Write No Cliches ... Pull No Punches ... And Keep Going All Night

unified field theory

i read a poem today
about the holocaust
of which i was not in attendance
and my ignorance
or lack of previous interest
had me swinging between hallucinations

i'm inside some emotion of words
that takes me from synapses to synopsis
and Stockholm syndrome means little
to someone who is heir to tragedy

Lady Lazarus was best at writing it
the half-breed inheritance
the internal battle that rages
between races and you hate yourself
because everyone tells you one of you is wrong

but in some burst of molecular idea
it was so right, and so perfect
because the skin and the blood
were monochromatic and everyone was blind
and fucking comes from the mind before
it ever surfaces on the skin

what spirit checks the DNA before invasion?

lifetimes ago those Nordic brutes
(not to be confused with other brutes of the time)
took the mitochondrial chain
from the highlands back to Iceland and made us vampires

my paternal grandma has a head like Otto Plath
all round and Germanic
she said that blond hair goes yellow when you get old
and she wished for it to be silver or white
her eyes went from sapphire to glaciers

my mother has Cherokee cheekbones
and a lazy emerald eye
her bronze hair was as straight and smooth as those warriors
but as autumn as any mixed American

i took the cheekbones and the glaciers
and the wild mane of my insane maternal chain
and i am as pale as royalty

i cannot speak to you of any holocaust
but i should be able to speak of the brutal kidnapping
of the Scottish women -- but there is barely history

i should be able to speak of smallpox blankets
and trading beads for the needs of the intruders
from across the pond

but i cannot

your preconceived prejudices fail to recognize
this universal consciousness has everyone thinking the same thing

i don't fear you like you fear me
i fear you differently

i fear that you don't know why you hate
and why you think the way you do

there is something in each of us that is master and slave
killer and victim weak and warrior

that tribal frequency that flows like heartbeat
is floating in the aura and transfers through touch
you've just got to reach out a bit farther

and Einstein on his deathbed still couldn't figure this shit out

At 1:05pm on September 5th, 2008, Lynn said…: Interesting, Wendy. When I was in Europe and had the opportunity to visit some of the camps like Buchenwald- I realized that I had no comprehension of the proportion, the horror, the scope of what happened. I knew, but I didn't "know".
Now Plath had a strange relationship with her German heritage and of course we know about the presence of her father in her writing. But I admit to being a bit confounded by the emergence of references in "Ariel" and their origins. I have read though that in her desire to emulate Virgina Woolf she adopted the "Jew" labels which were commonly known in relation to Woolf- "Jew husband", "Jewess" etc. We see this in Plath's term "Jew linen" and in other places.

I suppose people more scholarly than I can sift through that, and make the connections they want, if any.

At 4:22pm on September 5th, 2008, Wendy Grimsley said…: I was reading a poetry textbook once where they tried to analyze Sylvia’s relationship with her father in the poem “Daddy” and I thought, “you just don’t get it, do you?” It’s hard to try and say what someone else is trying to say when one thing could look one way superficially, but really be about something else. That’s kind of why I wrote this piece. I read a poem and missed all the references, and when my husband told me it was about the holocaust I was in shock at how obvious it was, and how I didn’t get it.

In Sylvia’s pieces when she talks about Jew linen and using body parts for lampshades, she’s getting deep into those stories. Only the authors and the people who lived those things know those tragedies. We as readers and whoever as scholars (aren’t we all really?) are liable to interpret however we see fit. It’s strange how we take things, but we do. Different perspectives . . . we are really just looking for a connection in all of this. Mutual empathy.

At 5:02pm on September 5th, 2008, Lynn said…: She's also pointing out how people viewed them- dehumanized. That's what I mean, I never saw her as anti-semitic and I was surprised when I read all of that because after reading her work, Hughes, the biographies, pretty much everything for years- I just did not see it that way. As her mocking the Holocaust. There are many layers to what she was doing, mythic layers, interplay of her inner world and her observations.

I think we also come to certain poems as different people later in life. Certainly as an older woman with experiences of wife, mother, etc. I find different layers now and recognize things in her struggle as a female in her era.

At 5:54pm on September 5th, 2008, Wendy Grimsley said…: of course. i don't know where you read that she was anti semetic . . . geez

At 8:07pm on September 6th, 2008, David P. Eckert said…: The poem "Daddy" never read to me as anti-semetic, nor anything else she wrote. When I read it in college, (actually in a course at Hampshire College in which it seemed about half of the poets we read had eventually committed suicide) I recall the lampshade references to the holocaust, but at the time I thought she was connecting her relationship with her father and her childhood to the holocaust.

As for "Unified Field Theory" it seems to start as commentary, which was interesting, but I liked it best when you applied the theory to your own perceptions/experience, your mother's cherokee cheekbones and your grandmother's glacier eyes, and the like.
For me the holocaust where I was not present and probably still feel at a great distance, is the Native American one, although I went to a college, Amherst, named after Lord Jeffrey Amherst. He was best known for providing the native tribes with blankets that had been previously used by people dying of smallpox. I suppose what made the Nazi holocaust the most remarkable was the speed and efficiency with which millions were exterminated, but certainly not the fact of choosing to exterminate a people. It's sadly too often been something we humans are capable of.

At 8:24pm on September 6th, 2008, Wendy Grimsley said…: i think this poem did exactly what i didn't want it to do.

At 8:53pm on September 6th, 2008, Lynn said…: Well I don't know what you mean by that, I was simply going from the connection to Plath and whether "Lady Lazarus" said it best. This is one reason why i am very hesitant to comment on what people post these days, apart from "great job" kinds of remarks. It seems best to keep it simple. I apologize.

I think people seize on what speaks to them, the questions stirred, etc. My point was certainly not to get into what scholars in different places and times thought of Plath's language or her anti-semitism.

At 8:53pm on September 6th, 2008, David P. Eckert said…: What did you not want it to do?

At 9:18pm on September 6th, 2008, Wendy Grimsley said…: lol . . . well, it was about how i missed the point entirely on someone's holocaust piece, but what is so crazy is that once i started writing this turned into a piece about the holocaust. i dunno . . . i am not offended at all, just intrigued, maybe. i like the conversation . . . keep it coming . . . sorry, it's been a while since i've been involved in conversation about writing

At 10:22pm on September 6th, 2008, David P. Eckert said…: I haven't talked about writing in many months. Then again I hadn't written in 4 months since I posted yesterday. What made the poem about the holocaust, strangely for me, were the lines about the Scottish women and the smallpox blankets, which were about other holocausts.

It's interesting, too, the effect of the holocaust - it has changed some discussions within Judaism, from the nationalist "never again" sentiment, to discussions of what it means that this happens in terms of "what is God" and how is god perceived in the world. In some ways I suspect that the fact of the holocaust may have changed literature, changed the discussion in some way.