Bat & Poet: A Conversation with Chad Parmenter

Chad Parmenter received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Luther College in Iowa. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, and Kenyon Review, as well as being featured on Verse Daily. His debut chapbook, Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book (Finishing Line Press, 2012), is a collection of poems based on the DC Comics superhero.

I first “met” Chad Parmenter in 2009. While preparing a class on contemporary formal verse, I came across Tony Barnstone’s wonderful article in The Cortland Review, “A Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics.” Barnstone included Chad’s wonderful “A Holy Sonnet for His New Movie” in his article, and spoke of a collection called Batsonnets. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight had come out just the year before, so you can imagine my delight. Most of my students were batcrazy—what a wonderful way to do what Barnstone was suggesting to make the old form new.  In particular, I had one student who was a rabid fan, and I wanted him to read not just the poem in Barnstone’s article, but the whole collection. I searched and searched for it everywhere, but could not find it. Finally, I found Chad Parmenter on Facebook, and eventually discovered the collection was still in the manuscript stage. Chad sent my student an autographed copy of the manuscript for his birthday. Holy batkindness!

Imagine my delight again when, just over a week ago, Chad contacted me via Facebook to let me know the collection had found a home, with none other than my old friend, Finishing Line Press. The collection, due out February 2012, is now available for special preorder from FLP’s website, and features the wonderful artwork of Mark Cudd. Being a superhero addict myself, I immediately asked Chad if he would agree to talk about the collection for this blog.

Q: Talk about your subject matter—what say you to the claim that poetry and comics don’t mix? Do you worry about labels like “serious” when it comes to poetry?

A: For me, growing up, reading comics was a serious thing--it gave me an escape that I absolutely needed, being a shy kid with thick glasses and little to no idea of how to talk to people. Batman, in particular, appealed to me because of his ability to turn completely from one person into another by putting his mask on. Poetry provided me with some of the same things, and has since then—serious play, maybe.

Q: A related question: Many critics believe that American poetry has drifted away from the American public. How do you see your work in relation to the public’s tastes? Did you have a specific audience in mind as you crafted these poems?

A: Good questions! I'm still not really sure who I write for; I do it because I enjoy it a ton, and writing a bunch of poems about Batman appealed to me as a fun kind of challenge. My favorite audience is whoever wants to read the poems, and the idea that it's not a lot of people kind of appeals to me somehow—I grew up with poetry as something that not a lot of people read, and that gave it an indy sort of feeling that I think is still with me.

Q: Why Batman?

A: Batman popped into my head one day as a topic to aim at, and most of me instantly said, "don't do that, it's off the map of what you've been reading and there's no way you can get a bunch of poems out of it that will be any good." So part of my brain seems to have taken that as a dare, and run with it, and kept running. In the process, I found a lot about both Batman and the scared kid I was when reading him that still really draws me—persona, how to deal with loss, and how to negotiate darknesses of different kinds.

Q: Why sonnets?

A: I've written a number of free verse poems about Batman, but the sonnet seems like a form that really fits with him, and maybe the superhero as a subject (Bryan Dietrich starts his book, Krypton Nights, with a sonnet crown that really helped me to read). Superheroes, and superhero narratives, follow strict rules, and tend to follow them mostly the same way no matter what; life gets inserted into that formula, and it changes the formula a little bit, but the formula wins out. I love that!

Q: How is your Batman different from other representations?

A: D.A. Powell wrote a poem involving Batman, and Bryan Dietrich did, too; there may be other Batman poems out there that I'm not aware of, but both of those poets have helped me by treating Batman as a malleable character, and one to be taken seriously, not just as a kind of campy figure. I'm pretty much following their leads, and using Batman as a kind of malleable figure, if that makes sense.

Q: What advice would you give to others who are interested in writing about similar themes?

A:  Kevin Young, when I asked him that question, said, "Get obsessed," and that worked for me! I devoured Batman media of different forms, and tried to write about it from a bunch of different angles, until something seemed to click.

Q: What’s next for you, now that the book is coming out?

A: Thanks; I have a full length Batman collection that I'm shopping around, and a couple of other manuscripts that are also each explorations of a single topic—"my America," about photographer Edward Weston, and "Vivienne's Recovery," an homage to T.S. Eliot's wife, Vivien Eliot.

Q: Whom are you reading?

A: Right now, I'm reading Shakespeare, Ovid, a little bit of Heidegger, a bazillion different contemporary poets including Meghan O'Rourke and Rodney Jones, and, if this counts as reading, playing Batman: Arkham City on Xbox 360.

Well, that explains a lot. Talk about a postmodern aesthetic. That is what appealed to me about Chad’s poetry in the first place, and it’s a common thread through all the works  of artists who engage with pop culture: fluidity. There is nothing worse for art than codification. Art dies when artists stop pushing at the limits of how it is defined. It takes an agile mind to see the perfect fit between the sonnet form and the comic hero the way Chad explains it above. Thanks, Chad!

Read some of Chad's sonnets at Diagram, and check out more of Mark Cudd's beautiful work here.

