Excerpt from Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mas, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely.  But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are.  And somebody else comes in.”

Restoration

By: Lawrence Raab

Making something the way it was—
what could I have been thinking
months ago when I wrote that line
in my notebook? I liked the way the words
fit together, and perhaps it was well below zero
that morning, the furnace acting up again,

and I was feeling particularly mortal,
just a few weeks after the operation on my spine.
Yet how easily an occasion explains too much,
and how risky, how exacting is the work
of the surgeon, and of the great restorers—

each layer of varnish slowly disappearing
from another grimy masterpiece until the luminous
colors must be as they were when Turner
or Piero stepped back and nodded
in satisfaction. This is what they saw
is what I want to believe—the way the world
once was, even if no one can swear to it,

a thousand smart guesses having turned into choices—
what to remove, what to leave undisturbed.
The tiny smudge of a dog sleeping
far from the cross was there from the beginning.
But the vivid plume of smoke
above the crippled ship? Or the precise stare

of that angel? Should her eyes be so cold?
Should she really be looking at me
with such casual indifference, as if hundreds
of years ago I’d never have begged: Come down,
show me your face, make me whole again.

Poem taken from: http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15576

The Massachusetts Review
Summer 2012

The Fury Of Abandonment

By: Anne Sexton

Someone lives in a cave
eating his toes,
I know that much.
Someone little lives under a bush
pressing an empty Coca-Cola can against
his starving bloated stomac,
I know that much.
A monkey had his hands cut off
for a medical experiment
and his claws wept.
I know that much.

I know that it is all
a matter of hands.
Out of the mournful sweetness of touching
comes love
like breakfast.
Out of the many houses come the hands
before the abandonment of the city,
out of hte bars and shops,
a thin file of ants.

I’ve been abandoned out here
under the dry stars
with no shoes, no belt
and I’ve called Rescue Inc. –
that old-fashioned hot line –
no voice.
Left to my own lips, touch them,
my own nostrils, shoulders, breasts,
navel, stomach, mound,kneebone, ankle,
touch them.

It makes me laugh
to see a woman in this condition.
It makes me laugh for America and New York city
when your hands are cut off
and no one answers the phone.

About the author:

Anne Gray Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. In 1953 she gave birth to a daughter. In 1954 she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, suffered her first mental breakdown, and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital. In 1955, following the birth of her second daughter, Sexton suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized again; her children were sent to live with her husband’s parents. That same year, on her birthday, she attempted suicide.

She was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest in writing poetry she had developed in high school, and in the fall of 1957 she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. In her introduction to Anne Sexton’s Complete Poems, the poet Maxine Kumin, who was enrolled with Sexton in the 1957 workshop and became her close friend, describes her belief that it was the writing of poetry that gave Sexton something to work towards and develop and thus enabled her to endure life for as long as she did. In 1974 at the age of 46, despite a successful writing career–she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for Live or Die–she lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.

Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other “confessional” poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. She made the experience of being a woman a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter.

Biography Taken From: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/14

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Agape

By: Timothy Murphy

The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp
to hear confession from an Eagle Scout
tortured by forty years of sin and doubt.
You whispered vespers by a hissing lamp.

Handlers, allowing you to hike with me,
followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront
down a firebreak this camper used to hunt.
Through all I said you suffered silently.

I blamed the authors of my unbelief:
St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene,
the Jesuit who raped me as a teen,
the altar boy when I was six, the grief

of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead
by Peter’s Church and all the choirs above.
In a thick Polish accent choked with love,
Te Dominus amat was all you said.

A brief by the author:

Pope John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, and that night he visited me in a dream. This dream recurred three times. The last time was April 15, 2007—the night Pope Benedict XVI accosted American bishops over the matter of clerical sexual abuse—when this poem came to me in its entirety. I rose and immediately typed it. In every instance the dream was identical, and John Paul’s words were the same. Te Dominus amat is Latin for “God loves you.”

