Wendy Brown-Baez's Blog: Wendy's Muse

At what point does a love of reading become the desire to write? In Writing as a Way of Healing: how telling our stories transforms our lives, Louise A. DeSalvo writes that many of us become writers due to something that happened in childhood: trauma, shocks such as loss, death, incest, violence, racism, homophobia, or just feeling misunderstood, outcast, other. At what point did this happen to me, that I began to pencil the first mystery novel in third grade? Was it because I had had congenital hip dislocation and spent a year in a cast and a year in braces? Did I feel abandoned by losing my mother’s attention when my brother was born? Was it the tension between my parents who were too young, too broke, and opposite in temperament? Was it when my mother left me in the care of my grandmother for several days? And yet: my grandmother was my first case of true love. I always wanted to be with her and went for sleep-overs every week-end until she retired and moved to Florida. And my brother, I bossed him around until he got big enough to fight back. I have the photos of our tea parties to prove it. And as for the casts and braces, my father built me a rolling platform so I could scoot around the house and yard. When I turned 7, I started dance lessons and cartwheeled my way to notoriety on the playgound.

It could be something born in our blood as well as a disposition to heal through rectifying, through explanation, through making sense of things, and raising our voices to be heard. Perhaps the stories my mother read to me before I went to sleep were the advent of the Muse. Perhaps I had a vivid imagination and making up stories was only one of the many ways I explored self expression. I also drew and painted, danced and sang, made up plays, and loved dressing up in costumes.

At what point does the gift of words become a necessity, a vocation, a way to interface with the world? Are most poets introverts, are writers naturally reclusive? And so more available to the task of writing down what we think about, what we hear in our inner ear, our inner voices? And what does that mean about the push to market and promote yourself?

I love reading my work, performing my poems, to a live audience. The feeling of connection, intimacy, revelation, removing the veil and removing my self, getting out of the way for the Muse to speak through me. The secret to good writing is transcendent awareness, to be in the “flow” as they call it. There are people who become addicted to the adrenalin rush of thrill seeking, of risk taking, the need to generate those hormones of flight or fight because their brain chemicals thrive on them, they feel more alive. There is always a risk when you are a writer. The risk of failure, of not being understood, of being mediocre, of rejection or criticism. There are other risks as well. The risk of telling the truth, exposing your own fragility and vulnerability to the public, the risk of discovering what you really feel and think, the risk of self awareness and no turning back. There is the risk of experimenting and exploration and the risk of falling flat on your face, of taking leaps and crashing to earth, of giving of yourself only to be emptied.

The risk of standing on stage in front of others is something I never imagined I would do. I begin my poem “My Goodness Girl” with an explanation of how terrified I used to be and how a shot of tequila was my "liquid courage". This terror calmed down after the first few poems and I felt in sync with my audience, saw their compassionate eyes and heard their responses of laughter or sighs or applause. Sometimes saw their tears.

There is controversy about applause at readings. At some, applause is saved until the end, which unnerves me even as an audience member. The cheers and applause and noisy raucous responses at slams were liberating and created excitement and solidarity.

But it is not for the applause that I have overcome my terror time and again to step out in front. And although I know now that I won’t faint if I make a mistake, that my terror will be reduced to butterflies and weak knees, it still surprises me. But the reason I keep going back out there is that I want to speak. Perhaps it is not the traumas and shocks and disappointments and sorrow and grief and fear that made me want to become a writer. Perhaps it was that as a child I was a chatterbox and was told to be quiet. Perhaps I just needed to finally take the stage.

It seems only days ago I was posting a complaint on fb about my neighbors installing their Christmas lights right after Halloween. "Can't we celebrate one holiday at a time?" I scolded. And now suddenly here it is the New Year with the celebrations of Solstice and Christmas behind us.

2012 is a hot topic as we wonder which of prophecies will come true. End of the World or just more technological and environmental changes? Crisis or transformation? Revolutions that are violent and bloody as Middle East protestors are gunned down or revolutions in mind-body-spirit that bring us to authenticity and truth?

The publishing industry is undergoing a revolution. More and more authors are taking the short cut of self-publishing rather than the long wait to have a manuscript accepted, then another wait for its debut, with the necessity to have a marketing plan, a platform, and a willingness to invest one's time and money into promotion in either case. I once had a manuscript accepted only to have the publishing company go out of business before the release date, thus needing to start all over to find another (and haven't yet). I just read one success story from a woman who made her manuscript into an ebook and sold 4 million copies within months. I also know that sometimes even with the best marketing strategy--the book launch which takes place at the best local bookstores and which includes other well-known local talent, the radio interviews, the review, the platform of readers and friends created over time, the previous readings--may still not come up to our expectations and the box of books seems not to dwindle down at all. The cost of magazine ads may not even fit into out budgets; even to enter the Minnesota Book Awards cost the equvilent of $150.

