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.
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