My Trouble with Optimism and an Interview with Shara McCallum (by Nin Andrews)

Lately, I have been having trouble with optimism. And I have been having trouble with my trouble with optimism. I am, quite simply, depressed. I'm not even sure of the role of poetry anymore—both in the world as it is, politically and environmentally speaking, and in the world of po-biz as it is, with all its emphasis on social media and self-promotion. Poetry, which I like to think of as a contemplative art, is becoming anything but. For that reason, I have written what I believe to be my last book of poems, The Last Orgasm, in which the orgasm, like the poem, bids us farewell. I sometimes think I’ve become like the madwoman in Shara McCallum’s poem, "Why Madwoman Shouldn't Read the News."

Why Madwoman Shouldn’t Read the News

I know you’ll say I’m overreacting,
but my mother’s prophesying has come to pass:
Armageddon is upon us. Just look at the evidence:
the carriers of our species at every second
being raped and killed and the rare ones
who survive offing their lovers and children
(or worse, if it can be believed, wearing bangs),
molesters and gun-toters skulking
in every lunchbox, the environment
churning into an apocalypse. Oh, kids,
please save us the heartache and leave
in advance: calmly but quickly
abandon your seesaws and swings. Friends,
do you remember when we were young?
Life plump with promise and dreams?
Me neither. Anyway, who’d be naive enough
now to believe in anything so impossible-
to-attain as happiness or justice? Sure
we had a run of it. Even some laughs.
But the day’s arrived, as deep down we knew
it would, and spectacles streaming
from across the globe should convince
even the most skeptical of our soon-extinction.
Not that we listen to true madmen
anymore, but the older I get
the more certain I become: my father
would have been heralded a prophet
had he lived, would have joined his brethren
and sistren on every street corner, trumpeting
this end from the beginning.

 

The poem, from her book Madwoman, is also included in the anthology, Here, edited by Elizabeth J. Coleman. You can see her reading the poem here: 

Of course, there are many Cassandras out there, and who wants to listen to them? We humans are naturally designed to avoid pain and suffering—to shut our ears to any suggestion of it. Certain religions tell us we won’t even die. Not forever anyhow, not if we're good people, however that is defined.

As the popular Stanford Biology professor Robert Sapolosky points out in his book, The Science of Intelligent Achievement, one person’s negativity has a profound impact upon others' outlook on life. And worse, listening to negative speech for thirty minutes or more can cause neurons in the hippocampus to die. That’s right, those brain cells just give up the ghost when you tell them bad things are happening. After listening to negative speeches, a person’s problem-solving abilities are measurably compromised. I translate this to mean that after two years of listening to Trump, we Americans are dumber than ever. 

But, I remind myself, I should not be negative. I am not sure about this. 

When I was a girl, the youngest of six children, my mother read aloud to us to keep us from fighting at the dinner table. In the beginning she read the usual children’s books and fairy tales. Then one day she announced that she was tired of happy endings. She said American children and their parents like to think we all live in a Disney film. (She despised Walt Disney.) So she began reading us The Gulag Archipelago instead. I was only seven at the time. I remember my mind shifting from fairyland to the Soviet Union, where a boy could be imprisoned for stealing a cucumber, nude women were paraded before lusty men, and prisoners were tortured in unthinkable ways for crimes they never committed. For most, the only escape was death. “No happy endings here,” my mother announced gleefully.

I think I suffered from a form of literary PTSD back then. But I sometimes wonder whether my mother was right—Americans are raised to believe in a happy ending despite all evidence to the contrary. We think of ourselves as exempt from global crisis. Why else would we seek so desperately to deny the facts we are currently facing—that our planet is overheating, that we humans are to blame, and that we are in grave danger? 

But I keep telling myself I should not be negative. How can I be optimistic in this day and age? I feel so helpless. Can we poets do anything to help save the planet? Or to change minds about the reality of climate change? Is there a way to inspire hope in the curmudgeonly gloom-and-doomers like myself?   

That’s the challenge taken on by the environmental anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet, from Copper Canyon Press.
And what a beautiful anthology it is. I have rarely read an anthology from beginning to end without pausing, but this one was an exception. I felt, while reading it, that poetry was working is magic in me again, offering a renewed sense of faith, if not in the future, at least in the mystical power of poetry. There were so many stunning poems in the book, including “For the Children” by Gary Snyder (posted below), “Kiss of the Sun” by Mary Ruefle, and “First Verse” by Tim Seibles.  In the Forward, the Dalai Lama writes that “if we have the capacity to destroy the Earth, so too, we have the capacity to protect it.” I want to believe him. 

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light 

 

I opened this post with a poem by Shara McCallum, so I thought I’d close with a totally different kind of poem by her—and ask her a few questions. Shara McCallum is a poet I trust profoundly, and I always look forward to reading her work and hearing what she has to say.