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Kaddish (An Elegy For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956)

By: Allen Ginsberg

 

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on

the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking,

talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues

shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm the rhythm–and your memory in my head three years after–

And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud–wept, realizing

how we suffer–

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,

prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-

swers–and my own imagination of a withered leaf–at dawn–

Dreaming back thru life, Your time–and mine accelerating toward Apoca-

lypse

 

 

You can read the rest of the poem here.

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Profiling American poet, essayist, and feminist – Adrienne Rich

Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich was one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. Widely read and hugely influential, Rich’s career spanned seven decades and has hewed closely to the story of post-war American poetry itself. Her earliest work, including A Change of World (1951) which won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award, was formally exact and decorous, while her work of the late 1960s and 70s became increasingly radical in both its free-verse form and feminist and political content. Rich’s metamorphosis was noted by Carol Muske in the New York Times Book Review; Muske wrote that Rich began as a “polite copyist of Yeats and Auden, wife and mother. She has progressed in life (and in her poems …) from young widow and disenchanted formalist, to spiritual and rhetorical convalescent, to feminist leader…and doyenne of a newly-defined female literature.”

 

May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012

 

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

They do not fear the men beneath the tree;

They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

 

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool

Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.

The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band

Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

 

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

 

 

Biography taken from: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich#poet

 

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Parliament Hill Fields

By: Sylvia Plath

On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.
Faceless and pale as china
The round sky goes on minding its business.
Your absence is inconspicuous;
Nobody can tell what I lack.

Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back
To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue,
Settling and stirring like blown paper
Or the hands of an invalid. The wan
Sun manages to strike such tin glints

From the linked ponds that my eyes wince
And brim; the city melts like sugar.
A crocodile of small girls
Knotting and stopping, ill-assorted, in blue uniforms,
Opens to swallow me. I’m a stone, a stick,

One child drops a barrette of pink plastic;
None of them seem to notice.
Their shrill, gravelly gossip’s funneled off.
Now silence after silence offers itself.
The wind stops my breath like a bandage.

Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge
Swaddles roof and tree.
It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank.
I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all.
Already your doll grip lets go.

The tumulus, even at noon, guards its black shadow:
You know me less constant,
Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird.
I circle the writhen trees. I am too happy.
These faithful dark-boughed cypresses

Brood, rooted in their heaped losses.
Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat.
I lose sight of you on your blind journey,
While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets
Unspool and spend themselves. My mind runs with them,

Pooling in heel-prints, fumbling pebble and stem.
The day empties its images
Like a cup or a room. The moon’s crook whitens,
Thin as the skin seaming a scar.
Now, on the nursery wall,

The blue night plants, the little pale blue hill
In your sister’s birthday picture start to glow.
The orange pompons, the Egyptian papyrus
Light up. Each rabbit-eared
Blue shrub behind the glass

Exhales an indigo nimbus,
A sort of cellophane balloon.
The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife.
Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light;
I enter the lit house.

A brief by the author:

I imagine the landscape of Parliament Hill Fields in London seen by a person
overwhelmed by an emotion so powerful as to colour and distort the scenery. The
speaker here is caught between the old and the new year, between the grief
caused by the loss of a child and the joy aroused by the knowledge of an only
child safe at home. Gradually the first images of blankness and absence give way
to images of convalescence and healing as the woman turns, a bit stiffly and with
difficulty, from her sense of bereavement to the vital and demanding part of her
world which still survives.

_____________________________________

Sonnet: To Eva

By: Slyvia Plath

All right, let’s say you could take a skull and break it
The way you’d crack a clock; you’d crush the bone
Between steel palms of inclination, take it,
Observing the wreck of metal and rare stone.

This was a woman : her loves and stratagems
Betrayed in mute geometry of broken
Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,
And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.

Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.

The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans
To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.

_____________________________________

Dresses

By: Franz Kafka

Often when I see dresses with many pleats and frills and flounces, draped
beautifully over beautiful bodies, then I think to myself that they will
not long be preserved in such a condition, but will acquire creases that
it will be impossible to iron out, dust in their details so thick it can no
longer be removed, and that no woman would wish to make such a sorry
exhibition of herself as to put on the same precious dress every morning
and take it off at night.

