a.bradstreet

I went to hear Maggie Nelson read last summer and was intrigued when she read from a work in-progress that explores, among many things, her experience as a mother. Nelson is most recently the author of four books of nonfiction Bluets (Wave Books, 2009); Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007); The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press, 2007); and The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (W. W. Norton, 2011). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull Press, 2005), Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2005), The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003), and Shiner (Hanging Loose, 2001). In the email correspondence that follows, Nelson and I talk about the relationships between writing, birth and motherhood. 

E. ROTTERMAN: Has motherhood inspired a change in which theorists and/or theories about identity appeal to you, and if so, what about motherhood inspired that change?

M. NELSON: The book I’m writing now focuses on Donald Winnicott and Eve Sedgwick, among many others (Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Annie Sprinkle, CA Conrad, James Schuyler, A. L. Steiner, Sara Ahmed, and so on). Also, while it may be literally true that “becoming a mother” is tied to having a baby, I actually don’t think of it that way, so in some sense there hasn’t been a super profound shift or reorientation. I’ve been a stepmom for some time now, which is also mothering, in its own deep and complicated way; I also think one can mother or parent without having “children of one’s own,” be it by teaching, fostering, even just being a mother to one’s own mind. I’ve always been interested in impulses and behaviors and orientations more than in identities; having a baby hasn’t changed that.

E. ROTTERMAN: Can you say more about the distinction between impulses, behaviors and orientations and identities? It seems like identities might be composed of impulses, behaviors and orientations (among others).

M. NELSON: Identities might be composed of those things, but too often identity marks their congealment. I’m more interested in flow, in impulses or orientations or behaviors that can cross identity boundaries, that don’t necessarily line up with each other. Which isn’t to say identities don’t have strategic personal or political value. But I try to keep my eye on freedom.

At the risk of generalizing, I would say that one of the great things about queer parenting is that it disallows this easy but brutal cult of the mother, either via doubling the mother, having a two-dad situation, or having genderqueer parents who disrupt the whole mother/father binary. Queer parenting offers ways to imagine ordinary devotion as unbound to particular bodies or identities. This is really important, especially as the homophobes out there continue to use queer families and the disruptions to status quo narratives and identities they offer as whipping posts in their arguments against the repeal of DOMA and so on.

I might also add that the disruption of such roles need not take attention away from the pivotal role that a gestating or nursing mother has to play; instead it could make space for us to look at such activities with fresh eyes.

E. ROTTERMAN: Annie Sprinkle and C.A. Conrad focus on the pleasures of having a body, secretions included, rather than the trials of controlling the body. Pregnancy, birth and the post-partum period can radically transform us in that they offer events in which to become animal. From the unseen doubling of blood to the fanning labia during birth to the weeks of lochia-seep, changes and amazements pour through and over the body. How has the experience of pregnancy, birth and mothering deepened your interest in artists who explore the fleshy bright side of the body, its impulses, embarrassments and triumphs?

M. NELSON: I have always been interested in such. Giving birth is indeed a limit experience, and a singular one I’m thrilled to have experienced, but it did not change what were already lifelong interests of mine in the “fleshy bright side of the body,” to use your lovely phrase. I think my longstanding interest in such is actually what led me, in part, to want to experience a pregnancy and a birth, rather than the other way around.

E. ROTTERMAN: Is language capable of holding such a profound physical experience?

M. NELSON: I tried to write down what I could remember soon after giving birth so I wouldn’t forget the details, and while I only wrote about 3 double spaced pages, I think I got the gist of it down. (I shared it with my doula, and she asked if I might be willing to publish it in a doula-context, but I selfishly said no, because I am using it myself in my present book!) It was actually a lot to manage, three pages within the first week of having a newborn baby, but I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t try. I don’t think language is capable of holding the experience, not at all. So I’ve found that I have to use the story do something else, to evoke something different than the pain and amazement of the experience itself, which is—perhaps like all peak physical experiences, especially ones involving great pain—essentially about the body and its silences.

E. ROTTERMAN: Transformation could be said to be an intrinsic trait of pain. Simone Weil said that when we feel pain, it is the knowledge of our work moving into us. How did the work and pain of labor instruct you? And can you tell me anything else about what you think your birth story may evoke beyond the experience of birth itself?

M. NELSON: I’ve been writing about this lately, so I won’t say too much here, as it’s all in my book to come—but I will say that giving birth let me know in the realest way I’ve yet known that I am going to die. That the body is going to do what it’s going to do; in the end, we are but its passengers.

E. ROTTERMAN: One of the most amazing moments in birth is crowning and the emergence of the head. Can you recall what that experience was like for you? And what about the moment immediately after birth? What do you remember about the release, the startling instant of absence? (Absence is not quite the right word…I’d like a word that describes the transitional state of presence to absence…when the understanding that the mind and the body share—a mapping of sorts—is redrafted and in that redrafting a silence opens and remains open for us to revisit, for it fascinates and instructs.) Perhaps this is similar to the body’s silences you mention above?

M. NELSON: Yes, you’re right, it’s not an absence. But it sure is a relief! I had a very uncomfortable final few weeks—before I was pregnant, I was a little over 5 feet tall and weighed about 100 lbs, and by the time I was due, I was up to about 160 lbs—little did I know I was carrying a gigantic baby, though I had my suspicions! I had been so miserable for so many days and nights, so when he came out I just felt amazing, incredible, right as rain, totally relieved.

E. ROTTERMAN: Donald Winnicott writes about holding and handling the child to gently cultivate a sense of an autonomous body, almost like a series of births-after-birth. These births, these moments of holding and letting go, or “loosening,” are also about imperfection. Is the perfect mother the one who never lets go? Who never lets her child realize the boundaries of her own skin? Is boundary, in this context, imbued with imperfection, albeit an instructive one? And, if the skin of language is a metaphor that speaks to you, how have the boundaries, the body of language, shifted meaning in motherhood?

M. NELSON: That’s all very nicely put, the births-after-birth, the loosening. You know I’ve never been very interested in the whole perfect/imperfect mother thing, which is likely why the subject of maternal guilt isn’t too compelling to me (at the moment, anyway). I think that I’m holding the baby alright so far, or so I hope. Certainly I’m having a great time, and he seems pretty cheery. I tend to think the fantasy of the all-protective mother does damage to everyone involved—the mother, the baby and the world that reviles the mother whenever she reveals herself to be finite. So I feel my goal is to protect my baby as best as I can while also knowing that to give birth is to invite another being into a world of suffering and, at some point, his or her death. It’s ridiculously painful—scandalous, really—but I want to be a steady hand, and not hysterical at my inability to keep the noble truths at bay.

I fear being a disappointment here, but I don’t think my relationship to language has changed very much. I guess language doesn’t seem the be-all-and-end-all, compared to the pleasures of being with the baby—that famous shifting of priorities. But that doesn’t mean I don’t write, or that I won’t spend the rest of my life writing. And just because language can’t hold an experience doesn’t mean you turn your back on what language can do. Language rarely does what you want it to do, but it does other things, some of which are under your control, some of which are not. I remember last year at my school’s graduation, a lot of students expressed frustration with one of the speakers—I can’t remember who, I want to say it was Annette Benning—when she said that whatever she’d done in the world with her art, she remained most proud of raising her children. But despite its cliché, it didn’t really bother me at all. Putting human relation before the value of art has always seemed sane and right to me, and it seemed that way to me well before becoming a mother. But really refusing to make a false choice out of those two entities—human relation or art—seems to me the way to go, the third path.

E. ROTTERMAN: Earlier in the interview you made a distinction between the behavior of ‘mothering’ in different aspects of our lives, and assuming complete responsibility for the health and happiness of a child. I’m drawn to your affirmation that the behavior of mothering was already within you. Can you say more about the mothering impulse we carry?   And what about the public tendency to “revile the finite mother”? What’s that about?

M. NELSON: I like Winnicott’s term “ordinary devotion” more than I like “mothering” per se. It’s likely self-protective, but I don’t like to think too much about my capacity to mother or not mother. Too anxiety producing. I like to presume I’m doing and will do just fine. I like ordinary devotion as a concept, because it implies that you’ll do the work of caretaking without a huge fuss, because it needs to get done, and you’re the one to do it. The example Winnicott uses is that of lighting candles at an altar each week, if that’s your job. It’s likely no accident that he uses an example of something both humdrum and holy.

E. ROTTERMAN: Despite some effort to address the struggle of working mothers—flex-time, lactation rooms, working from the home and even bringing your newborn to work (I had a colleague in grad school who had no choice but to bring her babe to class and breast feed while teaching!)— motherhood can still stymie professional achievement. However, you suggest, and rightly I think, with the phrase “a mother to one’s own mind,” that a symbiotic relationship can develop to another level. Perhaps the writer, or more specifically, the impulse to write, enhances the behavior of mothering, and the impulse to mother enhances the behavior of writing?  

M. NELSON: Besides the simple fact that I cannot hold my baby or adequately take care of him while writing (Bernadette Mayer chipped away even at this boundary), I see no impediment to writing vis-à-vis being a mother at all. But that’s talking on a spiritual/intellectual level; on the level of material support for caretaking of small children, there are obviously enormous impediments. Free, quality preschool, for one, should be available to everyone; it’s unbelievable—criminal, really—that it’s not. I am so extremely privileged, and the fact that I have to hustle beyond my full-time job to find ways to pay for my baby’s care to keep my household afloat really tells you something about how incredibly difficult, if not impossible, it is for so many, many others. BUT to go back to the other level, I think caretaking and ordinary devotion are one flow, no matter what the object of attention. One devotes oneself to one’s words and sentences; one devotes oneself to caring for another. The attention, opening, patience, witness and occasional sternness of caretaking & writing feel to me very related.

