Blameless Mouth – the Stories We Tell

Poet Jessica Fox-Wilson knows a basic & important truth: we are made of stories.  These are the stories we inherit culturally, the stories of family, the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories told by our peers.  But this poet knows something even more important—we have the ability to re-tell & re-shape those stories, to configure them in line with our own experience & to find a truth in them that isn’t the “received” truth of their packaging.

This is the task Fox-Wilson tackles in her debut collection, Blameless Mouth; she sets herself the task of exploring stories about hunger, consumption, satiety & want both culturally & in her own experience.  These are fundamental issues, speaking both to our overall human condition & more specifically to our situation as members of a consumer society.  But the poet doesn’t stop there.  She also specifically examines how these issues affect her & women in general—at its core, Blameless Mouth is deeply feminist.

Ms Fox-Wilson includes retellings—“re-visions” in a sense—of several important cultural myths.  There are at least a half dozen poems that treat the creation myth & the Eden story, all from Eve’s perspective.  For instance in the poem “Eviction,” which gives a title to the first of the book’s five sections, Eve describes herself as the coolheaded one, while Adam becomes hysterical about their eviction from Eden.  We read:

Even then, as Adam cried
about the loss of home and work and God,
as angels watched us pack, I calculated

our rations, how long we’d remain sated,
how long the fruit would last.

This introduces a theme that is central to the book: the woman’s role as provider, & how that cultural role affects her consumption.  While Fox-Wilson sees the consumerist society as preying on women in terms of body image & self-esteem, she also sees a built-in self-denial faced by women that makes them refuse to satisfy their own wants.  She discusses this most eloquently in the poem “The Day I Learned the Definition of Lacuna.”  Fox-Wilson writes:

    I saw
all the women in my family
who came before me, trimming the fat
off their own meat, slipping the best parts
onto a child’s plate.

This poem & others with a similar thematic concern (especially “Better to Eat Us With,” which I’ve reproduced with Jessica Fox-Wilson’s permission as a companion post) can be read against “Womyn’s Center Topless Spaghetti Dinner,” “Maenads” & “Daughter to Mother.”  The first of these describes a wildly exuberant spaghetti dinner at a Women’s Center, & as such seems to locate a form of healthy consumption in the midst of poems of insatiable want.  “Maenads,” which immediately follows “Womyn’s Center” is a somewhat darker vision of women being free to explore their appetites.  Finally, “Daughter to Mother” is an interesting re-telling of the Persephone/Demeter myth—in this case, Persephone welcomes her Underworld incarnation because the act of consumption has also given her power.

They do not ask anything of me;
their mouths forever shut.  I sit
on my black throne, gorge
on the sight of all
the heavy, full bodies.  I absorb
every nutrient I need
from their forsaken lives.

As in the “Lacuna” poem, again we have a dialogue between mother & daughter.  This poem is preceded by a piece entitled “Things My Mother Did Not Teach Me,” which describes how the poet’s mother could deftly slice an apple.  Apples again—Eve & Snow White, who appears in the poems “Waiting for Snow White” & in the very strong piece, “Inside My Glass Coffin.”  This is again a mother-daughter dialogue in which Snow White’s entombment in the glass coffin is contrasted with the stepmother’s fixation with her mirror.  & at that rate, Snow White’s release by Prince Charming takes on a whole new meaning in Fox-Wilson’s vision:

    I was no more
a beautiful girl, captured in her prime.  I was
like her, a woman imprisoned against her will,
in her own fragile and perishable body.

Blameless Mouth is a strong & engaging collection of poetry, & not simply because of Jessica Fox-Wilson’s willingness to handle deep & compelling themes.  As illustrated by the quotes (& I could go on at length with examples), Fox-Wilson also is skilled in her handling of poetic language.  Here are two more quotes I can’t resist:

Wrap your body in thousand thread count cotton sheets
and you can be the woman, sleeping at home, wrapped
in thousand thread count cotton sheets.
                                    “Magazine Says: You’ve Worked Hard”

                      At the heart of a shipwreck
                                                is a child

staring into a hungry mouth        broken boards/splintered teeth

                                            shiver/sink
                          descend into black depths,
                           learn to breathe water.
                                              "At the Heart of a Shipwreck"
 
This is writing by a poet who has a clear conception of voice, image & rhetoric, who can convey both strong emotion & precise thought. 

