I took a month off. It happens sometimes; life's like that. I wasn't being very literary; I was being caught up in the world of prosaic pragmatics. Life without art isn't as enjoyable as life with, but sometimes you make bad decisions. You re-commit, re-dedicate, and you jump back on the horse, treadmill, wagon or blogspot, whatever it is you've fallen from, and you try again. I'm trying again.
I went tonight to a poetry reading, which was a first for me. Andrea Gibson and Amber Tamblyn were playing at a synagogue-qua-arts center in DC, Sixth and I -- and if I was a better blogger, most of the nouns in this sentence would be links to things, but I'm not and you can probably find the google button without me. They were both spectacularly fantastic, and I ordered both of their books on Amazon as soon as I got home.
I can't overstate how awesome they were, both of them. Amber Tamblyn, who apparently started off life as an actress and built some level of success before crossing into poetry, knows what it's like to be a sexy woman in a world that commoditizes them; she knows what it's like to have lifelong dreams swept aside because a trend or a fad or your eyebrows are suddenly passé. She dreams of the dead actresses she grew up wanting to be, and she eulogizes them with the terrifying empathy of one who had boarded Charon's ferry to follow them. I hope I learn to talk to my daughters the way her father talks to her; I hope I am as comforting, faithful, and inspiring a husband as her husband is to her. She delivered panegyrics that made me fall in love with people I'd never meet, which I think is sometimes harder than crushing the bastards who need crushing.
Andrea Gibson crushed some bastards that needed crushing. She's a feminist queer poet who writes, chants, and sometimes sings the grieving of her people, and I am not ashamed to tell you she made me cry tonight. She talked of coming out to her family, being sent to psychiatrists, fighting suicide, and going to a Catholic school to be taught natural history by a nun who didn't believe in dinosaurs, "and what I learned about extinction is when your family stops calling." If you don't know what that feels like, there's no way to express it better than that.
But she also talked about the role of art in the community, which is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I guess she has, too. She discussed the death of Matthew Shepherd in 1998, a victim of anti-gay violence, how she'd cried when she heard he'd died, how she remembered exactly where and when she heard the news. She talked about James Byrd, Jr., who had died a few months earlier in 1998, a victim of anti-black violence, and about how she didn't remember when she'd heard that -- and what that meant to her.
She thought about it particularly in the wake of several killings lately, killings of black men by white cops, killings that reflected an abject and systemic racial bias that seemed irreversibly entrenched -- even in her own audiences. She talked about how she'd posted about the recent killings on her Facebook and her own fans, her own people who were at least nominally against oppressive regimes, at least when they were oppressive to white gays, her own fans were responding with racist hatred. And when she thought back to James Byrd, Jr., she realized that she hadn't been part of the solution.
As an artist, she felt her job was to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comfortable. She looked back at her shows, at her books, at her performances over the past 16 years, and realized she hadn't comforted many of the disturbed, many people who needed it, and she was going to make it her mission to do better from now on. Nobody's going to see a show with her anymore, she said, without her saying her piece on this before they make it out the door.
I don't know if that's the right way to go. Speaking reasonably and logically, fixing all the world's problems is a lot to do -- Jonas Salk focused on solving polio; he didn't beat himself up for not figuring out the common cold, too. It's very reasonable, in a world with so much injustice, to pick one part of the shitstorm and focus on that. I do not envy my feminist queer poet friends; they have a lot of uphill battles to fight, and I could never blame them if racism never cost them sleep at nights.
But reason and logic don't have a lot to do with making a concerted life effort to change the world with poetry, and they are not the sorts of things that Gibson and her ilk are likely to let stand in their way. They tilt at windmills; there's no telling them that they should be selective about the windmills.
I don't tilt at anything; I mostly sit back, surrounded by white, masculine, heteronormative privilege and swim around in Scrooge McDuck-style piles of money. But I admire them; I admire their talent, their grace, their indefatigable courage, their relentless charges.
I hope they skewer a bunch of the motherfuckers.
