Rachel Zucker : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Author Archive

A few months ago I tried to quit the blog. I emailed the po foundation honchos and my fellow bloggers to say I didn’t think I had it in me to blog more regularly, and I was tired of feeling so guilty about my erratic postings. Well, actually, this is what I said:
i feel really rotten that i’m the lamest blogger on the blog. i
cannot put my baby down without him screaming and i’ve been
cavilierly using my “free time” to: eat, sleep, pick up older
children from school, buy 15 brands of pacifier (none of which judah
will take) and try to get judah a passport. every single day i think
of a blog entry but i literally can’t write it down or type it.
(this is a rare moment when he’s sleeping in the sling and i have my
hands free)/
i meant to write this entry:
dear jeffrey, you were wondering how i can be a poet and a mom of
three kids? i can’t.
but i couldn’t even manage that much for the past 3 weeks.
i don’t want to quit but i do want to stop feeling like a flake. but
i am a flake.
crap.

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08.15.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Rachel Zucker

Hard to Master

Last night, Lindsey, the babysitter, drubbed me in Boggle. I think her score was more than triple mine. I’m not positive about this: I was having trouble keeping track of my running total. My brain is soft. Words elude me. In fact, the word “elude” eluded me for about a minute.

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07.20.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Rachel Zucker

The End of Imagination/ Write somewhere else

“Oh, Mr. Cuthbert,” she whispered, “That place we came through—that white place—what was it?”
“Well now, you must mean the Avenue,” said Matthew after a few moments’ profound reflection. “It is a kind of pretty place.”
“Pretty? Oh, pretty doesn’t seem the right word to use. Nor beautiful, either. They don’t go far enough. Oh, it was wonderful—wonderful. It’s the first thing I ever saw that couldn’t be improved upon by imagination. It just satisfied me here”—and she put one hand on her breast—“it made a queer funny ache and yet it was a pleasant ache. Did you ever have an ache like that, Mr. Cuthbert?”
(from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery.)
I’m going there–to “Anne’s Land”–in about 30 minutes. And not in my mind, no, with my three sons and my husband and Lindsey and my very bad cold and our overstuffed luggage and our small plastic bags of gels and creams and no water. I will have only intermittent email access but will try to post from Prince Edward Island at least once to let you know if it makes for a pleasant ache and if I can find a better word than “pretty.”

07.06.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Rachel Zucker

Anatomy of a Story

Friday night there was a big party for my mother to celebrate her 40 years of service to the city. People told stories and offered reflections about my mom and then we all watched a movie about my mom’s career. There’s one story in the film that I can’t shake and that has shaken me up.
It was a really well done film and talked about my mom’s life and career in moving and interesting ways. In the late 1960s and early ’70s my mother told stories twice a day, 5 days a week, in schools all over Manhattan, Harlem and the Bronx. She had a weekly radio program, Stories from Many Lands, on WNYC for years. She’s written 23 books, traveled the world–she’s had an incredible career and is still going strong. The movie contained interviews with friends and other storytellers (I was interviewed as were my kids) and also showed amazing still photographs I hadn’t seen. It felt very real, much less idealized than I would have imagined. But this one story:

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06.24.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Rachel Zucker

Write Where You Are?

Except I can’t. The problem is technical: hands. The baby must be held. In the sling he falls asleep and I eat and try to sleep make food for my older boys and aim for 15 minutes of attention to each one a day (can’t say that I make my goal very often). So the problem is also logistical: time. Somehow there is more of it now that day and night have blurred into one another and also no time at all. At least, no time with hands.
I nurse in the nursing chair, rocking back and forth, turning over words that disappear before I’ve burped him and even tried to put him down. And he does NOT like to be put down.
I want to describe how he smells. I want to describe how this mostly cranky alien, so new to the world, and, frankly, so dyspeptic and fusspotty in his temperament has stolen my heart. Rationally I am unmoved by his cries and grunts and moans and there I am again moving to move him—swing him, rock him, tuck him in close to my body and when all else fails I strip us down and get in the bath where he stares at me wide-eyed and completely calm. But he has already woken up. Even the sling doesn’t work for more than 15 minutes if I am not moving.
He is three weeks old today. I’d love to tell you what it’s like here but—(fade out with the sound of screaming in the background…)

