“My body is wrong; my presence is wrong. The only thing more wrong is my absence. When I am present, it is embarrassing. When I am absent, it is wounding.”  

–Rachel Zucker, The Poetics of Wrongness 

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.” 
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 

I.

When asked to consider collecting my thoughts around the “Poetics of” something, my mind reeled. This is my favorite kind of assignment: one that asks us to reflect on what is, ultimately, an existential question.  ​​What, I wondered, might be the conditions most central to my writing and to my life, around which my poetics have formed and continue to form?  

I turn to poems, as both a reader and a writer, because critical thought is insufficient to lived experience, theory to practice. Because some things cannot be said, only sung, drawn, painted, built, danced, and poetry is the closest we get to doing this with language alone.  At its best, poetry is alchemic: greater than the sum of its parts, which are, after all, only words, in much the way that we are only cells, made animate by breath, but also by spirit, by something ineffable.  When we read and write poems, we participate in this mysterious, potentially mystical process, which can be transformative and transcendent, even as it connects us to the world and everything in it.   

Poetry, however, is not the only altar at which I worship: I am also the mother of four, and I have always understood motherhood as a near-religious vocation to the practice of Bhakti: the path of devotion, a method of attaining God through love and loving.  But I have already written at length on the subject of motherhood and poetics, and although motherhood is intrinsic to who I am and, therefore, to what I write, it is not my sole identity or occupation. (Too, motherhood, in its contemporary Western iteration, is a social construct as well as a role-in-relationship, and therefore my experience of it has been informed and compounded by this particular moment in the late-stage Capitalist patriarchy.) 

I want to believe I write, first and foremost, as a human animal. I began writing before becoming a mother and continue writing now that three of my four children are young adults. What remains, however, is the challenge of worshiping at multiple altars, of wanting to be a devoted mother (daughter, sister, partner, citizen, friend) and to write, and to enact this devotion by writing, with only so many hours in a day, days in a year, years in a life. I do not have a corner on this market. Everyone, parent or otherwise, must choose to whom and what they want to give their time and attention, and rarely are we inclined or at liberty to be singular in our focus, any more than we are able to be singular in our identities. As Charles Simic has written, “I am in dialogue with certain elements in my life . . .. My effort to understand is a perpetual circling around a few obsessive images” — images, and also ideas, identities, issues that, for better or worse, sometimes seem to have chosen us as much as we them. 

Considering this, it occurred to me that I might write about the Poetics of Conflictedness, of Ambivalence, of Hypocrisy, of Paradox, of Contradiction, some combination of which often seems like my dominant state of consciousness. The will to be both good (devoted, self-sacrificial) and glad (willing and grateful to be alive). The Poetics of (attempting to live) a Double Life? (This compelled me to look back at a favorite (and exceedingly poetic) film from the early ‘90’s by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski, La Double Vie de Véronique.) The Poetics of the Divided Self (a concept coined by the psychologist R.D. Laing, that describes “the tension between a person's authentic identity and the self they present to the world”)?  

But the problem with each and all these as defining a poetics seemed to me to be their lack of poetry, which to my mind exists in part to remediate these impasses: first, by describing or naming them, and then by offering an antidote, a consolation. For me, this has often involved taking refuge from the mind by more fully inhabiting the body, the senses, the material world. The Poetics of Tea and Fruit and Trees and Birds and Breath and Skin and Soup and Bread. 

II.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The Poetics of Functioning? The Poetics of Cognitive Dissonance, ​defined as “the discomfort we feel when our behavior does not align with our values or beliefs, or when holding two conflicting beliefs, values or attitudes simultaneously,” as in the case of the Divided Self above? But what if our values and beliefs are multitudinous, such that any behavior is likely to conflict with at least one among them? A Poetics of Multiplicity?  

(I have written about this before as well: In her book, The Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum writes, “I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods, and circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing something wrong...these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of practical wisdom.”) 

But then again, my head begins to spin — it all seems so heady. Preferable would seem to me a Poetics of Simplicity, at least in aesthetic terms, though that would betray the complexity of what is. The Poetics of What Is? The Poetics of Discerning what that might be? The Poetics of Being? The Poetics of Moral Inquiry? 

In a personal statement I once drafted I describe myself as “a poet and essayist whose work emerges from the practice of slowing down and paying attention — to sensory experience, the natural world, the people I love, and the written word — in order to discern how we might live with passion and purpose amidst the demands of daily life and in the face of impending and incessant loss. I believe in the consolations of beauty and of philosophy; long walks, hot tea, ripe fruit, and physical touch; in nurturing and nourishing ourselves and one another, and in caring for this planet and its inhabitants.” 

