https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-12-09 18:18:002022-02-25 17:17:51“Pandemic Funeral: A Duplex,” by Andy Young (Poetry ’11)
The patient sits on the exam table. The doctor says, Seatbelt? Sunscreen? Calcium? Good, good, good. Have you had a mammogram within the last year?
Well, I changed health insurance and we moved and so—
Have a mammogram.
The patient pushes open the door to the mammography center. She sees that it shares space with a doctor’s office that employs one of her ex-husband’s best friends, a man who luxuriates in his perceived charm. The patient re-considers her appointment, but goes in anyway. There is a Keurig in the waiting room, the scent of vanilla espresso faint but distinct.
The patient states her name.
The receptionist says, I love your hair. That big messy look. Sure wish I had it.
The patient has had a stressful day. She has not showered or even really eaten, except almonds. She hands over her insurance card and license.
I’m here for a cancer screening?
The receptionist winks, her mascaraed lashes dropping like a crow’s wing. I’d make a terrible bartender. Can’t tell how old anyone is. I’d guess you’re about thirty?
The patient is fifty-one. Her hair is greying and there are lines around her eyes and mouth. She points these things out.
Receptionist: Well, you look GREAT.
The patient ignores her, out of politeness. Why do some women find the dishonesty of flattery comforting? She looks away, like a cat.
Love your bag, the receptionist says.
*
Breast as object: The boys of the patient’s youth, trying to cop a feel. What exactly did they want? To squeeze a breast? To simply touch one? What drives the desire for this ductal network? How odd it seemed that a boy would want to suckle at her breast, like a baby. How erotic. Sex is the most inexplicable and mysterious part of any person. She Googles the first boy who ever touched her breast and he’s on YouTube saying he’s “very intentional about building a great workplace culture” and then she finds an obituary for his wife, who died of a rare cancer just weeks ago.
A tech says, I’ll take you back.
To when, the patient thinks, following the tech.
She is told to remove her shirt and bra and put on a warm pink robe.
Take off your robe.Stand here, next to the machine. Lean forward. Raise your arm. Turn your head to the side. I’m going to compress the breast now. I’m sorry. Are you okay? Take a breath and hold it. Now let it go.
On the screen are white branching ducts leading from the milk-producing lobes to the nipple. The patient does not know how to read the image. Except that there is a small solid circle among the branches.
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We are a few months into my “honesty-only” policy when my son asks the question. “Why are bananas so cheap?” We are in the supermarket. He is taking notes for an elementary school project about balancing budgets, making informed family decisions. Behind one pink ear, he has tucked a chewed pencil. Evening is approaching and the last rays of sun pump their quiet heat through the window glass, illuminating persimmons, kumquats, other expensive exotics. “Maybe it’s a fire sale,” I say. Our shopping cart wobbles as I push it. I tell him what I read about bananas dying out, about the fungal disease slowly decimating their numbers, as I steer three working wheels, and one broken one, out of the section marked “Produce.”
At the register, I hang back while my son tabulates his expenses in a notebook, places each item on the conveyer belt with care, without my assistance. Though the cashier is uninterested in the particulars of his project, he tells her about them in great detail. She rings up his selections with a red laser beam that recalls a television program I used to watch with my grandfather back when I was my son’s age. Before we even knew phrases like “genetic predisposition.” Before anyone understood all the different ways words like “heart” and “disease” could fit together. Women in short dresses wielding astral powers, ray guns, dynamite calves. My grandmother, in the other room, frying a chicken.
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Your Salient is a book of poetry about the Third Battle of Ypres in World War I, a battle that is also called Passchendaele. Do you think of it as epic poetry? Or is it part lyric? If any part of it is epic, what are you singing—what is your theme?
I never thought about genre before or during the writing of it. Nor retrospectively. Let me think… There are lyric moments. Formally, it can be read as a sequence of lyrics, although I think of it as a single poem. It was very hard to pull out individual poems for a submission or a reading. But it’s not an epic. It’s not narrative, there are no named heroes. The war itself—courtesy of the machine gun and the artillery barrage—broke any lingering ideas of heroic conquest. No imaginable Achilles thereafter. One could say that there are elements of epic that have been picked out and used differently. It deals with a war. It alludes to examples of individual and collective courage. And, of course, as in the Mahabharata and the Iliad, it turns out there are gods hanging around in theatre. But if I had to tick a box, I would choose threnody, a song for the dead. A sub-genre under lyric, I think. Maybe this is a monody for The Missing, who, for the duration of the song, may be present, and safe within its confines. But there’s another layer, the speaker’s quest. Whoever she is. Her effort to see without quite knowing what that means as she wanders around between the lines in this temporal and geographical No Man’s Land.