E. ROTTERMAN: Can you write a little about the pleasures of mothering?

M. NELSON: Beyond the typical frustrations with sleeplessness and tendonitis in my wrists and constant cleaning and so on, I have to say there hasn’t been a moment with my baby that hasn’t been suffused with the deepest of pleasures. I love my little guy very much and have enjoyed everything about him. It’s been an additional pleasure to try to get that enjoyment into writing, which is part of my next book’s charge. I’m aware of the fact that it might come off as self-satisfied or annoying, but that doesn’t really concern me. Since I’ve never really written about happiness before, I’m just pleased to be engaged in a new challenge.

Maureen Owen is a poet especially attuned to the awareness that arises from full immersion in dailiness. There is a particular section of her Zombie Notes that moved me when I was pregnant and unsure what shape my new days would take:

Bump through 6AM Rookie lightness Care & Feeding of baby & small children Drive 150 miles to read poems Do it                 with feeling! Drive 150 miles back Get on train       Go 80 miles to work Work 48 hours straight Retrace trajectory Enter jeep         drive home Sleep 3 hours   Now Friday morning! Lunge upward Care & feeding of baby & children Go into small study w/ many books Sit in front of typewriter                                                 A Zombie!                                                 Zombie drinks tea!                                                 Zombie writes poems!

Here the poem functions as a word problem with no discernable solution. There is no way to move beyond the fact that no matter how far she travels, the speaker will always return home to face the “care & feeding of baby & children.” She claims the identity of a zombie – but zombies are not generally known for their generative abilities. The poem’s mere existence serves as proof that childcare, wage labor and commuting, while time-consuming, are not insurmountable obstacles to creation. Owen’s specificity here was exactly what I needed when I was pregnant. I needed to see the numbers laid out for me, needed to know that yes, it is possible to write when you are juggling a job and children; yes, if you want to write, you may only sleep for three hours, but you are allowed to speak about your exhaustion in the work you produce. Owen wrests dailiness back from obscurity. She does not propose a way out of the time crunch all poet-parents face, but there is a solace in seeing someone else assess the constraints of her material condition, let out a sigh, and go on writing.

                                    when I'm dust                                     my son might                                     think of me                                     when he's gone                                     I've only                                     a poem                                     or two

I spent several months last year—working in sporadic pockets of time while caring for my infant—researching and writing a review of Little Women: An Annotated Edition (Belknap Press, 2013) while on break from my dissertation work. This was amidst the Lean In media storm, and I decided to focus my review on Little Women’s relationship with 20th-century feminism. If you were a bookworm growing up, there’s a good chance you read and loved Louisa May Alcott’s story of the four March sisters—as Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich and Gloria Steinem certainly did.

The annotated Little Women’s preface boasts that Gertrude Stein did as well. I’m now writing my doctoral dissertation on Stein at UC Berkeley, but because of my family I live in Cambridge, MA. I have my own history with this area, however, and with its most famous school. I have been a graduate student at Harvard. I even won my department’s thesis prize. I have taught here and subjected numerous Harvard degree-holders to unnecessary Stein allusions. For over a decade, I have been using Harvard’s libraries.

Harvard is just 14 miles from Alcott’s home in Concord. The university makes a brief appearance in Little Women as the place where fancy young men such as Laurie go to school. However Jo, the passionate reader and writer among the March sisters, can only lament, “How I wish I was going to college!” Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868; Harvard finally became co-ed in 1977.

But this was 2013. During Harvard’s spring break, I decided to get out of the house with my daughter, just a year old then, and pick up the books I needed for my review. It was mid-week, Wednesday morning. Most students and faculty were out of town; I counted on this. I used a new feature advertised on the library website to text myself—on my new iPhone—the books’ call numbers. In advance I looked up on the library’s floor plan where the books would be shelved. The whole operation shouldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes inside the building.

For a brief moment I felt remarkably organized and in control of my ability to work. It was a feeling I had very much missed. I can’t even begin to describe that. I strapped my infant daughter onto my chest with a Baby Bjorn and walked to Widener Library, with the call numbers ready in one pocket and my library card in the other.

As I tried to swipe my card to get into Widener’s stacks, a young, college-aged man stopped me and told me I couldn’t come in. I couldn’t bring in my daughter. “But I am just picking up a few books,” I said. “I’m sorry, but those are the library rules. No children. It’s a security issue,” he replied. I pointed out that my daughter was quiet and confined on my chest. The young man then helpfully suggested that I give him my call numbers and wait in the lobby while he fetched my books.

This is preposterous as an alternative. As anyone who has used a library for research knows, one often encounters important but unfamiliar sources from scanning the shelves. Or within seconds realizes that the sought-out source is unnecessary. Or recalls with passion why this kind of work is indeed necessary. There are numerous reasons why a scholar should go into the stacks herself.

Instead I stood there, bouncing my daughter, repeating each title, each letter and each number—so smartly and efficiently displayed on my phone—as this young man slowly transcribed them by hand onto an index card: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Little Women and the Feminist Imagination. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women. “You have to admit it’s pretty ironic,” I said to the young man. He smiled awkwardly, inflexibly, “It’s the university’s policy.” Then he disappeared into the stacks.

For half an hour I paced around the lobby, avoiding the perplexed stares of the few library patrons passing by, trying to placate my now impatient daughter, having nothing I could do but wait, and growing gradually more humiliated, discouraged, disempowered.

“Never will I ask for that hospitality again,” declares Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, in that famous scene when she is turned away from the Oxbridge library. The problem is, I need that hospitality. I don’t have a choice. I am a graduate student. I am a young scholar and writer. For my family, I have to live in Cambridge, and I have to be part of the Harvard community. I don’t have the luxury to turn my back on the university’s resources. And even though I don’t make any money, now I have to pay $15-20/hour to a babysitter just to find a few books. This is my reality.

So why does Harvard insist on turning its back on its own reality? Why does it not see that supporting and encouraging young female scholars, many of whom who are either mothers or considering becoming mothers, will only benefit the university and the academy in the long run, that it has nothing to gain from making them or their children feel unwelcome to its resources? Why does it persist in acting like the most fictional, hyperbolic version of itself—the looming, conservative institution that only knows its real power from keeping anything it deems “un-Harvard” out?

A university is not just a workplace. We’re certainly not paid like it is. It is not a factory that stamps each product as “Future Leader.” It is the center of a community. It is a place one must make one’s home in order to be part of it. It is, above all, a place of learning, which we hope indicates the potential for growth and change, not just for the tuition-paying students but for the institution itself. We expect, or at least I do, that our universities will think forward in ways that the rest of our society does or will not.

Yet in this instance, Harvard fell back into the most dully predictable storyline it could. I was stunned, in fact, by how true-to-cliché this was.

I was dismayed enough to ask a few administrators in Widener about the policy prohibiting infants accompanying their mothers. Some were sympathetic, even perplexed, but ultimately continued to repeat verbatim the Harvard Libraries’ policy or directed me into the deep maze of their website, which offers the blanket policy that no one under 16 may be permitted.

This is an institution that likes to follow the rules. I suppose you could say that. Or you could consider this: in the past year, while telling a few people this story, I’ve collected some appalling—or more dully predictable—anecdotes in return.

* A tenured professor, a woman, at Harvard told me that she was once forbidden from using her own department’s library—by people she knew and saw on a daily basis—because her young daughter was with her. She confessed she went back to her office in tears.

* The wife of another tenured professor expressed surprise at my story, because her husband brings both their children to the library all the time.

* And a month ago, my own husband brought our daughter, now talking and running, to Widener. I wouldn’t do this at her current age, but he makes his own judgments, so he walked right into the stacks with our toddler on the loose next to him. No one stopped him and asked him to wait in the lobby with his child. No one told him that the only way he could get his books was if they transcribed each and every one of his call numbers and then fetched them for him. In their eyes, he was still a responsible and productive citizen of the university, who happened to be caring for his daughter as well. He was still someone they could trust.

Do you see a pattern here?

Never will I ask for this hospitality again, because the right for a young parent to enter the university library with his or her baby should not be left to hospitality, just as the right for a woman to enter a university library without a male chaperone shouldn’t have been considered hospitality in Woolf’s day. It should be policy. It should be a standard. It should be the only decent thing to do. And clearly leaving it to hospitality permits an even more regressive form of discrimination and exclusion to occur.

I write this story now not because I didn’t have the time or energy to do so earlier. I write this story now, a year after the fact, not because it didn’t really matter to me. I write this story now because it has mattered too much. Because after all the years I’d spent within the university—not just this one, but all before and after it—I found myself wondering, now that I had to be a mother first and a writer and scholar later, if even hospitality was something a university would no longer want to give me.

Perhaps this seems like a small incident—as time progresses, as I recollect my old self and feel a bit stronger on my feet, it can feel smaller and further away to me too—but it hit me at a time when I wasn’t strong and wasn’t sure if I could ever again do the work I did before. It would have helped just to know that if I found any way I could, I would have been welcome and would still have a home.

[ * UPDATE * The same day this essay was posted, Sarah Thomas, the VP of the Harvard Library, and a scholar and mother herself, sent us a sympathetic email stating that the admittance policy would be revisited. Two days later, the policy was officially revised. ] 

Armantrout is currently Professor of Poetry and Poetics at UC San Diego. Her book Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2013, she published Just Saying (Wesleyan University Press). Of Just Saying, Rob McLennan writes: “Armantrout’s is a poetry grounded very much in her real and immediate world, while making connections to something far larger and far greater than itself.” 

A. BRADSTREET: How do you see motherhood, the experience of motherhood, affecting your writing practice? Were there new procedures or routines, even strategies, you adopted to write after having children? And for your work in particular, we want to ask: would you say that the experience of motherhood affected the actual form/shape of your poems? One aspect of your writing that particularly draws us in as the mothers of young children is that the extreme condensation—and the short lines that elaborate on each other while also turning on each other—feel to be snippets extracted from an extremely full, active, constantly multi-layered, multi-tasking, and even sometimes distracted, life.