And I see girls who are certainly beautiful, displaying variously
attractive little muscles and bones and taut skin and masses of fine hair,
yet daily appearing in that same masquerade, always laying the same face in
the hollow of the same hands, and having it reflected back to them in the
mirror.

Only sometimes in the evening, when they come home late from a party, it
looks worn to them in the mirror, puffy, dusty, already seen by everyone,
almost not wearable anymore.

_____________________________________

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

By: Maya Angelou

The free bird leaps

on the back of the wind

and floats downstream

till the current ends

and dips his wings

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

 

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

 

The caged bird sings

with fearful trill

of the things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom

 

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn

and he names the sky his own.

 

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing

 

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

 

About the author:

Maya Angelou, born April 4, 1928 as Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, is an author, poet, historian, conductor, actor, singer, songwriter, playwright, film director, and civil rights activist. Born in a segregated rural area of St. Louis, Missouri, she comes from a broken home, was raped at eight, and was an unwed mother at 16 years old. Throughout all these circumstances she still managed to become San Francisco’s first black woman conductor. She was also the first black woman to have an original screenplay produced in 1971, Georgia, Georgia. She has several volumes of poetry and some of her composed music was recorded by B.B. King. She was also nominated for an Emmy Award for her acting in Roots and Georgia. She is fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, and West African Fanti. One of Maya Angelou’s books, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an account of her youth, describes the trauma of being raped as a child, the violent death of her attacker, and her subsequent refusal to speak for five years. It has been the target of many censorship attacks. In one case, Round Rock, Texas parents thought that the book was “pornographic” and “just plain filth.” The book was also filmed as a two hour special for CBS. Currently, Ms. Angelou lectures throughout the United States and abroad and recently has been named a Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Taken from: http://www.shadowpoetry.com/resources/famous/angelou/maya.html

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About My Mother

By: Adam Zagajewski  (translated by Clare Cavanagh)

I could never say anything about my mother:
how she repeated, you’ll regret it someday,
when I’m not around anymore, and how I didn’t believe
in either “I’m not” or “anymore,”
how I liked to watch as she read bestsellers,
always turning to the last chapter first,
how in the kitchen, convinced it’s not
her proper place, she made Sunday coffee,
or, even worse, filet of cod,
how she studied the mirror while expecting guests,
making the face that best kept her
from seeing herself as she was (I take
after her here and in a few other weaknesses),
how she went on at length about things
that weren’t her strong suit and how I stupidly
teased her, for example, when she
compared herself to Beethoven going deaf,
and I said, cruelly, but you know he
had talent, and how she forgave everything
and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston
to her funeral and couldn’t say anything
and still can’t.

_____________________________________

Schizophrenia

Voices whisper in your ear;
Sweetest nothings, greatest fears.

All your life your friend is there,
Waiting with a tale to share.

Threats are blown into the air,
Ever present, meant to scare.

Someone tails your every move;
A hidden fiend, free to rove.

Disembodied voices say:
Never dare to disobey.

Your friend arrives with a grin,
A plan in mind, a great sin.

Trembling grips your paling hand.
Someone whispers their command.

Terrified, you call to me,
Hoping I can set you free.

But as you point out your friend,
Wishing that this all would end,

My answer renews your fear:
I see no one standing there.

By: ChambersWithin

Originally posted on: Deviantart

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Dec 06, 2011:

I am not my illness.

Keira, 16

I’ve had depression for three years, and I used to hate the way my illness had changed me. I thought I could never be the girl I used to be. But my psychologist helped me to see that my illness can never change the inner me. In the end, I will have changed – I will be stronger for this battle – but my central values and the things that make me ‘me’ will always remain the same.

I am not my illness.

Mark, 23

I have schizophrenia. People call me crazy, and avoid me, because I hear voices and talk to them. Maybe I am crazy sometimes, when I have an episode. But I’m not always crazy. I may be schizophrenic, but schizophrenic is not all I am.

I am not my illness.

Jessie, 13

The girls at school all tease me because I always stutter when I talk, and sometimes I try to speak but my mouth can’t form the words. They call me retarded, dumb. I’ve never really had any real friends, all because I have autism. They can’t look past my illness and see the real me, the ‘me’ who longs to be accepted like any normal person. I may be autistic, but I’m still human. I still have feelings.

