Susan Landgraf's Workshop “What Your Body Has to Do with Writing”

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!

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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

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“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.

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“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. And further, they challenged others to do the same, to send in poems about their own bodies.

So we here at Poets.org decided to take up the cause and add to the conversation, beginning, as one must, with Walt Whitman, whose nine-part poem "I Sing the Body Electric" celebrates and glorifies the body in all its manifestations, whether stretched, flabby, or swollen. The poem ends

page 6 Landgraf with a litany of body parts, ultimately concluding that "these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul." For Whitman, celebrating the body became a celebration of the democratic spirit of his new America:

The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred, No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers' gang? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you, Each has his or her place in the procession.

Poems about the body are often poems of celebration and awe, poems that delight in the body's mysteries, its "dream of flesh" says Mark Strand, poems that wonder at the body's remarkable capabilities—the hands, bones, face, eyes, brain, arms, genitals, and, of course, the heart, that "ragtime jubilee," as Yusef Komunyakaa calls it. Whitman's praise of the body—his insistence that the body was a sacred element of the soul—was echoed one-hundred years later in Allen Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl":

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!

Poems about the body are also poems about history, as poets consider the long geneology, the whole genetic enterprise, the body being "this coat [that] has been handed down, an heirloom, / this coat of black hair and ample flesh," as Marge Piercy wrote in "My Mother's Body." In "Anodyne," Yusef Komunyakaa declares that he loves his body "clear down to the soft / quick motor of each breath," and decides his body is a steady reminder of history and geography:

This skin, this sac of dung & joy, this spleen floating like a compass needle inside nighttime, always divining West Africa's dusty horizon.

Similarly, in Lucille Clifton's well-known poem "Homage to my Hips," the poet's body become a metaphor for struggle and independence: they don't fit into little pretty places. these hips are free hips.

page 7 Landgraf (stanza continued) they don't like to be held back. these hips have never been enslaved, they go where they want to go they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. ...

If you're interested in reading more poems about the body, consider the following:

"I've Grown Very Hairy" by Yehuda Amichai "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou "Poem to my Uterus" by Lucille Clifton "Poem in Praise of Menstruation" by Lucille Clifton "Homage to my Hips" by Lucille Clifton "Hair" by Gregory Corso "Atlantis" by Mark Doty "After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen For The Third Time Before Bed" by Rita Dove "Footnote to Howl" by Allen Ginsberg "Cancer Winter" by Marilyn Hacker "A Story About the Body" by Robert Hass "A Hand" by Jane Hirshfield "Anodyne" by Yusef Komunyakaa "My Mammogram" by J. D. McClatchy "Small Hands, Relinquish All" by Edna St. Vincent Millay "My Mother's Body" by Marge Piercy "The Applicant" by Sylvia Plath "Face Lift" by Sylvia Plath "Heavy Women" by Sylvia Plath "The Surgeon at 2 a.m." by Sylvia Plath "Epidermal Macabre" by Theodore Roethke "Old Man Leaves Party" by Mark Strand "Sketch for a Landscape" by May Swenson "Question" by May Swenson "I Sing the Body Electric" by Walt Whitman "Dance Russe" by William Carlos Williams

Additionally, a great resource for finding art, film, and literature about the body can be found at New York University's Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.

Have comments about this essay? Go to the Poets.org Discussion Forum.

page 8 Landgraf Write Something on My Wall: Body, Identity and Poetry by Kazim Ali

When Kara Thrace first appeared on the screen and it became clear to the audience of the new Battlestar Galactica that Starbuck was a woman, one first looked at the new version and thought this character is still “coded” as a “male” character—the same old wise-cracking, cigar-smoking, hard drinking sexual predator he/she/ze always was. Like the Cylon enemies, the body of Starbuck in the past—in this case Dirk Benedict’s body—had been downloaded into a theoretically identical body; in this case, her gender, though nothing else, was switched. One’s second thought was to look back at the original Starbuck character and ask was the sexual tension between Apollo and Starbuck always there? If you look at those old episodes, you will agree that it was. The past writes the present, for sure, but the present always returns the favor.

A body, duplicatable and so actually bodiless is thus like the signature Dickinson sealed away, written on a separate card and included with her first otherwise unsigned letter to Thomas Higginson. There are a dozen different versions of the body unfolding around the self, written and overwritten. Dickinson herself was of course over-written—deleted and edited into limbo. She has, in a fashion, been restored, though Susan Howe’s complaint that the relineation of Dickinson continues has been largely ignored—except in the Paris Press edition of Dickinson’s letters to her sister-in-law Susan—and of course the bowdlerized Dickinsons of Bianchi, Todd/Higginson, and Bingham are all in the public realm and continue to be widely republished; at least one edition of those by a well respected publisher carries a foreword by a former U.S. Poet Laureate.

Of all the crew on the Pequod it is Starbuck who most wishes to disobey his captain. Both like and unlike his galactic counterpart, Melville’s Starbuck has a strong streak of rebellion but is fundamentally part of the larger social order and continues to support it. Standing before the sleeping Ahab with a gun in his hand, for all his Christian values, he is unable to make the brutal decision that needs making—by murdering Ahab he will save both the ship and all her crew. Does the population of the ship—hence the world—die by Ahab’s madness or by Starbuck’s inability to act? The future Starbuck, in space and newly female, does not choose a different fate; still driven by her gut passions rather than intellect, she becomes a new Ahab complete with her own salvation complex, visions and Starbuck-figure/enabler...

John Brown’s Body

John Brown’s body lies a-mold’ring in the grave John Brown’s body lies a-mold’ring in the grave John Brown’s body lies a-mold’ring in the grave His soul goes marching on...

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