Meet Me In 811

Hello Friends —

In the spring of my freshman year at Stanford, Cathy and I went to a live reading with Dorothy Allison AND Jewelle Gomez AND Alice Walker at the Women’s Community Center in San Francisco. Our seats were so front and center, we could see the beads of sweat roll down Allison’s face, the saliva gather in the caesura of Gomez’s front teeth, and the dark specs spark in Walker’s purple irises. The dynamic amongst those three writers, and between the writers and an overflowing audience, was incredible — it was by far the best reading I’ve ever been to, one of the best nights of my entire life.

That was over a decade ago, and I haven’t seen Dorothy Allison since. But I’m nonetheless convinced that tonight’s live reading by Dorothy Allison and Sister Spit in Long Beach is going to be its own kind of sweat-beading magical. Appropriately, the event is free — since experiencing Dorothy Allison live is priceless.

As communities and as individuals, we often to turn to poetry to survive traumas we have experienced. In today’s poem, Robert McDonald embodies clinging to writers and poets who have come before us, as well as clinging to the form and structure poetry provides, in order to process his trauma. I like that McDonald titles this piece “The Dorothy Allison Poem” — the phrase that his audience would use to request or refer to this piece no matter what he titled it, suggesting that added layer of his writing in turn providing something for others to cling to as he has clung.

Enjoy.
Ellen

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The Dorothy Allison Poem

For I shall praise Dorothy Allison

For Dorothy Allison is fearless and angry, the pull of that anger, the pull and the fire

For I do not like to be angry and I am most often afraid

For while Dorothy Allison’s anger could plow down a mountain, Dorothy Allison’s jokes could make the Pope laugh so hard that communion wine sprayed out of his nose

For Dorothy Allison had once had a contest with a gay male poet to see which of them could shove the most buttered baby carrots up the ass

For Dorothy Allison’s story did not tell us who won, for Dorothy Allison is modest in her triumph

For Dorothy Allison is in truth immodest but seeks to write herself beyond shame,
for Dorothy Allison, the discomfort and rage and rocking triumph of hard sex, and laughter

For my dead sister who comes to me sometimes not a ghost but a thought

And my sister big and loud, an angry dyke who shot herself in the head

For yea though I have met a lot of big angry dykes Dorothy Allison is bigger and badder, more hilarious and brave

For my sister and her upbringing, if she spoke to you on your ouija board she might tell you how it killed her

For white trash and drunken fathers, an uncle named Speedy an uncle named Buddy, an aunt named Red an aunt named Dot, baby sister it was my upbringing, too

For let us not compare our childhood to anyone else’s pot-holed road,
for buckle up your seatbelts it’s going to be a bumpy night

For the heat and howl of Dorothy Allison, for whiskey shots, the fluids of sex, the yes goddamnit yes oh mama baby daddy”’girl, nobody ever came so goddamn hard on the page

For I shall mourn my sister, she told me in the last year of her life
that she didn’t think she’d ever had an orgasm

For something broken and something sad, stupid ass world, it would not fix her

And I would tell her and tell her that yea all of us are broken

And Dorothy Allison with a limp and Dorothy Allison with a drawl rolls up her sleeves, pushes her hair up off her face, says fuck it, and commences to make herself some biscuits and gravy

For we must love one another, and oh if my sister like Dorothy Allison could live, and oh if my sister like Dorothy Allison might live, and how am I broken let me count the ways

For our father is not the villain in this story

And our childhood was not as remarkable as all that

For Dorothy Allison shakes the truth in her mouth
like a dog shakes a toy

For Dorothy Allison takes the truth out of the dog’s mouth and sets it on the ground not a toy but a rabbit and rejoice oh ye watchers as that sweet wounded bunny shakes itself sober and sweet jesus runs free

For read Bastard Out of Carolina and then sit down with me and let’s talk about childhood and what is remembered

For the fragility of our mother as she walked up the front porch to get into the car, for the sudden whiteness of her thin hair, for the sound in my throat when I saw her stooped and aged like that, we were leaving for your funeral
sister oh sister I do not forgive you

Yet still I wish and lo I wish

Yet Dorothy Allison is brave enough to brave her stories; for Dorothy Allison the laughter and the howl and the fire

For tell your little sisters do not die, for tell your little sisters: dismantle your guns

For I shall praise Dorothy Allison for the glorious rock, and the pull, the rock and pull and sweat of her language, for the force and butter and hard liquor of her words

For she lives, and she lives, and I heard the awesome growl of sex in her words

And my sister is dead, her name was Kathleen, she called herself Mick.

For how long did she drive around with the gun in her pocket

Her name was Mick and she was once a little girl, we called her Kathleen.

