Hope
Hope is the most cultivated feeling since 1987
Hope is graded
Hope has a shelf life of one month
There is always bitter hope
and hope that is budded on sour hope
South African hope is ready for summer market
Venezuelan hope arrives in October
Maltese hope is considered a mutation
Californian sweet hope must be eaten at once
Hope from Florida is most widely known
but can rot teeth
For those of us without mothers, for the mothers who no longer have children, loss presses against us: Mother’s Day. It opens our hearts to absence. I go to a friend’s garden and carry home armfuls of lilacs and remember the lilac shrub just beyond my childhood back porch where my mother and I gathered scent, but while I hammer the stems so they’ll draw more water, the sucked-out place inside me quivers.
The year my mother died, I wrote a story about another mother and daughter, ‘The Lost Boy,” which won my first CBC Literary Award. It was about my auntie’s childhood in the internment camps, and her fraught relationship with her mother, but it was also about my mother and how much in love with her I was after she died, and how this love threw me back into my childhood when I loved her simply and uncritically, when she swirled over my life as gorgeously as a van Gogh sky.
Here is a poem I wrote to my mama during NaPoMo:
Poem to Something Inanimate
Jane Eaton Hamilton
Even though she was my mother
and I begged her to get up
she did not climb from the casket
Let’s get the fuck outa here, I whispered
They don’t need to know.
Let’s hit the rails. Blow this pop-stand.
Georgia, I said, Tennessee, Colorado, California
Or hell—l’ve got the dough you left me
Let’s blow it on Paris
Like she hadn’t squeaked across the floor in nursing shoes
rubbed life into new kittens
helped me hammer holes into canning jars
Like she hadn’t pulled foals into soft midnight light
like she hadn’t kissed me up and down my face
till I squirmed
I’ve never participated in any writing intensives, but this month I have been writing a poem every day for National Poetry Month. It’s been fun experimenting at the edge of form and from intriguing prompts. I would never have written these poems otherwise. I have written on the Tar Sands, on being given up for dead as a 2-year-old, about being in NYC for Hurricane Sandy, about a magician on the metro in Paris, a poem made up of ten lies, a poem to something inanimate, and so on. Catch the New York School prompt, below, for a great example of what we’ve been challenged with.
The other terrific part has been participating as a group member with 17 extremely talented Canadian poets–their support has been invaluable, their talent and skill breath-taking. To read their work day after day? Priceless. (For everything else, there’s MC.)
This challenge has been completely and utterly exhausting. I will be glad when it’s over next week. Really, really glad.
To quote Thom Donovan, whose guidelines we used for the New York School poem:
“It is a “recipe” or constraint of sorts for writing a New York School poem (my class read James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, Charles Bernstein, and Dorothea Lasky—a heterodox selection, I realize; and listened to Eileen Myles, Schuyler, Robert Creeley, and Ron Padgett via PennSound).
“Students were encouraged to use as many of the following “ingredients” as possible:
Eaton Hamilton 