Month 3 of embarrassment studies
& my chapbook of poems is out!!
Dear friends,
I’ve been dreaming in poetry parties!! My book launch is this week!! Get ready bc there will be cake and go-go dancers!!
I just got back from a week in California doing the big writers’ conference, my first readings for Phantasmagossip, and spending time with my dearest Madison and Eleanor!! To gush a little, some highlights include: the day trip along the coast from SF, stopping at the schoolhouse from The Birds to take pictures, coffee and lemon mango scones at Madison’s favorite bakery in the rolling CA farmlands, listening to Katie Gavin at golden hour with the cliffs in view, oysters and beers at at Bodega Bay, the amount of lemon trees in CA (at Madison’s parents house in Sacramento, at a Tin House backyard reading in LA, perhaps my favorite of the trip) the amount of calla lilies I saw (and being an East Coaster not totally realizing calla lilies were real and grew in the ground but somehow only existed in Chloe Sevigny’s wedding bouquet—see below) going to three gay bars (leather bar prose reading, the Abbey in WeHo which supposedly is what Chappell wrote Pink Pony Club about, and an extremely delicious, chic queer bar in Oakland called Friends & Family, at which Eleanor kept talking about ordering the eggs and I was suspicious, but then we were all talking about the eggs for the rest of the trip. Unclear what they did to those eggs to make them so dreamy, tangy) bookending the LA trip with visits to the ocean (misty morning biking along Venice Beach, last morning breakfast and feeling the wind on our faces at Manhattan Beach) getting to attend writing panels about speculative memoir, the uncanny, queer characters in horror, signing books at the YesYes table and seeing old and new friends, my reading in Sacramento and the incredibly kind and generous audience of poets there along with wonderful co-reader Chio Saetern who was AMAZING, seeing Michaela with a bouquet for me and hugging so tightly I got a muscle spasm, ramen with Devin and putting my head on their shoulder at my YesYes reading, Madison’s moms bean dips and supply of grapefruit soda, walking along the American river with Madison and talking about the things that have been weighing on our hearts, the park in Berkeley with kites and blue herons, driving the rental with the top down with Josie and Piero up to the Griffith observatory, over to Koreatown to get barbecue, sitting at terraced bars in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, ten hours in the observation train car between SF and LA napping and reading Karen Russell, looking at Alex so many times and feeling so happy for our life!!!!!! Anyways, it was nice!!!!!
I’ve come back from the trip feeling such renewed motivation about poetry. I want to feel as alive as I did at the very best readings on this trip, gutted by the grief and love and feeling in the work, surrounded by people who laughed and cried along. At times I’ve had low self-esteem in writing communities where I don’t feel like I belong, don’t deserve to be there (I’m sure this is not a singular experience) but this trip reminded me I have people, that I’m excited to keep meeting new poets I admire. I’ve made a list of tangible goals, most pressingly: journals I want to submit to, dream presses I want to be published by, and residencies or workshops that feel important to me to make time for, balanced with a full-time job. I have beginnings of poetry manuscripts and my novel Lawn Madonna which I’ve been making real progress on this month, and now some deadlines to keep me accountable. July for fiction, generally the fall for poetry.
Michelle Zauner’s new album came out (and “Picture Window” is my favorite though I keep coming back to “Honey Water” “Here is Someone” “Leda” and “Magic Mountain” and I think her lyricism on this album is so inspiring to me) and she talked about performing and process in Vulture in a way that felt like such an honest and helpful model for me. She talks about struggling with an impossible work ethic, the possibility of having kids, how her writing is perceived, the cost of touring, self consciousness around bandmates. It sounds like this album cycle is her working to do this more sustainably. She had friend (a Philly artist Jarmel) do the set design for a special show at a museum recently. I’m excited in my organizer brain about how much love and specificity went into a show like that. I’m thinking about how to organize my life so it can hold my excitement in all my genres: poetry, and fiction, and music. I’ve known this summer needs to be focused on writing, rather than reading and performing. Late May-August is looking pretty open right now, which I’m thrilled about. I’m ready to work. I think I’m going to try to set aside two hours every day for writing of any genre. Generally I’ve done an hour every other day. Also, I’m going to organize my poetry differently, and submit regularly, writing into a monthly packet with a table of contents, craft notes, and list of lingering poems to edit from previous months on the first page, as well as printing and hanging some poems up on the wall so I have to live with them, as someone said on a poetry revision panel at AWP. It was so rewarding to get to the conference and meet editors who remembered my work!! It didn’t feel like the anti-climactic, faceless isolation I often am so suspicious of in writing, which made me more excited to send my work out again. Some lines I wrote down in my journal this week:
“You don’t love people. You love what they do to you.” - Claire Vaye Watkins
“in any erotic system which defines the good,/ you carry a brick towards where it needs to go” - Bianca Rae Messinger
“one body burying its cruel substitute” - Jimin Seo
“The terror we work hard to avoid is a very American feeling.” - Rhoni Blankenhorn
I spent three hours this morning transcribing drafts from my past two notebooks for songs, poems, fiction pieces, and here were a few notes and quotes from panels I attended at AWP:
Roland Barthes: literature is the question minus the answer
What is the role of violence in the world and can we use it for good? - Carribean Fragoza
The bigger the conceit, the shorter the piece - Rita Bullwinkel
What do we do with our love and desire in times of existential crisis? - Emily Doyle
the ideal is a tool of suppression - I think also Emily Doyle?
