This weekend is ARM's Maternal Health and Well-Being conference, which is being held in a hotel in downtown Toronto. I went last night for the launch of Andrea O'Reilly's massive 846 page tome, Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, and the equally wide-ranging book Rishma Dunlop has edited, White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood. Most impressive. I love this group of women.
I'm presenting Saturday, a chapter I wrote for my thesis on the maternal body that I didn't complete. The chapter was the 'grounding in the body' and is about the process of conception. It took months to write, if I recall, between medical accuracy and writing it as a love poem of what happens deep within our bodies when we create new life. After finishing it, I intended to continue on with the 9 months of pregnancy, but it seemed such a daunting project I didn't get started. And a more difficult task - for me to humanize pregnancy by bringing the poetry back into the medical view would mean writing it from my vantage and my pregnancies were, of course, different to the experiences of any other woman's and I foresaw problems with issues of essentialism were I to embark on writing it.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Some photos and little vids from Thanksgiving up north
Hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving! With beautiful, warm weather this year, had a wonderful day with family up north. And, yay! - I also...
-
Basquiat at the AGO: An Untitled Portrait When asked about his frequent use of "carbon" (tar, asbestos), Basquiat shot back, ... -
Pablo Valdivia, Breathing Underwater translated from the Spanish by Ross Woods Guernica Editions, Fall 2014 102 pages Trade Paperback... -
direct link: The Dancer's Backskin An accidental drawing - in a new Moleskine notebook, I brushed water over watercolour pencil. The ...
No comments:
Post a Comment