5/31/2023 0 Comments Tinderbox poetry![]() That moment pushed my belief that mother/children poems do have a place in the literary world, and that’s good for me because so many of my poems now touch on the concerns of motherhood: how the mother-body fails a baby during pregnancy, the mother love and the mother guilt (I’m not doing enough, I want to run away), the immense and crippling love we feel for our children: McCabe Poetry Prize in 2012, and was selected by Li-Young Lee, a poet I admire so much. Those experiences catalyzed my writing, which contained a rawer love, grief, vulnerability and a frantic desire to create art, since time had become scarce.Ī poem, “Necessary Work,” that I wrote about my daughter’s time in the NICU, when I was overcome with worry, won Ruminate Magazine’s Janet B. My daughter and son were born four years apart – I had two difficult pregnancies both were born early (my son nine weeks, my daughter three) and each spent weeks in the NICU. During those five years, I had my first child and I was writing, but not actively focused on submitting. Then I didn’t really publish anything until 2012. I published one of my first poems in Alaska Quarterly Review right after I finished graduate school, and then my first chapbook came out in 2007. Is that really how it is, if your mother voice takes over a poem, the work is diminished? If your body is a creatrix for another body, that body swells into your art, depleting you? If you’re a mother who writes as a mother, you’re no longer a writer? … hadn’t he invited this prominent writer, whom he now seemed to be dismissing as a cautionary tale? And what on earth was a Mommy Poem? Is a poet who is a mother not supposed to admit to that fact in verse? Does a child appearing in a poem diminish it? If the speaker’s body is a vessel, does her brain stop being interesting? I had no idea how to file this conflicting input. You’ll be fine as long as you don’t start writing mommy poems.” But a few weeks afterward, my program director told me, “You’re a good poet. They had invited a prominent woman poet as the visiting writer of the semester she wore rainbow knee socks and read juicy poems full of the body, childbirth, and children… During her visit, we all celebrated her work. In an article on VIDA, “Report from the Field: To Go to Sea: Making a Place in a Male Literary Landscape,” Rachel Richardson writes about hearing confusing writing advice from a male writing program director while she was pregnant: My breasts heavy with milk, stomach still loose from childbirth, always, always exhausted. I was still a writer, yet a writer with two small humans, constant, dependent. I met a man and married him, and we had two children. In graduate school (before marriage, before children), I fell into a pesky trap, thinking a woman poet must dedicate her life to art: living austerely, writing rather than eating, living alone rather than choosing a partner, not having children. Yet, she was the only student who became a poet of note, simply because, according to her, she persisted in her writing and submitting. Or did it uproot her?ĭuring workshop, my mentor shared an anecdote about persistence: In her graduate school class, she was one of eight, and the only woman. Mothering wasn’t enough to keep Sexton rooted here. My first writing mentor, a prominent woman poet – she also never married or had children – studied with Anne Sexton, one of my muses. My bent back, carrying the weight of two bodies borne from mine. Yet, part of that swagger is in my mind: In real life, I’m carrying a blond toddler boy moving like a Tasmanian devil in one arm, and holding my elfin daughter’s tiny hand in the other as she tries to skip away. Why does this bother me so much, my vulnerability loud in my mother voice? Perhaps because my chosen persona is tough: dark, wild-haired, lots of silver rings and chains, black-studded motorcycle jacket, ripped jeans – a woman with swagger. When she finally does it, her exposed umbilical hernia wiggling, my voice hits an even higher note as I say, “You did it! Baby, you did it!” The mommy voice making me cringe is mine: There’s my tiny daughter, belly-down, face scrunched up, struggling to overturn herself onto her back. ![]() Roll over! You can do it, baby.”įrost still on the window, my husband’s playing home movies from when our first child was born eight years ago. It’s disconcerting – one morning, coming downstairs to brew my coffee, I hear a higher-pitched female voice crooning, “Come on, baby, roll over.
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