beautiful monsters

Another day, another rejection letter (another long blog entry)…

In the mail today:

A stack of magazines from the NZ Institute of Architects who haven’t figured out that I’m not going to be an architect any more.

A postcard from Charlotte Yates announcing the release of her new CD, Plainsong.

A brief rejection letter from a publisher I don’t particularly like, for a poem I’d forgotten about sending, so not too much grief there. Still…

A package from my parents, containing a new mouse (look, no balls), several MDs of chamber music, a stash of ink cartridges, and a big bag of cape gooseberries. Yum!

Letters for seven different people who no longer live here.

Just another tragic angsty rant

I feel like such a failure at the moment. Could be to do with getting another rejection letter, but that’s only part of it. I couldn’t handle architecture school. I had to pull out of the Tohu Maoritanga. I’m behind schedule with my writing and my painting. I’m way behind with my IHC training. I never get out to the marae any more, I never find time to plant trees or paint stencils or organise events. I haven’t been back to the Indymedia meetings, I haven’t been to Aikido, and my guava tree is dying and I have no idea what to do about it… blah blah blah. I don’t seem to have the energy to do anything. But I want to. So I’m beating myself up about it. Beat beat beat.

Footsteps

Our flat has been very quiet lately. Just me a lot of the time. Now, all of a sudden, there are lots and lots of people, most of whom I don’t know, wearing woolly hats and big boots and carrying six-packs of Monteith’s and showing off the tattoos that they did themselves, freestyle. My female flatmates are very giggly and the whole house smells floral. I’m hiding in my room. Floral smells give me hayfever.

Wannabe writer seeks validation

I’ve got such mixed feelings about my writing at the moment. Part of me thinks that the whole publication/awards/launches/etc world is wanky and exclusive and I don’t want to be part of it. But part of me really wants to be “successful” in that world. At the moment I’m just sitting on the fence humming and hawing. I feel as though I probably could write the style of poetry that seems to be “publishable.” But it would mean some degree of compromise. I would be editing my work just because I knew that was what the editors wanted, not because I thought that it would be better or more worthwhile. I don’t know if I believe poetry should be about getting published in journals and getting a pat on the back from Bill Manhire and Fergus Barrowman. I don’t know if I even want that. I don’t think I really see that as success. For me, I know I have achieved something when I’m at a crowded party, and someone picks up a folder of my poems and opens it at a page, and then reads the whole poem, and then sits down in a corner and reads the whole folder, and then goes to show her friend. I know I have achieved something when I read a poem in a noisy pub, and the whole room goes silent, and when I finish I have compete strangers coming up to me and hugging me and crying. And the kinds of poems that have that effect on people are not the kinds of poems that get accepted by journals. Oh and did I mention how much it bugs me that I have received rejection slips from five different men? I haven’t found any women editors to send my poems to.

I can’t resist the temptation. I’m going to put in another cut and paste rant. This one is the essay I put at the end of my poetry folio.

The Case for the Defense

This course has turned my life upside down. There I was, down at the architecture school at some grisly hour of the night, sedulously gluing together tiny (but very expensive) bits of wood and plastic... The next moment I was surrounded by people who understood the importance of semi-colons and the wonder of the ‘best words in the best order.’

It was a revelation. I learnt some very important truths about myself.

When someone says to me “create a model no larger than 200 x 200mm inspired by Len Lye that demonstrates rotational motion using symmetry as an ordering principle and conveying a sense of infinite space and salient surface using only overhead transparencies and a staple gun...” I fall apart, drink huge quantities of sugar and caffeine, wake up at all hours drowning in panic, and take to my wrists with scalpel blades.

On the other hand, if someone says to me “write a sestina X ways of looking at Y in syllabics using only words found on page 6 of the Dominion Post but also make room for a teapot, a seasick iguana, a man who collects cat claws, three priests, and the Lonely Planet Guide to Yemen...” I fall in love.

I don’t mix well with architecture; I want to write.

The past few weeks have been challenging, as well as exciting. I have been faced with some difficult decisions regarding what I write about, and how much attention I pay to people’s comments about my work.