I give Blameless Mouth an enthusiastic recommendation.  You can purchase the book on Lulu.com at this link; & don't forget to check out one of the poems from the book, "Better to Eat Us With," in the post immediately preceding this one.  You also can join me in following Jessica Fox-Wilson on her excellent blog, everything feeds process.

Who’s in the Audience?

Anyone’s who’s ever performed under stage lights knows: the audience is a group of mostly figures, their features indistinct, if visible at all.  & yet as performing artists, we thrive on this group of unseen people—why?  Energy: although we can’t see the audience except for a few faces in the front rows, we can feel them.  Audiences give something to the performer: energy, vitality, inspiration.  Almost without exception, an integral part of a good performance is a good audience.

How does this idea of audience energy pertain to writers?  After all, theater, music & dance are “performing arts”—writing poetry & fiction—the actual creative acts—this is almost always done in isolation—we don’t invite our friends to watch us while we type out words!

But for me, audience has always been a crucial part of the writing process.  However, for the longest time, I focused exclusively on those few faces I could see past the stage lights, not on the figures beyond them who were faceless shapes.  Yes, I’ve always written with an audience in mind, but an audience made up of a discrete number of people—a half dozen, perhaps a dozen at most.  & indeed, I received energy, vitality & inspiration from that audience.

How is this relevant to publishing in general & to the process of publishing The Spring Ghazals in particular?  The Spring Ghazals actually began with a series of poems addressed to an old friend—I say “friend,” because I don’t know a word to better define what has been a complex & perhaps unique relationship.  In any case, the poems that now appear in the book as the “Kitchen Poems” section began as a direct address to her, tho they were shared with a handful of other people as well—other distinct faces in the audience. 

This was before Robert Frost’s Banjo.  With one exception, a poem which this friend posted on her blog—a once popular site that’s no longer extant as she’s moved on to different things—the “Kitchen Poems” had a very small audience.

I’ve generally made myself comfortable with that—I was content circulating poems in a circle of other writers & creative people while taking an MFA—this included publishing in journals run by friends & acquaintances; I was content giving readings & publishing in a punk rock ‘zine while in San Francisco.  I used to say I had a very 16th century view of publishing—that I wrote poems for an intimate circle—those few recognizable faces in the first rows.

But at a certain point, I realized that if I were to keep writing now, in my middle-aged return to poetry, I needed a larger sense of audience.  First there was the Robert Frost Banjo blog—the prose poems in the “Cloudland” section of the book were written for the blog long before I even knew a book was in the offing.  Then the “Ghazals” themselves were written for the blog in the spring of 2009, & as the sequence grew, I began to see a “book” taking shape.

But all the time I was posting these poems on a blog with a growing readership, to be read & commented on by people I scarcely knew, I was also writing the poems for the same intimate circle as always; & I was writing them as much for my old friend as ever, tho at that point we were no longer in touch….

Here’s the fact of the matter: at a certain point I realized that it’s necessary to draw energy & inspiration from the audience as a whole, not just from those few faces you can see.  If what we’re giving in art is a mode of communication, & this seems true whether we’re using words or notes on a guitar or dance gestures or brush strokes, then at some point we have to decide whether we really want to circumscribe that communication.  If I’m onstage playing music & I decide to somehow restrict my communication to the few people I can actually see in the front row, then I won’t give a good performance—it’s all about “giving” & “receiving.”  But yes, I do focus on a few faces I recognize, but I let them take me to the rest of the audience—the indistinct figures in the further rows.

In the writing game, we call that publishing.

On Thursday: “What Have You Published?”


Photo of the Alice in Wonder Band during an ovation at the Alpine Playhouse by Tim Hohs