chris at 2:36 AM |

Friday, September 05, 2003

 

Dept of 1991 "IMAG i
nation littered ..."

Here's an awkward blog of autobiog info (not my favorite mode since the "I" category as a meaningful and/or authoritative source is so culturally and often also personally fraught) attached to a poem of mine published in LOGOS, the University of Rochester's literary magazine, in Spring 1991,** when my children and I had been there for 3 semesters (I mention it as an "us," all of us, because it was that kind of life project). A great photo of my son, aged 18 months, boxing with an inflate-able Mickey-Mouse knock-over figure, is also in that issue, gracing the masthead page (p. 2).

I had returned to school in 1986 when the children were small (very small: I had the youngest in the middle of one semester--fall '86--and still managed to write the papers, keep up the grades; now I do not know how I did it & would not recommend it except to say that it can be done if one has to go that route to 'getting a life' as it were: I was single parenting 3: it was an extreme situation, a little outside the box even for that already economically and socially estranging role. I would not have elected that course unless necessary.).

We lived on welfare in subsidized housing in Cottonwood, AZ; I worked part time at the community college I attended, in the adiovisual and radio department setting up equipment and monitoring automatic broadcasts & televised courses. Of course I couldn't make enough to pay for much child care. Most of the single parent women I lived around worked as cashiers in Safeway or the new Walmart. If I weren't in school, that's where I would have been: that's what was there, and still is.

But materially for the literary minded one percent of that population, things seemed to be looking up: we were able to move from Sedona/Cottonwood, AZ to Roch NY primarily because I had been offered academic scholarships to Univ.of Roch. (also my family lived in Roch). There, I was completing courses for the major in English, minor in creative writing, and worked on the editorial committee for the lit mag (LOGOS) (that was volunteer work; my paying job was as a reception, phone, filing, and data entry clerk in the Financial Aid Office. Child care costs took more than I made, student loans allowed us a life).

As a writer I was playing at the time with every notion of the fragmented, fractured, and the moving--in all senses of that term: moving as movement, as action; moving as emotionally suasive; moving as that pragmatic sphere of experience where one uproots self and belongings to settle elsewhere, an experience that is difficult enough on ones own but is extreme when alone with three children. Of course we got through that situation of moving (and went on to move across country several times by sheer denial of direness on my part and plenty of good luck), in part because we are privileged as compared to many others in the world who undergo similar things and much worse.

One very gendered item seemed in abundance at the time of our move from AZ to NY, and then stuck around in real life play, and then prominently in the imaginative lives of my children, 2 girls, 1 boy: so many Barbies and their horrifying (to me) legacy! Even twelve years ago this surreal figure had been over-troped and criticized to no effect and for too long, I now think. As a parent I was appalled: on principle I wouln't buy these doll-toys for the children. But all their relatives did, and glorified this figure to the point of pukedom, I thought, never sure then or afterwards what to think of to counteract the effect or never sure what to do with such unwanted gifts that resonate around formations of individual identity, interactions with community, and social formations generally. Let alone that the consumerist implications were so ominous. Barbie was so stupid. But so successful. It boggled me. All her success seemed to feed another phenomenon at the time: this was right around the time of the big push for GI Joe dolls for boys: and then, guess what?--a war (the first Oil-Gulf War) was drummed up and manufactured in real life to fit this other horrifying figure of social imagination and expectation.

This was all way too much for a poem, but somehow a poem dealing with some of this seemed necessary. But this was when I wrote everything out carefully by hand several times: each poem had lots of work poured into it, each was a condensation of sorts. Versus now, where a poem lands on a screen basically as is and has little to do with condensation, at least not from any outward impetus or constructedness. If it is there now it is because some vital workings that go into making a poem have become so internalized--and I suspect have also undergone no little "mystification" in the strong sense meant by John Berger in Ways of Seeing--that they cannot be easily noticed in the self's watchdog missions. Maybe that's not a bad thing sometimes, I don't know (or care much about that at this point).

In addition to fragments, fractures, moving, and Barbie-bits, I had also been meditating on "imagination" at the time (as lately, too, since postings around blogs reminded me last week, which in turn reminded me of this old poem of mine).




Imag


i nation littered the
children's closet is
Barbie head leg
arm the torsos
lacking these dis or
orient so direct
unloose perfections.
Might we ask Marilyn?

Rout
inely Barbie
the children deconstruct
and dialogue to
assemble re
her by their
same accident
how forgotten
they how took her
a part
bringin her on
like a truce
their solemn
face piece
where peace
by piece she
is born
on their stretch
her of tissue
just paper old
courtly pages
bear Barbie like
tiding mystique
until translated.

She
always falls
through their
tissues. Her fails
weight the my
kitchen floor:
arm legs bouffant
eye hair thuds
aqua up at me
from all tiles
mosaic veiled
fresco stained glass
clut clut her
strut t t t t
I never know what
to make o f her.

Walk Walk Walk
at the uni
verse
city. Greek
four stat
yous at add
missions door.
One less head.
Talk.

While the children hurried
right and
left looking
for the lost head.
Navigation??????
Call Call
Security.

And mothers fast
buy murmurs
enroll children
beautiful rooms
murmur
they mean statues.

So lately the children
have set
up Barbie in the scale
down exact replica
John Deere Loader.
Pieces gaze inanimate
her images at
o f sell
ves she sees
on her very own Barbie TV
until the children play
hers, attend, enliven,
their own
voices.

chris murray (1990-1991), Rochester, NY


It always feels weird to read an old poem of ones own, at least for me. It feels like the wool barely combed but nonetheless made into heavy socks worn because it is just cold out there, ya kno? If I could change anything here now? It's scratchy on the tender skin. So I guess I would argue a little with this poet and what she meant at the poem's end by "their own/ voices." To say the least, that heavily individualized and self appropriated notion of voice as expressive, or as anything at all, has undergone a lot of "fragmentation, fracture, and moving" (this piece is already so self-referential that I guess it won't matter if I quote myself one more time while making a conventional gesture toward closure, no?) since this poem was written.


*Note:
I spent some time last night trying to search out the literary whereabouts of some of the other folks I have since lost touch with who also served on LOGOS that year, especially Felice Banker, David Iverson, and James Whittaker. If anyone happens to know them or how I might contact them, please let me know: cmurray@uta.edu. Thanks.