It’s All Connected…

The Babies by Sabrina Orah Mark

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
A wonderful book of prose poems. This is what I wrote on one of the pages in the book. I  make no claim that it is accurate, but it records part of my experience of the work: “Each perception contains every other possible perception and it’s a matter of choosing what to connect to what, and all the implications of those choices are contained in each choice, and orchestrating all these choices is a consciousness that has been through a disorienting trauma….” That trauma is very much connected to the Shoah, though the Shoah is not mentioned specifically by name, as far as I remember, which makes the book that much more powerful.

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So I am laying here on the couch at 2:38 AM with my right ankle inflamed and excruciatingly painful - though not as painful as before - and I am testing WordPress’ mobile features because I have been having a ridiculously hard time getting back to sleep. We are having company tomorrow and I am supposed to be cooking and I am wondering how I am going to stay on my feet. At least the food I am going to prepare is easy.

I wish I knew what brought this attack on. If I could be sure it was the little bit of meat I ate this past week, that would be okay. At least I would know. And if I could be sure it was the Apis - homeopathic remedy - that would be okay too. Not knowing, though, leaves me feeling, again, kind of helpless in the face of this condition. I don’t like it that I have had to take colchicine again; I was so happy with how good I was feeling up until the attack started last night. And I don’t like the feeling that I must have done something “wrong,” not in the moral sense, obviously, but in the sense of something that has set me back in terms of what I need to do to manage this condition.

Ah well, that’s enough kvetching for now. I am going to try to sleep.

I really liked this book, though I understand why people who picked it up expecting erotica of the Anais Nin sort, or people who expected the kind of self-involved confessional that often takes place in memoirs published in the US, would not have liked it. Millet writes about her very outsized sex life with a detachment that makes it sound like she is writing about someone else, reporting some kind of clinical research. I also found this detachment off-putting at first, but the more I read, the more I came to appreciate it, because I think anything else would have been a distraction from what appears to me to have been the point of the book: an exploration not so much of the meaning of sex, not an exposition–however erotically done–of her sexual exploits. In this, the book reminds of Sallie Teasdale’s Talk Dirty To Me, which is one of the smartest books about sex I have ever read.

I found myself underlining passages in Millet’s text. Here are a few, taken at random as I page back through the book. They represent for me the fact that Millet’s was an intelligence I really enjoyed following as it wended its way through the subject of sex

Page 8: A dick that is constantly exposed demands to be looked at, it provokes sexual excitement with its smooth monolithic contours, whereas the foreskin that you can play back and forth, uncovering the glans like a great bubble forming on the surface of soapy water, elicits a more subtle sensuality, its suppleness spreading in waves to your own orifice.

Page 27: There are major structural similarities between situations I have lived and those I have imagined, even though I have never actively chosen to reproduce the latter in my life, and the details of what I have lived had little part in nourishing my imaginings. Perhaps I should just assume that the fantasies forged in my earliest youth predisposed me to widely diverse experiences. Since I never felt ashamed of these fantasies, and I reworked and embellished them rather than trying to bury them, they offered not opposition to what was real but rather a sort of mesh through which real-life situations that other people might have found outrageous struck me as quite normal.

Page 65: Those who obey social mores are probably better equipped to confront demonstrations of jealousy than those with a libertine philosophy that leaves them feeling helpless in the face of passion. A person can prove her extensive and sincere liberality by sharing the pleasure she takes with the person she most loves, only for it to be pierced, without any warning, by an exactly proportionate intolerance. Jealousy may have been bubbling within like a spring, and as the bubbles burst it might even have been giving a regular and subterranean form of irrigation to the garden of libido, until–suddenly–it formed a torrent and then the entire conscious mind was submerged by it, as has been described by many people.

Page 70: It is just when I have found my bearings with the body, as it were, when the grain of the skin and its particular pigmentation have become familiar to me, or I have learned to adjust my own body to it, that my attention could focus on the person himself, often to form a sincere and lasting friendship.

Page 92: There must be a fairly general intrinsic link between the idea of moving in space, of traveling, and the idea of fucking, otherwise the widespread expression “getting off” would not have been invented.

Page 105: …[N]atural spaces do not feed the same fantasies as urban spaces. Because the latter is by definition a social space, it is a territory in which we express a desire to transgress codes with out exhibitionist/voyeuristic impulses; it presupposes the presence of others, of fortuitous looks to penetrate an aura of intimacy that emanates from a partially naked body or from two bodies soldered together. Those same bodies out under the clouds, with only God as their witness, are looking for the opposite sensation: not to make others come into the pocket of air in which their rapid breathing mingles but, thanks to their Edenic isolation, to let their pleasure spread as far as the eye can see.

Page 109: With the intransigence of the newly converted, I believed that fucking–and by that I mean fucking frequently and willingly whoever was (or were) the partner (or partners)–was a way of life. If not, if this thing was permitted only when certain conditions were met, at predetermined times, well then it was just a vacation from values that remained completely traditional.

Page 112: Sex really answered a wider necessity: to carve a smooth path for myself in the world.