Top Ten Things I Am Grateful for This Thanksgiving

In the spirit of David Letterman, and taking full advantage of my new blog mission, I present the top ten reasons I am grateful this Thanksgiving, which has nothing—and everything—to do with writing:

10. Good students. They exist. I know I gripe a lot about the bad ones, but, without the good ones, I’d probably kill myself. It’s hard to be an adjunct, to get paid so little, to be so marginal. When on top of that you think sometimes that you might as well have just popped in a movie for all the attention the students pay to class, it really becomes impossible to drag yourself to work. And then, it happens: the great essay, the great comment in class, the rare compliment. Someone who gets it. Someone who makes you feel like you’re a distinguished professor at Harvard. To the good ones, thanks.

9. The Internet. Been around now long enough for people to take it for granted, but I remember a time without it pretty good, when looking something up meant a trip to the library and it could take weeks for you to get a book in the mail. Thanks to the Internet, I read amazing things every day from all over the world, right in my pajamas, and mostly for free. Thanks to Facebook, I have reconnected with old friends and distant family. I can see their pictures and read about what they’re doing and what they care about, and they can learn the same from me. I can connect with people I’ve never met and would have never even heard of without the Internet, people like you reading this right now. Who are you? I don’t even know, but there you are, reading my words. I don’t have to wait for a publisher to find what I have to say interesting; I can publish it right here on my very own free blog. I can also, through the Internet, submit my work to those very publishers I don’t need for this blog, and they can respond to me via email, without having to use stamps or a trip to the post office. I can learn about new journals and presses without having to special-order trade books or scour libraries. The Internet may be a superficial place, but it’s not meant to replace reality—just to enhance it. For its endless stream of information, good and bad, thanks.

8. Being a vegetarian. The more I learn about food, the happier I am to be one. My only regret is that I can’t seem to commit to strict veganism—dairy sneaks in anywhere, and I still cave in to cheese. But this mouth has not touched meat for 18 years, and I am grateful, so grateful! Grateful to the original Ms. Alvarez, the English teacher who was a vegetarian and laid the psychological groundwork to make me one, although I wouldn’t succeed at it until I met my husband many years later. If not for her coolness, I might have not considered it. The biggest thanks goes to my husband, who taught me the skills I needed to succeed at it—what is tofu and where to buy it, and the horrors of factory farming that he used to teach every year in his first-year comp class. Thanks too to my mom, who tagged along at the ripe old age of 64, when many people—especially meat-loving Cubans—would have balked at such radical change. But she not only became a vegetarian herself, but learned to cook all over again for us, and to this day tells anybody who will listen about the horror of meat and shares her recipes with strangers at the supermarket. Now that everyone is obese, diabetic, and freaking out at all the hot documentaries like Supersize Me, Food, Inc., and Forks over Knives, I am grateful, so grateful.

7. My education. This cubanita can outtalk, outwrite, and outthink almost everyone she knows, and she has an urban public school, a Catholic school, and a football school to thank for it. Education is what you make of it, my little grasshoppers, and my family taught me to make the most of mine, and I did not find it lacking. What a joy it is to be able to read and understand anything I want, in two languages! (Maybe more, if you give me some extra time, a dictionary, and some leeway when it comes to clarity.) I see grown people every day who can’t read through a simple sentence, either through lack of vocabulary or through lack of sufficient background knowledge. In this increasingly complex world, I pity them. I pity them when they are sick, and they have to trust a bevy of overstressed doctors to prescribe a pill from a company that took them out to dinner. I pity them at the supermarket, when their decisions are based on advertising. I pity them at the mall, when they don’t understand how they are being manipulated. I pity them when they’re bored because “there’s nothing on TV.” Somehow, I was spared living an unexamined life, and, however unfit it has made me to enjoy the wonders of reality television and Black Friday, I am grateful, so grateful.

6. My wealth. I am rich, so rich. I have a house, and although it’s cramped and cracking, it’s secure, and it shelters me and mine. We have air conditioning and Netflix. There are three cars in the driveway, and I can use any at any time. They may not be sexy, but they’re reliable, and all paid for. I have clothes to wear whether it’s hot or cold, and some are even kinda stylish. I have never been hungry, ever, for lack of money to buy food. If my dog gets sick, I can take her to the vet and pay for it, even to her fancy specialist. We have no trouble making copayments for our human doctors. It’s been a struggle for this feminist to accept that this wealth comes from her husband, but I am grateful for every time the bills come and I can pay them without scrambling anymore. This is an enormous blessing. God has given us enough money to live well but not so much to let us forget what it means to lack it, and He has given us this amazing gift of being able to see that it isn’t iPads and Manolo Blahnik shoes that make us happy.

5. My freedom. Yes, yes, I have a love-hate relationship with this country. Being an immigrant is kind of like being the fat cousin someone showed up with to the cool kids’ party—they let you in because they don’t want to be rude, but they would have preferred it if you’d stayed home. But, despite its problems, this continues to be one of the best countries in the world to live in. You pay your taxes and are pretty much free to do what you want after that, and you have a fair shot at a school and a job and a decent life. That’s not equally true for everyone, unfortunately, but, compared to some other countries, the USA is still better. Better than Cuba, anyway. If my parents had not taken the leap, first of all, I might not have even been born, since my mother had so little to eat and was so stressed she couldn’t carry a child to term until she left. Had we gotten around that, I’d probably be an engineer of some kind, but I’d be whoring myself out to the tourists on el Malecón for money to buy food on the black market. I couldn’t keep this blog or do all that wonderful e-living (see #9). My house would belong to the state, and they could take it away whenever they wanted (see #6). Plus it wouldn’t have air conditioning. Or three cars in the driveway. Or a fancy vet. You get the picture. For the USA, I’m grateful.