R. ARMANTROUT: I should first say that I was fortunate in that my mother lived in town and was able and eager to have my son with her for hours at a time. Still, I wrote more slowly back then than I have in the years since Aaron went off to college. Whether that's because of the easing of my mothering responsibilities, I can't say for certain. My poems were always hyper condensed, even in my first book, which was written before I got pregnant. And, to be fair, I have always written in a way that includes snippets of the everyday—and still do.  So I really don't think motherhood affected the form of my poetry.  The experience of motherhood did give me new subject matter. You can see that in Precedence, Necromance and Made to Seem especially.  The poem "Character Development," from Necromance, uses the names of comic book heroes I wouldn't have known if I hadn't been raising a son. In that same book, the poem "Attention" begins "Ventriloquy/is the mother tongue" and includes a section labeled "song" which begins, "I'm not a baby/Wa, Wa, Wa."  I was sometimes moved to write about the natural but fraught power imbalance between mother and child. The child resents it, in my experience, and the mother may empathize with him or her.  "The Creation" from Made to Seem ends "Die Mommy Scum!//To come true/a thing must come second."  I think I was channeling the defiance of the child (my child) there. The end of the poem "Crossing" also dramatizes childhood abjection. It ends, "Out of spite, he crawled/to the kitchen, demonstrating/the mechanics of desire." That seems very dark. Actually, we had and have a loving relationship—but wherever need and control are involved there will be uncomfortable cross-currents of feeling—and I am always drawn to explore what troubles me. Right now the poet Catherine Wagner is exploring the underside of mothering in a more radical way.

A. BRADSTREET: In reading a somewhat recent interview between you and Ben Lerner in BOMB, we were struck by something you said: "As we know from physics, and from neuroscience, any single object we will ever see is, in fact, a buzzing multiplicity which we have found it practical to identify as a single entity." This kind of tension between the cohesive-one view and the view of the multiplicity permeates your most recent book, and it is a theme that we find ourselves drawn to as well. Motherhood was the point that we profoundly began to feel this fragmentation, plurality, contained within any "one" entitity. Do you see a thread between this scientific understanding and motherhood in your work?

R. ARMANTROUT: I started writing my second book (actually a Tuumba chapbook, The Invention of Hunger) when I was pregnant. The title describes the process of conceiving a child as" inventing hunger." Of course, you are also inventing (or re-inventing) perception, love, and all the rest. The first poem in that book, "Natural History,"(which was republished in my selected poems, Veil) begins with the line "Discomfort marks the boundary." I suppose I was thinking of the boundary between self and other. That boundary, that discomfort, is the way we know we are a distinct "self." During pregnancy, however, the distinction between self and other becomes blurred. The poem goes on to describe life from an (as if) distanced perspective as "Elaborate systems in the service of far-fetched demands." I had been reading an article about termite mounds in Scientific American. Since I was quite pregnant at the time, I may have half-consciously envisioned my body as a termite mound of sorts. The termite mound is a system that can perform extraordinary feats. ("Temperature within must never vary more than two degrees.") When you go through pregnancy and childbirth, you clearly see that your body knows what it's doing and that what it's doing is completely separate from what "you" may think you know. For instance, if you don't consume enough calcium, your system will pull calcium from your bones and teeth to supply the fetus.  What you think of as your self is no longer the center of the system to which you belong. But, then, it really never was and never will be. I imagine that the only time we see that as clearly as when we're pregnant is when we're in the process of dying.

A. BRADSTEET: You've mentioned in the past that you started writing because your mother read poetry to you as a young child. Do you feel that your consciousness of young children as possible readers, even as understanding readers of Emily Dickinson, affects your writing? Or affected your thinking of what kind of books, and kinds of plays with language, children really enjoy and should be encouraged to pursue? 

R. ARMANTROUT: Well, I find that children are all different from the start. My mother read me poetry, and it made a huge impression on me. I tried reading poetry to my son and he was never terribly interested—at least not after he was two or three. He loved books about trucks and dinosaurs and minerals. His favorite book for a while was How Things Work. Now he's a scientist. When I read him fairy tales he would ask, "Is that true?" I would say, "In a way"—and that would drive him mad.  We did we enjoy reading Tolkien together. A bit later he got into sci-fi.  I have a friend who read his twin boys parts of Finnegan's Wake when they were small and, by all accounts, they really enjoyed it.  I think you just try a variety of things, and the child will direct you from there.  It's interesting to see where his or her enthusiasms will take you.

A. BRADSTREET: In 1999, you organized a conference at UCSD with Fanny Howe called "Page Mothers." The program is just unbelievable—frankly, it beats the Berkeley Poetry Conference from 1965 as the literary event of the last half-century we most wish we could have attended! The conference was not about motherhood, but rather about women poets and/as publishers, but we wondered if you could talk about how you came up with the term "page mother," and what relation it had to motherhood. In other words, what political or social or even aesthetic work does the inclusion of "mother" do in a discussion on women poets and publishers—and how, on the other hand, you are might be subverting/ redefining/ rethinking what it means to be a mother here? 

The space of parent-being in my case is characterized by a recurrent tidal pulling between home, work and traveling (I do travel quite a bit as a lecturer, poet and editor) making my experience quite different from my wife’s or, for that matter, my parents’. I was raised by my mother, who is also an artist, and her art, like Amy’s, has gone through long periods of being awashed with parent-being. And I cannot speak to this full emersion experience because my experience is one constellated by this pulled space, a stretched being that pools and pulls while always remaining totally and radically plural. Yet a plurality inside a displaced geography is one dispersed in a way that is contingently, situatedly the space “I” come to be within, or as, it. Looking back at my “Lodge” poems, which I will talk about at some length in a moment, I can now see that they were shaped by this pulling even early on. But as I begin to reflect on this poetics, I feel my position of enunciation as a thick presence undergirding so much of what follows, and feel that my experience may make my “lodge” vulnerable to abstraction, to a poetics precisely because certain outsides may appear, if only momentary and peripheral in the psychic stretch between home and work, or as I travel, and this idea appears even in the early lodge poems before our children were born:

Love is spelled like a kind of distance,

Means in most cases what distance means

When flown into becoming the space of us.

This notion that love is a traversal of a perceived space as it becomes shaped into a plural being is something I am still puzzling over. Now I think that the plurality does not require a crossing of space even figuratively, but that space can make it more apprhendable. The pulling of plural being, as felt in romantic love, has its own shapes in parental love or “parent-being.” So I feel the poems that follow from “Lodge” are not to be taken as a “poetics” in the sense that they may speak to any kind of ontology or fixable sense of what fatherhood “is” or even “feels like” (though I would hope that “poetics” would necessarily contradict such fixities) but I do believe the work that follows does so from within the matrix of my particular parent-being.

Lodge-Revisited:

The last sequence of poems in in my book Grotto Heaven (Chax Press 2010) pursues a way of imagining the interplay of self/other within what I perceive to be the immersive, racially non-dual experience of parenthood. The first two portions of that book explores otherness in language and phenomena, but the third explores differentia within the self, what I imagine to be a displaced geography of a parent-self as it becomes increasingly heterogeneous with the advent of children entering the aggregate of this plural “I.” The poems begin in Edinburgh, Scotland (where my wife and I first lived together and where our son Isaac grew through his embryonic months). The poems then trace out the arch of our move to the Chicago land area; Buffalo, New York where our daughter Eliana was born; and to Norman, Oklahoma, where we all began to grow a bit older together and still are. In this sequence of poems I hoped to trace something of the diffusion of the “I” into the aggregate of a plural, socially constituted self within the co-presence of my wife and children. I had spent some time searching through our culture’s offerings on the subject of parenthood (and love, more generally), which left me with a sense that the so-called domestic space, within which these tend to be coded, did not seem to reflect my experience, so I wanted (and still do) to open a poetics of a familial “love/being” both existentially and aesthetically in a generative way that felt akin to life I was experiencing. I hinged this work on the notion of “lodge,” a term that seems to account for my sense of fatherhood (and husbandhood).

Here is the short introduction and the poems from the “lodge” section of Grotto Heaven:

Sequence Three: Lodge·· 宿 departs from the theme of relating to the unknown by way of leaning toward it, past a return to a unified, knowing self by acknowledging the already plural relations at “home.” Here the term lodge is explored as another measure of attending to relations already always within the self’s space. As a noun lodge is a small usually temporary dwelling, (a tent, arbor, hotel or the like); it is a place of sojourn, a place to accommodate, or a collection of objects ‘lodged’ or situated close to each other. In this sense, I want to explore the self as such a constellation or aggregate, of tightly packed relations lodged in temporary shelters. As a verb the term denotes extending hospitality, receiving others into one’s home, providing habitation, harbor or seeking shelter in or from another. Such a verb is less an action taken, than an action already taken. Becoming aware of this, however, is awakening to dependence, and in that sense, the ethics of being. The first two sequences may suggest a mysticism that moves away from the traditional desire for an identity with divinity and the certainty, knowledge, vision, and power such an identity would mobilize. But here (in the third sequence) one no longer needs to leave for relations to emerge. Lodged, we appear in the half-light, as multiple, shifting configuration of relations with(in) others. In Chinese, lodge 宿 is both the verb “to lodge” for the night (xiǔ), a lodge (as in hotel) and the ancient word for a celestial constellation (xiù): The poems in this sequence explore the contingent withness of this being.

The Compiler, Norman, OK, 2009

While I have written more poetry in the lodge series since 2007, my initial discomfort with writing “about” our family remains as strong as ever, and I am still processing the newer work and may indefinitely, or until the moment I’m not. I was always uncomfortable with the notion of thematizing the “them/us.” Even poems that feel open and buoyant in the way I need them to be, something of a path in them still points away from the dynamic mystery of their/our being into something other than what it is.

