I am not a parent, first of all. Last night I had quite a vivid dream that I was giving birth, but, alas, I am infertile, and at age 40, I’ve accepted that I won’t be a mother in this lifetime. There is definitely a grief there for many reasons, and having spent a while as a doula, and having many wonderful friends who are parents, I don’t totally situate myself in the world of “childless.” The treatment of tiny humans concerns me a great deal (and I would argue it should concern every human!), and I love children. My time also is not all my own, as some parents assume it might be. As a chronically ill person, I have little control over how I’m going to feel, and I don’t get to take days off from illness, much like there really is no “vacation” from parenthood. All of that to say, I don’t reap many so-called benefits from not parenting, and it is a sore subject for me, as I very much wish I were a parent, but it’s a closed case.
That is but a preamble to my real topic today. My vivid birth dream that woke me in the early hours led me to thinking about the metaphors we use for artistic creation, so much birth and labor imagery. Mary Shelley referred to Frankenstein as her “hideous progeny,” and Anne Bradstreet, to name just two examples, has several poems likening writing to childbirth.
The Author to Her Book
by Anne Bradstreet
Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view,
Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joynts to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobling then is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun Cloth, i’ th’ house I find.
In this array ’mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam.
In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come;
And take thy way where yet thou art not known,
If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none:
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door.
I’m struck by the way Bradstreet describes her offspring in this poem: disabled (“ill-form’d,”) and illegitimate (“If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none”). In the 17th century when the poem was composed, women were confined to the domestic sphere, which, at a time when it was so common to die in childbirth or from pregnancy and postpartum complications, Bradstreet often mentions her trepidation when facing another childbirth. She wed her husband Simon at 16 (and many poems speak of her love for him, like her famous line, “If ever two were one, then surely we…”) and gave birth to seven surviving children, and lost at least one child, though statistically she likely suffered miscarriages as well.
In the following poem, Bradstreet anticipates the very real potential of dying. This isn’t a celebratory poem sharing her joy at becoming a mother again, but resigned to a fate beyond her control. “A common thing, yet oh inevitable,” she says, addressing her husband, and encouraging him to remarry so that her children might have another mother (though urging him to protect them from a potential stepmother’s abuse)!
Before the Birth of One of Her Children
By Anne Bradstreet
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend,
We are both ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot’s untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my dayes that’s due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interr’d in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
These o protect from step Dames injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse;
And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake,
Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take.
Bradstreet also lost grandchildren, and Kevin Prufer has an interesting piece on the poem she wrote upon the death of an infant grandchild, that is stunning and worth a read.
One of my favorite contemporary poets who tackles the topic of motherhood (though of course that’s not all she writes about) is Rachel Zucker. Her book Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009) as well as her hybrid book MOTHERs (Counterpath Press 2014) each deal with motherhood, and MoA deals extensively with childbirth and miscarriage. Zucker explains that a poem is a “translation of experience”
One of my favorite of Zucker’s poems is the long tribute to/conversation with Allen Ginsberg called, “Hey Allen Ginsberg Where Have You Gone and What Would You Think of My Drugs?” She meditates in the poem on antidepressants (the “drugs” of the poems title), explaining the reason for seeking such medication, even though her life is going well.
But it felt undoable. This lucky life every day, every day. every. day.
In another poem, “Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday,” Zucker writes,
I sucked on ginger candies and held new baby Phoebe Kate, born on the same due date as the baby I miscarried. When she left I cried and had more candies.
The ease with which Zucker manages to be both lyrical and expansive in her work, capturing so much in one poem makes me envious. She manages to convey so much through everyday details, the ginger candies in these lines, the process of making a brisket in the “Hey Allen Ginsberg…” poem.
Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, talks about the difficult of describing pain, and the problem of its invisibility. Though you might hear a person crying out from pain, writhing in agony, see a heart racing on a monitor, the perspiration on their brow, you cannot see pain itself, and thus it is often not believed, particularly if it is women’s pain (and, with even more tragic consequences, if it is the pain of Black women, who are most often disbelieved, and thus have disproportionately higher rates of maternal mortality). This is true for mental/emotional pain as well. At least with childbirth, most people accept that it is painful, even if they believe women deserve pain in childbirth because of their concept of original sin.
Yet women have been writing movingly about the pain of childbirth of centuries.
Let’s look at the opening of Mina Loy’s poem “Parturition,” for example.
I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pinpoint nucleus of being ... I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony Incidentally with the exhaustion of control I reach the summit And gradually subside into anticipation of Repose Which never comes. For another mountain is growing up Which goaded by the unavoidable I must traverse Traversing myself Something in the delirium of night hours Confuses while intensifying sensibility Blurring spatial contours So aiding elusion of the circumscribed That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast Comes from so far away And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth Is no part of myself There is a climax in sensibility When pain surpassing itself Becomes exotic And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation Uniting the opposing and resisting forces ... Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity Indivisible Acutely I am absorbed Into The was—is—ever—shall—be Of cosmic reproductivity
That Loy was able to recapture those moments of agony after giving birth and compose such a resonant depiction is impressive. I quoted but a few brief sections of a much longer work, but I think you can yet get a sense of how she builds up each section’s description like the waves of a contraction. Line length fluctuates as the pain crests and then recedes; internal spaces suggest pauses of the intuition. There’s a level of intersubjectivity in the experience, that is described as only one who has experienced this can accurately capture. Though I’ve never given birth, I’ve been present at many, and I live with (at times) quite severe chronic pain, and the shifting sense of temporality within that “centre of a circle of pain” is so effectively captured by Loy it elevates the subject matter to great heights than it might have been considered by her contemporaries of the early 20th century, particularly when coupled with the technical innovation.
Though Bradstreet and Shelley and many others wrote about childbirth, it was not with such visceral details, however they may have alluded to the consequences each woman knew all too well. It seems relevant that Loy also lost an infant as well as her third child who died at 14, and her second child who came down with polio less than a year after her first child's death. Loy herself also suffered from a “nervous condition,” which sounds a great deal like what is now known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (aka ME/CFS, which I also have), and seemed to have been worsened by her grief.
Embodied poetics, like what is often found when writing about pain (whether the pain of childbirth or not) fascinates me. To reference Elaine Scarry again, much like pain, imagination is also invisible. You can see the consequences, the effects of imagination and pain, but not the thing itself. I think this is why poetry feels like an apt genre to capture the illusory sensations of both.
Thanks for taking some time wandering through the imaginations of these fabulous poets with me today.
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