It is not a time to remain silent. But where should I not remain silent? And how?
I feel like I’m waking up on a volcano. I am exploding with writing, fast and in fragments from the abrupt shifts from my creative practice to parenting, to pedagogue, mentor, administrator, and very likely a modicum of ADHD (something apparently ever-increasing numbers of us suffer from).
Like many of us, I have been posting on social media almost daily for years… always with some reservations and discomfort. That has only accelerated in the current regime.
Ripples of fear run through almost every conversation I have lately. Bunker it, I heard myself say the other day. Bunker what? The idea? Maybe. I draft and delete far more than I share…I tell myself it’s not the platform, it’s me. I tell myself it’s not safe to speak.
Number 14 of the 20 notes offered in Timothy Snyder’s 2022 book On Tyranny is a suggestion to “establish a private life.” We are only as free, he suggests, as we are able to control what people know about us, and how they learn what they know. Our digital traces are being recorded. Specific words have been highlighted for removal. Foreign students in America snatched off the streets and deported for using these words.
Maybe this is why the urge to speak regularly in public has once more awakened.
Poetry has also awakened in me once more after a long breakup. Poetry seems to be where my desire to speak publicly is rooted. Poetry appears to have a will of its own. Poetry may even be a separate organ rooted in the lungs. It bangs at my ribs these days, demanding to be heard. It rattles me, and when I try to assuage it by reading poetry it lets me know that this is not enough…
This state of physical distress and unease feels very familiar. As does the question of where to speak.
I go to my shelf and pull down, Unleashed my 2009 publication of selected blog posts from 2005 to 2008, the golden age of blogging. To speak, in 2004, 2005, was rooted in poetry, and not just any poetry, poetry that comes from somewhere I am not necessarily in control of…a place of vulnerability.
In 2004 and 2005 the poems felt like they were erupting from me with such force I hardly knew what they were—whether they were poems in the first place. That work became Lemon Hound, my third book of poetry and my first with Coach House, born out of a desire to comment on everything I saw, read, thought.
But the poems weren’t enough. I had tapped into something that could not be contained—and I wanted a regular outlet for this urge. Then wordpress came along and offered me a platform to do that. I blogged in one form or another from 2004 to 2018. With support & enough backlash to know barbs and bombs will come my way.
Twenty years later wordpress has come back into my life, and once again offers me a path forward.
What does that look like? I hope to find out.
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