So, as something of a conclusion, I would mention that one of the things about writing into/out of the space of fatherhood, is that the poetry may perhaps too often trip/skip into celebratory registers that complicate their page-feel as poetry (too light perhaps), or swing too far in the other direction, as the terror of our vulnerabilities take hold. In short, lodge appears to me as the woven space of feeling filaments, a nerve enwrapped impossible “whole,” a flailing miraculous aggregate impossible to shield in perfect safety, that leaves one with the joy of being (with/in others) and an unmet (fierce) longing for their health, joy and a light-enfolded sublime safety.  The prayer for this recited infinitely within the unconscious and verbally at a child’s bedside has revealed to me, anyhow, a basic heliotropic instinct within plural being. And while joy pervades my life at the cellular level, I also know I live as a body with organs that are not my own, but belong to the mysterious walkers of other pathways (always so radically free) that at any moment, the “I” that writes these words, can disappear entirely, lost to another’s time line. And yet life keeps showing me, day by day, that fatherhood, like the rest of it, leaves something astonishingly like a “me” intact. Still this is the “constellated lodge” that drew me to the term “liu,” as a figure for parenthood, to be the aggregated lights deep inside the Grotto Heaven (which as a book ends with the poem: “Friends, We are constellations for a night, then disappear in the light.”)

A selection of poems from “Lodge” (excerpted from Grotto Heaven):

Supplanted

Here among us

the I is an outflow

  The experience of staring

mirrored

in the glassweave

  less bound

to the wavefall of light

than shifting rudderless

than ambiguously edged

than stubbornly expressed waves

caught in the act of falling

         The Space

     Opened by your voice

     or the I that takes place here

     isn’t one without it

       The movement and event

     of the sounding itself

     is the lodge

     the taking place of us

     appears here in the encounter

     which opens as our own

       A self is a rupture in awareness

     housing windows

     bridging the echo’s return

     and forgetting the mirror’s immensity

     polishing cannot vanish

     the obscure approach

       Becoming the chamber

     of a self isn’t a place or presence

     just the name of returning to or from

     the sound of your voice

    A ripple in the words

  Or an opening beneath them

is small enough

for children to take place

         To overtake communication

     the rupture itself

     becomes the very heart of the world

    The countless garden is the ease

of loving them

                                                                                                Munster-Norman

  ------------------------------

         small

       legs

     running

    a continuum

of wing

wobbling  

light

         What a thing!

     we don’t have children

         Anymore than the atmosphere

                                                                                                  Buffalo-Norman

  ------------------------------

    In the half dark

She is pure current

          Ecstatic blue flame

      nearing syntax

      in half formed words

    I am made of her language

         I can’t wait to poor cereal

     into her chipped green bowl

                                                                                                            Norman

  ------------------------------

    Celestial,

leaf

his eyes are more than I can handle

his laughing is an outside of my own mind

emerging continual rupture

         only one thing more frightening

     than listening to the stammer

     murmuring  

     small silvery insects

     in their chests

     cellophane wings

     almost light

    what does it mean?

no shore

or cusp

to them

less a shelter

than

everything

open to chance

                                                                                                              Norman

------------------------------

    We can’t gather each other

  into the cotton sieve

of a gentler interpretation

or wrap this withness

into a tissue of unvoiced fricatives

         we are not quietly decidable 

     sound or noise

     we are barely the possibility of

     consonants

    vanishing

into becoming

each other’s

                   swift

     unsayable

     candle

                                                                                                            Norman

  ------------------------------

Take The Distance I Can Be From My Son, a series of videos in which Clayton records her toddler wandering off through a landscape until, in the last few seconds, she bolts after him. This isn’t just a documentary experiment, and it’s not just a moving account of parental love and fear and responsibility—though it is all of those things. It’s also about a particular kind of attentiveness, about looking at a person the way one might look at an artwork, and then again—with that final break into the frame—not that way at all. Put another way, the idea joins forces with feeling.

In the haze of new parenthood, Clayton’s work had a new urgency for me. I’d sit on the couch for epic nursing sessions with my son, one hand cradling him, the other scrolling through the pages of Mother’s Days, records mothers around the world sent Clayton, who retyped them on her old Underwood. Her typing gives the project aesthetic unity, but it’s also, as she describes below, a way to share other mothers’ experience, if only through the fingers and the mind. It’s sympathetic without being sentimental. In the isolating wilderness of postpartum hormones, Mother’s Days was a remarkable comfort.

An exhibition with much of the work from Artist Residency in Motherhood just wrapped up at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (the final day featured a poetry reading by the fabulous Joy Katz), but you can see much of the work on Clayton’s website. This, too, feels like a generous move: can’t get out of your house to see the work? The work can come to you. That’s not to say that Clayton’s work is all about rejoicing in possibilities: constraints, after all, constrain. The very premise of Artist Residency in Motherhood reminds us that a normal artist’s residency, in which one retreats into a world of solitary art-making and summer camp-style socializing, doesn’t really work for mothers. So Clayton finds other things that will: art that takes into account the rhythms of daily life, and that sometimes depends, for its existence, on other people—as other people depend on mothers. She also keeps lists of projects not yet made: her Idea Archive is all about the conceptual gesture, but it’s also pragmatic: sometimes mothers just don’t have time.

M. PUGH: Part of what I love about the Artist Residency in Motherhood is how much you flout the old idea of separate spheres, so that domesticity seems incredibly porous. Even before the Residency, you were making art that included other people: sending letters to everyone in the world; getting folks to bang a drum and proclaim their ages. So I’m curious—could you talk a bit about creating art that involves others? And has motherhood changed or enhanced your ideas about that in any way? 

L. CLAYTON: I really like to collaborate with others who have (or had) very different intentions to me. A group of recent pieces, Ta Da!,100 Returned Postcards, Accidental Haiku, Two Collections, all started from discarded items of personal ephemera that I came upon in thrift stores or estate sales. A diary that ends in June, a child-magician's notebook, a postcard sent 100 years ago. Each one was unfinished in its own way, and in each I became the unintended collaborator of the original author – taking their starting point and extending it in a new direction. In these impossible or inadvertent collaborations each found object brings with it an incomplete story of its author. These imagined people are my collaborators, and also my working materials.

At the moment I'm working on a piece in which one hundred married couples secretly made a single brown shoe, each from bits and bobs found around the home, then revealed them to one another.[1] There are one hundred mismatched pairs in boxes in my studio at the moment. I have worked with two hundred people to make this project happen but have barely seen or spoken to any of them. The correspondence was by email, the shoes delivered for the most part by post. This is how I usually work with others; by myself, in private.

Since becoming a parent life has become a lot more collaborative in general. When I was pregnant I saw pregnant women everywhere and imagined their aches and pains and exhaustion. When I had a small infant, sleepy strangers exchanged compassionate glances with me just because they also had a baby in their arms. Yesterday when I struggled through the doors of Rite Aid with a double stroller, screaming baby and crazy toddler, the woman at the cash register told me that she has 23 grandchildren. I love this about being a parent, this access to the worlds of others. When Otto was a few months old and rode in a carrier on my back, I would ask strangers to put his hat on for me. It was a practical thing - I was usually by myself with him, he would take his hat off all the time and I couldn't reach to put it back. But it was also, mainly, an excuse to share the intimate actions of parenting him for a moment with the world. I loved those interactions. People were sometimes a little taken aback (often it was teenagers or business men, or kids, people who maybe never had tied a sun hat on a baby before), but they always did it. And I was always grateful for that odd little moment. I remember going into Gap in Paris especially to ask the shop assistant.

The idea for starting Mother's Days came from a real isolation I was feeling, and realizing that the part of parenting that I told my friends about or that they shared with me wasn't the main business of it, wasn't the part I wanted to hear about. No one talked about crying by the toaster, or at least not enough. The wonderful comedian Mitch Hedberg said that when he would go to shave he'd say "I'm going to shave, too" realizing that at that moment around the world other people were definitely also shaving. That nod to the concurrent isolation and connectedness of individual experience is beautiful to me. In Mother's Days I wanted to create a record of aloneness and togetherness, all doing the same things with different words, in different places. Through the recording on the part of the mothers and the typing on my part, I want to direct labour and with it, attention to these shared cycles of daily domestic life. This work feels very intimate to me, but it is for the most part a symphony of strangers, each singing their bit in their own separate world. When I have collected one hundred days I plan to publish them as a paperback book.

M. PUGH: It strikes me that part of what you're talking about is recognition, which I've been thinking about quite a bit since becoming pregnant for the first time. I've been surprised to find myself chasing down poetry about motherhood, in search of something like models. It's not that I want to be instructed, or that formal estrangement and experimentation don't remain interesting, but there's something so helpful about being able to say,  "Oh, so this is how Alice Notley handled things—she had her sons help her write poems!" Finding your work felt like that too—a sign of what motherhood might be like, if handled with thought and feeling and attention. I wonder if you've experienced anything similar, as a parent and an artist. Have you found yourself drawn to different artists, or have you found yourself approaching art differently than you used to? 

L. CLAYTON: Thank you! 

When I was first pregnant with Otto, I remember just feeling this huge blank (mysterious) space was coming up. I knew that everything would soon change, had no idea how, and couldn’t stop trying to imagine it. I found myself knitting suddenly. I just learnt and started compulsively knitting as soon as I became pregnant. I knitted a baby jumper first, then baby trousers, then a baby hat. Later I realised that I was knitting the negative space of the baby I was trying to imagine, attempting to summon him up in wool somehow. 

I did look at the work of a few artists that explored motherhood, but didn’t find too much that had a tone that resonated with me. The residency was born out of not really finding those models, and thinking about that in a public way. 

Becoming a parent drastically changed my approach to making my work in many ways. When I had Otto and spare time became rare and precious, I realised that I didn’t much enjoy my art practice at all! This was both a slightly disturbing and very liberating realisation. Slowly, I let myself concentrate on the parts of my work that I did enjoy; collecting, playing, writing, thinking up ideas. I let things be half-finished. I asked for help, and made work that responded to my new life, rather than trying to pursue a limited version of what I had been doing before. This approach became formalised as the Artist Residency in Motherhood. I have relaxed my expectations a lot, and got very much more done.

