sons

me and the boys

Daughter's foot

Butchy and Bernard

Scott & Abe - July 8, 2005 - home for vacation

Me and Abe, 1989

Choices by Gallagher

In today's first meeting of the Thurs writing group at Cancer Lifeline, I used Tess Gallagher's Choices as a trigger for writing and discussion:

Choices by Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, a nest is clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

© Tess Gallagher

Writing as Mother

Why did I return to the diaries at just this time – when I haven’t revisited myself in that place of other since I wrote them? The Friday before I made the decision to publish the diaries on-line, Abe had gone to the doctor. The prognosis was not good and I was living each minute as if I could lose him this second, now. I didn’t realize at the time how frantic I was, but did the only thing I know to do during periods of chaos and stress – put myself inside a page.

This time I did not write, not frantically anyway. I went to the year the analysis began, 1990. I wanted to find me and Abe there, and though we were married nine years prior, I went to the analytic diary to remember who we were in relation to that period, to see what I could see of us, who we have been throughout our twenty-four years together; what I’m finding is good because it helps me understand how we’ve lived our lives together, why and how we made it through, or didn’t, and then did again.

I had been blocking something else too: I started the analysis, after eleven years of psychoanalytic therapy with the same man I was to do the analysis with, the month after my son was hit by a car. That was more than I could tolerate. He was in Harborview for two weeks and at home for another two weeks, then back to school on crutches for the next six months. But I remained on crutches and, if not for the writing, would be there still; for it is the writing that helps me care for others, and it is the writing that nurtures and cares for me.

-Esther Altshul Helfgott

The Diary Form

I am finally getting the psychoanalytic diaries together and publishing them in diary form. I have always envisioned presenting Psychoanalysis: The Magic and The Lie as a diary, a representation of the self over time. But my decision has been years in the making, back and forth from non-fiction to fiction (no matter I disown myself within the mindset of fiction and have never been comfortable there, except as Reader) to non-fiction, essay and poem, to fiction and back again, gratefully, to non-fiction in diary form.

I have been afraid of putting the whole truth on the page, to have it out there in plain sight, all the while it is only the truth I mean to tell, but always, and to tell it primarily to myself. I resisted publishing primary source material. How much easier to escape into secondary source, to turn the self into one. I neglected the diaries when, from the beginning, I knew the story of my analytic relationship needed to be published in the mode I had written it in, while I was experiencing it.

Finding my inoculation certificate and writing about Dr. Whittle the other day helped me understand once again how important fragmentary writing is to showing the writer’s work on the move, of discovering a piece of paper and remembering through its touch and absence of sound, how frantic and loud the past.

A half dozen pages or so of my fragments will appear soon in Olivia Dresher’s anthology, In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, Impassio Press (2006). In these pages I write about my mother’s death, easier to hang out in the air, I suppose, than the dirt in the analytic relationship, which held her and all the rest.

-Esther Altshul Helfgott

Dr. Whittle

Dr. Henry Lyman Whittle of 1229 N. Calvert St. signed the certificate below. He was our pediatrician even after we moved up from East Baltimore. I never saw such a doctor. When Dot and I were sick he'd sit by our beds and draw us Disney characters - Mickey and Minnie riding bikes, Donald and Goofy on skates. He told Mother she didn't have to go to all the trouble of making a pot of chicken soup; a can of Campbell's was just as good, together with warm tea, toast and apple sauce. We could also have an Orangeade: half a glass orange juice, another half water and a ton of sugar stirred in. After he gifted us with his spectacular drawings (he could have worked for Disney), he'd sit at the kitchen table, sip a cup of tea with out parents and politely answer Daddy's questions about our brother becoming a doctor, all part of the $2.00 house call. It seemed every visit was the same, even when we had to charge it.



I wonder why, if I got the shot in 1942, did it take until 1944 to issue the certificate.

Neologisms

Neologisms of an Ornithologist in a Quiet Room

Curled like a bird in its mother's nest
the patient lies on a cot mumbling: Roomboom.
Quietroom. Booby-hatch my egrets'
regrets. Magpie, tell Wagatail:
strap me to swallowlegs.
Blue-throated doc butcherbirds my brains
again and again. Nutcracker nurse nightjars my back.
Sniper trails me. Yellow-bellied sapsucker
twists. Oh, my arms pintail my sage.
Oh, girl, whippoorwilling
girl. Swallow me. Let the wren.
Let the quail, swallow me.

