Why it's taking so long

and kitten pics!

Aug 18, 2024

Hi friends. It’s taken me a long time to get this started, partly because once it’s been a while, it can be hard to begin again. And also because, well, my family and I are dealing with some really difficult chronic health conditions, and this summer has been absolutely wretched. So, thanks for your patience. (Title of this post is a nod to Johanna Hedva's essay “Why It’s Taking So Long” the follow-up to their iconic “Sick Woman Theory.”)

Not unrelated to that, I’m assembling a manuscript of poems and preparing to teach a class next winter about writing the long emergency—how do we sustain a reader (and ourselves) through material that is not just a discrete crisis, but a crisis that goes on and on? Through material that is inherently boring, repetitive, and emotionally difficult? I don’t know the answer yet but it’s been useful to keep asking the question.

I love this poem by Adrien Stoutenburg—it’s one I keep coming back to and studying:

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Intensive Care Unit
by Adrien Stoutenburg

   In one corner of the ward
somebody was eating a raw chicken.
The cheerful nurses did not see.
With the tube down my throat
I could not tell them.
Nor did they notice the horror show
on the TV set suspended over my windowless bed.
The screen was dead
but a torn face was clear.
 
   I did not see my own
in a mirror for weeks.
When it happened,
when I dared to face my face
after the ravaging,
it was not mine
but something whittled, honed down
to a sly resemblance.
It, even the mirror, the pale room,
the oxygen tank
neat and black as a bomb
in its portable crate—
all was hallucination.
 
   But the bloody rooster,
the stray pieces of bodies
slung into dreamless nooks,
the white-haired doll whimpering
on a gift counter—
those were real.
 
   I keep living there.
Foolish. I am home. Half safe.

I will be reading in person at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA on Sept 11 with the fabulous Jen Jabaily-Blackburn, and would love to see you there.

I’ll also be introducing our first winner of the Nine Syllables Press chapbook contest, Jai Bashir Hamid, at her Smith College reading on October 8, 7 pm at Wright Hall. She’ll be joined by Jen Funk, author of Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy. I am so excited to see Hamid’s book in the world! I started 9SP two years ago, and it’s still sometimes hard to believe that it’s real.

I’m planning to run an online writing group starting this fall for writers who are chronically ill/disabled. If you’re interested, let me know.

One serious joy around here is that my partner is fostering kittens at his house. So I leave you with kitten pics, the best medicine of all. They’re very squirmy so it’s really hard to get pics that aren’t blurry!

Also, wow, I’ve been doing this a little over a year now. That went fast.

with love and rage,

Adrie

Poetry & Other Ways to Piss off Capitalism

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