Sometimes people say my poems are too personal, too direct, I use the first person too freely. Too personal? How can writing be anything but personal? I am reminded of my experiences of essay writing. Research is supposed to be objective, and the word “I” is forbidden because “I” implies that the work is subjective and biased. (Which it is. Everyone has biases and these always influence their work).

Perhaps something similar happens in literature? Poetry is supposed to be universal, it touches on some big ‘Truth.’ Using the word “I” is a reminder that our experiences and accounts of the world can only be personal.

My poems are direct, and often in the first person, and this is a conscious choice. I can’t claim to speak for anyone else – the only experiences I have are my own. The use of “I” in my poems is also related to the spaces my poems have developed in, including the Mad Genius Songwriter’s nights at the Bluenote. My poems are created to be performed, they are a dialogue between “I” and you – the audience.

I am also conscious of my identity as a writer within a patriarchal culture. Writing my poems in my own voice is an attempt to define and speak about my own experiences in my own terms.

I have noticed that people are more critical of my poems when they deal with issues such as sexual abuse or madness. When I write an ode to Kim Hill, and say “I once had the honour of playing you in a radio drama,” it is personal, direct, and doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination; it’s just telling a story. But no one says “Dear Kim” is too personal, in fact, most people seem to think it’s a great poem. On the other hand, when I write about rape, all of a sudden there’s a lot wrong with my poetry.

During this course I have thought a lot about what poetry is, and who creates our definitions of poetry. In the past there has been no visible tradition of poetry by women. As Dinah Birch notes, the power of poetry has been “closely bound up with the continuity of its traditions.” Historically, women have been barred from education, and have not had access to classical traditions of poetry.

It would be nice to believe that things are different now. After all, we have Jenny Bornhoult and Lauris Edmond... Howver, recently I flicked through a few anthologies of poetry from Aotearoa. In the first (my favourite collection) about 40% of the poets were women. In our course text, the number of women dropped to about 35%. In other recent anthologies, less than 30% of the poets were women.
What does this mean?

I believe that men have always defined our ideas about what poetry is, and what makes good poetry. The very language we write in is inherently sexist, and there is an absence of words to refer to women’s experiences.

People have described my poetry as “confessional” or “personal poetry” – alright to show to your friends, but not the sort of thing you would publish. The word “confessional” implies that the writer “has done something embarrassing and inappropriate for which transgression she is in need of absolution.” Why is “confessional” poetry usually by women (or rather, why is autobiographical poetry by men not seen as confessional)? Could it be that the label is simply “handy for dismissing art that the critic wishes to trivialize”? Could it be that women’s experiences are seen as inferior, embarrassing, or trivial?

Who decides what is “good poetry,” and what it should be about? I believe that women have different experiences of the world, and this shapes our writing. However the freedom of the press belongs to he who owns the press. Joanna Russ notes that when screening candidates for an MA program in creative writing, her rankings of the top twenty samples written by men were almost identical to the ranking of her male colleagues’. However her ranking of the top twenty samples by women was almost exactly the inverse of theirs. She was outnumbered – none of her female choices made it into the program. She believes that men cannot understand the experiences which shape women’s writing, and writing by women does not fit their conception of what poetry is.

Women are not the only ones who exist on the margins of literature. Poetry is about communication, about showing something beautiful, or painful, about sharing experiences. There are long Maori traditions of creative and poetical communication, which are underrepresented in our literary history. Contemporary Maori writers
are producing some amazing work, but Maori literature is still underrepresented. “He who owns the press” tends to be white, and to succeed in literary circles Maori writers have to pass a Pakeha-defined test. I have the utmost respect for Maori writers, who (as Merata Mita puts it) manage to “express their peculiarly Maori experience in the language of the oppressor.”

I have been told that my poems are too political. I believe everything we do is political, from the clothes we buy or the food we eat... to the things we write. Or allude to, or don’t say at all as the case may be. Part of the story I live is about rape and about being locked in a psych ward, and about trying to survive these things. If I write about everything else but not these things, it feels like I’m lying.