I am not my illness.

Chrissie, 30

I have bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression. Many people consider me ‘unemployable’, because of my illness. They say I’m ‘unstable and unpredictable’. But just because I have bipolar, doesn’t mean I’m unstable. I take medication to stabilise my moods, and though I have to take care not to stress out too much, my condition doesn’t prevent me from working, and working well. I can actually be very efficient and organised with what I do. But people don’t see it, because they never give me the chance. Bipolar disorder may be part of my life, but it doesn’t define who I am or what I’m capable of doing.

I am not my illness.

Patrick, 15

The guys at school call me a wuss, because I freak out so much before exams I throw up and faint. They reckon I’m chicken. I can’t tell them I have an anxiety disorder. They reckon mental illnesses are for weaklings. They don’t understand. Anyone can be affected. Anxiety has been part of my life for a long time, and mostly I still manage to live normally. Why can’t they see that?

I am not my illness.

Annie, 16

I had a nervous breakdown two years ago, and it led to me slowly sliding into mental illness. I missed almost a whole year of school last year. Now I’m back, and even though I know I’m not meant to take things too fast, it bugs me that people treat me like I’m going to go crazy at a moment’s notice. I know I’m fragile, but why do they have to always make such a big deal of it? I’m still the same person I always was.

I am not my illness.

Samantha, 17

I have suffered from anorexia for my whole high school life. At first I got so many compliments on how skinny I was, which only pushed me further. Then people started to notice that I wasn’t just pretty skinny any more, I was skeletal. They call me crazy, that I can’t see myself for what I actually am. They say I’m delusional. I’m not delusional. I’m sick. I know what I’m doing is wrong, but I can’t stop it. It’s the illness. It’s not me.

I am not my illness.

Lily, 14

Ever since the girls at school noticed I had scars on my wrist, I have been the subject of merciless taunting. My friends have turned their backs to me; they say I’m crazy. They look at me with disgust. I’m not crazy though. Or at least, I’m not crazy all the time. I’m sick. It is an illness, this addiction. It’s paralysing. I still cope though. I’m still me, whatever my illness. I’m still me.

I am not my illness.

I am not my illness. My illness is not me. I am above this. I am above my illness. I. Am. Not. My. Illness.

originally posted on: http://poetrice.deviantart.com/art/I-am-not-my-illness-196636916

 

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November 30, 2011:

The Three Emilys

These women crying in my head

Walk alone, uncomforted:

The emilys these three

Cry to be set free-

And others whom I will not name

Each different, each the same.

 

Yet they had liberty!

Their kingdom was the sky:

They batted clouds with easy hand,

Found a mountain for their stand:

From wandering lonely they could catch

The inner magic of a heath-

A lake their palette, any tree

Their bush could be.

 

And still they cry to me

As in reproach

I, born to hear their inner storm

Of separate man in woman’s form,

I yet possess another kingdom, barred

I move as mother in a frame,

My arteries

Flow the immemorial way

Towards the child, the man;

And only for brief span

 

Am I an Emily on mountain snows

And one of these.

 

And so the whole that I possess

Is still much less-

They move triumphant through my head:

I am the one

Uncomforted.

_____________________________________

Photograph

My father and I play checkers

In profile.

He sits on the couch, leans forward on his elbow, there’s

A low coffee table between us.

I am four, sit opposite on a hassock.

He concentrates on the board,

I am watching him, who

Is winning?

I no longer know

The rules or object of the game

Checkers on the board and off

An open cigarette package, box of matches

My father wears a loose white

Shirt, work pants, my hair

Is badly cut, these

Are the details. Beyond the barely furnished room I guess snow:

Banked against the front and back doors. Years later

We’ll live in another city.

In an old farmhouse

Rock at the green edge

Of a golf course. My father

Will pull a stove out of a wall

And hurl it across a kitchen

On my account

Boiling lobsters

Will fly like wet birds.

In this photograph my face

Tilts up toward his. I wait for him to make his move

And I would gladly wait forever,

Deaf to the screams, and scarlet tails

That will one day scatter.

– Patricia Young (1958)