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My Skin, My Sanity
by Kat Duff
When I turned fifty, the only scar on my body was the thin trace of an incision on my right thumb where a doctor removed a sliver when I was nine
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Venus Examines Her Breast
by Maureen Seaton
Carnegie Mellon University Press; 2004; 65 pages
Review/Interview
by Lauren R. Mathews
It isn’t always clear from where poetry will emerge. The grocery store, a great love, or some previously unfathomable journey through loss. It is precisely that journey that Maureen Seaton leads readers through in her most recent collection Venus Examines Her Breast, a demanding book in which the reader is simultaneously witness to and recipient of the profound wisdom Seaton earned through the great loss of her mother.
Seaton’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in the early 70s and underwent a radical mastectomy. That same cancer, which metastasized into her bones, would end her life in 1999. Her mother’s prognosis was a few short months and Seaton took a leave of absence from her teaching position to become the primary caregiver. But a few months turned into a year and a half of trying cope with her own feelings while caring for her mother and watching her father collapse under the stress of losing his wife – not only physically, but mentally. Seaton’s mother had Alzheimer’s as well.
“My father came out that time with Parkinson’s. His hand began to tremble one day that second winter (1998). His nerves simply broke,” said Seaton. While she was fully dedicated to be with her mother until the end she admits she “was afraid at several points that I wouldn’t make it out alive myself”.
Her escape – writing poetry, collage style. Seaton kept a journal to “keep myself sane and to stay even slightly grounded” and she created visual art and collage poetry there. She included drawings of herself, her mother, and even glued in notes her mother had written and left around the house.
“There was one horrific afternoon and evening where she went through opium withdrawal, hallucinating, etc. and I went into the little spare room where I slept and wrote it all down. It was a way to handle my rage at the medical profession, which was really my rage at cancer and my own powerlessness to help my mother. The night of the day she died I wrote about the moment of her death. That year and a half was a whole separate world, an island, a banishment. People said things about God’s will – lots of God stuff – and it all sounded so incredibly goofy to me. Sometimes almost obscene. Writing helped with all of that.”
That journal became Venus, a collection that is unsettling, vivid, and packed with profound images. It is ultimately a beautifully narrated, hauntingly detailed message to the living. Seaton documented and explored the death she found herself surrounded with to unwittingly craft a guidebook of sorts, a territorial survey on death for the rest of us.
Not bad for poetry that was never intended for anyone else to see.
But that’s not to say the collection is easily accessible.
The book begins and ends with the only truly linear poems in the collection, a framing technique Seaton wisely employed knowing that her use of collage style “is more difficult to absorb” than lyrical or narrative poetry. It is precisely that difficulty that makes this collection so wildly alive and surreal between those frames without losing itself in obscurity or its own artfulness.
In one brief section from the 10 page poem You’re Babylon and I’m Brazil,
Seaton writes:
I wish my name were Zelda. I wish I were a filmmaker. When all of me
collides with all
of you will I be too busy? I just missed being killed by a huge window that
flew
off a red skyscraper and sliced a woman in half under the awning of a
pizzeria.
Peter Greenaway, watch over me.
There’s a story about a woman who was stepping on a manhole cover
when it blew her
sky-high. I fear that word, sky-high. It reminds me of how air is for sale
in the city, how lives
develop like cones into heavens. How much for the fourteenth floor,
a twenty-ninth?
How much for a cubic foot of space, a cloud caught in an air-shaft, how
much would you pay
to shake hands with the sun? Put’er there, I’ve heard people say
as they
hold out their hands.
Put’er there, pardner.
A tremendous amount of the element of the weird is weaved throughout the reality of this work. For instance, in You’re Babylon and I’m Brazil, Seaton arrived upon the scene of a terrible accident in Chicago moments after it happened.
“The fall before my mother died (1998), a woman I didn’t know was killed in downtown Chicago. She was walking south on Wabash, west side of the street, and a piece of window fell from high on the ‘red building’ and struck her. The little daughter, who was holding her hand when it happened, was physically unharmed. I arrived right there – the spot where the glass hit – a few minutes later. Venus is about that death as well, and about my own sense of vulnerability. The book is a heavy one. My hope is that the images and multiple small stories of the collages make it easier to take in.”
Venus is one of the few poetry collections that not only can be read from start to finish in one sitting but should be read that way. To take any poem in singularity causes a dissociation and rift in time that is not easily repaired without exploring the work as a whole. Thoughts and images are fragmented and circular, people die and live in the same stanza, colors are feelings are magic are lightening are violence are psychic.
From Riding Hood, Seaton writes:
Once I touched a dying woman. She could not be touched in the
conventional way. I stood at her feet – she looked nothing like she had
in
her other life – and I touched her beyond her skin where she was already
dying into, where no one could touch her but me.
Let’s take our wombs and hide them in the sunflower fields.
Oh night fighter, oh scrumptious fatigue.
“The movement of time was excruciatingly slow during the year and a half of my mother’s illness. Time was circular and seemed to spiral. It moved around us, sucked us down, my father, my mother, and I. We were in a little boat and we rowed our asses off toward a horizon of land we absolutely couldn’t see. The day my mother died was a flash. Flash! Then they took her out of the house and it was over.”
Seaton has finished a new manuscript of poems about caves and towers and sea monsters “sounds like fantasy,” she said, “but it’s still just my life”. She continues to write in her journal and is looking forward to discovering what poems will emerge this summer.
Other collections by Maureen Seaton:
The Sea Among the Cupboards
Fear of Subways
Furious Cooking
Exquisite Politics (with Denise Duhamel)
Little Ice Age
 Writer, artist and feminist activist Lauren R. Mathews is Literary Editor for Ink & Ashes. She writes and makes art to uncover and reveal the tragic, beautiful, and sacred landscape of women and femininity.
She, along with her partner Skye Enyeart, is the founder and executive director of Survivor Circle, an Illinois Not-for-Profit working to educate and advocate the use of art as a fundamental healing process in the aftermath of sexual and domestic violence. Additionally, Lauren is the poetry coordinator for Woman Made Gallery and is also the co-host for R.A.W. Chicago.
Lauren earned her degrees in Professional Writing and in Women’s Studies from Purdue University and studied political journalism at Georgetown University. Her work has appeared in PoetryMidwest and The Pedestal Magazine. She has exhibited at Woman Made Gallery, Havana Gallery, and Around the Coyote. |
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