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Eyes AvertedJanuary 27, 2011 One of the first poems I had published as an adult -- quite possibly the very first -- was "This is a poem about eyes averted." (Whether that was the title or the first line or both I'm not sure now, and I'm not sure I ever decided one way or the other.) I wrote it around 1983. It was published in Women-Identified Women, a nonfiction anthology, the following year. I hadn't reread the poem in many, many years, but these lines stuck in my memory:
The other thing I remembered about "eyes averted" is that it was very hard to read aloud. Not hard in the emotional sense: hard in the sense that the words and phrases resisted oral delivery. I wrote it before I started to read in public. Once I started reading in public, I paid a lot more attention to how my poems sounded. I read every line aloud while I was writing it, often several times. Now I read prose aloud while I'm writing it. Hell, I read passages from the books I edit aloud when something isn't working and I can't figure it out. Working on To Be Rather Than to Seem, I wanted to reread "This is a poem about eyes averted." It was a significant milestone in this writer's education, after all. Trouble was, I couldn't find a copy of it. The anthology it appeared in had been in one of the many boxes of books that went into my parents' basement when I moved to Martha's Vineyard; after nearly 25 years of mold-and-mildewing, they were all thrown out when the house was sold in 2009. I couldn't lay hands on a manuscript copy either. It must be in a folder or envelope or scrapbook somewhere in this apartment, but my scrounging didn't turn it up. Rather than waste any more time looking, I ordered a copy of Women-Identified Women from one of the booksellers in the Amazon Marketplace. Now I'm glad I couldn't find the manuscript. My recollection of the front cover was accurate -- no surprise there, since we sold plenty of copies at Lammas Bookstore (and nearly always wrote it up as WIW on the sales slips). JEB must have taken the photo, right? The copyright page confirmed it: indeed she did. So many of the other names were familiar, starting with the editors, Trudy Darty and Sandee Potter. I'd met both of them through a mutual friend -- who wrote the book's foreword, which is quoted on the back cover. Trudy and Sandee were partners. Trudy died of cancer after the manuscript was completed but before it was published. So I read and reread "This is a poem about eyes averted." It still resists reading aloud, but it's a pretty good poem if I do say so myself. Reading it brings back to mind some of the incidents that went into it, like this:
and this:
I'm pretty sure I remember who made that remark, and if I'm right she herself was raped a year or so later, down by the Other Side, the lesbian bar on 8th Street, S.E. What really strikes me is how in "eyes averted" I was already working with (obsessed by?) the themes that grew into the essay "My Terrorist Eye" more than 20 years later. The bombed-out Belfast train station appears in both works. Both works explore how we keep putting one foot in front of the other even though we know that very bad things can happen to us without warning. This isn't the first time that To Be Rather Than to Seem has sent me back to my own past, and it won't be the last. The experiences and writing that sustained me then can keep me going today. The truism about wood is that "it'll warm you twice -- once when you cut it, and again when you burn it." Writing has the same power.
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