I believe 2012 will be a good year for me. The past year was both challenging and exciting. Healing from the right hip replacment, publication of my chapbook transparencies of light, attending the Austin International Poetry Festival, watching my dad's dementia worsen, the death of my son's fiancee from burns suffered in a gas explosion, the birth of my fourth grandson, a whirlwind of writing workshops and 14 appearances, one under a spotlight on stage and others as part of a group effort, are some of the highlights. It has been productive and horrifying, heartbreaking and uplifting all mixed together.

I look forward to the reading sponsored by Saint Paul Alamanc with the high school students from the after school writing workshop next Monday because I am so proud of them for showing up and completing the work despite their own challenges of young children at home, working and supporting themselves, or low reading comprehension, and yet taking the risk, diving into material that was not always easy literarilly and emotionally.

My favorite story from this past year comes from the writing workshop at The Aliveness Project, a non-profit that serves people with HIV or AIDS. One of the participants told me that he has joined a men's support group 6 months previously but had not yet contributed to the discussion or even introduced himself to the group. "I read the writing we did in the workshop to introduce myself," he told me. His story brought tears to my eyes. I know that must have been hard, and yet, what a wonderful way to break the ice! It is proof that writing together, self-reflective writing with a focus on healing, can have dramatic results.

I hope 2012 will be a time of inspiration as well as transformation: inspiration to use your talents, to show your support for others who may be struggling to get their work out into the work, cooperation and joyful exchange of ideas as well as hands on helpfulness and loving kindness. I am excited to enter this new year with some of my challenges behind me and with the strength to face those coming. But most of all with awareness that my dream of being a poet, a writer, a teacher is my true north and thus cannot but point me where I need to go.

Mouth

Mouth that pulls at my mouth.
Mouth that has pulled me along;
mouth that comes from afar
with beams to illuminate me.

Dawn that fires my nights
a red and white radiance.
Mouth crowded with mouths:
bird full of birds.
Song winging its way
upward and down.
Death that subsides into kisses,
into a thirst to die slowly,
you give the blood-stained grass
two wing beats that gleam.
The upper lip, sky,
the lower lip, earth.

Kiss moving through darkness:
kiss that comes rolling
out of the first graveyard
toward the outermost stars.
Star that has silenced
and stopped your mouth
until a celestial dew
flutters your eyelids.

Kiss moving toward the boys
and girls of tomorrow
who won’t let the streets
or the fields lie empty.

Mouths, however many now buried,
mouthless--we are digging up!
I drink for them from your mouth
with your mouth I toast all those
who'd imbibe the wine
in their loving glasses.
They're memories now only memories’
kisses turned sour and gone.

I sink my life in your mouth
I hear the booming of space
and infinity seems
to have poured itself over me.

I shall return to kiss you.
I have to return, and falling
Sink with the centuries
descending into the deep ravines
like a feverish snowfall
of lovers' kisses.

Mouth that with your tongue
drew out of the earth
the brightest dawn. Three words,
three fires you have inherited:
life, death, love. There they abide,
inscribed on your lips.

--translated bt Edwin Honig



THE WOUNDED MAN

for the wall of a hospital in the front lines


The wounded stretch out across the battlefields.
And from that stretched field of bodies that fight
A wheat-field of warm fountains springs up and spreads
out
into streams with husky voices.

Blood always rains upward toward the sky.
And the wounds lie there making sounds like seashells,
if inside the wounds there is the swiftness of flight,
essence of waves.

Blood smells like the sea, and tastes like the sea, and the
winecellar.
The wine cellar of the sea, of rough wine, breaks open
where the wounded man drowns, shuddering,
and he flowers and finds himself where he is.

I am wounded: look at me: I need more lives.
The one I have is too small for the consignment
of blood that I want to lose through wounds.
Tell me who has not been wounded.

My life is a wound with a happy childhood.
Pity the man who is not wounded, who doesn’t feel
wounded by life, and never sleeps in life,
joyfully wounded.

If a man goes toward the hospitals joyfully,
They change into gardens of half-opened wounds,
of flowering oleanders in front of the surgery room
with its bloodstained doors.

II.

Thinking of freedom I bleed, struggle, manage to live on.
Thinking of freedom, like a tree of blood
that is generous and imprisoned, I give my eyes and
hands
to the surgeons.

Thinking of freedom I feel more hearts than grains of
sand
in my chest: my veins give up foam,
and I enter the hospitals and I enter the rolls of gauze
as if they were lilies.

Thinking of freedom I break loose in battle
from those who have rolled her statue through the mud.
And I break loose from my feet, from my arms,
From my house, from everything.

Because where some empty eye-pit dawn,
she will place two stones that see into the future,
and cause new arms and new legs to grow
in the lopped flesh.