This was written around a year and a half ago and does somehow seem to encapsulate what might otherwise be irreducible. A Poetics of the Irreducible? ​ In the essay "The Edge: of Motherhood and Poetics" which originally appeared in The Dunes Review and then in the 2023 collection Homing In: Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose, I wrote “Poetry has never seemed to me a form of writing, per se. It has, for as long as it has appealed to me, seemed a thing apart, the by-product of a way of being in the world... To pay attention; to be curious and alert; to be receptive and reflective, reverent and irreverent, romantic and skeptical; to mourn and to praise; to contemplate, celebrate, and salvage what we can of the universe, on behalf of our species. ​​To be a poet, then, is no more or less than to be fully human and to translate and distill that experience into language so meticulously as to evoke and redeem something of life itself.” 

​​​I continue to believe this, but my perspective has evolved over time.  The older I get, the ​​less possible it seems to maintain such voraciousness. I have become more modest in my poetic (and human) aspirations, slower and quieter, more accepting of my own limitations and of the inevitability of failure and inadequacy, and yet I am more committed than ever to poetry as a practice, the practice of being present in our lives, in the world, and in the lives of others, which brings me full circle to this difficulty:  

In order to enroll in an MFA program, as I did at long last this fall, I am having to spend the work weeks during the academic year away from my eight-year-old daughter. “Home,” it is said, “is where the mother is.” Might it follow then that, for mothers, home is where the children are? This separation is far from ideal for either of us, but I also haven’t been able to come up with a better solution. I enrolled in my first creative writing program thirty-five years ago and, before I knew it, had married the chair of the department, a man twenty-five years older than I was.  I had four children and found myself approaching fifty neither earning a living wage (as a Montessori teacher) nor living the life (of a poet) I'd aspired to. One or the other might have sufficed, but a life that was neither economically sustainable nor existentially/artistically gratifying felt untenable. So here I am, beginning again. The Poetics of Beginning Again? (I have long been drawn to the Buddhist concept of “Beginner’s Mind”: “the idea of letting go of your preconceptions and having an attitude of openness when studying a subject.”) The Poetics of Continuing? A Poetics of Perseverance? 

In the essay “In Praise of Persistence: Notes on Some Contemporary Lyric Poems,” I once wrote that: “Poetry persists as a result of our doubts, not in spite of them. Poetry is an act of faith rather than an assertion of knowledge . . . . Poetry thrives in the realm of negative capability, ‘that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties,​​ Mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact & reason,’ as Keats claimed. ‘With a great poet,’ Keats continues, ‘the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates every other consideration.’”  

This, I would wager, is a Poetics of Suspended Disbelief, of poetry over theory—even a theory of poetry?  

Leonardo da Vinci is famed to have said “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” If I were a painter, my work would consist of still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and maybe a few nudes. A Poetics of Still Lifes, Interiors, Landscapes and Nudes?  

III.

In the wake of the loss of a loved one, grief sometimes feels like a lifeline connecting us with the dead. Mourning and grieving feel like a means of remaining connected to the ones we’ve lost, and also a means of paying tribute to them and to their significance in our lives. To recover, to “let go” or “move on,” then, can feel like a betrayal and a severing, as though by getting on with our lives we are somehow expressing that the beloved wasn’t really that significant after all, that we can indeed live without them. 

​​So, too, with guilt: In the wake of an offense, guilt can feel as though it binds us to the injured party, honors them, acknowledges our wrongdoing and the injustice ​​of such treatment, though this is likely an unhealthy and unproductive delusion that does nothing of substance for those who have been harmed. Still, to forgive ourselves might seem to diminish or disregard our culpability or the wounded person’s suffering. To forgive ourselves might feel as though it constitutes a further affront. 

As a mother, I feel guilty every minute of every hour that I am not actively caring for my children. Guilt feels like my penance for not attending to them directly. Guilt holds their place in my heart in their absence, the way grief holds the place of a lost loved one, though, like the dead, my children likely know nothing of and stand to gain nothing from this. 

When I express this to a mentor, I’m told I need to get over it. Rationally, I understand that guilt is not serving any purpose beyond self-flagellation, and may also be a response conditioned by a patriarchal system dependent on the devotion and servitude of care-givers (often women) for its survival, but feeling as though I am being punished and suffering does somehow feel like a form of justice, an expression of my longing and of my love. 

Though not raised within a particular religious tradition, I experience this orientation toward devotion as a veritable moral imperative. Nonetheless, I also identify, almost involuntarily, as an artist and as a contemplative, and my work remains to reconcile these roles, to worship at both of these altars, to find balance. 