Page 126: I leafed through the magazines on display, cautiously turned over the shrink-wrapped one. Isn’t it wonderful how you can be aroused so freely, in full sight and full knowledge of all the other customers doing the same thing, even though each behaves as if he or she is searching through the display racks at the local newsstand? Isn’t it admirable, the apparent detachment you have in public, contemplating pictures and objects that would certainly make you lose your composure at home? I liked to imagine myself in a mythical world where every shop offered that sort of merchandise, in among other goods, and where, with apparent nonchalance, you were gradually suffused by that warm feeling, absorbed in your perusal of organs reproduced in full color that perfectly depicted their moist surfaces, and you might shamelessly turn and how them to the person next to you. “Excuse me, could I borrow your paper?” “Oh, please do.” Etc. The quiet unassuming blatancy that reigns in a sex shop spread to every aspect of social life.

On April 16th, Persian Arts Festival welcomes Maryam Habibian, author of the play Forugh’s Reflecting Pool: The Life and Work of Forugh Farrokhzad, and Fawzia Afzal-Khan, editor of Shattering The Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out. Dr. Habibian will read a section from her play and offer a dramatic reading of some of Farrokhzad’s poems, in English and Persian. Dr. Afzal-Khan will sing a selection of Farrokhzad’s poems in Persian.

The event will take place on Wednesday, April 16th from 6-8 PM at the Bowery Poetry Club. There is a $12 cover, which buys you one drink. As usual, an open mic will follow the featured readers. If you would like to read your work, in English and/or Persian, please email poetry@persianartsfestival.org to sign up. Anyone can read, as long as what you read has some connection to Iran, Iranian culture, Iranian-American experience and so on. If you sign up, please plan to read no more than 2 or 3 poems or about 5-7 minutes worth of prose. Full bios of our readers appear below.

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On Thursday, March 6 at 7:30 PM, I will be reading from The Silence Of Men at RiverSpace in Nyack with my friend, Joseph Legaspi, whose new book of poems, Imago, was published this year by CavanKerry Press. Joseph’s poems, which break male silences in ways different from but also similar to my own, explore in truly moving images the world of his childhood in the Philippines, his deep connection to his family, his coming to the United States and more. I will be reading from The Silence Of Men. For more information, click here.

Here is the title poem from Joseph’s book:

Imago

As soon as we became men
my brother and I wore skirts.
We pinched our skirt-front into tents
for our newly circumcised penises, the incisions
prone to sticking painfully to our clothing.

I was partial to my sister’s plaid skirt,
a school uniform she outgrew; my brother favored
one belonging to my grandmother, flowers
showering down his ankles.
By this stage, the skin around the tips
of our penises was swollen the size
of dwarf tomatoes.

As a cure, my mother boiled
young offshoots of guava leaves.
Behind the streamline of hung fabric,
I sat on a stool and spread
before a tin washbasin. My mother bathed
my penis with the warm broth,
the water trickling into the basin like soft rain on our roof.
She cradled my organ, dried it with cotton,
wiping off the scabs melted by the warmth,
and she wrapped it in gauze, a cocoon
around my caterpillar sex.

I then thought of the others at the verge of their manhood:
my brother to replace me on this stool,
a neighborhood of eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old
boys wearing the skirts of their sisters
and grandmothers, touched
by the hands of their mothers,
baptized by green waters,
and how by week’s end
we will shed our billowy skirts,
like monarchs, and enter
the gardens of our lives.

///

And here is the title poem from my book:

The Silence Of Men

A man I’ve never dreamed before walks
into my apartment and sits in the green
chair where I do my writing. He carries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he places silently on the floor.
The phallus begins to waltz to music
I cannot hear, its scrotum a skirt;
its testicles, legs cut off at the knees.

I want to know why this disfigured
manhood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, deflating
in short spasms like an old man coughing,
spreads itself in a pool of shallow blood.
The silence between us is the silence of men.

///

I hope you’ll come hear us read.

A Bird In The Garden Of Angels is out!

If you’re a fan of Rumi, this new anthology, on the poetry sections of which I collaborated with primary author John Moyne, is one you will want to get. A Bird In The Garden Of Angels is also a wonderful introduction to Rumi for those new to his work, or those who may know of him but don’t know much about him. Containing essays by Moyne on both Rumi’s life and Sufism, A Bird In The Garden Of Angels is further divided into five sections, one for each of the genres of poetry and prose that Rumi worked in. Some parts of each section have been translated into English for the first time; some of the poems were originally translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks, but appear in this volume in new versions. You can order the book from Mazda Publishers’ website or any online bookstore. (It’s also on sale at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!) If you want to read some samples from the book, visit my website.

The first poem I ever published was chosen by my best friend Adrienne to be included in our 9^th grade yearbook. I called it “Alone.”

Alone, always alone,
Staring always staring,
Out of a window,
Never leaving it.
Watching children,
And remembering,
Yes, always remembering,
What it was like,
When you were young,
Alone, always alone.

