pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BODY HOLLOWS (Sunday night) I pulled out some clay yesterday, but never got around to sculpting anything. Have been wanting to shape something with my hands, which is a very different creative process than painting or drawing. Less cerebral. There's something very satisfying about digging your fingers down into your clay, about getting them dirty. Something very sensuous about molding a human form out of earth. And shaping it with your hands really makes you think about the hollows and curves of the human body, makes you pay attention. Tactile. Or maybe this is just sexual frustration.... I won't experience this sensuous pleasure for a few more weeks though, since I'm off to the mountains soon and must keep my clay wet once I begin work on a sculpture. Today, I worked on a subjective compilation of poems that Bird believes are good instead. Over 200 pages of poems with at least one beautiful photograph on every spread. I thought I could proof the whole thing and complete the updates today, but including some of my own poems in the collection resulting in my rewriting a few poems during the proofreading stage. The changes are minor—two words in one poem, a new stanza in another, and several new lines and phrases in the third—but they're all improvements, so the poems are a little closer to perfection today than they were on Friday. (Alas, two of them are already published in their earlier form, but at least I know they're better now.) I've pondered one of the poems for a long while, but couldn't quite put my finger on what to do to make my meaning so clear that even an editor at Sinister Wisdom would comprehend my meaning. That's not a particularly nice thing to say, I know, but the editorial collective of that fine journal rejected this poem some time ago and returned it to me with a condescending lecture along the lines of, —"um, you probably don't know this, living in the South as you do, but the word 'nigger' is considered offensive in most civilized circles and MLK and other activists struggled and died in your region to make you backwards people aware of just how offensive and backwards you all are and you should be ashamed of yourself for using that horrible word you bad poet." Well. I guess it was clearly time that they raised my consciousness about racism, since, excuse me, I have been living in a backwoods holler with all my barefoot and pregnant kissing cousins, just a drinkin' and a tokin' and a lynchin' my neighbors these last forty-odd years. Let me back up here and say that a member of my writing group actually FOUNDED Sinister Wisdom (the first lesbian journal in the US) many moons ago and is the one who suggested that I send this poem there. The journal is run by a collective these days though, and I suppose that nice collective saw my southern address, saw that word, and just didn't bother to determine what the poem actually says. That's the only explanation I have for the condescension, since over twenty readers commented on earlier drafts and not a single one of them had difficulty grasping that the poem actually comments on the damaging pervasiveness of racism down south. The poem was published elsewhere a good decade ago, but I still ponder how to make the message so clear that even a reactionary firebrand can fathom its meaning. 2:10 p.m. - 2005-03-07 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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