-Esther Altshul Helfgott

from the Homeless One: A Poem in Many Voices
originally published in Seattle by Kota press, 2000
Now, thanks to the German psychotherapist, Dr. Rudolf Suesske of Cologne, Homeless has a website and is available for theatre use and in academic environments. It has been particularly effective in abnormal psychology classes.

terza rima

I'm terza rima, and I talk and smile. Where others lock their rhymes and thoughts away I let mine out, and chatter all the while. I'm rarely on my own - a wasted day Is any day that's spent without a friend, With nothing much to do or hear or say. I like to be with people, and depend On company for being entertained; Which seems a good solution, in the end. What Poetry Form Are You?

Me and the Kids, 1991

At Sea-Tac
& off to grad school ...
We all finished.
I took the longest,
16 years.

Children

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand. - Sylvia Plath, Morning Song

Children,
I can’t imagine
not being your mother.
Who else could
be, with your eyes like mine
and your curly heads of hair.
The three of you, parents now
in your own right,
mirroring your children
as they mirror you
and you me
with your smiles
and idiosyncracies,
community involvement.
Not that you don’t
suggest
your father too,
but I don’t think of other sides
of you (as much as I should).
I think of me
and you with me
the single parent years
of roaming the house
with absences
we tried
to fill.

-Esther Altshul Helfgott

Anna Swir's A Woman Writer Does Laundry

I have introduced a number of Anna Swir's poems to my classes. Today I used A Woman Writer Does Laundry from Talking to My Body to trigger and discuss writing. I had planned to use it in another class, but I'll stop here. I think there's a translation problem. Read it and ask yourself if you know or have known of any woman who would use the word relaxation after doing laundry, especially in the old style. Perhaps the male translators forgot the question mark after Relaxation? And why interrogation marks chosen instead of question marks ? Politics? On second thought, I'll use it in Friday's class too. Some good work and discussion resulted, and I'd like to know what others think, especially of the translation. Is the poet being sarcastic? Or is she genuinely relaxed after doing her laundry? But, of course, this is not the point of the poem, is it?

A Woman Writer Does Laundry

Enough typing.
Today I am doing laundry
in the old style.
I wash, I wash, rinse, wring
as did my grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
Relaxation.

Doing laundry is healthful and useful
like a washed shirt. Writing
is suspect.
Like three interrogation marks
typed on a page.

-Anna Swir
Translated by Czeslaw Milosz & Leonard Nathan
Copper Canyon Press, 1996

Iser, 1899-1964

Iser is pronounced 'eeser' and is Yiddish for Isidor

He died on August 15, 1964,
during that hot hot summer.
Mother sent his clothes down to Mississippi
for the Freedom Riders,
or anyone else who needed them.
I wish she would have saved just one item for me,
something with his smell still on it.
One of his shirts, maybe, with the stained collar
or the worn down brown Oxfords
that he always polished.
I would have loved the fedora he wore all winter
or a pair of white socks
that he filled with Dr. Scholl's foot powder.
She could have left me anything: a handkerchief,
his bathing suit, an undershirt,
or those thin black leather shoe laces
he always broke.
I would have liked the shaving brush I bought him.
or the striped tie he spilled soup on.
His false teeth and the cup he put them in,
the tall glass he sipped hot tea from.
His Russian-English dictionary.
Or his bifocals and damn racing forms.
She could have left me anything:
even the belt he hit my brother with.

-Esther Altshul Helfgott

Can A Diva Blog?

for Puah

To blog is to unmask the self -
(forgive the cliche).
So I ask you,
Dear former diva:
Can a diva blog?
You say:
The ever-present
and mysterious wall
between stage and audience,
not to mention the orchestra,
never allows such naked presence.
When diva-ing, you say,
one always wears the persona,
the mask.
Yet, the blogger
spills herself into the public domain.
Hiding is anathema.
Even omissions tell a story.
So how do you, a former diva,
taught to unknow the self,
reconcile the difference
between who you were then
and who you are now?
How does the poet in you,
the wanting-to-tell poet,
survive all those soprano deaths
on the stage?
-Esther Altshul Helfgott

Sylvia Plath's Morning Song

For the week of June 13, 2005, I will be using Morning Song from Ariel to trigger and discuss writing in all three Cancer Lifeline classes:

Morning Song
by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.


From Ariel by Sylvia Plath, published by Harper & Row, 1966. Copyright © 1966 by Ted Hughes. All rights reserved. Academy of American Poets Used by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Dear Esther: Sexism & Poetry

I recently attended a poetry reading to support a friend and to read during open mike. I had attended this venue before though not for several months .... My main reason for staying home is that I have read as a featured writer for this particular venue but always left feeling “outside” the regular group of (white) men who all know and support each other, while tolerating women with the courage to read. Theirs is a style of writing that is clever, witty, and fast paced, with a kind of heartless verbal flippancy (I am being generous here) that does not speak to me. I have chosen to avoid it.

