Dear Daughter
a brief note on wanting to write poems about motherhood, zero fucks given; some Brenda Hillman, and an allergic reaction to literary criticism
I’m opening up the wormhole of Substack to say that I’ve come to the conclusion I’m writing, mostly, what I think are, let me hem and haw for a minute, drumrolllll, Dear Daughter poems. Like, I could use the acronym from Mommy Boards: DD, here, and it’d be a pretty accurate way to describe the abstract “you” my lyrical selves are speaking to. And there’s a tightening in my chest, a memory of a graduate student yawning at a BRILLIANT reading by a fellow mother poet (“What did you think? I was so bored.”), and an unwanted fear of being sentimental.
Then I read a Brenda Hillman poem in preparation for her visit to Tucson this week. I am in the poem’s murky mother waters from the get-go: I love a good time problem, and there’s a daughter, a dear daughter, that I’m rooting for. The poem is fun; Hillman talks to impish spirits that steal her ability to track time. She reflects on Hawking and Lean Cuisine with equal ease, a postmodern acrobat. She’s also tender, and I love it. Then I read the first sentence of an essay about “Time Problem” by Joy Katz, up at Voltage Poetry. Katz’s first impulse is deeply concerned with ^^that chest-tightening reaction of mine:
“How to avoid sentimentality in a poem about a young daughter who says “mama” and needs help with math? If that girl popped up in a draft I was working on, I might instantly delete it. It’s too easy to imagine a cheaply redemptive poem about a child whose mother helps her with homework.”
Why are DD poems so easy to imagine as “cheaply redemptive”? As “cheap”? Strike that. How do I banish that mocking tone from my consciousness altogether, my consciousness, which grew into a Real Woman only after much floating around in a patriarchal academic-y po-world goo? I mean, I can visualize the editors at a magazine I worked for in New York opening up a submission bouquet of my poems and going, Ugh, another mom poet. It was never a phrase I heard them say, but I can so clearly visualize their faces, grimacing in a way that meant the same thing. I can still, sixteen years later, imagine running from the grimace to the kitchen to make coffee, only being so flustered about their perception of me that I fold the too-large coffee filter over the brew spout, ruining an entire pot.
What I want to say, by writing the DD poems that I’ve been avoiding for stupid ego-driven people-pleasing reasons, is enjoy the coffee motherf***ers.
Katz goes on to praise Hillman’s poem, I should say, noting the collage-like nature, the perceptive mind at work: “These shifts allow Hillman to alight on emotionally live material yet avoid sentimentality.… Whenever this poem offers tenderness, the tension of it (i.e., a reader wondering anxiously if the poem is getting too soft and sticky) is relieved by a quick shift to neutral.”
What I want to do is write poems that are unabashedly soft and sticky, and I cringe to see tenderness described so clearly by a poet/critic as a defect. And if I’m being honest, I know that they, like me, have been trained to anticipate my reader’s automatic (programmed) anxious reaction to “sentiment” (whatever that is). Moreover, I don’t want to be anxious about my squishiness. Or— shout out to my therapist!— I’d like to understand my anxiety as information. Perhaps about me, but definitely about the aforementioned patriarchal goo.
A Self-Prescribed Poetry Rx: Re-read Vap’s End of the Sentimental Journey; go see Hillman read at the poetry center on Thursday
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