I believe silence is a breeding ground for fear, ignorance, and violence. If I only write poems that people feel comfortable reading, I am contributing to the silence. And sometimes the weight of silence is unbearable. I want to speak these words because there are others who do not have a voice. Yes I am angry and it hurts and it’s all so close to home... but don’t say that like it’s a bad thing.

Some of my poems are one-sided accounts of shared stories. I don’t want to speak for others, I am not giving a factual account of what happened. Instead, I have tried to capture a feeling, a page of a story, a fragment of life.

Other poems are about experiences I have not personally lived through, however there are parallels in my own life. For example, I can never fully comprehend what it is like to be sent to a concentration camp, but injustice and pain have scarred me, and as a queer activist I am part of a community of people who were sent to the camps. I want to offer my voice as I struggle to understand the experiences of others.

In some of my poems I use te reo Maori. I am Pakeha - my ancestors came here from Scotland and England. But I am not European, my roots have been in the soil of Aotearoa for six generations. Growing up in Rotorua, tikanga Maori was the obvious alternative to the western modernist way of life. I have been challenged about my use of images from Maori (his)stories. As a child, these images were part of my life, and shaped my perceptions of the world around me. They have become a part of my truth, and to let go of that would be painful. I use te reo Maori as part of my journey, learning the language, and as a sign of my respect and love for te reo. As I mentioned, my poetry is created to be performed, and some of the words in my poems are songs or chants. I hope that (to borrow words from Keri Hulme) “if you sing words you will hear singing, even when the words are flat on paper.” If I have used words and images in a context that anyone objects to, I am sorry to have caused offense. I am approaching te reo from a Pakeha perspective, because that is who I am, and the only route I can take. I have not provided a translation – Maori is an official language of Aotearoa, and of our university. If you don’t have a dictionary, you should get one!

When you read these poems, by all means, think to yourself “is this a good poem.” Then go a step further and ask yourself “good for what? Good for whom?”
I hope you will be challenged, surprised, and delighted.

Na Fionnaigh.

And if you made it to the end…

This is turning into another looooong blog entry, huh? I just thought that after all that ranting about my poems I should give you a couple of samples! These are actually two versions of the same poem, believe it or not. I wrote the second one after getting feedback from my course, saying that my poetry was too personal, and there was too much emphasis on bleeding, etc. (Well hey, blood has been a constant theme in my life). I like both versions, for different reasons.

Again, don’t know if I should put a warning before this one. It does deal with abuse a bit, though I don’t know, it’s not really explicit. Sort of. I don’t know. Don’t read it if you’re not sure if you’ll be traumatised or something!

A history of Bleeding

There are no words.

When someone takes your sexuality
and twists it, bruises it with their own body
rips you open, leaving a deep gorge
that runs from between your legs, through
your stomach, to a pool at the base of your throat,

and something cold flows out of it

the only language
is blood.

*

Little moon, you must have clung so tight
to the inside of your mother
you ripped off a piece of her.

Perhaps that’s why
there is so much blood.

Your mother threw back her head and screamed
she didn’t want to let go either, but you gave up
and we dragged you out by your feet and kept on dragging you
into the world, into an ambulance, leaving
your mother gasping on her knees
a pool of blood spreading quietly.

*

I don’t want to touch
the water, it seems dark enough
to drown in, and there are things floating in it
strands of pink, brighter red
colours I cannot name.

It was almost midnight
the last time I checked my watch.
How many people have been born
and died since then?

I can’t breathe, the air is so thick
with the scent of blood.
There are pools of it
in the shadows behind the sofa
under the bed.

Only the moon
understands
each month
her belly swells
with all the pain we
cannot bear.

*

How heavy can it be
blood and water?

Breathless

You clung so tight
colours ripped apart
and came
flying.

They settled in the corners
left moist secretions
thickening scents

Our voices
drained from us

we wandered around the house
clutching at bright pieces
as they sank

impossibly
heavy.

We closed
our eyes

left
with the weight

the question
of your voice.

Posted by Fionnaigh at April 24, 2003 09:44 PM