I used to teach Mary Oliver’s poems–a slim volume, Dream Work, so many years ago now that I don’t remember the exact course. What I do remember are the poems and the students’ responses to them. Those memories came to mind recently with the news of Oliver’s death, as did the image of Brueghel’s “The Fall of Icarus.”

Foolish Icarus does not listen to his father. His hubris pushes him to fly too close to the sun. His wings melt, and he plummets to his death.

Or is the story of Icarus quite different?

Brilliant Icarus follows his imagination and takes flight with the grace of an enormous Blue Heron. Maybe the narrative depends on the poet’s gender. Certainly, what Auden notices in “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in addition to the “dreadful martyrdom” of Icarus, is the conscious irony of Brueghel’s painterly composition: “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster” of Icarus’ death. Everyone in the painting’s foreground is too intent on the mundane to notice the loss.

As for Oliver, have we actually noted her passing? Have we, as writers of prose and poetry, accounted for the weight of our collective loss? Of course, for a poet of her rank, a writer who earned the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, The New York Times ran an obituary, written by Margalit Fox, that respectfully navigates Oliver’s achievements, as well as the critical reception of her poems. “Her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality. It was this, combined with their relative brevity, that seemed to endear her work to a broad public…” writes Fox.

I thought about the young woman who approached me after class. We had been discussing “Rage,” the fifth poem in Dream Work. The student was weeping because Oliver had put into words the experience of incest–had given her access, a different path into the experience:

But you were also the red song

in the night,

stumbling through the house

to the child’s bed,

to the damp rose of her body,

leaving your bitter taste.

And forever those nights snarl

the delicate machinery of the days.

Is this the “pedagogical, almost homiletic quality” of Oliver’s poems? Oliver has taken on a subject that requires enormous courage and (psychic, physical) stamina to articulate, one that remains marginalized, maybe because it so often happens to little girls. She has also dared to articulate her rage, which is not an emotion generally allowed for women.

To be clear, I have no argument with Fox’s obituary of Oliver. In fact, I draw directly from Fox’s quotations of specific reviews and so remain much indebted to her. In fact, I see the obituary as a gift, an insight into what it is like for women writers to pursue doggedly the arc of their intellect and creativity, to fly as high as their talents take them. Fox’s description of the critical reception of Oliver’s poems brings into the foreground our very recent social history.

Think of Brueghel populating the foreground of his painting with, in Auden’s words, the “position” of human suffering: how “…even the dreadful martyrdom [of Icarus] must run its course / Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” Fox provides a list of some of those itchy behinds that produced the “mixed” reception of Oliver’s work, critics who “were put off by the surface simplicity of her poems and, in later years, by her populist reach.”

Specifically, Fox quotes James Dickey’s 1965 review of “No Voyage”: “[Oliver] is good, but predictably good.” She also quotes David Orr, who in 2011 described Oliver as a poet “about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.” There is something about these comments that galls; that echoes Horace Walpole calling Mary Wollstonecraft a “hyena,” a creature then believed to change sex with every new moon, because she dared do a man’s job, writing. I have to wonder how these critics would have responded to the “Preface” to “Lyrical Ballads,” the poetic manifesto of Wordsworth and Coleridge, a call for poetry as “a selection of the language really spoken by men” (1802).

I recall my students, stunned by language that appears so simple but evokes a complex nexus of ideas about the intersection of self and world. I think about the story Oliver’s poems often tell about what it means to heal by passing through the wound; how the courage to do so heals ourselves and the world, one person at a time. Dream Work, like other collections of her poems, has a trajectory, a plot that maps a heroic journey–both internal (through the wound) and external (through the mutilated world). Take a look at the claim Oliver makes in “Dogfish,” the first poem in Dream Work:

Mostly, I want to be kind.

And nobody, of course, is kind,

or mean,

for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to

swim through the fires to stay in

this world.

As a poet Oliver does exactly that: “stay in / this world” despite its complexities, its demand to “swim through the fires.” Here is Icarus the Romantic hero who follows his imagination and takes flight against all odds. Oliver is, after all, part of a much longer Romantic tradition (British and American) of Nature poets. The “mixed” reviews point to an exclusion of her position in poetic history and a refusal to accept her focus, her ken as a writer.