Springbank, Great House
Port Antionio, 1796

Place of memory now in ruin.
This point overlooking the sea,
this cliff, this perch, paradise
to none but one who came
imagining he could be laird, could be
unmoored from class and caste.
The way past is always the way
through. Overland, we traversed
Blue Mountain, rocky passages
flanking us, abutted by gullies,
oversized plants casting their shadows.
The horses’ hooves trod and trod
until stone gave way to field,
and we entered the Rio Grande Valley,
approaching the house from behind—
first sight rising still in my mind,
bodying forth its false promise.
Leuk twice or ye leap ance echoes
now, late and fruitless. O, what foolishness
lies in the heart of man, gleaming
wish to be more that waits
for its chance to pounce and savage.

 

NA: I think of you as a social activist as well as a poet, professor, and mother. And you are writing these wonderful poems about Robert Burns. I’d love to hear you say a few words about your life as a poet in this difficult time—and how you put it all together.

SM: Thanks for all your kind words, Nin, and the good question here. I wouldn’t call myself a social activist. For me, that connotes being directly in the thick of political engagement or community organising and would mean being part of larger organisations or movements for social change in ongoing, sustained fashion—which I don’t do very much these days. Having said that, I do still distinguish between the work I do as a poet, when writing a poem, as being private vs. the work I do when reading poems and especially when teaching poetry, as being public and social. The latter comes out of being a poet but channels that self/knowledge/experience into my engagement with others and my service to others. When I’m in the role of facilitating workshops in community settings for example, which I do quite often, I am in the lucky position of being in the service of the art. It’s an ethical responsibility and one I take seriously. The bridge for me between being a poet and being a citizen of the world is in consciously seeing and speaking of the way that poetry, as with so many arts, can spur activism, how it can be a catalyst for change and for imagining the kind of change in the world we want to make manifest.

NA: Tell me about your new Burns project. How did this begin?

SM: The project began about four years ago when I was then living in London and had gone up to Scotland to give a reading. Being Jamaican and with a Scottish surname, I was naturally asked if I knew the story of Burns’s Jamaica connection. I didn’t. The story is a true one and is this: Burns had signed on to be a bookkeeper (an overseer) on a slave plantation in Jamaica. He had booked passage and was set to sail until a stroke of fortune changed his life. For many reasons, I found this story to be a thorn under my skin. Ultimately Burns didn’t go—he didn’t become imbricated in slavery—but what I couldn’t let go of is that he was ready to go. The book I’m writing is a book-length sequence of poems that imagines an alternate account of history, that gives one answer to the question of what would have happened had he gone.

NA: What is your secret to keeping the fire going—the poems, the engagement, the optimism?

SM: I love this question as it suggests I do all of this at once. I think, very much like you, I struggle with remaining optimistic right now, so I’ll speak to that part of your question at least. There are things I turn my attention toward deliberately that seem to help. One is history. As a poet, I am a lover of and lay student of the past (as the Burns’ project suggests) because it is a hopeful act for me, ironically, to interrogate the stories we tell of who we are. The past is always palpable to me, in the same way I know I carry my dead with me wherever I am in the present. This might sound morbid, but I often experience an eclipsing of myself—it is a tyranny the self!—in this way as being just the opposite. It’s a relief to see myself as small! Knowing and trying to sit with the disquietude of history reminds me that as bad as things might feel to me in the present, there have always been other moments like this one—and worse. This doesn’t diminish the losses I’m witnessing. Trump, who you mention specifically, is an unmitigated blight on this country and planet. The potential for ecological collapse is real and there is a huge amount at stake right now. But when I train my gaze on a different moment in human history or I take in a larger swath of time, that helps me to see this moment with greater perspective and, yes, with hopefulness. The other thing that helps has nothing at all to do with being a poet and everything to do with being a mother. I simply find I cannot endure for long the negative narratives you speak of so incisively in your blog here because I have a responsibility not to become entirely the Madwoman who wrote that poem you began with, who is very much drawn from the part of me that can easily and quickly fall into the mode of speaking she does. Knowing this about myself, for my children’s sake I have to sometimes shut out the ‘news’ and remind myself that life on this planet has always been chancy and that, yet, against those odds, it endures.

NA:I love that—against all odds, it endures. May we go together then, against the odds!

 

From Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry, published in the US and UK, most recently Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her work has appeared widely in the US, the Caribbean, and Europe, has been translated into several languages, and has received such recognition as a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. McCallum is a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University.

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

We love your posts, dear Nin. The idea of moving one's residency from a Disney movie to "The Gulag Archipelago" is terrific. Who's we? "Every buddy." -- DL

[Nin Andrews]

Thanks David!!