Susan Landgraf's Workshop “What Your Body Has to Do with Writing”
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Handout for San Miguel Writing Conference 2017 – Susan Landgraf’s workshop “What Your Body Has to Do with Writing” “to my uterus” by Lucille Clifton you uterus you have been patient as a sock while i have slippered into you my dead and living children now they want to cut you out stocking i will not need where i am going where am i going old girl without you uterus my bloody print my estrogen kitchen my black bag of desire where i can go barefoot without you where can you go without me “Small hands, relinquish all” by Edna St. Vincent Millay nothing the fist can hold,-- not power, not love, not gold-- But suffers from the cold, and is about to fall. “There's a moon in my body...” by Kabir There's a moon in my body, but I can't see it! A moon and a sun. A drum never touched by hands, beating, and I can't hear it! page 1 Landgraf (new stanza) As long as a human being worries about when he will die, and what he has that is his, all of his works are zero. When affection for the I-creature and what it owns is dead, then the work of the Teacher is over. The purpose of labor is to learn; when you know it, the labor is over. The apple blossom exists to create fruit; when that comes, the petal falls. The musk is inside the deer, but the deer does not look for it: it wanders around looking for grass. “A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused or considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." the radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered, very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-- she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees. “You Fit Into Me” by Margaret Atwood You fit into me like a hook into an eye A fish hook An open eye page 2 Landgraf “A Third Body” by Robert Bly A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born in any other nation, or time, or place. They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking. Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know. The man sees the way his fingers move; he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him. They obey a third body that they share in common. They have made a promise to love that body. Age may come, parting may come, death will come. A man and a woman sit near each other; as they breathe they feed someone we do not know, someone we know of, whom we have never seen. “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt. page 3 Landgraf “Passion for Solitude” by Cesare Pavese; translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock I'm eating a little supper by the bright window. The room's already dark, the sky's starting to turn. Outside my door, the quiet roads lead, after a short walk, to open fields. I'm eating, watching the sky—who knows how many women are eating now. My body is calm: labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too. Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive, but not worth these cherries, which I'm eating alone. I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them. A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things. A small dose of silence suffices, and everything's still, in its true place, just like my body is still. All things become islands before my senses, which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence. All things in this darkness—I can know all of them, just as I know that blood flows in my veins. The plain is a great flowing of water through plants, a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone, lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins with each living thing that this plain provides. The night doesn't matter. The square patch of sky whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star struggles in emptiness, far from all foods, from all houses, alien. It isn't enough for itself, it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone, my body is calm, it feels it's in charge. page 4 Landgraf “I Sing the Body Electric” by Walt Whitman I I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? 2 The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect. The expression of the face balks account, But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards, The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and from the heave of the water, The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horse-man in his saddle, Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances, The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open page 5 Landgraf (stanza continued) dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting, The female soothing a child, the farmer's daughter in the garden or cow-yard, The young fellow hosing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd, The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown after work, The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes; The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps, The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert, The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv'd neck and the counting; Such-like I love- I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother's breast with the little child, Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count... On Thursday, August 18, 2005, staff members of Salon.com published a list of poems about their bodies. "What we all did is write honestly about our bodies: banged-up and stretched, flabby and swollen," the writers said.