On July 9th at around 9pm, I gave birth to my second child, Charlotte, at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. By the time I got to the hospital, around 6pm, I was already eight centimeters dilated. For those of you who don’t know much about childbirth, that’s pretty far along. The birth itself went very well. I didn’t have an epidural or any other pain medication which is what I wanted, I only pushed for about five minutes and my partner, Craig, was there through the whole thing to support me.
Since I anticipated things going smoothly, I hired a doula named Logan who had never attended a birth but needed the experience to get her doula certification. My friends made fun of me. “I can’t believe you’re hiring a doula without experience,” they said, “She’s supposed to help you.” But I’m glad that she attended the birth. At one point, during my worst contraction, crazed and delirious, I told Logan that I needed to BITE something and instinctively grabbed her hand. Terrified, she shoved a towel into my mouth…Lucky doula!
After a couple of hours at the hospital, my beautiful baby Charlotte was born. Everyone celebrated. Eventually, the doctor left and so did Logan. But two hours later, I started hemorrhaging uncontrollably and experienced, what I now know is called a postpartum hemorrhage.
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When I was in college, poetry was a passionate love affair. I still remember reading “Tintern Abbey” and its “dizzy raptures” for the first time and gathering with friends at my apartment, drinking red wine and reciting our favorite lines to each other. But as my life moved forward, the more I studied, the more degrees I piled on, that initial exuberance turned into something like a long, dysfunctional marriage with a depressed person. Sure, there were days when we’d go out and have fun, but most of the time we didn’t even sleep in the same bed. What happened?
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By the time the doctors and nurses were able to stop my hemorrhage, I had an earworm. For hours, the song “The Circle of Life” from the Lion King kept looping in my head. As you can imagine, it was extremely annoying. I bet that this is some sort of bizarre neurological thing that happens to people under extreme stress. But when I could break through that song, I kept thinking about poetry, mostly how I needed to write it.
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Being a poet is kind of like being a good detective. Taking mental notes on what was happening to my body, mind and environment during and after the hemorrhage allowed me to distance myself from my own experience and helped me cope during what has been one of the scariest and loneliest experiences of my life. During my blood transfusions, I thought, “I need to write a poem about getting a blood transfusion while watching the Leon County Spelling Bee on TV” and “No, wait! I need to write a dramatic monologue in the voice of a BLOOD CELL entering another person’s body.” When Ezekiel, my three-year old son, came to visit me, I thought, “I need to write a poem about TOWERS and I have to incorporate the fact that he keeps calling the hospital “mommy’s tower” into the poem. And that reminded me of going on a field trip to Watts Towers when I was a little girl growing up in Los Angeles and then that reminded me of how I was in Dante class in graduate school when the Twin Towers fell and isn’t this a little bit like being in a circle of hell and if it is, which circle, and more importantly, which way to PARADISE? Auden is right when he says, “poets are tough and can profit from the most dreadful experiences.”
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Often, you will hear someone say that poetry doesn’t need to be about experience but the older I get, the more I find fault with this idea. Poetry without lived experience is like a beautiful vase that you aren’t allowed to touch. I say let the toddler hold the vase and if it falls and breaks, then you can always glue it back together again or you can write a poem about that beautiful, broken vase—sort of like Keats did with the URN.
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My blood transfusion changed everything. I was healed! I went from barely being able to stay conscious to, a few days after being discharged from the hospital, being able to walk around my neighborhood and listen to the bird squabble. The world seemed new again and I was ready to write a whole bunch of poems about what happened. Plus, I had a baby! A baby named after Charlotte Bronte!
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When people ask me if they should get a PhD in creative writing, I always say YES. But I also say that the minute you defend your dissertation, you should start on the path to unlearn your PhD like a ZEN master. Why? Because you have to remember what brought you to poetry in the first place and I bet you nine times out of ten, it was because something really shitty happened but a certain poem gave you comfort and joy and then you thought “I can do this” and you started writing poems yourself. So, forget dissecting a poem, but instead why not memorize what you love, sit by a lake, and recite it to your dog? Or what about finding a really great group of fellow poetry lovers, meeting every week and exchanging poems? What about investigating Medieval Welsh poetic forms like my friend and trying to write those? See, they don’t teach you any of that in PhD school.
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My friend, Justin Marks and I were IMing each other last week. He’s like “What are you up to?” and I said “Oh I’m just writing about my near death experience” and he’s like “Whoa, dude, that’s some heavy shit.” I put that in a poem too.
