In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.
Michael Peter Ancher, Den syge pige (The Sick Girl), 1882, oil on canvas, 31 1/2″ x 33 1/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
When I first began research for my book about women with mysterious illnesses, I was overwhelmed. No two women were alike. The number of illnesses that qualified as mysterious was staggering. Lyme, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, candida, Epstein-Barr, Ehlers-Danlos, polycystic ovary syndrome, subclinical hypothyroid, dysautonomia, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, nonceliac gluten sensitivity, heavy metal toxicity, environmental illness, sick building syndrome—I had started out with the intention of exploring intestinal health as it relates to chronic fatigue and women’s health, but as soon as I turned on my headlamp, women with mysterious illnesses of all kinds came hurtling out of the jungle, like giant moths to a tiny flame.
And so one of the first things I ever did was come up with a clarifying top-ten list regarding the problems contributing to the mysterious marginalization of the mystery illnesses. This list was not exactly a clue in figuring things out, but rather a series of clues making it clearer and clearer that there really was a veil tightly drawn before anyone who was trying to figure things out.
More than a decade later, the list is still as useful as ever. Read More
In this series, writers present the books getting them through these strange times.
Recently, I’ve found myself drawn to stories about women locked up. I’ve been reading Anna Kavan’s short fiction, in which protagonists are pursued by invisible enemies—nameless perpetrators of “some vast and shadowy plot” against them—and shut in asylums “where days passed like shadows, like dreams.” I’ve finished Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in which two outcast sisters seek refuge from society’s taunts in a crumbling mansion. And I’ve returned to Katherine Mansfield’s restless diaries from the French sanitarium where she died of TB in 1923 (“Felt ill all day … rather like being a beetle shut in a book, so shackled that one can do nothing but lie down”). At a time when neither escapism nor consolation quite appeals, I think I’m enjoying these strange, claustrophobic books for their emotional intensity, their piercing portraits of dissolution, and their dark, absurdist humor in the face of despair.
In my quarantine household, we have a notepad by the bread bin on which we keep a list of the movies we plan to watch in our own indefinite confinement. Last week, we put on An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion’s 1990 adaptation of Janet Frame’s autobiography, which Hilary Mantel has described as “perhaps the most moving film ever made about a writer.” We meet Janet as a squat, determined child, with a frizzy mop of ginger hair. Over two and a half searing hours, we watch her flounder to find her place in a hostile world, from the unremitting tragedy of her childhood in the New Zealand coastal town Oamaru (a father who beat his children, a brother with severe epilepsy, two older sisters who drowned in separate incidents) to the grim unfolding of her twenties in psychiatric hospitals across the country. In 1945, age twenty-one, Frame was diagnosed as schizophrenic and incarcerated at Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, where misunderstood patients were routinely condemned to electroconvulsive therapy. Over the subsequent eight years, as she wrote in An Angel at My Table, she “received over two hundred applications of unmodified ECT, each the equivalent in degree of fear, to an execution.” In 1952, while she was awaiting a scheduled lobotomy, it came to the attention of the hospital superintendent that Frame’s book The Lagoon and Other Stories had recently won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. He canceled the operation and Frame was released. She left New Zealand and spent her life living and writing in exile: some of the film’s last scenes show a suntanned, laughing Frame in Ibiza, enjoying a carefree love affair and creative productivity. She died in 2004 as a celebrity, her funeral broadcast live to the nation, her body of work regularly mentioned alongside that of Mansfield, for whose family Frame’s mother had once served as a maid.
© Zacarias da Mata / Adobe Stock.
Years ago, right after I moved into my last apartment in Chicago, the one I expected to die alone in to the soundtrack of an NCIS marathon, I thought I had a ghost. Several nights a week, I would be awakened from a dead sleep by this—I don’t know how to describe it without sounding like a fucking moron, but I’ll try—vibrational energy? I’d be knocked out atop a pile of pizza boxes and magazines, then be jolted fully awake by a humming and swaying feeling in the air.
