I decided to go back and read everything I posted since this project began, mostly because I felt like I had lost the sense of the ‘theme’ a bit. ‘Anti/ante’, right? Things I’m against, things one can wager, things that came before. It’s the ‘things that came before’ bit that really interests me, I think. I have no problem calling myself a narrative poet, owning all that that implies; people (you know who you are!) seem to think that that limits one to the facts of one’s own life, but that’s all nonsense. Ted Hughes once wrote a letter to The Guardian in response to a piece published by (don’t quote me, but I think this is correct) A.Alvarez about Sylvia Plath, that he took objection to, factually. In the letter, Hughes wrote, ‘I hope each of us owns the facts of his own life.’ He appears to have colossally missed the point—we neither own nor lack them, right? Why not treat the past as a labyrinth, a curio shop, an advent calendar—each fact is a door that leads to another door, or at the very least, a threshold. I have a fantasy of someday writing poems about real things that read like labyrinths—that’s part of what I’ve tried to do, here, without a terrible lot of success. In my head, those fantasy poems take the shapes of garden mazes, with high hedges, that just keep opening and opening, those poems take the shape of secret passageways, revel in the knowledge that there is always something else behind the veil, and something behind that, and . . .
Layers. That’s a very pedestrian word. But it suits my purposes. In the last month I’ve tried, with varying degrees of failure, to write about an event that took place in 2005, when someone I knew raped me. I have never written about this event, explicitly, and, looking again at what I produced about it on MTS, I note that I still haven’t written about it explicitly. Will Roby thinks those poems (are they poems? I wouldn’t call them poems, but if you’re interested in deciding for yourself, they fall under the heading, ‘fine, then. some answers #3′) ‘work’. He thinks by the end of them, you ‘get it’. I’m not sure. In terms of process, they were something of an act of desperation to get anything down on paper. Will had asked the question, ‘Where is the difficulty in dictating your personal history,’ or something like that. When I read that, my brain exploded. I’ll show you difficulty! I thought, fuming. For nearly half a decade, I’ve tried to decode that event in poetry and failed and failed and failed. I wrote one (almost terminally) brief, and very cryptic, lyric about it, which I thought was clever as the dickens. I had dressed it up in sexy clothes, made it about ‘the devil come to call’. I made it about sex, not about violence, or power, which, of course, is what rape is. Terrance Hayes read it in a workshop and slaughtered it. He even (horror of horrors!) compared it (unfavorably) to a Joyce Carol Oates story I despise. ‘What do I do with it?’ I asked him. ‘Mess it up,’ he replied. Easy for you to say, I thought glumly. I read the poem that very night at my graduate reading, in my best husky voice, kind of grinding into the podium. I’d wager my pittance of a savings that NO ONE in the room understood that poem to be about rape. Which brings me to a point, not about my own history, but about the way we choose to ‘own’ the facts of our lives—if I ‘make’ that event about sex, I never have to admit that something was taken from me when it happened, right? I ‘own’ those events; he doesn’t ‘own’ me. Right?
Except that, he does. Or, I should say, ‘it’ does. ‘It’ being violence, ‘it’ being (write it!) rape, a word that fills me with squeamish dread, something akin to terror crossed with the feeling of not wanting to watch a video of one’s self—turn away, my brain says, don’t look! When Will asked, ‘Where is the difficulty in dictating your personal history,’ I couldn’t get past the word ‘dictate.’ Because it implies a listener, someone scribbling down your words. Who am I ‘dictating’ to? Who would I want to ‘dictate’ that story to? So, I tried to write the story down—no tricks, straight narrative—and this happened, and that happened, and he, and then I,—but I couldn’t. Everything crept in. The ‘facts’ of my life that Ted Hughes thinks I should ‘own’ (or, he seems to imply, at least have the right to own) are inextricably linked with myths and history I’d long obsessed over, prior to this event taking place—Anastasia Romanov, Leda and the swan, Agamemnon’s murder of Iphigeneia. Not only that, but also–those facts mutate everyday. I teach English 101—just about the time I began trying to answer Will’s question, we read an essay by a man named Brent Staples about his ability (being a black man) to ‘alter public space’. When a white woman runs from him at 3 am, he scornfully blames this on his race, not on the fact that, as a woman, she is endangered (potentially) by any man at 3 am. We discussed this. I glanced at one of my students—she was terrified. I had forgotten—she wrote her ‘personal narrative’ about being raped, and never reporting it. She knew nothing of my experience—could she sense I’d been through something like that? Did she just, inexplicably, trust me? Her ‘story’ was mostly just like mine. ‘Date’ rape. As I sat, that morning, in bed, trying to write about all of these things, two men banged on my parents’ door, at 8 am. It was pouring. They claimed to be from the electric company. ‘Sorry, my dad’s not here,’ I said. ‘I see that,’ the one said, and leered at me. I made short work of them and returned to my computer, now incorporating that event into all the others.
Mutations. Ubiquity. Mess it up. How nice of him to tell me that—mess it up. I was furious—that event had ‘messed’ my life up so thoroughly, and here I’d found this way to tie it into a tidy little package, and he wanted me to rip the paper to shreds. Fuck him, I recall thinking. Except he was right. That morning in bed, I wrote six vignettes about rape, about power, about reading, about myth. Then, I did (for me, anyway) the unthinkable. I cut them up and pasted them back together; I broke the narrative. It made my head hurt behind my eyes. I hated the results, but I posted them. They aren’t poems, and they make no sense—or do they? Going back, I note that they are ‘about’ my ‘ante’ life—and my life as it is. I found, also, that the language, though broken, makes its own amazing shapes, which are nothing to do with me, but which are everything to do with me—my father speaks words the man who raped me spoke, and vice versa. My father, who has terrified and fascinated me my entire life, who stands for security and threat, all at once. At one point, the ‘poem’ reads, ‘Clytaemnestra dresses her daughter in the silk they need to tie her to an altar.’ This is a mish mash of things—the silk is the silk robe I wore the entire next day, Clytaemnestra is Iphigeneia’s mother, who sends her daughter unwittingly to her death at the hands of her own father, after she dresses her in bridal robes—bridal robes, in the mish mash, become the cords that bind her to her death. So her mother gives her what she needs to be murdered, and does it with a smile. I’ve just ended a marriage that, had I stayed, would have probably killed me slowly. Anti-desire. Ante-life. Ante up. This just goes on and on. . .
Category: Ante / Anti (Process Section),
Emily Van Duyne
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