking furiously.
It's a strange conversation, this art-making process. I picture Clifton listening to the "nondead past" for instruction. In fact, Clifton often viewed writing as taking dictation from spirits. There are certain (rare) poems of mine (like Somewhere Real) that fell into/out of me in one-fell-swoop. It felt more like being a stenographer than anything else! I was overhearing a downpour & pinning it to the earth as quickly as I could. Although, unlike a stenographer, I have a personal investment. I'm overhearing information that deeply pertains to me; information my psyche wants to splash me with, but that I've long been too asleep to wake to.
Writing in this way is like listening to the shadow describe the body. It's a way of taking playfulness very seriously. You are creating the ladder as you climb it. But the blueprints for the ladder aren't a conscious process. They appear, rung by rung, perfectly. You are mid-air, but supported. What a strange conversation!
Have you experienced this before? Writing as eavesdropping? Writing as tiptoeing to a mossy edge, without notion of what you'll see should you peer over? Poet Brenda Shaugnessy offered a related potent & succinct thought this week that stirred this pot for me:
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Today, try and see if you can you use art-making as:
• a tool for divination
• a conversation with "the nondead past"
• vivid stenography of the world around you as it unfolds
• a trashy gossip magazine
• an undertaker whose load is too heavy to bear
so they have to elicit the help of strangers
• light insisting on itself
• a door rattling off the hinges from being knocked on so loudly
• a shadow speaking about the body
• a playground for your nerves, heartache, &/or danger
When you invite unseen collaborators, who shows up?
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• My poem Love, Whose Pronoun is We, Collect Me was published in Northwest Review
• I've been sharing my texts to myself & it feels like an inadvertent art project. Some more here.
• Catapult recently published my essay––a love letter to Instagram for being an unlikely healing space for folks with mental illness, including happily-scrolling little old me.
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• Angel bought me Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radke & I'm loving it. I've always believed loneliness [which could be seen as a deep forgetfulness of our inherent interconnectedness] is at the heart of so much of our planet's interpersonal & global issues. This graphic novel elegantly explores that.
• ISL Alum Rachelle Boyson got everyone in January's ISL session hooked on these Lucille Clifton Oracle Cards. I've been pulling one to guide my writing time. Buy them here.
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• ISL alum Riley Cowling has made a beautiful zine of her photographs called CERTAIN & UNCERTAIN. It's sitting open on my desk, spilling beauty. Contact her via her website for a copy!
• Mónica Gomery's book MIGHT KINDRED won the 2021 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize & is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, fall 2022!
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This one is inspired by the tweet below from poet Imani Davis. You are an Attention Detective. Therefor, you must keep an attention journal. Be on the hunt for detail. What keeps shirking your eye? What divine beauty keeps cockroaching into the corners? Consider it your mission to log the evasive minutia of your surroundings. Investigate: what does attention feel like? How can I lengthen mine?
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🐣 Sign up up as an Early Bird for our April ISL Session 🐣
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Photos by Riley Cowing, CERTAIN & UNCERTAIN
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Let's close out with a little prayer, why not. As it turns out, you can pray however you want. You can put the words mayonnaise, Toyota Corolla, &/or spider into your prayer, if you so desire. There are really no rules, so long as you center gratitude & a wish for the blossoming of wholesome things like peace, happiness, good health.
My prayer for you is that the rest of your January is lit by small, bright realizations of life's preciousness. That these zaps appear softly like lightning bugs. & Even when they disappear, may you know that these preciousness-reminders are just temporarily hidden & waiting in the tall grass somewhere.
If you like mayonnaise, I hope it finds your sourdough. If your Toyota Corolla has been stalling, may it stutter-hiccup awake! As for the spiders out there, this prayer is for you too. May you love each of your legs. May you praise yourself for being literate enough to read this Zine (what a feat in a world where spider education is underfunded!)
Here's to the peace we build moment by moment, stutter-hiccups & all.
With ample maple syrup,
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