Who's for Dinner? (HAWMC)

I think I'm funny with the title--last week, one of the topics I was teaching was how the brain processes linguistic ambiguity, and one of the sentences whose ambiguity my students had to explain was "Kids make healthy snacks." Lexical ambiguity three ways--can you see all three?


I love how my stream of consciousness on Simic yesterday segue'd both into the essay I had to write on Simic and into an aspect of this personal essay on which I've been working furiously the past month. I've been writing every spare minute since my last post! Even the harder prompts have been generative and helpful this month!


Yes, the HAWMC prompt for today is to imagine a dinner party to which we can invite five guests, yielding MFK Fisher's ideal party of six, I notice, including anyone, either living or dead. I agree that six is a good number for a dinner party--intimate enough to allow melding of ideas and sustain a single conversation rather than having people break off into little groups. But how on earth am I supposed to pick just five people from all of history? Additionally, am I to envision a dinner party based just on conversation, or am I to take into account food preferences too? Do I need to invite people who would be content to eat carrots with me, or do I plan an elaborate spread, none of which I'll eat, and spend the party bustling in and out of the kitchen like my grandmother does (did)?


Actually, I can make eating carrots seem fairly attractive, between this carrot cake...

 ...and these carrot brownie bites...

 ...and this carrot cream cake!

But anyway, who's for dinner? One of my first thoughts in response to this question was to recall a post from Lori a month back in which she and Amber and their partners met up in San Francisco. Since I used to live in the Bay Area too, and love both these ladies so much, from afar, at the time of reading all I could think of was that I wished I could have been there too. Add my Phil, and we'd have a party of six--we could all go to Cafe Gratitude or Millennium, if we left it in SF! I'd love to spirit Joanna down from Portland too. And definitely make sure Meredith joined us. That's the West coast...


If I stayed in the blogging world, there's several other ladies whom I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting in person and with whom I'd love to spend a relaxed evening. Basically, everyone whose blog I read is someone I would like to know. I imagine a wonderful evening in NYC with Gena, Lori and Michelle, Shannonmarie, my dear friend Bitt, and perhaps we could spirit Lisa down from Toronto to join us too--if I'm in NYC, anything is possible! There's a lady in Boston I'd love to have join us there too.


For another spin, as part of the prompt, they also suggest including some possible reference to your health condition. Well, one of my health conditions isn't exactly conducive to dinner parties (!) Another of my 'conditions' is one shared by very many artists and poets, so perhaps I'll just give my imaginary dinner party with artistic ladies (funny that all my dinner parties are mostly ladies) from across the years. This will be a spiritual banquet of souls, because I have no idea how to devise a meal that would please palates from two thousand years ago and from the present day and from across the world, as clever as I am about "dishes dissolving difference." So, around that table I would have Sappho, and Sei Shonagon, and H.D., and Adrienne Rich, and Naomi Shihab Nye. There's one other person I would invite, if I could exceed the "five" stipulation, and that would be my great-great-grandmother Rachel of Basra. I don't even know her last name--I don't know my great-grandmother's maiden name, and they all changed their names when they moved to Israel anyway. This Rachel, for whom my mother and several of her cousins are named, never left Iraq. She died before the expulsion of the Jews in 1950. But I would love to get to know her, to give her the opportunity to know one of her descendants, as she was apparently a barefoot doctor. My mother's healer persona and my own fascination with herbs and remedy-concocting, as well as nutrition, probably comes from her. Naomi, she, and I (ha, sounds like "Naomi Shihab Nye!) could talk about peace in the Middle East. Myself aside (if I am alive), Naomi is the only living poet in that bunch, and she exemplifies the life-affirming, welcoming spirit that would cement the group. 


I would love--love--to be present for a meeting between Sappho and H.D., and to be able to participate in that conversation myself. Last month I wrote a huge essay about H.D., some of it about how she uses Sappho in her poetry as a bridge to enable expression of deeply personal material behind the mask of translation. If you know me at all, you'll understand why that interests me so. I'd love to see whether the Sappho that H.D. projects is the same Sappho who lived on Lesbos in the 600's BC, and how H.D. would respond to getting to know the real woman. And I'd love for all of us to meet with Sei Shonagon from Japan, with her medieval courtliness and her feminine strength. I'd love for Adrienne Rich and Sei Shonagon to talk about the role of women in the world. Gosh, wouldn't you love to be at that party?