By organizing groups for women only, you have tapped into a deep vein of longing within me to be heard and appreciated BECAUSE I am a woman with experiences unique to women and where I don't have to adopt the verbal phyrotechnics and testoserone-laced punchiness of the male writer's clique. I remember reading a bio of Sylvia Plath and the behaviors that endeared her to her male colleagues, drinking, smoking, running in their circles. Still, she got away with writing about mothering, female sexuality and subjects men were not writing about.

The other night, one man walked around the room growling his poetry, singling out a pretty young woman for some choice lines. It bordered on offensive behavior, but the men loved it. Clever word play, allusions to jazz, mean streets, made-up characters etc. I hope you know what I mean. I would no sooner read a poem about birth or "womanly" things to these men than I would read naked. Women who grab their attention often speak in the same voice and I hear the same stridency. I hope you will post this on your blog. I would like to hear what others have to say on this subject.

Signed,

Frustrated in Seattle

Sylvia Plath? I don't think so ...

Don't believe this quizz result for one minute. I love being alone, and Despair is not my middle name. Nor am I particularly ambitious. Who writes these ridiculous quizzes anyway?

You are Sylvia Plath. People think you are sweet
and pretty, but inside you are raging pit of
ambition and despair. Darkness is your friend,
and you would do well to avoid being alone.


Which Famous Modern American Poet Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Actually when I write poems that are filled with darkness and despair, I feel quite liberated afterwards, for having gotten the junk out. Now, if people can't read my work because it is filled with the stuff of childhood that makes some poets cringe, so be it. I write primarily to survive, not to produce a great product. If I happen to create poems or prose that editors want to publish, lovely; gravy. Meanwhile, I'm still alive and can contribute to the well-being of others. Sylvia Plath has always pissed me off; I don't blame, and never have blamed, Ted Hughes for her suicide. End of soap box.

Me and Dot

Me & Dot in front of Sussman's Drugstore, next to the tailor shop at 3603 Park Heights Ave,where we lived with our parents and brother. (In back was the kitchen and upstairs were the living room, bathroom and bedrooms). Mother made us these outfits. She liked to dress us as twins. c 1948.

Across the street was Goldberg's with the fruit and vegetable bins out on the sidewalk. Inside were groceries and two pinball machines. Out on the stoop, neighbors whispered that people bet Numbers over there. (I think the police on the beat did).

Three or four doors down was Gottlieb's Cheese shop and down from there, the kosher butcher which wasn't supposed to be open on Sundays so he let everyone in the back door and the cops pretended not to see, probably because they were paid off.

Up the street was the six year old German boy we played with. He owned the one television on the block, at least the one we knew about. His mother let us come in to watch Howdy Doody, but our father didn't like those people because they were German and next door to them was a bubbe with purple numbers on her arm.

Can you find me?

Dear Pat

Stop worrying about my instructions.
They're not that difficult.
First, you crouch down. Squat.
Take a deep breath.
suck in, hold it, and slowly let go.
Dream of completion and sky.
Then, push.

Don't think about blacking out.
You won't. And if you did, so what.
Nine women will be with you.
The men will be in another room.
The women will sing.
They will hum. They will rub your back.
And chant.

Take a deep breath, Pat.
Suck in, hold it, and slowly let go.
Dream of completion and sky.
Then, push.
Push.

- Esther Altshul Helfgott

originally published in Midway Review

Mercy

This morning I wanted to set up the Orion Telescope CD for my husband, the one that accompanied the telescope I gave him for his 76th birthday last year, but every time I try to get him to use the computer, even if it doesn’t concern email or the internet, he turns his nose up, as if it comes from a different world; and, indeed, it does. I’ve thought I could tempt him with Science since he’s a retired pathologist and ever since he was a kid, went to the Bronx High School of Science, won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search Award and I don’t know how many others, he has been hypnotized by anything Science. But now his eyes go elsewhere, and I give up the notion of learning more about planetary systems with him, at least for today. I start to get up to do the dishes, but his words stop me:

This room has so much mercy in it

I sit back down. What do you mean?

The goodness of it...

Hmmm?

the books, the words
that fall from the shelves

The quiet ... the softness ... and poetry
The whole aura of this place

With Bach playing in the background?

Yes and the bananas ...
There’s a certain tenderness in bananas

In the oatmeal
with the milk poured over it?

Yes, and the picture in front of the Freud books
it has a certain peacefulness to it

The one of you and Butchie?

Yes, on the porch,
in the sun.
We’re almost praying

Praying?

Yes, praying ...
for things future … for things past ...

I've always thought of the kitchen table in our library/family/everything-in-it room as a crowded mess. Not until now and this conversation with my husband, tired and infirm, have I considered that there could be anything as grand or as simple as mercy here in our scrambled lives.

Esther Altshul Helfgott