Poetry Break: By The Way

from my journal (M.A. Reilly)

By the Way

for Adrienne Rich

By Joy Harjo

I’ve given it time, as if time were mine to give.

There was a dam, larger than Hoover or the President or the patent

For the metal creature that sucks up all the dust.

Words had to stop and ask permission before crossing over.

Oh, sometimes they were wild with the urgency of sweet

And leaped—Mostly the rest were kept in the net

Of swallowed or forbidden language.

I want to go back and rewrite all the letters.

I lied frequently.

No. I was not O.K.

And neither was James Baldwin, though his essays

Were perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fight

To assert humanness in a black-and-white world.

That’s how blues emerged, by the way—Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess.

The music, a sack that carries the bones of those left alongside

The trail of tears when we were forced

To leave everything we knew by the way—

I constructed an individual life in the so-called civilized world.

We all did—far from the trees and plants

Who had born us and fed us.

All I wanted was the music, I would tell you now—

Within it, what we cannot carry.

I talk about then from a hotel room just miles

From your home in the East

Before you fled on your personal path of tears

To the West, that worn-out American Dream

Dogging your steps.

You lived on a pedestal for me then, the driven diver who climbed

Back up from the abyss, Venus on a seashell with a dagger

In her hands.

I had to look, and followed your tracks in the poems

Cut by suffering.

Aren’t they all?

We’re in the apocalyptic age of addiction and forgetting.

It’s worse now.

But that dam, I had to tell you. I broke it open stone by stone.

It took a saxophone, flowers, and your words

Had something to do with it

I can’t say exactly how.

The trajectory wasn’t clean, even though it was sure.

Does that make sense?

Maybe it does only in the precincts of dreams and poetry,

Not in a country lit twenty-four hours a day to keep dreams stuck

Turning in a wheel

In the houses of money.

I read about transcendence, how the light

Came in through the window of a nearby traveller

And every cell of creation opened its mouth

To drink grace.

-->

That’s what I never told you.

#yesallwomen and "the task you cannot refuse"

Women Unmasked (M.A. Reilly. Collage. 2012)

I.

I appreciate Audrey Watters' (@audreywatters) post about women, ISTE & misogyny and although the context of the post is about misogynistic actions by ISTE male leaders, I am reminded that such behaviors are and have been present in the structures of hierarchies (contemporary and otherwise) for far longer than there's been ISTEs and the internet.  We need only consider Aristotle's belief that 'women were naturally deformed or imperfect males' (Flood, et als., 2007 from here) to grasp a sense of the long, long history of the hatred of women and girls.  This has never been limited to the 20th or 21st century for it is a learned expression of power and violence interwoven throughout our institutions and found lurking in the ways we value and fail to value.  It is an ideology, not bound by time or place--yet (in)formed by each.

How such ideology is communicated and reported does alter with time such as we see via the Internet. Moveable type allowed for the transfer of meaning beyond the intimate boundaries of touch and voice so long as one could author and/or have access to written texts and possess the ability to read them or listen to them be read. Such spaces of permission, of course, have often been controlled. Nonetheless, moveable type allowed for the possibility of the preservation of language, of one's story, of the voicing of other. It is in these stories that are not bound to us by geography and time that we learn how to bear witness.

A Room of One's Own (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Today, the access to connect and reconnect with others across the earth via social media--along with the speed to do so--creates new conditions for stories to be told and heard. Our uses of social media allow for the possibility of voices that have been largely absent, silenced, missing, singular, misquoted, defamed, and quiet--to be heard as it enlarges the field of who hears--of who bears witness.  And it is in the co-specifying nature of telling and bearing, that a power to oppose misogyny is given voice--just as such power will invoke an increased desire on the part of some to limit possibility by regulating the Internet so that stories, such as those being told via #yesallwomen, can be silenced. And so the ways women and violence to women are situated and expressed also travel with force and speed--a force that Watters and others call to our notice.

II.

A Pocket Full of Stones (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

In thinking about #yesallwomen and the rise (and clash) of voices this hashtag has occasioned, I am reminded of Virginia Woolf who at the very end of  A Room of One's Own tells the story of the Shakespeare's sister and our responsibility to her:

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young — alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

The internet may well be a room of our own--giving rise to the courage to listen to other, to write,  to share, and to receive.  Hearing and telling have always been forms of bearing witness and in some ways reading the deluge of tweets via #yesallwomen allows us to bear the personal truths that may be difficult to voice and difficult to hear and yet we know bearing witness is an action we cannot refuse.

It's what we learn from the speaker in Adrienne Rich's An Atlas of the Difficult World who concludes:

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn 

between bitterness and hope  

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.  

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else  

left to read  

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

III.

And so to the women publishing via #yesallwomen,  to Audrey, and to the still silent women:


We are listening, too

           for something

(un)familiar

knowing you are

                    Shakespeare's sister

stripped from our very bones.



We are thirsty.

Thinking About Adrienne Rich

An Atlas for Our Time (M.A. Reilly, 3.28.12)

I am so inspired each and every time I hear or read work by Adrienne Rich.  Once, years ago, Rob and a friend of ours, Michael listened to Adrienne read. It was autumn and night and I have not forgotten. The bright light in the tent, the surrounding darkness, and how transformed I felt listening to her read.  It was the closest thing I know to grace.

So when word came of her death, I began to reread and to work on the image that tops this post.

A few words from Adrienne Rich....

from Penn Sound (audio)

from An Atlas of the Difficult World

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

What I Am Reading

Happiness is the Longing for Repetition. Image by M.A. Reilly

I always have a few books going.  Here's what I am reading currently:



1. bell hook's Art on my mind: Visual politics
2. W.J. T. Mitchell's Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology
3. Douglas Rushkoff's Program or be Programmed
4. Peter Taubman's Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education


5. Adrienne Rich's essay, Poetry and Commitment


6.  (Just read this)
The Future of Thinking
Learning Institutions in a Digital Age
Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg

7. 
Quest to Learn
Developing the School for Digital Kids
Katie Salen, Robert Torres, Loretta Wolozin, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper and Arana Shapiro



8.

Digital Media and Technology in Afterschool Programs, Libraries, and Museums Becky Herr-Stephenson, Diana Rhoten, Dan Perkel and Christo Sims An investigation of how three kinds of youth organizations have integrated digital practices into their programs.