Adrienne was the yearbook’s literary editor, and I still remember the anxiety I felt when she told me she’d chosen this poem to publish. Indeed, when I read this poem now, I can still remember how deeply painful the loneliness it describes was to me and the conviction that I was, somehow, somewhere inside myself, as old as the speaker of the poem sounds. I was scared of the responsibility entailed in making the experience in the poem available to anyone who wanted to read it. They could hold me accountable for what I’d written, ask me to explain myself, subject my words to a kind of scrutiny I associated with the courtroom: Was I telling the truth in this poem or was I lying? I also remember, though, the way that writing the poem seemed to give substance what was going on inside me, making it real to me in a way that I had never before felt real to myself, and I guess I was also afraid that this reality was still too new and vulnerable to made public.

Then Adrienne told me about how the poem made her feel. (Unfortunately, I have no recollection of what she said.) For the first time, someone I cared about was taking my writing seriously as more than the product of an overly self-indulgent adolescent mind. She thought I had something to say and that helped give me the courage to say it. It’s not that I think I would not have become a writer without Adrienne’s support, but it was largely because Adrienne took my writing seriously that I came to discover the making of poems as a way not only of coming to terms with the life difficulties I faced at the time, but also of creating possibilities of being that had never before occurred to me.

I needed those possibilities of being desperately. I’m always a little reluctant to write about this part of how I became a poet because I still have some residual fear, even after all these years of being a poet, that I will sound either like I should be baring my soul on a TV talk show or like I am trumpeting the therapeutic possibilities of poetry, and not like someone for whom becoming a poet was, concretely, and in ways I am still learning about, a matter of survival. I don’t mean to sound highfalutin. Simply put, writing poetry taught me to believe I had a voice I could call my own, that because I could hear myself in my poems, and because—as I began to show my work to more and more people like my friend Adrienne—others could hear me as well, I was not, in the core of my being, the invisible boy I thought I was; and I thought I was invisible largely because of the violence and sexual abuse I suffered at the time.

Perhaps understandably, violence and abuse, sexuality and gender, our  bodies and how we live in them, have all become central concerns of my work. I called my first book of poems The Silence Of Men because the silence I had to break in order to write poetry in the first place was the particularly male one that makes it so difficult individually and culturally for men to speak honestly about precisely those central concerns. In 2002, I gave a talk in New York City as part of a panel at The Sophia Center on poetry and spirituality in which I spoke more discursively about the relationship between and among the sexual abuse I survived, my writing and my own spirituality. I don’t want to repeat here what I have already said in that piece, which is called “The Rectification Of Names,” but you can read it here on my blog if you’re interested.

In 1990, I published a poem in Five Fingers Review #8/9 called “To Carve A Shape Through Silence.” It was my first attempt to write about my friend Joey’s suicide and to connect my grief at his death to how I felt about—or, rather, to trying to figure out how I felt about—my father and the fact that he was no longer a part of my life, and then to connect those two emotional experiences to my writing. There are two strophes from that poem that have stayed with me, and I suppose that, together, they form a kind of ars poetica. Here is the first one:

Writing is like that. These lines
on the page, the sound
I imagine of my language
in the hollow of your ears,
how a sentence never dies, but seeps
into us, until,
like soil, we turn it out again,
useful and alive.

And here is the second one:

Learning to write poems
has been easier than loving people
and harder than counting syllable.
But words grow
and sentences shape
time into meaning, and learning
to let that happen
has been learning to shape my body
(and I am my body)
into somewhere I can live.

Come join Persian Arts Festival as we celebrate the publication of Roger Sedarat’s first book of poems, Dear Regime, which won the 2007 Ohio University Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Dear Regime has been praised by writers such as David Lehman, Kimiko Hahn and Nahid Rachlin, who has written that it is “a stunning collection of poems that vividly captures all aspects of Iranian culture.” Roger Sedarat is a professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

When & Where

Wednesday, 1/16/2008
6:00-8:00 PM
The Bowery Poetry Club (click for location and directions)
308 Bowery @ Bleecker Street
$12 cover buys one drink

Information
www.persianartsfestival.org

To sign up for the open reading, send an email to PAF’s Literary Arts Director, Richard Jeffrey Newman: poetry@persianartsfestival.org

Shab-e She’r at the Bowery Poetry Club will run from 6-8 PM on the third Wednesday of the month through May 2008.

For anybody who might have gone looking for my web site and ended up here, a billing snafu led my hosting company to delete my account. The site should be up and running again within a couple of days.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Update: I have decided to take the text of this post down until I have a chance to revise and repost it. The comments the post has received at Alas have convinced me that, as I said in comment #19, my words are both conjuring things I do not intend and failing to make distinctions that I do intend, and this weakness in the writing means that what I want to say, the questions I want to ask and explore are not only not getting across, but are being misrepresented. It’s not so much that I think the revision will change the mind of anybody who has posted a critical comment, but that, at least, the criticism will be directed at what I actually mean to say, not the unintended implications of my having said it not as well as I should have. Hopefully, I will have that revision up within the next week or so.