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Most
writers hold keys to ugly rooms. It is our duty to strip
their walls, to process our disappointments and grief, in
order to move on. Purging is a goal in and of itself, but
for many of us that end is not enough. We seek validation
in its many forms. Confessional writers have often been
scorned because audiences associate a privy cache of emotion
with self-centeredness, depression, and an obsession with
the negative. Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven; Hemingway
put a gun to his head. Both writers earned measurable recognition
and fame, but I don’t think their writing accomplished
the deliverance their souls had clearly hungered for—or
suicide would not have won.
I see writing as
a slush pile of melted ghosts that turn to mulch for growth. Even
the most hideous admission of truth can drive one upward. Hence,
the term transcendence. Much of my social consciousness poetry began
with an unguarded glance at the bathroom mirror. A good deal of
my early work deals with the amputation of my right leg, a hideous
string of surgeries, and the on-going process of accepting the concrete
facts of my disability. By naming and expressing my losses and my
frailties, by calling a stump a "crooked carrot" or a
"bleeding beet," by saying the unsayables, I have given
my sadness a voice and very slowly begun to embrace the good that
comes of tragedy, which is simply the presence of raw strength coupled
with a lesson in mortality.
When airing issues
related to my disability grew into tired hats sulking on
a worn pew, I tackled my alcoholism. Speaking out actually
cemented my sobriety in ways I’ll probably never know.
When you’ve told the world about the ins and outs of
drowning in yellow Chardonnay, guzzling a bottle each and
every night, it’s a little harder to sneak back to
the old sins. By examining the worst of times, you are creating
a ripe ambiance for change. Admission is a catalyst.
Journal writing
is an age-old tactic in the battle of wellness. At a recent conference
in Vancouver, British Columbia, I sat on a publishing panel with
bestselling author Bonnie Sherr Klein, who spoke about her recovery
from two very serious strokes. In Slow Dance: A Story of Stroke,
Love & Disability, she writes about gritty bed pans, the
eternal hissing of her respirator, the galling but human elements
of clawing at the screen of a new identity. Paper was a life-line
to sanity when her body had abandoned her. Klein’s courage
in publishing her story offers a profound example of the crucial
importance of the writing process. Paper stitches healed her wounds.
Reading that book,
I identified with her struggle to stand, her grocery lists of bitterness,
the glory of her every step. Perhaps more importantly, I was buoyed
by the example of candor she set for the rest of the world. When
she chronicled the fetid details of illness and paralysis, her family’s
rocky coping road, the dread of her own demise, this very private
Holocaust taught readers they are not alone. Sharon Olds has accomplished
a similar feat with regard to sexual abuse; others have done the
same with AIDS. Leaving someone speechless with your words and itching
for an exit is no great sin. Unsettling is good.
Inaccessible pain
is the real killer, a kind of second-hand smoke that hovers over
daily life. The page, to me, is a surgical mask; it provides the
safety of distance as well as a grounding point for seizures of
grief. Alice Walker once wrote: "Writing saved me from the
sin and inconvenience of violence." If we apply her sense of
purpose and process, we discover that anger and sadness can be stepping
stones. The trouble here is risk.
Discomfort is inherent
to the integrity of emotive art. This morning, I was whining to
my husband about my family’s lack of interest in my work: "They
treat my words like roadkill on an overpass." He chuckled but
delivered a salient reply: "You make them open doors to rooms
they’d prefer not to enter; people just don’t say ‘thank
you’ to someone who drops a boulder on their foot." In
this context, craving the pastel lace of approval’s pat is
totally unrealistic. A writer’s sojourn can be a lonely one,
but for the sense of completing something sharp enough to cut through
ingenuine chatter and artificiality.
My parents have
my first print collection of poetry on their coffee table in the
living room. The pages themselves have no traces of a reader involved
with the text: no coffee stains, no fingerprints, no creases in
the binding. They are proud that they can call their daughter a
"writer," but digesting the contents is an impossible
dream and it’s mine, not theirs. Incisive poetry is a cobblestone
path to a patch of weeds. It is not a view of untainted bliss.
Walker once said that
she pens the books she needs to read. A quill is so many things
in one little stick: we dig, we scratch, we scream, we moan, we
shift around in our carnal shells, searching for our place in this
world. I have to look at writing as a practical past-time that makes
my life more livable, much the same as tying my shoes so I don’t
fall flat on my face. The rewards are subtle. Slowly, ever so slowly,
my difference has stopped hanging its head in arrant shame.
A
KLEE IN COAL
"Everything
vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of
the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has
become the obedient instrument of a remote will."
Art is a protest rally dressed up right
in stanzas of silk negligees.
Emotion’s fleas resist the lift.
Serrated razors on the edge
like rust in silencers of guns.
My absent leg, a broken crayon
under feet of pick-up trucks.
Disabled’s coal–my private Klee:
sand between my missing toes
and Stonehenge scabs of surgery.
I have no palettes of color,
no genius but blood–
well-earned–still blood,
no better, no worse than runs
through veins of wounded deer.
I crave, at times, Fushia artsy
in corners of a coffeehouse
or roses with their perfect stems
in fridges of a flower shop.
No Flaubert, No Oscar Wilde,
my Ravens have no regal grace.
Faith and candor work together–
slaughter meat of luckless fate
and package it for grocery stores.
I cannot write in bright Picassos
nor pretend my bitter pen is
bon vivants that pick sweet petals
from harmonies of motion’s waltz.
Jolly Green Giants of giggling beans
remain in cans of cupboards shut.
Humor has an acid edge–
pivots me away from dark:
a fleeting rainbow centered in a hail storm,
I pencil gray the salty sweat
and stretch bequeathed by difference fire. 
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