4. My health. So the flu knocked me out for a couple of weeks. Big deal! I’m almost forty and I’ve never been hospitalized, never even broken a bone. I take not one prescription drug. Man, I’m so healthy. I can eat what I want, I can run up three flights of stairs—in heels. I am freakishly, wonderfully, incredibly healthy. Without even trying. I smoked, I still drink, I eat rather badly (vegetarian does not equal healthy—consider that Funyuns and beer are both vegetarian). I totally gave up on that stupid treadmill. I haven’t been to a doctor in over ten years. I am so ridiculously healthy, and I’m grateful.

3. My friends. Don’t have many of them, and don’t treat them well—I neglect them for months, even years. Yet, some hang on. God only knows why. Thanks.

2. My family. They tax me, they heap me, but they are my greatest blessing, my clearest mission, from my immediate family to the extended network of hundreds, it seems, I can call blood. I love my stupid dog, whom I tried to give away when I found her on the street because I had too many pets already and who needed a little annoying mutt. Now that she’s the one and only, I shudder when I remember how close I came to giving her away. She’s next to me right now, working hard to keep me warm, make me happy. And I love my stupid husband, who stumbled into my life and stayed, and who wakes up every morning and goes to sleep at night with the single-minded mission of making me happy and taking care of me. And I love my crazy mother and her vegetarian concoctions and her big Benjamin Franklin head. I love my father, who only knows how to work and did it for me and my mother and does it still at 78, waking up at five in the morning to go to work and coming home to demand that we play dominoes even though we suck at it and he ends every game by saying he will never play with us again. I love my uncle, who, at 91, still plans on going to the beach in the summer. And every cousin and every in-law I haven’t seen for too long who still, somehow, is connected to me in ways no Facebook application can possibly understand. I am grateful for them all, and for the ones who are now dead who watch over me and are waiting.

1. My faith. Somehow, a feminist academic has been able to not only hang on to her faith, but have it grow. True, I might have faltered there for a while in my questioning twenties, but it came back to me and has stayed. There’s much about it that I can’t understand, but faith is believing without understanding, and I do. I wouldn’t find meaning in anything if not for God. If we were just a collection of biochemistry and nothing more, I’d see no reason not to toss the Petri dish into the garbage. The secure knowledge that this broken plane isn’t all there is to my existence is the only thing that makes me able to keep going. So what if things go wrong here? Of course they do. This place is busted. You get through it. You keep your eye on the prize. When I get to heaven, God will explain all the things even the Internet can’t (see #9).  What I am most grateful for this Thanksgiving is that I know to Whom I’m grateful. It’s kind of baffling that people have come to see this as a secular holiday. I understand that people gather to be with family and celebrate togetherness, but saying thanks implies an audience. Thank you, _____? No comprendo (despite #7). And I’m so freaking grateful that I’m not going to wake up at 3 am to go pitch a tent in front of a store. You might think that has nothing to do with religion, but I’m pretty sure that kind of fevered consumerism is a sign of a serious deprivation of meaning and self-worth. I’m grateful, so grateful, that I do my worshipping at St. Dominic’s, and not Best Buy!

An Unexpected Birthday Present & a New Blog Mission

This blog is dying. This is my first post in almost two months! It’s time to make some changes, and what better time than a birthday to start over? Birthdays, like New Year’s, are a time for reevaluation, and significant birthdays that much more so—I’m going to be 39! No, it’s not the big 4-0, but it’s in a weird way even more of a milestone: the last of the birthdays beginning with 3. Goodbye, thirties. I feel that compared to 39, 40 will be some kind of arrival, some kind of welcome arrival. Didn’t much enjoy my thirties, for all that they’re supposed to be “the new twenties.” Maybe my forties will be what my thirties were supposed to have been, maybe once I’m there I’ll be able to reinvent myself, or at least this blog. 

The issue that I’m having is staying true to the blog’s description, “A blog for beginning writers about the basics of writing creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.” As you can see above, I’m adding “and other musings about teaching, writing, and living with words.” Less specific, perhaps, but that’s the point. The main reason why I haven’t been posting regularly is simply the lack of time, but there are also other thoughts where writing about writing should be. I only get to teach creative writing in the spring, and when I’m busy I do much less writing of my own, which means that I have much less to say about writing. On the other hand, there are lots of topics I would like to have a chance to write about that don’t fit the original blog description. For a while, I contemplated starting another, more personal blog, but that just seems irrational—if I don’t have time to keep one blog going, what’s the logic in starting another? Besides, according to fellow poet-blogger Ann E. Michael, this blog has always, apparently, been about more than I thought. According to her, my “posts include cultural commentary, books, movies, education, feminism, and tips on writing.” Sometimes it takes someone else to point out the obvious!