This is, after all, what I would have wanted for my own mother, what I want for my daughters, and for my father and sons and friends, for that matter: For them to be devoted and caring and to feel authentically expressed in their lives and in the world, rather than erased, as generations of women have been as mothers, generations of men and women as workers in the exploitative Capitalist labor force. Making art is, in this context, an act of resistance against the basely (and debasingly) utilitarian. “It is difficult / to get the news from poems” writes William Carlos Williams, “yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” I want my daughter, my children, parents, siblings, friends, even enemies and strangers to live in a world where there is art and poetry. I want to live in a world where there is art and poetry and this alone seems to me grounds for devoting at least some of my time and energy to producing it. 

IV.

I have moved some thirty-eight times in my life. I did not have a “childhood home” to grow up in, nor are my parents living in such a place now. My husband and I never lived anywhere together for more than a few years, nor have I spent more than a few years under a single roof since we’ve been separated. ​​If one has never had a singular, physical home, might we — might I — then look to other entities to serve that purpose in our lives? Love, for example (though that has proven equally elusive), or religion (likewise), or: art? In my case, Poetry has been with me now, and I with Poetry, for longer than anyone or anything else. For thirty-five years I have turned to it for shelter, for refuge, for consolation and for identity, much as others might turn to home or country or family for such things. Perhaps this is why, when I have attempted to forsake poetry in favor of my maternal responsibilities, ​​I have felt punished and adrift, much as I feel punished and adrift now, when I am away from my children? 

Being a mother and an artist is perhaps akin to having dual citizenship, and perhaps to feeling treacherous whenever one’s loyalties (time and attention) skew or veer or list more in one direction than the other. Thus my conflictedness. 

Studying human anatomy years ago, I was introduced to the concept of homeostasis, “the state of balance that the body maintains to function properly and survive; a self-regulating process that allows organisms to adapt and survive in a changing environment.” Might it follow that the mind, being part and parcel to the body, ​attempts to achieve a balance of its own in order to function and survive?  And might this constitute a poetics itself?  The Poetics of Homeostasis?  The poetics of maintaining a balance between the multiple altars at which we worship in order to survive?​ 

To turn, for a moment, away from theory and toward form and practice, I think this balance is expressed on the page in our efforts to marry sound and sense, to allow both to be represented simultaneously or by turns, to allow neither to dominate or recede. Dominance and recession, to my mind, evoke the tides, which are forever turning, and over which we have little control. What we can control are the little altars we build on the shore, the altars of our lives and of our poems. 

Though I tried to create a family of my own as soon as humanly possible, in which I would provide my children with the nightly dinners and stable home I longed for and lacked myself, history instead repeated itself and my children have, despite my best efforts, experienced their own variation on the theme of instability that I did. Part of this is economic: without generational wealth it is hard to extricate oneself from cycles of poverty. Part of this is emotional: it is hard to provide a source of secure attachment for others when one isn’t securely attached oneself. 

That said, my brothers somehow seem to have managed. They have corrected for our childhood’s shortfalls and amassed wealth and the material security that comes with that. What they’ve never seemed inclined to do is make art, which leads me to wonder if it isn’t a creative/contemplative life itself that is antithetical to prosperity outside the narrow margins of commercial success? Must we choose between the two? And if we don’t, will the choice be made for us?  

But perhaps that’s an unfair generalization. Perhaps security and creative work aren’t so much mutually exclusive as in need of sequencing? When I think of my children and younger aspiring artists and humans, one thought I have is that it might due for them to address their lives in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: for the physiological (food, water, clothing, shelter, air); for physical and emotional safety; for love and belonging (again, both physical and emotional); for “esteem” (though I’m not even sure I know what that looks like or means); and for self-actualization, which I take to include self-expression, among other things. 

As a baby poet in art school in the early 90’s, this certainly wasn’t suggested to me. We were encouraged to cut to the chase of making art, physical and psychological stability be damned, which played perfectly to our adolescent egos and impatience. 

​​But that’s ancient history by now. It’s pouring down rain today as Hurricane Helene makes its way across the Florida panhandle toward the mountains of Western North Carolina, where two of my children are at home waiting for me, 200 miles away.  I was due to drive there this morning to join them, as I do every Friday, but the interstate, I will come to learn, is being washed away even as I write, and so I have no choice, for now, but to stay where I am.  When I began writing this a month ago, I had no idea that these questions would come to such a head, that the multiple altars at which I am attempting to worship would come to feel even more irreconcilably distant from one another, and yet, as within the eye of the storm itself, there is an internal stillness, a particular calm that descends when we realize that all we have been wrestling with, all that we have been attempting solve and resolve, is in fact, for the moment at least,  beyond our control.  As Proust wrote: “There are moments in life when a sort of beauty is born of the multiplicity of the troubles that assail us, intertwined like Wagnerian leitmotifs."  What remains is for us to inhabit this beauty, surrender to it, without that “irritable reaching after fact & reason,” that Keats warned against and, like the nuns in Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” continue to keep this “difficult balance.”  

 
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;    
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,    
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating    
Of dark habits, 
                       keeping their difficult balance.”