The crime oh my sister and my shame oh my sister and why will you not speak to me even in my dreams

And lo we fail and we fail and we fail those we love

For Dorothy, and Oz, and there is no place like home, and where is the home in Homosexual, and never oh never was there ever such a place

Oh my sister with her heart and my sister with her brains and her lion’s roar, yet my sister that final cowardly act

For I wish she’d been the baddest dyke I wish she been the bitch unconquered I wish she’d seduced one hundred loose and eager girls

For she did not know the power of an anger tinged with joy

For she did not let her muscles thrum with electric rage and then stretch and square her shoulders, and put herself to work

For I think that Dorothy Allison knows

For the daunting, for the sacred task of saying the unsaid

For saying the unsayable for this our daily bread

And mother fuck it, six tears in a bucket

For Dorothy Allison could kick my ass from here to California

Oh Dorothy Allison I will not let you go unless thou bless me

For I will tell the world and tell the world that all of us are broken

For Dorothy Allison shall make me brave

For I am alive god damn it, alive and triumphant and failing and broken

And I shall not go by my own hand, you can bet your buck-toothed Aunt Hazel on that

For I am alive and angry and failed and shaken.

And the joy, and the fire, a fire that burns under the crust of the world, and sister, believe me, the world will always find a way to break your heart

For my sister on the gurney in that terrible room

For my dead sister on the gurney in that terrible cold room

For I saw her face and I can still see her face and my sister looked angry and yes I said yes I said yes that is her

Sister, sister, the word a caress

For Dorothy Allison, I saw her read what she had written and raise the crowd to its feet

For Dorothy Allison says we have to tell our stories.

For I can’t go on. For I will go on.

For my sister is dead, her name was Kathleen, she called herself Mick.

For some stories weigh one hundred pounds

Forgive me. The world will always find a way
to break the heart. Forgive me, then

forgive yourself. I will lift up this story, I will tie it to my back.

Like a pack mule descending down in

the Grand Canyon (I have a photo of you, happy on the lip
of that break in the earth.)

I will lift up your torn story: I will carry it, carry it.

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“The Dorothy Allison Poem” by Robert McDonald appeared in the October 2010 issue of [PANK] magazine.

Traveling Light

I’m only leaving you
for a handful of days,
but it feels as though
I’ll be gone forever—
the way the door closes

behind me with such solidity,
the way my suitcase
carries everything
I’d need for an eternity
of traveling light.

I’ve left my hotel number
on your desk, instructions
about the dog
and heating dinner. But
like the weather front

they warn is on its way
with its switchblades
of wind and ice,
our lives have minds
of their own.

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Hello Friends —

Sometimes when writing a poem, you discover the words have minds of their own. For me, the title poem from Linda Pastan‘s 2011 collection Traveling Light (2011) documents one of those moments of discovery. “For an eternity” and “traveling light” are two completely ordinary, everyday phrases we use when describing travel. And yet, when the two phrases are combined, they evoke an extra layer of imagery: in the context of “eternity,” “light” can also be read as a noun, as in rays of light traveling through the eternal blackness of outerspace — giving the reader a visual equivalent for what it feels like when “it feels as though / I’ll be gone forever.” When I get to that “traveling light” image in this poem, I feel a sudden joyful leaping out of the page, like I’ve just bounced on a trampoline that zoomed me from the tiny black of inked letters all the way out to the infinite blackness at the limits of outerspace, and then quickly back again — wheeee! — that delightful sensation of words becoming more than the sum of their parts, becoming poetry.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out one poem per day for the duration of the month. I love hearing when you love a poem, or hate a poem, or have a thought or a question about a poem — so please do hit reply, or leave a comment on the blog, meetmein811.blogspot.com. You are also welcome to nominate a poem or poet to be included. You can also learn more about National Poetry Month at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Dear Friends,

Some things are very different for me this April: I am divorced, relocated, unemployed, and uninsured — in a period of great transition in my life, in every sense of the word. But some things are the same: April is still National Poetry Month, and I’m as determined as ever to celebrate it by sharing with all of you a bit of what I love about poetry — via one poem per day, delivered to your email inbox, for the duration of the month: 30 days. 30 poems. 30 poets.

No prior poetry experience is required! Enthusiasm, ability to read, and web access are the only prerequisites.

For the first time, I have also converted my poem-a-day email series to a blog: you can now find the archives for the past five years of poem-a-days here at meetmein811.blogspot.com. You are welcome to send friends and family who would like to join the poem-a-day list to the blog. As always, you can also learn more about National Poetry Month at the website of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.

So, again, Happy National Poetry Month! And thank you for celebrating with me.

Love, Ellen

Now, for today’s poem-a-day: Sometimes a scene, a tableau, a moment frozen in the mind, strikes a writer as inherently poetic not because of what’s there, but because the scene illustrates so precisely what is not there. A tableau, a poetic moment, can become a poem, and today’s poem-a-day is one of those — a poem about what is not there. Enjoy.