So, expect to see more posts about all that other stuff, as well as the usual posts on craft, which continues to be the main emphasis of this blog as I see it. Hopefully a little more wiggle room in terms of what I allow myself to write about will give me the necessary push to save Writing with Celia.

Meantime, check this out: they’re celebrating MY BIRTHDAY in New York! Oh, this is sweeeeeet! My jaw dropped when I got the Google alert. What a nice thing to do. My thanks go out to Roxanne Hoffman of Poets Wear Prada, who is hosting the event, in which five local poets, David Joel Friedman, author of The Welcome (National Poetry Series, University of Illinois Press. 2006), Erik La Prade (Chelsea), George Held (Greenwich Village), Maria Lisella (Astoria), and Juanita Torrence-Thompson (Flushing), will be reading from their own work and that of the November birthday poets, Stephen Crane (11/1), Marianne Moore (11/15), J.P. Dancing Bear (11/17), Sharon Olds (11/19), Paul Celan (11/20), William Blake (11/28), and myself. My thanks too to Left Bank Books, and to Andrew Christ, who included me in his November poet birthdays list, and, of course, hugs and kisses to the participating poets. If you are anywhere near NY tomorrow night, please go to this event, and comment below! The reading will take place tomorrow, Friday, November 18, 2011, at 8:00 p.m. Left Bank Books is located in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan between Bank and West 12th Streets at No. 17 8th Avenue, New York, NY 10014. For more information, see the Poet’s Wear Prada post on this event.

I can’t tell you how mind-blowing it is to know that my poems are in a city I’ve never been in, in the hands of people I’ve never met. I feel just like Sally Field, who was doing pretty well when she was 39:

99 Writing Problems, but a Bitch Ain’t One

People who don’t know me very well are often surprised to hear that I’m one foul-mouthed . . . woman. Perhaps no one expects a 5’4” female poet-professor to have the talent to make Yosemite Sam blush. Whatever. I’m very proud of my ability to drop F-bombs not just between words, but between syllables. It just feels good. However, it makes teaching hard. One must keep things professional. There are two words I do allow myself to use in class: bullshit and bitch.

Listen: I’m a freaking poet. That means I will use the best word for the job, and if it offends you, go run and complain to whom you will. Bullshit is an excellent word. You can spend half an hour explaining to a student that her answer to a question “lacks authority” or “is verbose” or “illogical,” or you can say “you’re just bullshitting here” and get your point across immediately. I choose the latter approach.

Similarly, feminist politics be damned, nothing conveys my maximum-security-prison approach to writing skills better that the word bitch. You need to make words your bitches. Moreover, and here I finally get to the point of this post, if you’re going to walk around calling yourself a writer, you need to make MS Word and other tools your bitches.

Johnny, why have you chosen to capitalize the first word of all the lines in your poem? That seems like a rather traditional choice. Are you making a statement about traditional poetry here vis-à-vis your contemporary urban subject matter?

Nah. I typed them lower case, and the computer just did that. I dunno why.

Johnny needs to learn how to make that computer his bitch. Usually, especially in contexts such as this blog, when one says “writing skills,” the assumption is one is referring to rhetorical or even grammatical skills. But we must remember the most essential meaning of the verb to write: to put words down on a legible surface via some sort of tool.

I came to computer skills late in life, even for a Generation Xer. I didn’t get my first computer, a Tandy 1000 RL, until I was a junior in college, in the early ‘90s. It didn’t even have a mouse or Windows. It had its own operating system, something called Deskmate. It came without a hard drive (later I installed one myself, thank you very freaking much). To switch between programs, you had to switch floppy disks. Before my Tandy, whom I affectionately called Keifer, I didn’t even have an electric typewriter. I had a mechanical Smith Corona.

Mind you, I love that typewriter (I still have it, somewhere). Something about the physicality of it is really appealing, the tapping noise of the keys and the zip-ping! when you got to the end of the line. I forget where, but somewhere I recently read (heard?) that when you press down on the keys of a typewriter, something pushes back. That’s pretty cool. Am I going to go back to writing on a typewriter? Hell no.

When I first got Keifer, I would still compose longhand, and then use the word processing application basically as a typewriter. This worked well from the point of view of revision—I made many changes as I typed. However, I soon abandoned this double process. Working on a computer was extremely liberating—I could go backwards and forwards, and make innumerable adjustments without confusion or extra work. Even as I write this, I have ideas I want to get to jotted down in my own gibberish above, below, and within paragraphs I have already drafted. True, these could just as easily be scribbled on a sheet of paper, but I couldn’t move them around as quickly.

The only drawback to writing on the computer is how easy it is to lose drafts. If you fiddle with, say, a poem too much, and want to go back to an earlier draft, it has been overwritten, unless you are carefully creating separate documents, or maybe printing drafts as you go along. But this is a minor inconvenience, easily overcome by more careful saving of your work.

The truth is you are lost as a writer in 2011 if you don’t have at least some basic computer skills. I’ve never even spoken to an editor. All of my publishing has been done through email. If you intend to work with small, independent publishers, be ready to format your own manuscript for publication—you need the ability to make not just MS Word but also Adobe or other PDF software your bitches.