Before Oliver locates home in the very last poem in Dream Work, she arrives in Loxahatchie, Florida, and experiences the sense of being both as ancient as the waters and as new as an infant. In “At Loxahatchie” time collapses. The nameless flowers and shrubs around her call for her birth and she knows [Read more…]

Writing in 1946, at the end of the Second World War, George Orwell stands at the bloody intersection between language and politics and tells us what he sees. “In our time,” Orwell begins. At this point, near the end of “Politics and the English Language,” he arrives at the beginning of his jeremiad. Imperialism, purges, deportations, atom bombs–these are all defensible, he tells us, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.” For Orwell, vicious arguments are made palatable, normative by euphemism. He deplores euphemism because it is an instrument of propaganda, one that creates an enormous ethical schism between act and representation; between what we do and how we represent those actions to ourselves, individually and collectively.

Orwell’s point about language that works to broaden the schism between act and representation is especially relevant to the role of literary satire, which demands that we acknowledge the distance between how things actually are and how they are represented. Now, more than seventy years after the publication of Orwell’s essay, we live within an incessant stream of flashing messages and images shaped by the intellectual descendants of the most effective propagandists in human history, the Nazis. For those descendants, the ability to build consensus en masse, whether selling slaughter or dishwashing soap, has become a thing to be admired because it is the foundation of a consumer economy, an economy that situates profit as the central and abiding value of our culture.

The ability to say one thing and mean another, an aspect of satire, is the heart of advertising’s darkness. Over time, we have become used to the yoking of the trivial and the serious; the inconvenient and the immoral. We have learned not to ask about the effect of a product on the environment despite what we know about climate change; to demur at the differences between free speech and hate speech when a politician claims all Mexicans are murderers; and to be too busy to bother with the pesky details of history when the next foreign crisis winds its way through the news cycle.

For Orwell, political language will remain “the defence of the indefensible” until our own revolutionary turn in consciousness, the point at which we turn away from blind obeisance to critical questioning. That turn requires that we demand from our politicians and ourselves language that does not short circuit critical thinking by appealing immediately to deep and commonly held fears, or that puts us to sleep with its bureaucratic layers of woolly abstraction, repetition, and terms of art.

Why don’t we just eat Irish children, Jonathan Swift proposed, modestly? “I HAVE been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London;” he tells us,

that a young healthy Child, well-nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked or Boiled; and, I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust. [italics original]

Your policies kill Irish children, Swift tells his audience. You may as well eat them. Doing so would be pragmatic and tasty–if not exactly humane. Written in 1729, Swift’s language still shocks–though we should remember that his “Modest Proposal” did nothing to ameliorate the suffering of the Irish in the approaching famine of 1740, or the famines that followed in the nineteenth century under continued English rule. Satire is no substitute for clear-sighted social policy. We don’t demand that a sonnet sequence turn swords into ploughshares, so why place such onerous demands on satire?

As Swift explains in a 1725 letter to Alexander Pope:

…the chief end I propose to my self in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it….

Perhaps that is all satire can ever accomplish: the vexation of a powerful, enfranchised class and the sad acknowledgement by the rest of us as to how things are. Remove Irish children from Swift’s proposal. Substitute Guatemalan and Salvadoran children as if you were swapping ingredients in a recipe or objects in a long caravan of Iran-contra chicks come home to roost.

Does the satire vex you, or does it waken you to injustice, to the cupidity of the human heart?

The comedian Trevor Noah describes the daily news as a yoking of terror and joy: a meteor is hurtling directly toward us–and it is shaped like a penis. [Read more…]

Once upon a time, I listened as Noa Baum, an oral storyteller, told a story about her German-Jewish mother. Noa’s gestures and facial expressions, the details of culture and history, the characters she fleshed out with an accented turn of phrase–these all held my attention. Yet at some point early in the telling, Noa was describing my Cuban-Catholic mother–whom she had never met. The question of what drove the metamorphosis of one story into another fascinated me as a writer and, in addition to my friendship with Noa, has led me back repeatedly to her performances and workshops.