M. PUGH: There's a great photo in your studio diary of Early in her Bumbo, next to your typewriter, captioned "preparing for an exhibition, writing mysterious letters, breastfeeding." Is that a pretty normal juggle? Do you make art on a schedule? During naptimes?  

L. CLAYTON: My work structure changes all the time, as the kids develop, and as resources allow. 

Otto (2 1/2) was a great napper for a while so I had three hours a day of studio time, during which I tried not to do any cleaning, life administration, or other distractions and just work in the studio. For a while I also tried waking at 5am and working while everyone else was asleep. This was great actually and I got a lot done, but I stopped that when I became pregnant for the second time and was too tired. Now with a very lively-at-night four month old and Otto napping less these plans don't work as well. 

So at the moment I work whenever the kids are asleep at the same time which is about an hour a day at most. Otto is also at school for two mornings a week, so I work then while Early (the baby) sleeps or I bounce her in a bouncy chair with my foot while I write things. Occasionally I have a baby sitter for an extra morning if I have a show or deadline coming up. Every Sunday I usually have the whole day as a studio day when my husband Seth takes the kids. (He is a ceramic artist but works as a carpenter in the week for our family income. He has his studio day on Saturday). We call this studio weekend our McDowell Days after the McDowell Colony. The one who has the kids also makes the meals and clears up. Occasionally we put these meals in baskets as at the McDowell Colony but not often enough. Actually we must restart this, basket-meals. We both work at home (Seth in the basement, me in the attic) so we usually get to eat together and visit studios.  I always feel that I don't have enough work time though. At the moment I let a lot of other things go (housecare, big chunks of all-together family time, and an evening social life) in order to make time to work and our house is often in chaos of one kind and another. 

One really important thing for me has been to have a structure that I am working within, at the moment the Artist Residency in Motherhood, so that the tiny gestures and bits and pieces I am able to achieve each day have somewhere to go, and add up eventually to something. When it works best, I use my studio time to set things up in and do administration, so that things are happening while I can't be in the studio. Things like materials being shipped, shoes being made, applications pending, other mothers documenting their days. This is how I recently made One Brown Shoe, and am making Mother's Days. Often the ideas for my work come during the time I am with the kids, then I use studio time to realise them. I try to carry a sketchbook most of the time, but am always putting it down somewhere and losing it. 

Other tricks: I use an anti-baby monitor (a white noise machine) when in the studio and the kids are downstairs with my husband so that I can think of things other than "is Otto falling down the stairs? / is something hot landing on Early?" I swap time with friends where we watch each other’s kids. I think of questions or problems about my work during studio time then daydream about them when I'm walking to the park. I meet a dear artist friend every Thursday naptime to measure our studio progress. We write to-do lists each week, and share them with each other. I find it really inspiring, and it helps me to focus on the things I've done as well as all the things I haven’t. And I keep a list of all the projects I'd like to do one day when I have time. It's quite long.

[1] Note: you can purchase a portable exhibition of One Brown Shoe here.

I first read Olds’ debut collection, Satan Says, when I was a teenager, full of youthful severity about poetry and love and smarting from the end of my first significant relationship. I was inspired then by Olds’ raw pen, her intimacy with the body. I was still trying to own my body and my pen, or rather, to come to grips with body and pen as my own. I wrote artless confessional poetry inspired by her insistence on “blood,” her attention to the “breast,” her willingness to go to “the steep forbidden / buttocks, backs of the knees.”

Again and again, I read that collection’s “Woman” cycle: “I lay asleep under you, / still and dark as uninhabited / countryside, my blood slowly / drying between us, the break in my flesh / beginning to heal, open, a border / permanently dissolved.” It was what I heard as Olds’ fearlessness that moved me most. Daring, unflinching, she approached the body’s borders in their transparency, porousness, and flexibility, not shrinking from the seeping fluids of mingling flesh, moving toward, not away from, the visceral desires that infuse all acts of writing and living. Playfully, too, she checked the optimism with which we each assert our own precarious subjecthood.

Returning to Olds a decade later, I have, I hope, matured, as has she since her 1980 debut. I am no longer struck by the brute force of what now seem relatively juvenile lines like “my father is a shit.” Now, it is the fierce perceptiveness of the “Mother” cycle that moves me, Olds’ description, for example, of the immersion of mother in child and vice versa, of “the child in her / risen to the top, like cream, / and skimmed off.”

How to understand the belonging of the cream to the milk, of the milk to the cream? Do I own my baby daughter? Does she own me? The cream is of the milk, impossible without it, but separate, skimmable, intact. “My daughter—as if I / owned her,” she writes in “The Possessive.” “My body. My daughter. I’ll have to find / another word.”

Olds’ words capture my new mother’s struggle to come to grips with the fact that body and pen, like time and life, were never really my own. The permanently dissolved border of “First Night” reveals itself to be not simply a property of emergent sexuality, but a permanent condition of womanhood and the privilege, perhaps, of the writing mother. 

It wasn’t love that surprised me when I became a parent; it was the fear and frustration, the claustrophobia. These things swirled in me as furious as all the affection. It is that intense complexity I find in Museum of Accidents. Zucker writes explosives lines of emotional implosions. They are poems of interior panic, anxious love. Her lines race across the page. They slam to a stop. Other times the stanzas grow larger, chunkier, their mania barely controlled in those long and urgent expressions. These lines extend almost beyond breath, our body falters, and what better way to honor poetry and parenthood than stretching the self? These poems, by strength of voice, convincing in its danger, courageous in its fierce and almost obsessive devotion, are some of the best poems involving family I’ve ever read. Actually, more accurately, these are some of the best poems I’ve ever read. As a poet, as a parent, simply as a reader, I am thankful I found this book.

At any given moment, if I stare at my daughters for too long I inexplicably tear up. I am “swept away by love / and terror.” In a slant-way I react physically to Museum of Accidents as well. When I read the poems out loud I lose my breath. My pulse quickens. Zucker’s biography states she is both a labor doula and a poetry teacher. The intersection between these two practices, the focus on the body, breath, blood, and work, and love and love and love…it makes sense. It is visceral and beautiful. These forms fit the content, and the content is messy, sprawling, tragic, tender, wondrous. As a labor doula Zucker may help others breathe, but as a poet she is part stunning spectacle, part strangulation, with the ability to make a reader gasp as if before a freefall, a contraction. 

A. BRADSTREET: What books did you turn to, either for solace or inspiration, upon becoming a mother?

J. CARR: When my son, my first, was born, it was Fanny Howe. Her Selected Poems had just come out. I have a really strong memory of lying in bed with him, nursing and reading her poems. And yes, there is motherhood in those poems, but it wasn't even that. She has this way, in her work, of just describing stuff-- very simple things make their way into the poem, and there’s a real questioning going on, a metaphysical thinking, as these very ordinary and unembellished things are happening. So the revelation I had while reading the poems was not, "Oh, I can write about my son," but, "Oh, I can write about that branch." Somebody said to me, "When you have a baby, don't try to write. Just take notes." And I realized the notes could actually be the poem. Fanny’s poems are so short, discrete and contained, they seemed approachable in certain ways. That book was the reason I felt like I didn't have to stop or give up writing.

After that, there were other women I read, like Brenda Hillman. Her work doesn't always, or even that often, have her daughter in them, but her way of working through the poem allows for a lot of interruption and inclusion. The poems are long, but they are rangy. This is another way of thinking about writing when you know you could be interrupted or only have a short amount of time. You can keep things coming in, and there's freedom there.

A poet my age who was really great for me was Laynie Browne. We became friends when my second daughter was born, so I had a four-year-old and a baby when I met her. She had two children almost the same age-- kind of like how you two are friends. When I met her she  was writing this book that Counterpath ended up publishing, Daily Sonnets. She had the idea that she would write a sonnet everyday while she had a baby and two-year-old. She  thought of the sonnet not as this structure, but as a unit of time. She has a beautiful essay at the end of that book about how a sonnet can fit in the palm of your hand. It's this thing you can manage. So in that book, there are poems with titles like, "Sonnet While Listening to So-and-so Read," or “Shower Sonnet.” They are very influenced by Ted Berrigan and by Bernadette Mayer, of course.

That's the other book. I could go on forever actually, but to name one more: Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day. It's very powerful for every mother who reads it, in that it chronicles the day, and the day matters. That is what is so amazing about that book: all this stuff that's happening, and the chaos of it all-- like when she describes what's hanging on the hooks, and the shoes, and then this child is crying, and then that one wants something to eat-- all that chaos was the poem, instead of being the thing you have to get out of the way. That was very liberating.

The other poet I have to think about is Alice Notley, especially The Mysteries of Small Houses from 1998, because of how she seems to be threading a mythology, a personal history, politics and poetics all together in one amazing poem.

A. BRADSTREET: This gets into more autobiographical territory, but I was really moved by an email you sent me, when I first contacted you, about strategies you used to incorporate caring for your baby while doing your scholarly work. I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about that.

J. CARR: That was just about being a graduate student and showing up at Berkeley pregnant and having, also, a little boy. I had to be kind of shameless about it, or otherwise I would have had to take time off, which I just didn't want to do. I had to bring Alice [the baby] to class. There was one class, a Shakespeare seminar with Richard Halpern, where I was the only woman in class. It was not a big class, and he was very sweet. They were all very sweet, nice guys. And I thought, "I have to nurse, but whatever, I don't care. I'm not doing the tent. I'm just nursing." And it was fine, but what I didn't anticipate was that babies spit up, and they poop, and they fart, and they make all this noise and do all these other things. Nursing is sort of elegant compared to other stuff that goes on! So I was mortified actually, but I pushed through that and kept going.