I’m no tekkie. I’m not running to go plunk down my vast adjunct wages for an iPad, for example. I played around with one at the store, and I’m not impressed by the keyboard function. Though it’s responsive, it’s not as responsive as a physical one, and I need to write. I can’t be checking to see if every third keystroke registered. True technological literacy is not about fluttering from one latest gadget to the other, but about knowing how to use the best tools to maximize your productivity, or creativity, as the case may be.

I have ranted before about the need to have good grammar and punctuation skills to be a good writer. That is also a form of literacy. The writer’s skills, however, don’t stop there. In the same way that you’re not going to find an editor willing to plod through your bad grammar, you’re not going to find someone to type for you or figure out how to number your pages for you. Well, you might, but get ready to pay for it with money or sex. There’s always at least one bitch in every situation. Don’t let it be you.

Goodbye, Summer

Labor Day was yesterday and another summer has curled up at the edges and dissipated into smoke. I didn’t write the novel, didn’t put together the manuscript, or do much writing at all. I didn’t fix up the house or lose the weight. I didn’t even do some of the things that used to define summer for me during other years when the hopeful to-do list was gobbled up by mornings laying out in the sun or floating in the water and afternoons reading in bed. Where did the summer go?

Last thing I remember, I was watching 84 Charing Cross Road, and hating it. I suppose I should have read the book instead. I don’t remember making the decision to watch the film first—I usually go the other way around, but there it was in the mail, auto-delivered in a bright red Netflix envelope from a queue I long ago lost control over, and there we were, exhausted from the usual end-of-summer syllabus scramble. Someone had recommended it to me, someone who thinks of me as a bibliophile, which I suppose I might be. Don’t remember who that was either, but I absolutely hated the film, based on the true story of writer Helene Hanff’s decades-long relationship with a London bookstore. All I could think of was how wonderful it is that hardly anyone will have to go to such lengths again to get a book. Pretty much any book you can think of is readily available online, and you can either download it instantaneously or have it delivered to your door in just a few days.

The whole “good books” attitude seems snooty to me, smells of The Canon, of Dead White Men and beliefs that exclude little brown women like me. Hanff was not just a bibliophile but an Anglophile, and anyone who acts like the sun should have never set on the British Empire is highly suspect in my book. I’ve met people like this, people who believe nothing good has been written in the past hundred years, which happens to coincide with the diversification of postcolonial literature. People who refer to women’s literature as “minor.” I don’t like these people. The death of the canon, of the leather-bound Good Book only a few of the initiated are capable of appreciating, is good news to the likes of me. One wonderful thing about the proliferation of alternative publishing venues is the democratization of literature, or at least the promise of it.

What I can’t bring myself to embrace, however, is the lack of a physical future for literature. I can download anything I want into my fancy ereader my husband got me for Christmas, but I can’t go to the Main Bookshop anymore. The Main Bookshop, like so many independent bookstores and even more than a few big-box stores, is closed for good, done in by a fire a few years ago but in reality in trouble long before then. Summer for me meant the beach, yes, but it also meant the Main Bookshop, a huge remainder bookstore that once stood in downtown Sarasota. At its height, the Main Bookshop had two floors, three if you counted the even deeper discount books, records, and prints you could find on the third floor. The place was messy, cluttered. It smelled funky. It was full of ancient tables and chairs, ratty armchairs, and even rattier sofas. When the rain kept you off the beach, you could spend hours there, reading. No fancy coffee or cakes. Just books and classical music or instrumental jazz piping in through the speakers. Every year my husband and I would bring home dozens of books, sometimes for as little as two dollars each. I had a favorite chair, I knew where the key to the bathroom was. I knew the cats—everyone did. It was home. Home the way my local library branch—now basically a hallway of computer terminals—used to be when I was little, when Saturdays meant getting free air conditioning at the library and reading and napping with books. I can browse online, I can “look inside this book” on Amazon, but I’m still here, in front of this screen, my world ever smaller as the need to leave this bright rectangle in front of me for pretty much anything lessens more with every passing day.

View from the second floor of the Main Bookshop. Photo courtesy of jennadeleo.com

Byron, one of the Main Bookshop cats.
Photo courtesy of jennadeleo.com

The bathroom door. Photo courtesy
of jennadeleo.com

Reading is an activity of the mind, but I also have a body, and this body longs for books that occupy more than digital space. The thing that rankles me about the so-called bibliophiles is that often books seem like just keys to some clique they wish to belong to—some coffee-drinking, fake-glasses wearing club that just looks better holding a book. I’d hate to think that such hypocrisy is what, at heart, makes me still prefer paper, and, much as I once longed to wear a hoopskirt, I have no illusions about the Great Past When Good Books Were Written. Maybe wanting to sit on the floor of the Main Bookshop in front of the Women’s Studies section with a stack of books and a cat again is no different from wanting to fit into the bikini or boogie board all the way to shore—one of those summer joys I long to feel again.

I AM A FEMINIST POET

Wanna make something of it?


A bestseller. Ever
heard of it?