Bits of my body I lose in every wound
will sprout once more, sap-filled, autumnless wings.
Because I am like the lopped tree, and I sprout again:
because I still have my life.

--translaed by James Wright

Beneath my skin is the tingle of sea touching sand, the ebb and flow of moon tide, the ricocheting cries of seagulls, the thud as waves hit the boat. I dangle my feet close to the wet stern; I leap onto sloping sand; I follow my friend to hot cobblestones of an ancient street; the smell of fish and lime entice me to a sun baked porch and the smoke of fire blazing beneath the banana leaf-wrapped salmon. Beneath my skin is happiness wanting to bubble up like champagne and sadness coating the waters like an oil slick, dangerous, unpredictable. Beneath my skin is a dark cave lit only by a torch held high in the hand of a medicine woman, her hair blown wild, her eyes full of wisdom, the quaking of my insides. Beneath my skin is a universe of stars expanding and spider webs patching the wound. Beneath my skin are the stories that spill from my soul across the arch of time and make me whole.

The year has come around again to that day when many traditions believe that the veil between the worlds is thinnest and the dead return to the places they once inhabited.

I have celebrated Día de los Muertos with a bilingual poetry performance in Puerto Vallarta. I asked the members of the audience to light candles in honor of their own dead and later, my performance partner and I called out the various Spanish names of La Muerte (la perra, la hedionda, la harpienta, la chingada, La Katrina, etc) across the space like an echo, as if we were searching for her. The realization that death is a cycle of life, that it comes for all of us, was healing after my son's death.

In 2000, my partner Michael and I wandered among the graves in Xoxocatlán, the site of ancient Día de los Muertos traditions, under the hovering ruins of Monte Alban in the city of Oaxaca. I wish you had been there with me. The air was reverent but festive. Copal incense rose up to sweeten the air; the graves were illuminated by candles; families sat together to pass along stories; candies, hot chocolate, and cervezas were enjoyed. For two weeks, we saw people with huge bundles of cempúsechil flowers on top of their cars or in wheelbarrows and every public building from the panadería to the biblioteca had ofrendas, homemade altars with sugar skulls, miniture skeletons, flowers, candles, and treats for the dead.

Michael would pass on a year and a half later. His ashes were spread on a hilltop above the town of Magdalena, a town that often began our excursions into Mexico. With roosters echoing the colors of the sun, four of us lit candles in each of the four directions and blessed him. This town favored plastic wreaths over the elaborate designs of Oaxaca and although the cementary was packed, Día de los Muertos felt more subdued.

Two years ago I dressed as La Llorona, the mother who wanders the arroyos of the southwest weeping for her dead children, an archetype of a misfortunate and terrorizing ghost. I was attending the Dead Poets Party sponsored by The Loft. I teased my hair into a tangle, painted my face white with teardrops, and dressed in black. Who knows what the people on the bus thought? I felt inhabited by her. I understood that she did not kill her children as she is accused, but that they were murdered and she was blamed. Too stunned to defend herself, she wanders the world weeping. Today she weeps for the destruction and desecration of Mother Earth. I think she also was weeping for the slain children of my neighborhood, the senseless violence of gang retribution.

Last year I did a presentation of Versos de Calaveras, a Mexican tradition of eulogies for the living, in particular those in power, such as politicians and the weathy, as a form of social protest. In some villages, the poets seek out those who have lost someone recently and their silly "character roasts" are meant to bring the survivors back from mourning to rejoin the living.

This year, I will decorate my ofrenda with the photos of my loved ones who have passed on, but I will not be there to greet them if they come from the other side. I will be holding my 8 week old grandson.

Tell me, what will you do to honor this sacred time? Light candles for those who have fallen in Iraq, both soldiers and civilians? Your ancestors? Your best friend who passed away from cancer last year, your elderly neighbor, the I35 bridge victims, the dying in Africa, the murdered women of Juarez? Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, or maybe Jimi or Janis? Not too much time has passed; time means nothing on the other side. Do they come to check up on us, to be sure they are not forgotten? Do they come to bring a message? Do we show our love with a prayer, a candle, a visual creation? Or do we simply hope that someday, we, too, will be remembered and thus, set the example of how we want it to be done.

But for the Dead Poets party tomorrow, I will dress in my red fringed Spanish shawl and read Neruda's poem Nothing But Death:

There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.

Translated by Robert Bly

Who knows how often I hugged loneliness to me like a prodigal daughter, how often I have draped the shawl of grief around my shoulders, how many nights I tossed and turned alone on the edge of understanding and not caught a glimmer in the moonlight of my own holy face? Feast on memories of loved ones around the table dipping bread into oil, drinking wine, toasts and laughter. Feast on songs that carried my bones into dancing, feast on the unbroken web that is between us, irridescent. Who knows that I struggle with the shadow within, claimed finally after allowing others to be the mirror image? Who knows that I now have asked for the blessing, no matter the limp from the broken thigh? Feast on the light, enkindled by words, by touch, by love, by willingness, holding the lantern to the sky no matter how fierce the wind.