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Commencement Speech, Delivered to a Herd of Walrus Calves
Young walruses, we all must adapt! For example, some of your ancestors gouged the world with four tusks, but you can grow only two. It’s hard to say what evolution plans for your kind, but if given a choice, you should put in a request for thumbs. Anyway, congratulations! You’re entering a world that’s increasingly hostile and cruel and full of people who’ll never take you seriously though that will be a mistake on their end. You are more tenacious than they know. You’ll be a fierce and loyal defender of those you love. You will fight polar bears when they attack your friends and sometimes you’ll win. Of course, odds always favor the polar bear, but that’s not the point. The point is courage. The point is bravery. The point is you are all fighters even when the fight in which you find yourself ensures unpleasant things will happen to you. For example, the bear will gnaw apart your skull or neck until you stop that persistent twitching; it will eat your skin, all of it, then blubber, then muscle, then the tears of your loved ones, in that order; it will savor every bite, and you will just suffer and suffer until the emptiness can wash over you. The good news is: things change! For example: the environment. Climate change, indeed, is bad for you, but it’s worse for polar bears whose conservation status is now listed as “vulnerable” which is one step removed from “endangered” which is one step removed from “extinct” which is a synonym for Hooray! None of you get eaten!
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How has teaching poetry workshops to men who were formerly incarcerated impacted your writing process?
First, I’ve never taught before working with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men. Just the act of developing a class that looks closely at poems and preparing for leading discussions with the men have improved my knowledge of poetry. I believe this is one of the reasons why teachers and professors are so smart about the areas they teach. They’ve developed a comfort with and a deep knowledge of the material.
The other profound discovery is that the men in my workshops are no different than anyone we might talk to on the bus or waiting in line at the DMV. Yes, they’ve made mistakes but that doesn’t define them. Far from it. Most of them have moved past that time in their lives and are just doing their time so they can get out and lead normal lives. Before we do any writing, I always give a warmup exercise where they recall something from their lives. It’s usually something fairly mundane. I’ll ask them, for example, to talk about a time where they had a good time with other people. Their stories are real, human, sometimes moving, and often unexpected.
It has opened me up to having a much greater appreciation of people who have made mistakes (who of us hasn’t made terrible mistakes?).
All of us have made mistakes—and I am aware of and check my privilege as a white person. Where law enforcement is concerned, there’s little tolerance for mistakes—especially for many people of color.
How have the events of the past few years impacted your creative process (if at all)? Do you feel a certain urgency to make sense of this time through poetry?
It has intensified the energy behind my writing. Both my wife Mary Hawley and I retired to write full time. Before COVID, I was writing every day but also going out to readings and other cultural events three or four times a week. Starting last March when everything shut down, it gave me the time to focus even more time on writing.
I have spent my life as a poet writing between the cracks of my work and other responsibilities. Now I have been given the incredible gift of being able to write full time. I am determined not to waste it.
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…THERE ARE PEOPLE, I guess, who regularly regard the air—cloud watchers lying on their backs in the grass, contemplating the meaning of a breeze. I come from a different tradition of nature watching. What I have always wanted is contact. “The solid earth!” as Henry David Thoreau once put it, standing atop a barren mountain. “[T]he actual world!” The material things, the rocks and soils: the dust from which life emerged, to which we will return.
Until recently, the closest I’d come to contemplating the sky was a five-week commitment to sunrise. A few years ago—after the death of my father, after a dismaying US election, amid the final fraying of a six-year relationship—I canoed a thousand miles down the Mississippi River, camping on islands and sandbars. I wanted to be in a landscape that made me feel small, that showed me something bigger. I made it a point to rise before dawn each morning so that I could watch the sky shift from the gray scale of morning twilight to gentle oranges and pinks, until these were overtaken by the spreading blue.
But what was a sunrise? What produced such pastel magic? These were questions I could not answer—questions I did not even think to contemplate.
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