I am a dumb person who doesn’t understand building structure or architecture, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a fucking midrise apartment building should be doing. It was like my room was droning at me. Every morning while getting ready for work in those days, I would listen to this ridiculous show on Kiss FM hosted by a dude I’m pretty sure called himself Drex. You know what makes me wistful for a happier, simpler time? Thinking about when I could actually crack a fucking smile at prank mother-in-law calls on drive-time radio shows before living turned to hell and I had to be mad about everything all the goddamned time. You know what I listen to now? Pod Save America, on a phone I come perilously close to dropping in a toilet full of feces every single morning. Because we live in a fiery hellscape, and I don’t know what the three branches of government do exactly, I need three IPA bros to explain our crumbling democracy to me between ads for sheets and Bluetooth speakers while I wonder which of the six washcloths scattered around the shower is mine.
So early one morning Drex on Kiss FM tells this riveting story to the other hosts (you know how those shows are: pop hits interspersed with prank calls and ticket giveaways, and they feature a woman of color who is funnier than the host is, but who is forced to play sidekick, and featuring “my old pal Clown Car with the traffic and weather on the twos!”) about how he had a ghost in his place. And he knew it was a ghost because he’d come home after work and cabinets would be hanging open and shit would be rearranged, and no one else had a key to his apartment. I immediately glanced around my clothing-strewn apartment and wondered, Was that novelty Taco Bell bag filled with Corn Chex cereal on my nightstand when I left yesterday? Drex had consulted with a paranormal expert who told him that the best way to deal with a ghost is to firmly yet politely demand that they leave, because apparently ghosts have some strict moral code that they are required to adhere to. And so, the day before, when he’d gotten home from work to find yet another rearranging of his belongings, he yelled at the ghost to leave him alone, and lo and behold, IT DID. I was gobsmacked. Read More
In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.
by Kay Ryan
Issue no. 151 (Summer 1999)
Slip is one
law of crash
among dozens.There is also
shift—
moving a
granite lozenge
to the left
a little,
sending down
a cliff.Also toggles:
the idle flip
that trips
the rails
trains travel.No act
or refusal
to act, no
special grip
or triple lock
or brake stopscrash: crash
quickens
on resistance
like a legal system
out of Dickens.
Natalie Shapero is the author of the poetry collections Hard Child and No Object. She teaches at Tufts University.
My father: my savior, my best friend, my confidante. Funder from afar of gymnastics lessons, giver of “kissies” over the phone, called me Princess, called me Peter Pan, photos of infant me sleeping on his chest, love of mine, I love you, dad. I call him with my good news, I call him with my bad. Picture him this way first, eyes squinting to nothing when he smiles. See his Vietnam photo with his hand raised like a wave or maybe saying stop, baby-man in combat, up all night forevermore drinking it away. Understand our lineage: newspaper clip from the early 1900s, Clem Bieker given ten lashes on his bare back for “wife-beating” but the whipping post did him no good. Say it runs in the blood, say it’s a generational disease, and it is, it’s all of that, our curse. Understand my father’s boyhood, hiding under tables while his father beat his mother. See him old now, body stooped, still unable to sleep, half a mind at war, ready for the next bomb to explode. See him hold my son with awe, hands shaking, hear him ask about my daughter, whole voice alight. See him this way first because it’s how I see him, somehow, despite everything.
*
After my mother left me when I was nine, I was made to give a testimony in front of a judge about our life and answer questions. I answered every single one truthfully. I don’t remember what I said, only that I was honest. That’s what my father told me to be. I was not in trouble. I just had to be honest. “Tell them what she put you through,” he said on our drive there. He had appeared the day before as if my desire itself had conjured him, picked me up and bought me new clothes for the occasion. Clean socks pulled up to my knees, a pale-yellow cotton shirt. Nothing smelled like me anymore, or like my mother’s cigarettes. There he was, my father, with me, there for me, saving me. He had flown to me from his job an ocean away, and it was time for the truth about my mother’s alcoholism. It was time to remove me for real, court approved. He had to make a grand gesture now that she had actually left, his letters with survival instructions at the bottom no longer enough for me to get through the dysfunction: If things get too bad there, remember—9-1-1. Read More