This past June, Noa organized a workshop in the DC-metro area, “Hidden Treasures: Your Story as a Gift,” and I was lucky to be part of a group of twenty or so oral story-tellers, writers, poets, physical therapists, psychologists, and trauma survivors. We were ready to discover a memory that could be transformed into a gift, to turn what was lost into something found. We were ready to plunge in and start speaking. So Noa insisted that we listen to a story.

In the discussion that followed her performance that morning, I rediscovered something primal in the comfort of listening. What I felt was akin to the difference between legend, (a story rooted in the specifics of time, place, and character), and myth, (a story untethered from those elements). The same legend cannot be found across continents. The same myth fragment can. In The Bond Between Women, for example, China Galland traces the myth fragment of “The Handless Maiden” across continents, part of her odyssey in search of “fierce compassion.”

“Oral narrative is not about words or context,” Noa told us. “Yes, the teller has to know the story and develop its structure. But the teller has no control over the relationship between listener and story. The listener is the co-creator of the story.”

Clearly, Noa’s skill as an oral story-teller rested on well-honed techniques: gesture, voice, breath, rhythm, facial expressions. She also invited and sustained her listeners, asking us to become the co-creators of her story. As listeners we came to trust that she would create meaning without delimiting or constraining it.

Were readers co-creators, too? [Read more…]

Please welcome Elizabeth Huergo to Writer Unboxed today! Elizabeth is a new WU contributor, and we’re thrilled to have her with us. She was born in Havana and immigrated to the United States at an early age as a political refugee. A published poet and story writer, she lives in Virginia. She is the author of THE DEATH OF FIDEL PEREZ.

Please join me in welcoming her, and enjoy her first post–and her wonderful voice. Welcome, Elizabeth!

Writing as Tango

Perfection is stasis, and both dancing and writing require us to move in time, vulnerable to failure and limits, aware of the difference between where we are and where we wish to be, between love lost and love found. So when Estampas Porteñas, the Argentine tango company founded and directed by Carolina Soler, came to a DC-area venue, I was in the audience. I had to be. They were performing “Deseos,” the story of Margot and Charlo, who realize their love for one another only at the moment of parting, when Margot leaves her rural village for the big city, Buenos Aires. The rest of the dance is the story of their reunion, which ends with “Los Pajaros Perdidos” (“the lost birds”) finding each other again and an enormous celebration.

“In Spanish deseos means desires or longings,” I told my friends. “The tango is all about desire. It’s all about writing,” I insisted. They smiled and listened, the way generous friends do. To be clear, I’m not referring to the tango performed by a B-list celebrity in a televised competition, a distracted, melodramatic grimace stretched across his face as he counts the basic eight steps of the dance: slow, slow, tan-go close; slow, slow, tan-go close. I mean the tango as an expression of infinite desires against finite human limits. For despite the delusions imposed on us by Madison Avenue, (bodies sans wrinkles, age-spots, and any number of unresolved appetites), there is no perfection.

The night I watched Estampas Porteñas perform the earth rose through the dancers’ feet. I thought about the ghostly darkness, the duende that fascinated García Lorca, who described it as a rupture of form, a breaking away from the intellect, a moment when the artist is inhabited, consumed; and who liked to quote an old guitar master: “‘The duende is not in the throat [of the singer]; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.” While all art forms are capable of duende, for García Lorca the greatest expression of this haunting darkness occurred “in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.”

Before the tango became bourgeois, the movements stylized and performed by the higher social circles of Buenos Aires, it was the milonga of the lower classes–loose, fast, and bawdy. It was an expressive process before it was either a form (the Tango) or a formula (slow, slow, tan-go close; slow, slow, tan-go close). However far-fetched it may seem at first, we can draw an analogy to the difference between drafting and revision: drafting as an expressive process that precedes and perhaps even resists formalization and revision as a delimiting process, one that requires us to “look again,” to judge our work as a performance, and to discern those points that need improvement.

I don’t mean to suggest that drafting is more important than revision or revision more important than drafting. Both are important and necessary–as separate intervals in the writing process. As writers, however, we move from drafting to revision too quickly. Too often we confuse revision with drafting, insisting that we are drafting when in fact we are polishing a handful of sentences that have barely had time to settle on the page. It’s a little like placing one foot on the accelerator and another on the brake and then berating ourselves for getting nowhere–and ruining the engine. We judge ourselves too soon, which is to say unfairly. Why? [Read more…]