“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash–and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘Lamplighter,’ and other books neither better nor worse?–worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1855

"I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."
—VS Naipaul, 2011

There’s a post that’s been stuck in my craw for some time now—ever since the VIDA count came out last year, the statistics that proved an alarming disparity when it comes to which gender gets published in the major journals. I felt that griping about the status of women writers was off-topic for this blog, which I had started exclusively as a venue for discussing ideas pertinent to beginning writers. I went so far as to ask Lesley Wheeler about it, but I passed on the topic more than once since then.

I was wrong. It’s a very pertinent topic, especially if you’re a beginning writer who happens to be a woman. Here’s the thing: whether you want it to or not, the issue is going to affect you. You can no more not write as a woman than you can not write as a Latina or a black or an Asian, but that’s another post.

What finally threw me over the edge was Anis Shivani’s post about Philip Levine being chosen as the next poet laureate. To be incensed by Shivani is to be duped—he sets out to shock you, and so of course was bound to poop on Levine’s parade. I’d no more be upset by that than by Madonna (I show my age—Lady Gaga?). It’s the way he went about it that really upset me. Shivani has taken Levine’s appointment as an opportunity to blame all that is supposedly wrong with modern American poetry on women.

To be fair, Shivani’s rant is not original—people have been condemning modern American poetry for its depoliticized self-absorption for a while now. Billy Collins, he whose great poetic oeuvre is the ode to osso bucco, has made a career out of not being self-aggrandizing (it’s no surprise that Shivani mentions him in his rant). It’s also nothing new to blame the contemporary confessional poets for this so-called bankruptcy. After all, you can only be depressed for so long before people start telling you to shut up and get over yourself, and after the initial voyeuristic thrill of the first confessional poets, those who came after were bound to bear this criticism. It’s also not Shivani’s fault that most of the major second-generation confessional poets happen to be women: Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück. All this being said, however, Shivani’s rant shows too much glee. What a wonderful opportunity, via the thinly disguised excuse of Levine’s appointment, to totally diss the top women writers of our day. Everything that’s wrong with contemporary American poetry is directly attributable to women’s obsession with the personal and domestic. They are outside of history, their dramas of no interest to the world: “Whereas Robert Lowell had a secure sense of himself as a conductor in the vast orchestral schema called History, for Olds and the post-feminist writers of our era womanhood as it exists is an unfathomable conspiracy, a calumny against some ideal nature that must nevertheless be embraced.”

Yikes. Olds writes in “flat language, unimpressive diction, predictable rhythms, and barely passable metaphors, lumped together in herky-jerky fashion across intentionally unclean line breaks.” Graham is “unreadable.” For Glück, “from 1968 until now nothing in the real world seems to have impinged on Glück's domestic melodrama.” He must complain about Levine, or the ruse collapses, yet of him Shivani says, “unlike Olds, Graham, and Glück, Levine does possess some measure of genuine skill.”

WTF? Glück, in particular, gets a lot of hate. Not many people liked her last book, A Village Life. Admittedly, it’s not her best (although it doesn’t suck, either). But read William Logan’s New York Times review and you’ll get a whiff of that same old stench. Glück’s “pinch-mouthed poems have long represented the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse — starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing.” She is unable to strike out successfully in a new direction, unlike “Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer.” All the groundbreakers—except for Plath—are men, and women who follow them, like Glück, cheap imitations. Apart from Eliot, Lowell, and Hill, Logan compares Glück’s work to the bible, Edgar Lee Masters, even M. Night Shyamalan. Nowhere and no one is too bizarre an original from which Glück copies. Even Plath doesn’t get credit: “Glück learned much from Plath about how to make a case of nerves central to poetry,” Logan says, but “both poets owe a shadowy debt to Eliot”!


A new semester is beginning. I have to be careful, because on Rate My Professor someone has warned my new students that “SHE iS SUCH A fEMiNiST! EXtREMELY RUdE iF Y0U d0Nt AGREE WiTH HER ViEWs! i LEARNEd AL0t Ab0Ut W0MENs RiGHTs! bUt ALL t0GEtHER SHEs N0t tHE BESt PR0f!!”

So be it.

One of the greatest tragedies I have witnessed—yes, I mean it: one of the greatest—in the last two tragedy-filled decades is the demise of feminist discourse. Somewhere between Buffy and Bella, “feminist” became an archaic term, something like “abacus.” To be a feminist not only marked you as some old warrior fighting a remote battle belonging to some long-forgotten war, but as a man-hater, baby-hater, fat-ugly-hairy nuisance.

WTF? I’m not going to claim some sort of media conspiracy is to blame for the death of feminism—I don’t believe the world is that organized. True, the word became too rigid at some point, and it became difficult to be a feminist while at the same time being heterosexual or Catholic or—worst of all—pretty. But these multiple identities were present in feminist thought since its inception. What really happened, I think, is that we just gave up. Exhausted by the effort, by the glacial pace of it all, it was much easier to say yippee, we won, than to continue fighting.

Perhaps what makes me “rude” is my refusal to play along. Look at Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the freshmen will say (remember when we made the effort to refer to them as “first-year” students?). Go ahead, look at them. Clinton had to pretend not to be fazed by people telling her to “stop running for President and make me a sandwich.” Palin had to stand being referred to as “Caribou Barbie.”