Honor your mess. Get stuck, instead of asking how can I make this legible. - Vanessa Angelica Villareal
speculate the silence and imagine otherwise - Christina Sharpe
Listening as revision
I came home to Philly and found my contributor copy of Passages North, a piece that got accepted over a year ago, that I’d been debating pulling, but too late now I guess! The issue is lemon yellow which felt like a good thing after my annual-spring-and-immediate-past obsession with lemons. I think this leads well into my monthly embarrassment study. Why have I been wanting to withdraw a piece I was once so proud of, that meant a lot to me? I worried I sounded petulant, or angry in the wrong ways, in how I talked about gender. That I wasn’t elegant, and was instead being messy on the page working out my thoughts. It feels scary to put something into the world that isn’t EXACTLY what I would say in this moment. But reading it back for the first time in a few months, I turned to Alex and said oh this is good!! Also, I had referenced Gabby Windey and forgot!! A delicious surprise. I was proud of what I was working through, and how I was trying to come up with visual language for it—talking about gender through volume and speed in notated music. The piece is called -issimos, and lands on me talking about living easiest in the extremes of gender. Interesting then that I was so worried about coming across as composed, steady.
I’ve talked before about an unkind professor who steered me in the wrong writing direction (being so discouraged by her words I didn’t write for a year) and she told me I would be obsessed with this writer I genuinely did not like, Helene Cixous. There’s a part of Cixous’s book The Third Body where the speaker talks about leaving books open in her room, and gathering the essence of the books just by their being open. I remember sitting back and thinking, this is the kind of bullshit that makes people hate artists lol. It is just so out of touch with reality. But then I was like, do I need to lean even harder into my innate sensibilities, my queerness, and stop censoring myself so much?
From Safia Elhillo’s recent newsletter:
I think poetry is about radical presence, a radical act of paying attention, and I think discomfort keeps us in the present moment. In his essay on syntax, Muscularity and Eros, Carl Phillips points out that “the risk of too much regularity is monotony.” So there is something exciting when a poem creates a landscape so unfamiliar, so removed from the regular. It makes for a more involved reader, one who can’t just rush through fluently and just “get it” on the first try. In the same essay, Phillips goes on to say that “syntax is precisely what allows information to be withheld and unexpectedly delivered…in this ability to create hierarchies of information, syntax is concerned with power, which is to say at some level syntax is […] by definition political.” It is political, too, for these poets with backgrounds in historically vulnerable communities, historically surveilled and overpoliced communities, to seize power in this way, to guard their information and make it accessible only to those who take the time to learn the form, to sit in the sensation first before going off in pursuit of sense.
A hypothetical embarrassment I am struggling with is an upcoming show. I am playing with Hot Spit, Brennan Wedl, (who I admire so much, their song “Fake Cowboy” was in my top 10 songs last year and they recently opened for Lucinda Williams and Waxahatchee) and Soft No at Minimart 4/13. My bandmates will be out of town and I am either playing solo or band-leading a new person in a short amount of time. I feel nervous about my ability to carry things on my own! It’s been a long time since I had to do that, and even though I’ve learned so much, I feel really daunted. I feel like I’m going to show up and embarrass myself.
In learning Daniel’s songs for his Providence show (which was truly an incredible trip and turns out I had so much fun playing) I realized I love being a student on my own time, but I get way too nervous to be unprepared in front of other people. When I’m alone, practicing the songs, I can have the patience with myself. Alex said he’s watching me become a different kind of learner—I used to put so much money into classes for everything. But now I’m risking trying new things on my own!!
Embarrassment questions from my dear friend Rachel, dutifully sending embarrassment related content my way!!! (And you can do this too!!)
1) what are the sorts of things that embarrass you
2) is there anything that you’ve been embarrassed / not embarrassed by that has surprised you
3) is your embarrassment usually pretty easy to expect or does it usually come on suddenly or unexpectedly?
4) how do u distinguish between embarrassment and shame?
5) do u need an audience or a witness to feel embarrassed? or do u find u get embarrassed even by yourself?
In reflecting on these myself, I found I primarily felt embarrassed by not being prepared, and this creates a spectrum of responses in my body: blushing and sweet flirty nervousness, chest-tightness and panic, hot-faced and being close to crying. Embarrassment slips into shame when the stakes are higher. (And sometimes it is possible for me to reframe how high the stakes are!) I was working on a poem on the flight home that talked about a gesture of kindness towards a new friend, how much it embarrassed me to show that I cared. I think sometimes embarrassment comes when you are working outside of expectation—doing something more than what is expected of you even in a positive way, just as much as being unable to rise to the occasion.
In transcribing from my last two journals, I was proud that I’m writing about my struggles in my poems in precise language, and just being honest with myself without judgment. The trip to California had me constantly thinking about how much I love the life I have landed in. My last morning in Berkeley, I ran far enough to touch the calla lilies with my own hands!
See you out there -
Sara Mae