06.20.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Rachel Zucker

Post-Partum Poetry Thought

I think I will not write poems about the birth of my third son. I might be wrong, but I’d bet not. The birth itself was so real, present, calm, loving, right. What poem “needs” to be written about it or of/out of it or in it? Does that mean that I write poems in order to fix experiences? I have always found it annoying when people tell me I write because it is therapeutic. I understand how writing can be therapeutic (and the writing as a therapy can be extremely useful), but the notion that every time I write a poem I’m performing a self-treatment is disturbing. And, if it is true, does it mean that publishing poems is like taking photos of yourself taking medication and showing these snapshots to friends?
We’ve all been to readings (particularly open mics) when the poems sound a lot like A.A. testimonies. Again, nothing against testimony or A.A., but I often think, sitting at these kinds of readings, “I’m doing something different.” Am I? Or is my poetry simply a more subverted type of testimony, a less obvious form of self-therapy?
In my photography classes with Lois Conner I learned to say I was “making pictures” rather than “taking pictures,” and I hope making a poem is more than recording a (bad) experience or “expressing” how you feel (for more on my thoughts about poetry as “expression” see my GNAT. I don’t write poems to make myself feel better or to convince someone else to do something—these aims are more the purview of diarists, journalists, and essayists—but what then to do with this realization that I will probably not write about the birth of my third son because I don’t need to? (I certainly felt I did need to write about the birth of my second son, see my discussion and birth poems on How2).
Does the fact that I don’t need to write about this birth mean that when I do write, I write to fix something?

06.11.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Rachel Zucker

My New Work

My son, Judah Darwin Zucker Goren, was born at home (in the water) yesterday morning. We were gently and lovingly attended to by a midwife and a doula. My husband and our older two sons (and Lindsey, our poet/babysiter) witnessed Judah’s arrival. It was everything I could have hoped for. It was, in the most profound sense of the word, awesome.

05.31.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Rachel Zucker

You’re WHAT?! (Poet + Homebirth = FREAK)

Some of you reading this blog must have had this experience: someone asks you what you do and you say “I’m a poet” and they laugh uncomfortably, or say, “what?!” or “I don’t like poetry,” or they step away from you, or say, “you’re kidding, right?” Of course there are times when a person says, “me too!” or, “I’m a painter!” or, “really!” but I’m always surprised at how many people seem not only confused by my answer—“I’m a poet”—but concerned or angry.
Well, these responses seem like warm embraces and a big thumbs up compared to how people respond when I tell them I’m planning to have my baby at home. Except for people who have had or witnessed a homebirth or are midwives or have had a close friend who had a baby at home, the response to my plan is overwhelmingly one of fear, disgust, and enormous anger. “You’re WHAT?!” “WHY?!”

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05.22.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Rachel Zucker

Proofs

This morning I begged the beautiful and brilliant poet Catherine Barnett (author of Into Spheres Such Perfect Holes Are Pierced) to meet me in the lobby of the elementary school (our kids go to the same school) and help me with some commas. As usual, she came through for me. I had a short list of questions, and it didn’t take much time. Occasionally Catherine lingered over a poem, reading, I could tell, for meaning, rather than simply to answer the question and said, “I’m excited for the book.” Book? All I see are words on a page, commas here and there—probably too many. The acknowledgments aren’t standardized. I detest the closed-dot subsection ornaments. The all-caps bother me—TOO EMPHATIC!—and sometimes, when italics meet an em-dash, the two lean into each other like drunken teenagers and begin to collapse. The “w” in Bell font has a little “u” shape inside, which both pleases me and embarrasses me in ways I can’t explain. Some of the poems in this manuscript were written more than seven years ago, and I’ve been revising them off-and-on since then. Now I can hardly see them except as layout and symbols, a code I invented that once stirred me with feeling. Perhaps this makes me a good editor—the ability to objectify the poems and see them as not-mine, unfamiliar? But, I am horrified by the thought that perhaps my husband feels this way when he sees my naked body. Something dear that has since lost meaning. The way a name, repeated, becomes a word, then a sound, then marks on a page.
In October, the manuscript-transformed-to-book will arrive in my mailbox. We will meet one another like lovers who have aged and changed and dressed in unfamiliar clothes.

05.18.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rachel Zucker

My Mother

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom recently. Maybe it’s all the Mother’s Day hoopla or maybe it’s because I cannot consider the question of why I enjoy poetry readings or why (thanks Jeffrey) I might not suck as a reader without thinking about and acknowledging my mother, Diane Wolkstein.
My mother is a famous storyteller. I grew up watching her practice in front of the double full-length mirrors in the apartment upstairs where she wrote and rewrote and rehearsed alone and with musicians and other storytellers. I was such a good listener—so quiet—I was permitted to sit in the on-air studio at WNYC while she recorded her weekly program, “Stories from Many Lands.” From her I had an up-close portrait of a hard-working artist. Our relationship hasn’t always been smooth or uncomplicated; how could it have been?
In any case, I wanted to mention that Mayor Bloomberg has declared June 22nd DIANE WOLKSTEIN DAY in tribute of the 40 years of service my mother has given the city. She has been telling stories and inviting other storytellers to the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park for 40 years. Maybe some of you have seen her there or read her books. If not, you should! On June 22nd and 23rd will be celebration with many world-class storytellers to honor my mother’s service and to promote storytelling in New York City. Check it out: