no more grandma poems
they said
forget your grandma
these american letters
don’t need no more
grandma poems
but i said
the grandmas are
our first poetic forms
the first haiku
was a grandma
& so too
the first sonnet
the first blues
the first praise song
therefore
every poem
is a grandmother
a womb that has ended
& is still expanding
a daughter that is
rhetorically aging
& retroactively living
every poem
is your grandma
& you miss her
wouldn’t mind
seeing her again
even just
for a moment
in the realm of spirit
in the realm
of possibilities
where poems
share blood
& spit & exist
on chromosomal
planes of particularity
where poems
are strangers
turned sistren
not easily shook
or forgotten
I discovered the work of Maine-based photographer, Jocelyn Lee, at a point in the pandemic when I missed intimacy with strangers with a deep ache—I missed the anonymity of standing in a crowd at a concert and singing our favorite lyrics and bobbing our heads in unison, I missed sitting and writing in a coffee shop for hours, watching the other people who were also immersed in that particular space and moment of smells and sounds. When I found Lee’s photographs, I felt that unexpected intimacy with strangers that I so badly missed during social distancing. The older women in her photographs are bluntly beautiful.
Her work features women’s bodies in all stages of life, but I was particularly drawn to these old ladies alongside bodies of water. Something about the openness of water combined with bodies that are typically disregarded feels like radical visibility.
Given the news of Roe v. Wade’s imminent reversal, I’ve been thinking about my grandma a lot lately. I love my grandma. She’s 96; born on Halloween, so a certified witch; grew up a Cambridge street urchin and daughter of a truck driver; had terrible taste in men; went through two husbands and doesn’t miss either of them; raised a bunch of kids to the best of her ability, which is to say, imperfectly; worked countless, shitty jobs; and was, until her late 80s, an unapologetic flirt. She loved men, especially ones with a uniform, and got two back-door abortions, one of which caused significant physical harm. She’s never been ashamed of who she is, which is pretty remarkable given how little society respects her body, her work, or her choices.
I’ve been thinking of my grandma’s stories about her back-door abortions, because behind news stories and public outrage, are real women’s lives. I heard this podcast years ago, and I still think about it—more specifically, I keep coming back to how clear the ethical consensus was across religious differences. I find it hard to picture such ethics of compassion in religious institutions now.
And this podcast does a good job of explaining whose bodies are being legislated and limited by abortion bans (spoiler: it’s poor women and women of color).
I used to work as an artist’s model, and I recently ran into the artist I posed for seventeen years ago. Apparently, he still sometimes uses the reference photos to paint me into a fairy or a mermaid. When I think about how my body’s changed from the one that’s somewhere in those photos and paintings, I’m not ashamed or sad or any of the feelings I’m supposed to feel. I kind of love it?
In her poem, “Ode to Wattles,” Sharon Olds writes,
I love to be a little
disgusting, to go as far as I can
into the thrilling unloveliness
of an elderwoman’s aging. It is like daring
time, and the ancient laws of eros,
at once.
I don’t have wattles or folds yet, but I’ve got some grey hair and some good smile wrinkles, and I’m kinda digging my “crone beauty, in its first youth.”
This essay by Ayla Samli is stunning. In it, she explores the nature of burls, those knobby flaws in trees, as guides for character strength, saying “I wish that I could convert my challenges into growth” as burls do.
Burls share commonalities with pearls—both fascinating irritations, both natural treasures, both grown under duress.
I wish that, from my discomfort and irritation, I could cultivate such effortless beauty.
It reframes past hurts and personal flaws as beauty and strength, something we carry with us as we age. It’s an argument for vulnerability (which I explored in a Notions & Notes a whole year ago), but it’s aspirational—as emotional beings, we’re not as well designed as trees.
Humans are experts at keeping pain private. We don’t always have the courage to display most of our injuries; we often port our pain on the inside.
Some of my burls grow inside and are mine alone.
I think her essay pairs particularly well with Lee’s photographs and Old’s poem. Look at old bodies, scarred and damaged bodies, fat bodies, and see them, and don’t feel shame for them or look away. Look at them, and see them as beautiful in their endurance.
Redwoods teach me to see the beauty in my own knotty scars, the gorgeous burls of my figured survival.
The Sea, The Forest
By Carl Phillips
Like an argument keeping the more
unshakable varieties of woundedness inside, where
such things maybe best belong, he opened his eyes
in the dark. Did you hear that, he asked…I became,
all over again, briefly silver, as in what the leaves
mean, beneath, I could hear what sounded like waves
at first, then like mistakes when, having gathered
momentum, they crash wave-like against the shore of
everything that a life has stood for. —What, I said.
Social media may be a soulless space of advertising and simplified rhetoric, but I’ve got a few accounts on Instagram that I truly love. I’ve been following Chinami Mori, a Japanese textile artist, for a quite while. Until her passing a year or so ago, her grandma, Emiko, was always the model for Mori’s work.
I love these images for the vitality and joy in them, for their art, and also for what isn’t directly shown: the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter. There’s such free silliness there!
After years of loving Emiko, I finally decided to learn more about SAORI weaving, Mori’s artform. It’s a contemporary art form founded by Japanese artist, Misao Jo, who built her own loom and began weaving free from traditional concepts and rules when she was 57. As with tree burls and wattles, SAORI celebrates the irregularities and flaws created in being made by human hands, making visible the individuality, creative expression, and authenticity of the process. It feels fitting to end with the four principles of SAORIweaving—they could be equally good guidelines for aging.
Consider the differences between a machine and a human being
Be bold and adventurous
Look out through eyes that shine
Inspire one another and everyone in the community.
Ok, bonus ending, arguably in connection to point 4 of the SAORI philosophy: I love it when you folks write to me about parts of these newsletters that resonate. And it was extremely special to learn that my friend who’s a sound artist, Jon Bellona, responded with a creative piece in response to the last episode. It’s in conversation with the part about wealth hoarding and what a billion dollars looks like.