from The Princess Diaries of Poetry & Poetics: Mk Chavez edition
“what kind of fuckery are we?” — Amy Winehouse
“true sexuality makes us sovereign” — Shannon Port
*
PALACE ATHENE
This piece is infused with love for all women. I must state that to begin and call in a protection for and a recognition of us all. For all beings, but particularly, here, because of my subjects, for all women and girls. Very especially for our girls.
In a time when we have celebrity feminists like Susan Sarandon stating that women don’t vote with our vaginas (in explanation of her choosing Sanders over Clinton [I myself will be writing in Elizabeth Warren, our first US Beloved Woman, as in Cherokee/Tsalagi tradition]), I prefer to echo Patricia Arquette’s Oscar speech of 2015 and remind us all that not only have women birthed all US taxpayers through our vaginas (plus our sweet little caesars), we have in fact ushered in the entire human population of the planet — what better organ with which to vote, one might ask? [I speak as one who took my children out of school rather than have them be taught that rocks are not alive and that the brain is the most important organ.]
In a time when we have celebrity feminists like Susan Sarandon stating that women don’t vote with our vaginas (in explanation of her choosing Sanders over Clinton [I myself will be writing in Elizabeth Warren, our first US Beloved Woman, as in Cherokee/Tsalagi tradition]), I prefer to echo Patricia Arquette’s Oscar speech of 2015 and remind us all that not only have women birthed all US taxpayers through our vaginas (plus our sweet little caesars), we have in fact ushered in the entire human population of the planet — what better organ with which to vote, one might ask? [I speak as one who took my children out of school rather than have them be taught that rocks are not alive and that the brain is the most important organ.]
*
Mk Chavez adorns, valorizes, articulates, elucidates, defends, and celebrates vaginas in her writing. It is a liberation and I felt the deep release of it listening to her read in San Francisco last fall and then publishing some of her poems
at #gorgonpoetics soon after. Those poems inform me as I approach this new work.
“an equality of desire that righted me” — Patrice Vecchione, in response to Rachelle Linda Escamilla, Aspasiology Study No. 1
“This insistence is neither gentle nor coercing, it is a pure heart.” — Ginger Ko, Ibid.
at #gorgonpoetics soon after. Those poems inform me as I approach this new work.
“an equality of desire that righted me” — Patrice Vecchione, in response to Rachelle Linda Escamilla, Aspasiology Study No. 1
“This insistence is neither gentle nor coercing, it is a pure heart.” — Ginger Ko, Ibid.
*
It is in the adornment of Chavez’s dictions that — to paraphrase Chimamanda Adichie’s magnificent speech “The Danger of a Single Story” — a sort of restoration, or reconciliation, might occur. Because I feel a kinship with so much of it, a joy in its complexity and capacity, its movements and mystery, its tripped-up tropes and heaving heralds (“You let me fall from the tower into the jaws of dogs. The dogs ate me, and I loved them.”) and because to have another woman write
“On the matter of size, I was instructed never to combine certain words, and I being beaked learned the lesson as swiftly as a swallow.
I began to cough feathers at dinner parties. My lover blamed my upbringing, the monthly disposition, and I worked hard as always, covered my mouth with hands shaped like wings, thought of fledglings, their tiny peeping hearts ripping “
alerts my happiest curiosities in language even as it enacts the horror (it is all one horror) of externalized, internalized, and “polite” oppression, because at this dinner I believe an oppression, already extant and crueled via other experiences/moments, is not amplified so much as reinscribed in the guise, even, of care. Ok, I want to say that in one or two more ways. Chavez here acknowledges rather than reinscribes the peculiarist intimacies of oppression and self-(soul)-banishment refracted in moments of lesser devastation. Linguistically Chavez’s rendering is an enactment which to me takes place, for example, in the lack of commas around the I’s “being beaked” — and even as the being beaked is simultaneously an oppression and a radical insistence on self-definition — and even as the display of intelligence, humor, pain and rigor resolves (as in, solves again, gives a feeling of solidarity, recognition) some of my most crucial wounds and boring (reiterative, echoic) experiences. This occurs gorgeously and simply via its — the display’s — transmutation of misogyny’s tedium and stridence. From — or through, as in a birthpath — the oddities and anachronies of language leaps a fully formed, an absolutely constant freedom. Here leaks a luminosity we have all been able to access, even if ever so barely and in unspeakable circumstances, throughout time — or we’d never have survived. And of course we have been able to access it, as it is the very sentience which embodies itself through each and every cell and organ. An adornment, a passageway, a liberty, a mystery, a grace.
Cumulatively, the “pinked thread” of connection is a feral, ferocious, hope, one which is also vernacular and cellular.
“On the matter of size, I was instructed never to combine certain words, and I being beaked learned the lesson as swiftly as a swallow.
I began to cough feathers at dinner parties. My lover blamed my upbringing, the monthly disposition, and I worked hard as always, covered my mouth with hands shaped like wings, thought of fledglings, their tiny peeping hearts ripping “
alerts my happiest curiosities in language even as it enacts the horror (it is all one horror) of externalized, internalized, and “polite” oppression, because at this dinner I believe an oppression, already extant and crueled via other experiences/moments, is not amplified so much as reinscribed in the guise, even, of care. Ok, I want to say that in one or two more ways. Chavez here acknowledges rather than reinscribes the peculiarist intimacies of oppression and self-(soul)-banishment refracted in moments of lesser devastation. Linguistically Chavez’s rendering is an enactment which to me takes place, for example, in the lack of commas around the I’s “being beaked” — and even as the being beaked is simultaneously an oppression and a radical insistence on self-definition — and even as the display of intelligence, humor, pain and rigor resolves (as in, solves again, gives a feeling of solidarity, recognition) some of my most crucial wounds and boring (reiterative, echoic) experiences. This occurs gorgeously and simply via its — the display’s — transmutation of misogyny’s tedium and stridence. From — or through, as in a birthpath — the oddities and anachronies of language leaps a fully formed, an absolutely constant freedom. Here leaks a luminosity we have all been able to access, even if ever so barely and in unspeakable circumstances, throughout time — or we’d never have survived. And of course we have been able to access it, as it is the very sentience which embodies itself through each and every cell and organ. An adornment, a passageway, a liberty, a mystery, a grace.
Cumulatively, the “pinked thread” of connection is a feral, ferocious, hope, one which is also vernacular and cellular.