Two of the most critically acclaimed American films of the last two decades are American Beauty and Revolutionary Road. Both were directed by Sam Mendes. Both screenplays were written by men, and the novel on which Revolutionary Road is based was also written by a man. How are these not domestic dramas? No; they are biting social commentary, meditations on the collapse of the American Dream. They would only be petty, self-absorbed domestic melodramas if they were written by women.

I am a feminist poet. I have to be. If you are not only a beginning writer, but a woman, I suggest you figure out how you feel about this issue, before someone else figures it out for you. Define your feminism or lack thereof any way you want to, but define it. Because you will never be a writer—you will always be a woman writer.

Are You Writing About It, Celia?

What Judy has
been up to.

On Suffering, Inspiration, and Writer’s Block

Despite working together at STU, my pal Judy Bachay and I rarely bump into each other. When we do, it becomes a quick catch-up conversation. What have you been up to, she always asks, and I abbreviate the major events. Whenever these include some kind of trauma, like a death or an illness, or some kind of emotionally laden story, she always asks me the same thing: Are you writing about it, Celia?

Judy’s assumption is common. Most people believe that suffering is de facto inspiration, and that, moreover, writing about something traumatic is therapeutic, both for the writer and the eventual readers. But writing doesn’t work for everyone this way; it certainly doesn’t for me, and Judy’s question always leaves me stumped. I’m never “writing about it.” When I’m in the middle of some personal crisis, I can’t write. Don’t get me wrong—I want to be this sort of writer. It seems to me that, as my friend Steve likes to remind me, quoting of course that wonderful film, Throw Momma from the Train, “a writer writes, always.” It makes me question whether I’m a writer at all when I spend long stretches of time without writing. Shouldn’t the impulse overcome me, shouldn’t writing be the primary means through which I digest my life? Shouldn’t I be able to write at the funeral, the hospital, in the middle of the storm, if I am really a writer?

"On Impoverishment"
and other collected
essays.

Glück’s first four
books are now
collected in one
volume.

Perhaps not. One of the most heartening essays on this subject is Louise Glück’s “On Impoverishment,” a characteristically depressing baccalaureate address she gave at Williams College in 1993. I have read it over many times and could spend the rest of this post quoting it at length—every sentence is so resonant for me. In it, she analyzes a two-year period of her life between Firstborn and The House on Marshland, her first and second books. She spent these two years without writing. Not on purpose, not as some bizarre exercise. She simply wasn’t capable of it, and assumed the gift of writing had left her. She was, of course, still able to write, and then some. But during this time she lay, in essence, fallow. What she came to realize later was that she was processing—achieving a change in her life that would result in a change in her writing. She explains:

To teach myself hope, I began, thirty years ago, to chart periods of silence in the same way that I dated poems. And I have repeatedly seen long silence end in speech. Moreover, the speech, the writing that begins after such a siege, differs always from what went before, and in ways I couldn't through act of will accomplish. And this happens even when outward circumstances don't change at all. Some work is done through suffering, through impoverishment, through the involuntary relinquishing of a self.

Despair in our culture tends to produce wild activity: change the job, change the partner, replace the faltering ambition instantly. We fear passivity and prize action, meaning the action we initiate. But the self cannot be willed back. And flight from despair forfeits whatever benefit may arise in the encounter with despair.

I have found this in my own life to be true. One of the most traumatic experiences of my life happened in 2002. My mother, 73 years old yet seemingly in perfect health, went from a simple cold to a lung collapse in the course of just a few days. On Christmas Eve she was chatting with my mother-in-law about how lucky she was to be so old and yet not have to take even one pill, and the day after Christmas we were rushing her to the hospital. We still don’t know quite what happened. Obviously, she wasn’t as well as we thought. She was self-medicating for her asthma, and back then all of us smoked. She spent a week on a ventilator. At one point I thought they would ask me to sign the papers that would turn it off. Miraculously, she came out of it, but so weak she remained an invalid for months.

How I got through my
impoverishment.

Back then I was still “working on my dissertation.” We had no money for a nurse, and so I called in and asked for a semester off. I thought I could surely continue writing while I nursed my mother. Without teaching, I’d have all this free time. And I did. Nursing my mother and keeping house took time, but not all day. Yet, I didn’t write one word of that blasted thing, or of anything else. I spent my free time maniacally collecting fish and insects on Animal Crossing.

Why couldn’t I write, with all that free time? Because, of course, I had none. While I was lying in bed next to my mother, controller in hand, chasing a virtual butterfly, it may have been the case that I was “doing nothing” on the outside, but inside, whether I chose to acknowledge it or not, my mind was racing. Would my mother die? If she stumbled on the way to the bathroom, could I stop her from falling?

Could I stop her from dying?

I couldn’t face these thoughts, much less write about them. That’s why I was putting all my energy into the mindless task of virtual fishing. Moreover, I couldn’t “make” myself confront these thoughts in an attempt to force the movement from despair to whatever state follows. In our action-driven world, Glück observes, it’s difficult to accept the function of surrender:

Unfortunately, it doesn't follow that, since despair can sponsor deep change, capitulation should be immediate and absolute. The condition demands resistance at the outset; to treat impoverishment as a prerequisite to wealth, to turn it into a kind of fraternity hazing, is to deny the experience. It must be feared and resisted; it must exhaust all available resources, since its essence is defeat.