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The night she walked to the house
she held a string; on the other end,
fifty-three feet in the air, a kite.
Wind provided the aerodynamics.
Does every collaboration
need to be explained?
She tied the string to the mailbox
left the kite to float until morning.
Every night this happens.
She sleeps, I listen, darkness
slides through us both.

The next morning
the string still curved into the sky
but the kite was gone.
This was the morning
newspapers announced
the Mona Lisa was stolen.
This was the morning
it snowed in Los Angeles,
the morning I wore gloves
to pull from the sky
fifty-three feet of frozen string.

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“The Aerodynamics” by Rick Bursky from Death Obscura (2010)

The Poem Said
By Franz Wright

The poem said never love anything
Not even you?
I asked
and it answered

especially me

If you must, love

not living
with hope

or not living

taste this
and remember

not yet being—

Especially me

I am just you

If you must, like
and coldly admire my cold stars
shit for brains
love what I stand for

not me

the leopard the beautiful
death
who puts on his spotted robe when he goes
to his chosen,
the

what was the not now the what will be

Like suddenly using a dead friend’s expression

Make yourself useful
while there is time

while there is still light and time

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Hello Friends,

Well, we’re running short on both light and time for National Poetry Month 2011. But the good news is, the poems are still there, all around you, all the time, if you look for them.

My hope is that a poem or two has spoken to you over the past month. Maybe you even got to ask a poem or two a question.

I thank you for humoring me in this April ritual. And if a particular poem or two from the past 30 days did stick with you, and you feel inspired to dive deeper, here are some places to start. You can also now find all of this month’s poem-a-days (and April 2010, April 2009, April 2008, and April 2007) migrated here to meetmein811.blogspot.com.

Cheers,
Ellen

Hello Friends —
I’m going to subject you to a longer poem today, cuz it’s just so darn gorgeous. So I’ll mostly avoid making this email any longer with explanations, except to point out this poem contains 12 hyphens, or 13 if you include the title…as well as several additional instances of compound adjectives that could be hypenated but aren’t.

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WOOFER (WHEN I CONSIDER THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN)

When I consider the much discussed dilemma
of the African-American, I think not of the diasporic
middle passing, unchained, juke, jock, and jiving
sons and daughters of what sleek dashikied poets
and tether fisted Nationalists commonly call Mother
Africa, but of an ex-girlfriend who was the child
of a black-skinned Ghanaian beauty and Jewish-
American, globetrotting ethnomusicologist.
I forgot all my father’s warnings about meeting women
at bus stops (which is the way he met my mother)
when I met her waiting for the rush hour bus in October
because I have always been a sucker for deep blue denim
and Afros and because she spoke so slowly
when she asked the time. I wrote my phone number
in the back of the book of poems I had and said
something like “You can return it when I see you again”
which has to be one of my top two or three best
pickup lines ever. If you have ever gotten lucky
on a first date you can guess what followed: her smile
twizzling above a tight black v-neck sweater, chatter
on my velvet couch and then the two of us wearing nothing
but shoes. When I think of African-American rituals
of love, I think not of young, made-up unwed mothers
who seek warmth in the arms of any brother
with arms because they never knew their fathers
(though that could describe my mother), but of that girl
and me in the basement of her father’s four story Victorian
making love among the fresh blood and axe
and chicken feathers left after the Thanksgiving slaughter
executed by a 3-D witchdoctor houseguest (his face
was starred by tribal markings) and her ruddy American
poppa while drums drummed upstairs from his hi-fi woofers
because that’s the closest I’ve ever come to anything
remotely ritualistic or African, for that matter.
We were quiet enough to hear their chatter
between the drums and the scraping of their chairs
at the table above us and the footsteps of anyone
approaching the basement door and it made
our business sweeter, though I’ll admit I wondered
if I’d be cursed for making love under her father’s nose
or if the witchdoctor would sense us and then cast a spell.
I have been cursed, broken hearted, stunned, frightened
and bewildered, but when I consider the African-American
I think not of the tek nines of my generation deployed
by madness or that we were assigned some lousy fate
when God prescribed job titles at the beginning of Time
or that we were too dumb to run the other way
when we saw the wide white sails of the ships
since given the absurd history of the world, everyone
is a descendant of slaves (which makes me wonder
if outrunning your captors is not the real meaning of Race?).
I think of the girl’s bark colored, bi-continental nipples
when I consider the African-American.
I think of a string of people connected one to another
and including the two of us there in the basement
linked by a hyphen filled with blood;
linked by a blood filled baton in one great historical relay.

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By Terrance Hayes from Wind in a Box (2006)