Who would YOU invite to your dinner party?

Maxine Kumin on Anne Sexton; In Praise of Pills; This Week's Herbal

With my holiday goodies-making well underway and now that my camera is found, I'm feeling an absolute logjam of food-related posts building up.

So I'd better slide in something non-food-related while it's on my mind.

At our poetry group on Tuesday, we listened to an audio recording of the poet Maxine Kumin, who continues to be lucid, potent, trenchant and poetic, now well into her eighties. She talked about herself, inevitably, but the focus of the talk was her friendship with Anne Sexton, which lasted from the late '50's until Sexton's suicide in 1974. As might be expected, it was some very inspiring and also very poignant listening. Meeting as we were to support one another in our poetry practice, we listened with delight to Kumin's description of the intense intimacy with which they workshopped one another's poems. The fact that they would workshop over the phone and thus receive aural impressions of the poem long before they saw it laid out on the page (which, Kumin said, was wonderful ear-training) was intriguing to all of us as a way to add another dimension to our appreciation and critical faculties.

I felt a little wistful for a time and place in which the big poetry world was so much smaller than it is now. I'm not saying they had it easy at all, especially with the gender bias they still encountered. Kumin received a rejection note from an editor saying he'd have loved to publish her poem, but he had published a woman writer last month and had to wait a few months before he could do so again!!! But the fact that it was a smaller world creates the impression (illusion?) that entry to it might have been easier then.

Kumin's freshness was most inspiring: she said a couple times that she almost felt like she had to apologize for the fact that she was still writing and publishing new poetry, "dinosaur" as she was.

Her words about Sexton's suicide were both difficult and important for me to hear, since I have some experience with both sides of that coin. I've had a best friend commit suicide, and have narrowly missed it myself. I was glad for Kumin that she didn't experience the intense guilt that most friends of suicides experience: she explained that she'd rescued Sexton from several previous attempts, and had been warned by her in no uncertain terms that next time she wouldn't see it coming. But, as she said, here almost forty years later she's still writing it out. It's something you never get over.

She lamented the state of medication at those times and, when speaking of Sylvia Plath (who killed herself in 1963, aged only 31, and with whom they had interacted a little at the Boston Poetry Society), lamented her short life, her genius and how little time she'd had. "Think of what she'd have been able to do if she'd just had the right pills," she said.

That got me. It's probably obvious from my earlier mentions about pills that I have some resistance toward them, and I spent years avoiding them. It's also true that lately I've been having some compliance issues around my own pill program, and the results have not been pretty. It's easy to feel paranoid about 'what they're doing to you,' and to want to be 'yourself,' unmediated, unmedicated. And then it's annoying when your treatment team chorus at you that your behavior is a symptom of your disorder... But finally, these last few days, with another increase in dosage and a little consistency, I'm feeling evened out and actually more like 'myself,' even if it takes this intervention. I'm still not sleeping much, though.

Kumin's "pills" comment came from her position of deep friendship with Sexton. I sometimes feel I have to protect people I'm close to from myself, or even avoid getting too close, to spare them that potential heartache. But Kumin's words actually might have persuaded me that just taking the pills might be the best way to 'protect' the people I care about. I just need to remember this for the times when I don't care anymore if I'm nice to be around or not (or if I'm around at all)...

Speaking of sleep, my hops tincture/syrup seems to be working like a charm for several people around here--a bunch of people having trouble sleeping got their gift early! As I mentioned, I can't use it because it's not compatible with my brain chemistry.

I realized that the herbal project I had been planning was a non-adrenally-impacting "pick-me-up," when what I really needed was to calm the heck down.

So, very very simply, I made an infusion of chamomile and lavender flowers.

They're so beautiful--I find them calming even to look at.

That's about a tablespoon and a half of each, in a quart of hot (not boiling) water. I added it to my regular morning brew of Rhodiola powder and Gynostemma leaves. (The Rhodiola seems to help with anxiety, and the Gynostemma is a great all-round tonic herb, and delicious.)

 But you'll need a strainer for this--the Rhodiola and Gynostemma behave themselves and settle to the bottom (roots and leaves) but the Lavender and Chamomile float up top (flowers).

I hope you're having a lovely weekend, enjoying the quiet of midwinter, preparing holiday goodies if that's your thing.