The alternative? A life made entirely of will and ultimately dominated by fear. Such a life expresses itself in too prompt, too superficial adjustments of what can, in the external environment, be manipulated, or in a cautious clinging to those habits and forms which, because they are not crucial, cannot, in being lost, do much damage. The deft skirting of despair is a life lived on the surface, intimidated by depth, a life that refuses to be used by time, which it tries instead to dominate or evade. It is all abrupt movement or anxious cleaving; it does not understand that random action is also a kind of stasis. In its horror of passivity, it forgets that passivity over time is, by definition, active. There exists, in other words, a form of action felt as helplessness, a form of will that exhibits, on the surface, none of the familiar dynamic properties of will. Fortitude is will.

Which is not, of course, to say that you shouldn’t put up a fight. The fight is part of the process, and even Glück acknowledges that surrender can go too far. There are a few actions you can take that help you through impoverishment.

Keep Reading

During her period of impoverishment, Glück says that “nothing I read, nothing I saw or heard provoked response. And in the absence of response to the world, the act of writing, which had been, which is, the center of my life, the act or dream that suffuses the life with meaning, had virtually stopped.” But she kept reading, or else she wouldn’t have known that it wasn’t working. Even if everything you read seems dead to you, just read it. Think about why it’s dead. Keep looking until one day she comes back to you, the muse that lives so often in the work of others.

Keep a Journal

You may not be able to write formally, but the act of keeping a journal will keep the machine oiled and help you sort your feelings. Don’t worry about it making sense. Be simple and mechanical—record, rather than interpret, what you have done, seen, eaten, said. Though these mere facts may seem meaningless at the moment, later they might supply the details of your journey back.

Carve Physical and Psychic Spaces for Your Writing

Virginia Woolf’s famous desire for a room is more than physical, and whether you’re writing or not, some people need “room”—both physical and emotional—more than others. Some people can write at Starbucks, and some need the attic. Figure out what works for you and make it happen or die trying. Not many of us have the material means to have the dream room, but even if it’s a small corner of the closet, having a physical space that has the specific purpose of writing can have immense symbolic value. But you also need psychic space, and that can be even more difficult to get. Fight for it. Be rude. Tell people you are writing and that you need to concentrate. Put the phone away, drug the kids if you must. Give yourself the designated space and wait for it to be filled. Much like the new bookcase you just bought, writing space has a tendency to fill itself.

Set Goals and Deadlines

When I started this blog, I promised myself a post a week, and for months I was able to keep it up. It wasn’t always easy. Some weeks I had to postpone or cancel activities that certainly were more important than a stupid blog post, like exercising or paying the bills. But I had a goal. When did I falter? When I said to myself, it’s summer, I’ve already proven that I can do the weekly post, what’s the point in continuing. Call it a goal, call it a promise, call it a vow—call it whatever you want as long as it’s binding. Whether it’s a poem a day or a story this weekend, create a goal and meet it. Make the goal realistic. Underestimate yourself—it’s much more motivating to exceed your goal than to fall short. If you can’t do a poem a day, do one a week, or a month. But do it by the time you said you would, even if it means doing it badly. Doesn’t matter if it came out good—you did it, and one day it will be good even if it wasn’t this last time.

When You Can’t Write, Revise

I’ve been milking the work I did in my late teens and early twenties for years. Back then, I was eager to write and wrote a lot—I couldn’t be bothered to revise, much less to put things together into manuscripts and go through the drudgery of submitting. Now it’s the reverse—I rarely get those spurts of creativity, but yet I’m able to edit more critically and find the mindless paperwork of submitting soothing and reassuring. I may not be “writing,” as in composing, but I’m tending to my writing, and that’s part of the process.

Get Help

Don’t confuse normal life events and writerly impoverishment with illness. Addiction and depression are not writing problems, they’re medical emergencies. If you’re doing more than just not writing—if you’re drinking or sleeping (or not sleeping) excessively, if you’re alienated from others, if you’ve lost interest not just in words but in living, you’ve got bigger problems than writer’s block. People glamorize the addictions and depressions of artists to such an extent that many people believe destructive behavior is linked to creativity, but that’s bullshit. Ask Amy Winehouse.

It’s nice that today is the feast of St. Martha. St. Martha was the sister of Mary and Lazarus. In Luke 10:38-42, we’re told that she got upset with Mary during one of Jesus’ visits. Busy with the mundane details of hospitality, Martha gets upset with Mary, who’s just sitting by Jesus, listening to him speak, instead of helping Martha with their guests. Martha asks Jesus to chastise Mary for her laziness, but Jesus surprises us by telling Martha to stop fussing and let Mary enjoy the better part. When Martha looked at Mary, she thought Mary was “doing nothing,” especially in comparison to all her own “purposeful” activity. Imagine that—thinking of listening to Jesus as less worthwhile than putting together a platter of crudités or whatever the heck it was people laid out for their guests back then!

So, yes, sometimes writers write. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they think, or listen to Jesus, or play videogames. It’s all good.

There you go, Judy. I wrote about it.