Then there was the issue of trying to read. My daughter wasn't a hard baby, but she wasn't like my son who would just sleep for four hours a day-- so I would put her on my chest, and I would just walk around Berkeley, reading, doing my best, reading the book while sometimes balancing it on her head And then you just have to rely on other people. You have to get the partner in there, or get a babysitter and pay for it somehow. It's just not feasible to not have other people involved. I have never been able to be the sole "mother at home." I just can't. I feel like I'm a good mother only because I've never done that. Some people can. I just can't. So there's always been a lot of help of one kind or another.

Two other really big things worked for me. The first is about time and structuring time really strictly. Always waking up at a certain time, early, and writing for a certain amount of time before the kids get up. And when they were really little and would get up early, I switched off days with my husband, who also writes. Not to say we didn't fight about it sometimes, but we really had to stick to the schedule. The other thing was that all of it, whatever it was-- whether it was reading for orals, writing a dissertation or writing a book-- happened only when the child was at daycare or wherever they were going to be. I didn't try to do that really hard work while they were around. And I set it all up and structured it so that I never went to the grocery store while I had a babysitter, never did the laundry. I absolutely refused to give up that time.

A. BRADSTREET: Did you figure that out along the way?

J. CARR: I have said this before, in some other place, but I had lived in New York and supported myself as a dancer. My life was about, "Okay, so you get up at 6, and then you go teach these people physical training, then you go to class, then rehearsal, then the other rehearsal…" It was very rigorous and very structured. Not that it didn't change from time to time, but, you know, there were two hours for this, three hours for that, and then you'd have to do this, and then you have to do that, and it would go on all day long, just to make it work. And I was just used to that way of thinking about the day, as a series of units that had to happen. I already had an ingrained way of working, so I didn't really have to figure it out later. But it does make you a rigid person, and when people spontaneously say, "Want to meet for lunch?" you're like, "No, I don't!" I'm still that way, and when I'm at home and in my working mood, I have a hard time breaking out of it for anything.

A. BRADSTREET: One thing you mentioned yesterday, in your talk at the Carpenter Center, was the importance of procedure in your dance training-- that these are the themes, these are the frames, and then you create something within that framework. I wondered if, in terms of your work after having your children, you felt that procedure had an important role in your writing style and technique?

J. CARR: Yeah, absolutely. The first book I wrote was called Mead, and it's a sequential book. The sections are numbered, there are 64 of them, and that kind of counting-- you do this, and then you do that, then you do the next thing-- really helped move it forward. All of the books I've published have been sequential books. Some of them are all the way through, from beginning to end, one sequence. Others are two or three different sequences. And that's because it's really a way into writing. What would be the alternative? A looser structure, just to write and then see what comes of it, could be less productive when you have a short amount of time. The thing I am writing currently, which is called Real Life, if there is such a thing, is a daily writing practice. The structure is to write everyday from Labor Day to Labor Day to Labor Day. Two years of daily writing, everyday at the same time of day, and then there is a structure around when it's okay to edit. I can only edit at three-month intervals, so four times a year I have an editing period that's about a week to two weeks. Then, at the end of the whole two years, there's a full year of editing. That's an arbitrary set of numbers, with arbitrary dates, sort of. And then that's it. When it's done, it's done. I think Laynie helped me a lot with that, and other writers too. A lot of Language poetry is that way, structured around a set of pre-decided constraints or frames.

And at the same time, when I finished 100 Notes on Violence, I thought, "It's too contained!" I'm happy with the book, but I still felt, "Alright, where's the wildness? This is controlled by these numbers, these numbers are controlling it, so how can I do this and still let more wildness happen?" That's the challenge that book left me with.

In this new book, RAG (forthcoming from Omnidawn), even the title is trying to tear at that kind of structure. Its forms are less rigid. What I set out to do is write one book-length poem without sections and without numbers, although it does shift between different forms. It's not the same form for a hundred pages, which some people can do, but I have not been able to do. But I do consider it to be one poem from beginning to end. So that's scary, this loosening of that structure.

The other thing about me is that, before I was a mother, I wasn't really a poet. So there's never been a Before and After. I was writing poems, but my primary identity was as a dancer. I didn't really know what I was doing with writing; it was just something I did. It's not that I could take it or leave it, but it wasn't as central yet. So it kind of all happened at once: becoming a mother, and becoming a poet.

A. BRADSTREET: That's heartening, because Rachel Zucker also told us that she crystallized as a poet around the time she became a mother.

A. BRADSTREET: What are the books that you found yourself reading after becoming a mother that suddenly you had a new appreciation for?

R. ZUCKER: Definitely The Mother/Child Papers by Alicia Ostriker, of which I had a used copy, but which was then rereleased. It’s an amazing book and really important, mind-blowing. Rereading Sharon Olds and definitely Adrienne Rich, particularly her prose. Her poetry had always been important to me, but in terms of being a mother, Of Woman Born and On Lies, Secrets and Silence. I read non-poetry books like Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy, which is this huge socio-anthropological look at the biological and sociological underpinnings of motherhood. That was a really important book to me. And there were other books, not poetry books, that were really significant to me. But in some ways, all the poetry I read after becoming a mother I read differently. Definitely Alice Notley, particularly her early work.

A. BRADSTREET: What are some of the more recent books that have come out that you feel have been thinking about motherhood in interesting ways?

R. ZUCKER: It’s almost harder for me to think about which books that aren't doing that. Brenda Shaughnessy’s book [Our Andromeda], which I just read, is a pretty interesting take, and Sarah Vap’s books. There are so many single poems in full collections. I don’t know if I would say, probably to their benefit, that it's necessarily that whole books are like this.  I feel like all the poets whose books I’ve loved--not all, but so many of them-- a substantial amount of their work now is about motherhood to varying degrees.

A. BRADSTREET: How has motherhood has changed your own writing practice?

R. ZUCKER: I don’t really remember my writing practice before I had kids so much. I know I had one, but that’s a hard question for me to answer. I didn’t have kids in graduate school, and I didn’t have kids for the first few years after graduate school, but I think my real writing coincided with having kids, so I can’t quite answer that.

A. BRADSTREET: What caused your real writing to coincide with having kids? Do you think it was an outlet that you especially needed at that moment? Or was there a burst of creative energy?

R. ZUCKER: I don’t think it was a burst of creative energy. I think it was definitely an outlet that I needed, and I think that I had always been interested in the self in the world, and relationships, and who I was. Becoming pregnant and having a baby, and in particular having a second baby, created a real crisis for me around some of the things that I’d always been philosophically interested in. But then, at that point, I was physically and metaphysically interested in those things. So I think it was both that the subject matter I'd always been interested in, but hadn’t had a real sense of urgency about, became very clear, and everything felt much more urgent. Writing as a way of being a single person, as opposed to being half of a diad or half of a triad, was really important.

A. BRADSTREET: What were some of these things that you talk about being philosophically interested in, that physically and metaphysically became imperative? 

R. ZUCKER: I think what it means to be a human being and one person and a lot of existential questions like, ‘What’s life for?’ and, ‘What’s the point? When’s it a good idea to die?"

A. BRADSTREET: I’ve been surprised that questions about death have come up so much since becoming a mother. That they’re so paired with new life coming in.

R. ZUCKER: Yeah, for me, I was like, now it would really be a problem if I died, whereas before, not so much. Or a very different kind of problem.

A. BRADSTREET: I think that’s one of the things that is so beautiful about “Long Lines to Stave off Suicide”-- the confluence of the poetic will with that of actual living. Because Arielle is here too, and you were talking about what it means to be a single person, you of course collaborated on Home/Birth, and I wondered if collaboration as a mode of writing also felt like a necessary thing to do too after becoming a mother?

R. ZUCKER: There was time in between those two parts, but absolutely. At the time I didn’t have some big plan. It was Arielle’s idea. It wasn’t like, Oh this is the next stage! But in retrospect, it does certainly make a lot of sense that I’d already had a different way of thinking about the world and thinking about being one entity, being two entities, whose language was whose, and what was I trying to say, and what was that all about. I don’t think either of us knew what we were doing until we were done.

A. GREENBERG: We definitely tried to get a few different collaborations going before that, and it wasn’t like we didn’t want to do it, but we were like, you know, it sounds kind of fun, but it just doesn't feel particularly urgent given the business of our lives. We had tried and failed maybe two or three different collaborations before that. Mostly, in my memory, to maintain and sustain a writing practice in the face of having children.

A. BRADSTREET: Someone was just telling me that collaboration is a natural mode of writing for women, and in part possibly because of the fact that, in the long history of male poetic "geniuses," there is always the contribution and collaboration from the person who is taking care of the house, raising the kids, and even as an intellectual collaborator, but nonetheless just gets written into or under the name of the male "genius." So somehow women are always more aware of that, and I think that’s part of what you were saying, about whose words are really whose. 

R. ZUCKER: Absolutely, and I think that together, but separately, we’d already explored a lot of those issues that you’re taking about intellectually when we were working on the mentorship book and the idea of 'Is it mentorship? Is it influence? Is it collaboration? What’s defining the subtle differences between those kinds relationships?' was very important to us. Thinking about where you get your inspirations or permission or support. But then we wanted to take it one step further and to really rethink, Why is there a very male anxiety about influence?, and to see that wasn’t what women our age were describing when they were describing their relationships with mentors. It wasn’t like, Oh my god, what if I read Fanny Howe and then I lose myself completely, and I never discover my own language again? It was like, Oh my god, this is amazing, I want to write now.

A. GREENBERG: I think we were conscious before, during and after of the problems of it being a gendered thing. I certainly think it’s true, the idea of the woman behind the male genius writer, but Carol Gilligan would say that we’re just socialized as women to collaborate rather than to compete. I think we are both interested in how that is a power that is a force of good in the world, and also how that’s problematic and complicated. I don’t think either of us wants to paint some romantic picture of what it’s like to collaborate with women, or be influenced by women, or have a woman be your mentor, or a woman be your student or your friend. It’s not all rosy and wonderful just because it’s women. It’s really complicated stuff. I think Home/Birth came out of that, and the mentorship book came out of that too.

