Alison Croggon wrote:
>I guess the easist examples to reach for are my own (and I could be talking
>about something quite different from Annie). It's been a long time since
>I've done this kind of thing. But when I was writing about childbirth &c,
>while crashing head on into what a role and stereotype and misogyny really
>meant, I used and distorted a lot of devices I pinched from traditional
>religious poetry, including as I recall gestures towards George Herbert, in
>order to give humble and banal tasks like washing nappies or caring for
>babies the kind of attentiveness I felt they deserved. This was in a
>context where persons were saying I was written off as a poet because I had
>had babies and would now be swamped forever in the stink of domesticity...
>obviously, in certain minds, the reverse of the literary or the
>experientially significant, being anerotic and boring. I wished to record
>having babies as an aesthetic experience. Part of the sequence Domestic Art
>below - it dates from around 1995, when Josh was born -
>
>
No space to quote the poem, which is wonderful. Thoughts force
themselves upon me. We escaped the nappy issue by using disposables.
No, we were not environmentally friendly, we were damned lazy and
besides nobody gave us a diaper service as a birth gift. Caring for
babies...well, I am supposedly unique among men ("blessed art though
among men"?) for getting up with my wife when she was nursing the first
boy, or getting up on my own to feed the 2nd one when we decided to
bottle-feed (my wife was not an endorser of La Leche). I don't know,
however, whether men CAN (or should?) try to write about the domestic
experience the way women might. We can learn from women if we dare, but
I suspect the value system that prizes children is in us long before we
need to learn from our wives, partners, women poets, etc. I suspect the
fact the child came from within the woman changes everything about how
she, as opposed to the father, will relate to the kid. Nor do I think
that apparently self-evident statement is at all self-evident since most
men are a bit thick when it comes to matters like this.
For me having children and nurturing them as a father infused some of my
writing. Nobody ever said "How cute" about the poetry I wrote about my
kids when they were little. Nobody ever said much of anything, which is
okay too.
There was this, of walking into their rooms late one night and just
watching them. What surprises me is that as Alison mentioned using
religious references from Herbert et al., so here--having no conscious
memory of The Tradition--I worked both the Jewish and Christian forms in
there. And it's way old.
MY CHILDREN, ASLEEP
It is my ritual, as near to me as
repetition of the Silent Prayer or
elevation of the Host: for I form
my own religion from the vision of
their breath; whispered sounds of inhalation,
each an answered prayer I have not spoken,
only thought in my cells they have from me.
I catch my breath in witness of their breath
and breath of night on their still faces, seen
in half dark, and bless them for my vision.
December 24, 1990
Sometimes the kids require tending even when they get into the mid-20s....
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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