Whereas: sounds and motherhood

Steady Summer had a very distinct sound. The letter ‘s’ and the ‘shhhhh’ sounds play a huge role in this poem, as well as the focus on grass songs and the movement of grass, like an ocean, like waves. The grasses demand to be listened to, and other sounds are heard in them: the buzzes and knocks of grasshoppers and horseflies, the padding of dog paws across wood, the clicking of forks and scrubbing of plates, maybe chewing, all become part of the overall sound of the grass. Out of all the poems in this collection, this one stood out to me for creating a soundscape, that demands to be listened to. The blue flowers on the plate boarders meld into the blue sea of grass, which meld into the single-spaced lines on the page, and everything is sort of permeated thoroughly through the grass stems, which are ‘air italics. There was something very calming about reading this, something meditative about all the sounds coming together on the page and in the mind.

            Less calming was the poem Dilate and Left, which were heart wrenching to read.  Dilate II goes: “All is experienced / throu / g / h / the / body / Somebody told me.” And the spacing, I now believe, is meant to resemble the shape of a pregnant belly, which became clearer to me after reading Dilate III, about the trauma of giving birth. “though all experience / is through the body…” eliminates the body as a mediator between yourself and the world, and instead the body becomes the world, which I imagine is very clearly felt when giving birth. Why do we conceptualize the body as something through which we experience and not as the entirety of experience itself?

This past week, I’ve read several articles about what it’s like to give birth in this country, and how women experience pregnancy and birth and motherhood in a culture that often values the life of the baby over that of the mother. I started off reading about a new drug to treat post-partum depression, and about how the onset of PPD could be more affordably and successfully avoided by means of providing actually adequate care during pregnancy and in the months and years after birth, something which is not generally done in this country. Anyway, a little off topic, but I thought of this when reading Long Soldier’s writing because it touches on the violence and de-humanization many women experience when giving birth. “lean back honey you are bleeding more than expected” is a terrifying thing to hear after giving birth. Infant and maternal mortality rates are really high in the US, and they’re highest for women of color. Left depicts the pain of miscarriage, with “a limited clinic closed on Sundays”, and the psychological trauma that lingers from this. The dream baby abandoned in a train station, baby’s experienced as poems, needing mothers, being dead and being nightmares or ghosts. It hit hard.