R. ZUCKER: I think it's interesting that we did the mentorship book before Home/Birth. I don’t usually think about it that way. 

A. GREENBERG: I don’t really have any motherhood poems out yet, but I have poems to Rachel in my second book asking what it’s going to be like on the other side. Those are my only motherhood poems in book form at the moment, poems directly addressed to Rachel asking, "What the fuck is it going to be like when I become a mother?"

R. ZUCKER: And that’s also why it’s hard for me to answer the first question because there are so many poems that I’ve read that aren’t published, or aren’t published in books that I feel like are part of my world. Like Arielle’s poems, it’s weird to me that you guys haven’t read them. It’s strange, I feel like they’re in the world because they’re in my world.

A. BRADSTREET: There is one question I've been thinking a lot about, especially because I had my first child at the same time as when my university was going through all these budget cuts. I felt so far removed from that, because there was no way I could physically be there protesting with everybody. And I worried this tied back to a general perception of writing about motherhood. There’s an idea that you can’t be radical, or you can’t be avant-garde, if you’re a mother. So this is something I want to hear from women who I do think are very innovative writers: Is it possible to be radical or avant-garde and be a mother? Or is there an inevitable adjustment of values or an adjustment of commitment? And is that necessarily a bad thing, or is there something new that can arise from that?

R. ZUCKER: That is such a good question. Obviously I think it’s possible to be radical and avant-garde and be a mother. In fact, I think some women become mothers in ways that are radical and avant-garde and activist-- in their birthing practices, in their mothering choices, in their family dynamics, and whether they work or don’t work and how they manage those things. So it’s not just about, Are you bringing your baby to a protest in a sling?, although I think that is also a very important part. I think that many women, me included for sure, became radicalized at the same time that we became mothers. That is a huge inherent issue that we have as women, that it is biologically and sociologically very compelling to stay home, protect your child, and not care in the same exact way about the rest of the world, when you have a new baby. That's really what you're supposed to do, not just because the world is telling you that’s what you're supposed to do, but because… 

A. GREENBERG: You are a mammal.

R. ZUCKER: Yeah, and you shouldn't-- "shouldn’t" is maybe the wrong word-- but I don’t expect a woman with a new baby to be changing the university structure. God, you have something more important to do. But then the problem is that those voices are not really heard. I think that the worst part of this is that often women go through a period of a time when, for many different reasons, some good and some bad, their attention has to be turned inward, or toward the family, or toward the domestic sphere. Then they come back into their professional life, or they’ve really lived a very compartmentalized, very painfully divided life, and when their children are older they’re not always the biggest advocates for young women with children. This is something that’s really painful and, unfortunately, divides a lot of women. You kind of go into your motherhood place, and women get divided, and women who are mothers and not mothers get divided along various different lines. Then we lose a lot of power, we lose a lot of our collaborative force. And I don’t quite know what to do about that, because it feels just like an inherent problem.

A. GREENBERG: Or benefit. You choose your battles. You can’t do everything. I feel like, even after you become a mother, the mothers are divided. The issues we were passionate about when our children were young, or when we were pregnant, are not the same issues as when our children are 8 or 10 or 12 or 13. The issues change over time, and your children are facing different things in the world, and that changes where you want to put your energy.

R. ZUCKER: It’s hard, though, because people that are the best to advocate for women with very young children are women with very young children, but it’s not right time for them to advocate. That doesn’t mean that they’re brainless passive mammals. They’re not. But I think that, realistically, it’s very hard.

Rachel McKibbens’ first book, Pink Elephant, exposes the trauma of childhood and the redemptive joy of motherhood through emotionally powerful, poignantly narrated, and heartbreakingly confessional poems.

The speaker’s domineering father, who physically and emotionally abuses everyone in the family, dominates the first half of this book. The father even assaults a man with a crowbar who calls him a “wetback.” Perhaps because of this violence, the speaker grows up without her mother: “an infuriated child tucked beneath / her father’s bed, waiting. Waiting” (11). In “Weather’s Here, Wish You Were Beautiful,” the speaker endures how weekend visits with her mother “faded into a nineteen-year / carnival line where I waited for you until the sights and sounds / of families and laughter made my stomach plunge” (15). The poem ends as the speaker internalizes her feelings of neglect: “I was just some filthy hitchhiker you never meant to pick up. / A greedy little fetus. An accident waiting to happen” (15).

The narrative accretion builds as each poem unveils a different moment in the speaker’s childhood. One of the more traumatic moments occurs in “The Doll,” a poem about the speaker’s sexual molestation by a stranger. As she recovers, her cousin Jennifer visits carrying a brand new doll, “hand stitched by her mama, so there was no / way to duplicate such love, no store to snatch it from.” The speaker takes the doll and calls her “whore,” “bitch,” and “orphan.” The anger continues:

Then I twisted her up in my hands, mangled her cloth body until I knew she felt it. And then I shoved her down my pants, rubbing her against the worst part of me I could think of as I spoke to her between my teeth, Hello, pretty girl. You have such beautiful long hair.             My name is Thomas. What is yours? (13)

We acutely feel the mother’s absence in the fact that the doll—soiled by the speaker’s displaced anger—was hand-stitched by a mother’s love that the speaker would never find. This absence culminates in the short poem “Orphan”:

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to be in the same room as your mother.

To be able to look at a woman’s body and say, I lived there. (37)

Throughout, McKibbens slowly unfolds the narrative with an impeccable eye for detail and pitch-perfect ear for tone. Additionally, her use of enjambment creates both narrative suspension and rhythmic torque, arriving at an always memorable and sometimes haunting last line. The measured craft of these poems, however, barely manages to contain the brokenness of their stories. In “Easter, 1981,” the speaker’s mother actually appears when she drives to the speaker’s home. The speaker’s father is inside beating up his current girlfriend while the children sit outside:

Is that the bitch screaming in there? She asked. We nodded our heads. He hits her too, huh? And I saw that she was pleased. Finally, I had something. Something she could love me for. He does it all the time, I said, You should have been here for her birthday. (19)

Any dream of a loving mother quickly fades in “The Pacifier” when the speaker, now a mother herself, remembers how her mother used to tease her during breastfeeding:  

Sometimes, it wasn’t a nipple at all— she’d graze my cheek with her knuckle or a lousy finger, haunting my dumb and helpless face.   That is how I learned the difference between women and mothers. That is when I knew what I wanted to be. (69)

At this point, the book turns to the speaker’s experience as a caring mother (according to her biography, McKibbens has five children). In “Central Park, Mother’s Day,” the speaker’s son picks tulips in the park as a gift, yet she scolds him because the flowers do not belong to them. Later, she feels regret:

A mama forgets what her weapons can do. Can’t know which of her failures will be what does it. Tommy’s turn with the belt, in fifteen years, becomes Meaghan’s throbbing black eye. (79)

The poem ends with the speaker finding thirteen tulips at the foot of her bed. She kisses each one and names them, imagining possible consequences: “The Crumpled Photograph I’ll Find of Myself in the Garbage,” “The Dog Smacked with a Tire Iron,” “A Lock on the Bedroom Door,” to name a few. The last tulip is named: “Mom, Do You Remember That Day / at the Park? It Was Your Birthday, I Think. / Do You Remember? How Small I Was, / How You Didn’t Even Say ‘Thank You?’” (80). The speaker’s determination to be a good mother, conscious of how her actions can affect her children’s future behavior, will hopefully end the cycle of familial abuse.

Hoa Nguyen, in her second collection Hecate Lochia, invokes the Greek goddess Hecate, who is associated with childbirth, nurturing, witchcraft, gates, the household, doorways, crossroads, and torches. Lochia refers to post-partum vaginal discharge (mucus, blood, placental tissue) that may occur for weeks after childbirth. Thus, Hoa Nguyen’s work creates a post-partum Hecate, a guardian of the household at the crossroads of domesticity, culture, politics, economics, and globalization.

Unlike McKibbens’ absorptive narratives, Nguyen hews a poetics of perceptive and syntactic openness. In “Butterflies, Breastmilk, Chinese Jade, Continuous Present, & Motorcycles,” Nguyen writes: “The continuous present streams by / We step in it.” Within this stream, language becomes “a book conscious of the eating / world    the breathing world     the alien / self and her lover / son” (38). The connection between linguistic consciousness, the breathing world, and the eating self underlies Hecate Lochia. From “Birthday Poem”:

It’s my birthday             and throw myself a party                        Hard to be born            live variously and have a job                        Be grateful for the job            heat in winter                        9 AM and 3 I love you’s            Wipe poop […] (19)

Echoing the personism of Frank O’Hara and the field composition of Charles Olson, this stanza captures the speaker’s immediate thoughts and actions. Because the continuous present moves the poet from perception to perception, thoughts about mothering always exist within contextual vectors. Take, for example, the poem “Up Nursing”:

Up nursing            then make tea The word war is far   “Furry” says my boy about the cat   I think anthrax and small pox vax

Pour hot water on dried nettles Filter more water for the kettle   Why try to revive the lyric (13)

Nguyen suggests that writing poetry within the everyday, continuous present is enough to capture poetry’s lyrical impulses. Just as Hecate nurtures the dangerous crossroads, the speaker nurtures a domestic space continually penetrated by threats from the outside world. Other poems are haunted by the dangers of global warming, debt, the housing crisis, the war in Iraq, and high gasoline prices. 

Nguyen also explores the experience of a mixed ethnic family. The poem “Eurasiacan” takes its title from the neologism for “European,” “Asian,” and “American.” The poem opens as the speaker talks on the phone while meatballs are simmering on the stove. Amidst this domestic scene, the speaker muses: 

Maybe my baby whitens me Turtles and blue eyes   “Pet” turtles discarded in the pond crusty deformed shells

Ground deer meat balls mixed in my mutt hands   Ma = horse Ma = rice seedling Ma = graveyard Ma = mother

Even though the question of whitening remains unanswered, its significance becomes re-articulated in the images of shells and “mutt” hands. The poem ends powerfully with a moment that traces the variable cultural pronunciations and shifting meanings of ethnicity and mothering. 