Live as if love were a garden, filled with succulent fruit, decay and growth in their seasons, nourishment after the planting, the tending, the weeding.

Live as if spring was a fountain of joy rushing through your being, summer the way you do your work—opened wide, daring to be tasted, daring to be plucked, casual in the heat, determined to ripen.

Live as if tenderness was your birthright, as if gentle touch is the way the world caresses you, as if you were a dancer with a piece of sky in your hands.

Live as if you are an old lady with ribbons around your hat and flowers in your hair, unstoppable, wild.

Live as if everyone you meet is a friend, everywhere you stop an adventure is about to begin.

Live as if surrender moment by moment is possible, a work of art crafted by your own two hands.

Live as if beauty was the way you love the world, the beauty of thunderstorms, the beauty of the pearl created by friction within the oyster, the beauty of conversation, the beauty of not knowing the future only moving towards it in good company for the sake of becoming whole.

The door is open, dear
And it is time for you to go
Do not be afraid, do not
Be afraid for beyond is
The life you hoped for
And the love you wanted

The door is open, dear
And this heartbreak will
Be mended in the usual way:
Infants playing and friends
Passing a bottle of wine
To fill our cups, toasting

The miracle that we are
Still alive. But you, dear
Have nothing left to toast.
All is as must be, free
From the blackened ruins
Of your past and your

Guilt, laid to rest in the
Flame that scorched you
Clean, sacrificial
Offering. Unable to
give one hug or even touch

your burnt flesh, I stand whispering
By your hospital bed,
Prayers for your swift ascent,
The last words you will hear
From me: The door is open, dear.
Go home.

I have learned to live with more and more. Long gone are those youthful days of traveling with only one bag, a Bible, a toothbrush, a nail clipper in my pocket, and one change of underwear. Long gone as well the ability to sleep on a table, a cement floor piled with ragged clothing, a hammock, a springy pull-out couch, a piece of porch, a few blankets thrown on the desert floor. This is not only a matter of my physical discomfort, the aging process, the newly acquired security of a paycheck and a condo bequeathed to me. This is also choice. This is knowing the limitations of being blinded by vision that required sacrificing pieces of my soul and realizing the deep connections felt in those fleeting encounters were only that—fleeting.

I have learned to live with more and more blessings and I know how to count them. The children have increased from the ones I birthed to the ones I raised as a nanny to the twenty in my classroom, each unique, each bringing gift of challenge, of satisfaction, of endearment. The friendships that solidify with each admittance of failure and need of assurance,. that age along the path with me, the people I allow to see my tears, my frustrations, who let me be wild, who like it when I am delighted, who aren’t afraid to tell me what they think and when I admit I am following my own star, they trust that it is ok even when it doesn’t make any sense.

The blessings of poems as well. How they gather, how they are given away. The presence I have grown into when I communicate with an audience.

I have learned to live with more and more and sometimes I imagine going back to simplicity. What if I had only one small bag, one room, only one best friend next to me? If I could chose only one poem to be taken along, which would it be? If I had only one year or one month to live, what would I let go of? What would I give away if I knew I could take nothing with me but my own heart and my own song?

I am scanning my memoir of living communally for ten years from pages that were written on a word processor to computer files, editing as I go. On the one hand, I am grateful that I wrote everything down because I see as I edit, that I have already forgotten many details. On the other hand, this is reawakening old memories, some of which are not pleasant. My naivite surprises me, and yet I was young and idealistc, why should this be a surprise? I am glad that I captured that naivite and that I can look back at that young girl with more kindness now. At first when I started writing the memoir, I was angry that she was so stupid, so gullible, so eager to please, that she didn't stand up for herself and wasn't aware that she was placed in situations that were dangerous, demoralizing, and emotionally damaging. And worst of all, despite her strong maternal instincts, subjected her children to situations that were also dangerous and emotionally damaging. And yet, I envy her the joy, the daily miracles, the faith, the encounters with others who were special, seekers of truth, pilgrims to the holy center.

In writing a memoir, we want to tell the story, share our experiences, brag about how we survived or perhaps how we transformed. Were transformed. We want to remember. But we also process, we come to understand who we are through where we have been in a different way. Through the objective lens of words on a page. They may be our words but we craft them, we seek to have a fine literary sense, we want our reader to be inspired enough to read to the end, to want to know what happened to us. To cheer us on, to sigh with relief, to become our friends, to know we are more than just acquaintances passing in the night, that we, too, have suffered and survived, grew and celebrated, took wing and soared.