Poems about Caregiving, Poems as "Therapy"

A couple of poems from my forthcoming book The Adorations has been published by Luna Luna:

My son asks me if I have ever been black.
Asks me if I have ever been homeless. Asks me if I have ever
seen god’s face. Was it surrounded by butterflies?
Was it ugly? Were the teeth made of gold or silver?
My son asks me If I have ever been to Los Angeles.
Asks me if it was made of silver. If it was built by angels.
Asks me if angels have teeth. Asks me if they whisper to me
at night. If they smash mirrors at night… [cont]

These are the two first poems I wrote for the book. At the time I wrote them, I didn’t know that of course. I hadn’t written any poems for a few years, going back to the translations of The New Quarantine and the poems in Summer. The main reason for this creativity drought was basically the reason for most such droughts - I haven’t had the time. I’ve been teaching of course, and serving as the director of our MFA program at Notre Dame, but the main reason is that I have spent a lot of time raising my son Othello. Othello has some severe special needs which makes raising him demanding.

But once I wrote these poems, I just caught fire and wrote the whole book in just a few months, over the same time my mom was dying from cancer.

The thing is that the poems are largely a response to raising Tello. The two poems published by Luna Luna began when I remembered a conversation I had had with Othello, when he asked me if I had ever been Black (he’s Black). Then I started remembering other curious things he’s said and that energy kind of blended with the dynamics of raising him and led to countless poems. (I actually wrote a second book too but I’m not going to worry about that.).

I have always dismissed ideas about poems as “therapy.” Have tended to think of it was poetry that doesn’t care about form, artifice. But I realize thinking about this book, these poems, that they were in a sense “therapy.” Not in the maybe cliche idea of a patient pouring out their hearts. But they were definitely ways of processing the affects were in/around me. I think that can be a kind of therapy.

Othello’s behavior is very volatile, and when I write I let myself sit in the humming aftermath of interacting with him. The poems becomes a ways of writing that humming, the vibrations of my body - but also to metabolize the humming. Not to “make sense of it” as people sometimes say, but to be in it.

And to be in it is also to recognize all the parts of our society that Othello’s life - going back to before he was born, to his adoption, to his current conditions - touches on. Which is like every issue in America. So when I process my time trying to help Othello, I am processing America.

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Ben N from Neon Pajamas recently posted another poem - written later - called “Haiku Against the Police” which is also one of the Adorations. Here’s how it begins:

My son and I are eating

watermelons and spitting out the seeds

as if to plant an army. The soldiers

contagious in the street

wish they were made of glass. I have learned

that laughter is contagious

from watching them break. I have learned

to butcher champagne from watching them

try to put out a fire in the bank building… [cont]

I think this maybe makes clear what I mean that by attending to a child, you are putting yourself in touch with so much of society’s issues.

I think both poems also get at a central dynamic of The Adorations: My “voice” here is a voice largely influenced not just by my interactions with Othello, but also his “voice” - literally the things he’s said but also these vibrations that his body creates in our lives. In Program Era pedagogy, we were always told to find "the voice that is great within”, but this is not that kind of voice. This is definitely a voice that comes from not within, but the body. The way it hums. I have tried to make art out of that vibration.