In Hecate Lochia, the national, environmental, and cultural intermingle within the domestic space (one thinks of reading the figure of Hecate Lochia as an interesting counterpart to Charles Olson’s Maximus). Just as it’s “Hard to be born,” it’s hard to be a mother in difficult, insecure times. Within this difficulty, Nguyen shows that poetry can be nursed from every ordinary and tragic and joyful moment.

Hiromi Ito is considered the foremost poet of the wave of “josei shi” (“women’s poetry”) that emerged in 1980s Japan. According to the introduction by the translator Jeffrey Angles, “the rise of feminist discourse encouraged women to speak about their experiences, desires, and bodies, stating that to do so was a significant social and political act” (vii). Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Ito is the first full-length collection of poetry by this revolutionary poet translated into English. Angles selects Ito’s most important and dramatic works from six of her collections, published between 1980-1993. Quite different from McKibbens and Nguyen, Ito’s most anthologized poems contour the darker psychological effects of pregnancy, childcare, and motherhood. In terms of form, Ito’s work is much more Beat than Black Mountain, much more shamanic than narrative.

The opening poems of the book explore suicide and eroticism, the line “between the female genitalia and the anus,” breastfeeding, masturbation, diarrhea, and weight-gain. One poem begins with a long list of foods (i.e. white squid, fatty pork, lotus root) and ends with a dizzying meditation on menstrual blood: 

Grandmother gave birth to my mother when she was forty Mother gave birth to me when she was thirty When I was born, my seventy year-old grandmother had not menstruated for years I gave birth to my daughter when I was twenty-eight When she was born, my fifty-eight year-old mother had not menstruated for years When my water broke, dabs of blood came out too Almost like I was menstruating (16)

Ito’s work rejects Japanese classical metrical patterns in favor of a more colloquial style with Beat-influenced rhythms (in a blurb, Anne Waldman calls Ito a “a true sister of the Beats”). Additionally, Ito uses vulgar and profane language, grotesque images, and childlike vocabulary. From “Postpartum”:

Childbirth was not dying nor defecating Childbirth was just a very painful period For the thirty-seven hours from beginning to end I kept on bleeding just as if I were having my period I wanted to change my maxi pad, change it right away I was constantly aware of my anus but I knew I didn’t have to defecate The pain was unpleasant, nothing more The pain was unpleasant The pain was unpleasant Dying is unpleasant Unpleasant

April 30, 9:47 am, a baby girl 3,650 grams, 51 centimeters (26)

Prevalent repetition and sudden shifts of register exemplifies much of Ito’s work. Each line moves with trance-like propulsion; “Logical Like a Baby” presents a striking example:

Kanoko’s diarrhea started as liquid stool that seeped through her diapers. Then she started vomiting violently. After four bouts of vomit and ten bouts of diarrhea, her stool turned white. That is, the hard bits of stool mixed with the liquid were white. It did not stink. It smelled acidic like rice being cooked. After thirty-four bouts of white stool, the diarrhea stopped. It took six days from start to finish. The day the diarrhea stopped, Kanoko started to say iiyoo. (21)

According to the translator’s note, “iiyoo” is a childlike way of pronouncing the Japanese word for “That’s nice.” As the poem continues, the area from Kanoko’s rectum to her labia grows inflamed. Even when the speaker places a warm, wet gauze on Kanoko’s skin, Kanoko continues to cry and “pull over and over at her swollen, red labia from the pain.” Kanoko repeats “iiyoo iiyoo iiyoo iiyoo iiyoo in her musical refrain.” Pain, bodily function, sexuality, and language converge to create a visceral atmosphere. 

In “Healing Kanoko’s Rash,” the fear caused by a child’s illness comes to the fore. The poem begins almost sweetly but takes a dark turn:

Sweet cow milk fattens me Countless eggs fatten me Beans cooked into mush fatten me Milk from my breasts Fattens my daughter Kanoko gets wet from my gushing breasts […] The protein from Cow milk Countless eggs Beans cooked into mush is foreign Foreign protein fattens me I fatten Kanoko A rash forms on Kanoko’s forehead (30)

As the poem progresses, the rash consumes Kanoko’s body, which is inexplicably covered in bruises. The speaker realizes Kanoko is allergic to the foreign proteins. Frighteningly, “the oil from the oily rash on Kanoko’s forehead congeals, dries, and stands up” and eventually walks off, leaving both child and mother completely powerless. 

The most powerful poem is the two-columned title poem, “Killing Kanoko.” The right column narrates the suicide of a friend, moves to the speaker hitting Kanoko over the head with an alarm clock, and ends with the speaker finding a dead baby sparrow covered in ants. A refrain echoes throughout: “Congratulations on your destruction.” The left column narrative begins with the speaker’s younger sister asking if the speaker ever had an abortion. She did. The refrain, “Congratulations on your destruction,” continues in the left column and takes on new meaning:      

Kanoko eats my time Kanoko pilfers my nutrients Kanoko threatens my appetite Kanoko pulls out my hair Kanoko forces me to deal with all her shit I want to get rid of Kanoko I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko Before she spills my blood (36)

Ito acutely expresses her exhaustion and fear as a mother, pushing her towards thoughts of infanticide. This passage stands in stark contrast to McKibbens’ work, which turns away from violence, and Nguyen’s poetry, which captures a safe and mothering domestic space. However, all these writers point to mothering as a fragile state susceptible to psychological, physical, cultural, and societal pressures.

Anna Akhmatova once wrote: “motherhood is a bright torture.” Reading Ito, Nguyen, and McKibbens together demonstrate how the multi-dimensional experience of motherhood embraces different aesthetics and a spectrum of emotions, from “bright” to “torturous.”   

You begin to learn the shape of things underneath things                              Knit winter hat and the curves of pot handles or spout pushing like a twisting baby's arm or leg

in a seven month sack 

My pregnant pause had been exactly that, my attempt to “learn the shape of things underneath things,” to allow myself to be read and to acknowledge and embrace that reading.  The tea cozy, its surface and depth—a new topography required new maps.

And then, during labor, I had a textual revelation.  As I felt my way through things—feeling trapped, feeling raw, feeling like I had “exceeded my boundaries”—I actually thought about Mina Loy’s “Parturition,” and I understood labor’s clichés.  In the midst of an otherwise very primal, intensely unthinking experience, I knew what it meant to be “the centre of a circle of pain.”  There was only now, and in that now, “I am knowing / All about / Unfolding.” 

I have told this story several times (with varying degrees of embarrassment!), and I think it epitomizes the conflict that motherhood presents: out of a profound acquaintance with the self (labor, the epitome of self-knowledge) comes a relationship that asks us to set aside ego, to reinvent subjectivity.  Loy wrote poems in between the mending, the laundry, and the cuddles.  I am writing this in the dark, as my son sleeps on the bed next to me.  Motherhood has become my subtext, the material condition that shapes what and how I write.

He just turned three, and I am still trying to invent a language to describe motherhood.  It is somewhere between the pregnant pause and the “knowing,” this attempt to render what is both exceptionally normal and exquisitely unique.  Sometimes, I like to think about my son as an unfiltered version of myself, whose relationship to language is raw and utterly present.  He apprehends the world in manageable meters and ideational rhymes, and in this sea of words, I see a kind of poetry (of my own creation?) that gives me pause.

I recently read about a new breakthrough in our understanding of microchimerism, which is the presence of a number of genetically distinct cells originating from another individual existing within a host individual. This phenomenon which was originally noted as occurring in children, who hold cells from their mothers, has been discovered to happen the other way as well, unique cells from the child also exist in the mother.

Is this corroboration for the swarm of me as myself, as mother, as myself the mother?

Last year, a friend shared with me an account of early motherhood by a well known American poet. The poet described it as what seemed like years of pushing her child on a swing that suddenly, when that particular responsibility lessened,  opened and released a torrent of new poetry. I kept returning to this anecdote and later realized that what moved me so in this little story was that both parts of the poet’s life existed and were developing even if the poet herself was not completely aware of it. Still reeling from the seismic shift, the freefall of my son’s first year, to hear this gospel of the latent, of art assembling itself below the surface of the parental, was manna.

But it wasn’t only the fruit of the poet’s actions that struck me in this story, it was the symbol used to describe this period of poetic gestation, those years of intensive all consuming parenting—pushing a swing. Not rocking a baby, not reading to them, not cooking, not nursing, not changing diapers, but the swing. The mind-numbingly repetitive action of pushing your child away and guiding them back, over and over and over again. That this seemingly pointless activity, this repetitive burnishing of one swath of space —with no clear beginning or end besides initial desire and ultimate boredom—could cultivate poetic expression, this was what made me keep the story close to my heart returning to it over and over and over again. 

Shortly afterward I came across Jorie Graham’s poem “Lapse” in the American Poetry Review, which conflates both the symbol of this new state, the swing; and it’s form, a microchimeral awareness. There is so much in this poem represented by the swing and its movement: the pendulous emotions of parenthood, the terror of responsibility countered by the weightlessness of wonder, the duty to foster independence versus the physical longing to protect, the smear between that upswing of complete symbiosis and the downswing of vulnerability and independence, all of which are encompassed by the mother. And yet, between these poles, throughout, everywhere, the poet opens, flickers. The more you look the more you see her mental I’s, her physical eyes. They populate the poem like weeds, they grow through this simple moment of mother pushing her daughter on a swing on this “day that seems even now it will never end.” They affirm, even here in this space domesticated by this action, this emblem of parenthood, the poet exists, multiplies.

This record of growth and opening through this act of stasis—of parenthood—creates a muti-dimensional map of a microchimeral consciousness: the poet mother mind. Readings like this act as rosary beads to me. They are testament that motherhood does not diminish, smother, extinguish the poet. It divides her. It opens I’s.