Richard Jeffrey Newman's Amazon Blog

It's 6:30 AM on a Sunday morning. I should be sleeping, but I'm not. Instead, I am sitting here on my living room couch in an apartment that is uncharacteristically quiet, not just becuase my wife and son are still sleeping, and my dog, instead of nudging me to take him out,  is curled quietly in the big green chair in the corner, but because there is not much noise coming in from outside. The windows are wide open, but the street is quiet. Only one or two birds are singing; I don't hear the usual barking of dogs out for a walk; and even the main road that sits just on the other side of our northern-facing windows sounds like it is empty of the usual traffic--because even on Sunday morning, there is usually traffic.

I like mornings like this. Before my son was born, I used to get up this early every morning so I could write. It was a habit my wife got me into when she suggested that I change my teaching schedule so that I taught my classes later in the day and freed up my mornings. Before that, I often wrote until after midnight, and I was, of course, exhausted the next day. After my son's birth, however, that all changed. Early mornings became filled with him, and, even now, when he's seven, early mornings are still almost always not my own. During the week, it's about getting him out of bed and into the car so he won't be late for school, and on the weekends, it's almost always giving him the time he doesn't get with me during the week. I begrudge him none of this, but it does make mornings like this one, when I can be by myself and write or reflect or listen to music without interruption, very precious.

One of the reasons I couldn't go back to sleep this morning was the feeling of helplessness that has come over me lately about two issues, one on the stage of world politics and one on the stage of the blogosphere. The first is the current, two-front war going on in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians on the one hand and Israel and Hezbollah (with Lebanon caught in the middle) on the other; the second is a discussion thread I have become involved in on the blog Alas which has to do with a fundamental disagreement among feminists about the stance feminists ought to take regarding the sex industry. On the one side are those who believe the sex industry is the quintessential expression of patriarchy and needs therefore to be eliminated, completely abolished. On the other side are those who believe that sex work can be a freely made choice and that what needs to happen is, rather, the reform of the sex industry, so that the people working in it can be safe and so they are respected for the work that they do. What makes me feel helpless in these two apparently disparate issues is that resolution just does not seem possible. Neither side in the Middle East conflict seems truly to be willing to do what needs to be done to achieve peace; and neither side in what the writer of the post on Alas calls the "Sex Wars" seems willing to listen closely enough to the other to hear that they are not, or at least in my opinion that they are not, as far from each other as their rhetoric would suggest.

My point in writing this morning, however, is not to inflict on you my opinions about either of these issues. Rather, what ties them together in my imagination at this moment is the relationship between the helplessness I feel when facing them and why I became a writer in the first place.

To say that I grew up in a home where I felt voiceless would be an understatement. Not that I was quiet. Quite the contrary. I had something to say about everything, but what I had to say rarely reflected what was really going on inside me and, more to the point, I felt helpless to make what was really going on inside me heard. Part of this helplessness, of course, came from the dynamic of my family, the place I occupied within that dynamic and the fact that I did not yet have enough distance to be able to understand how that dynamic worked; part of the helplessness came from the fact that I lacked a vocabulary to talk about either the sexual abuse that had taken my voice from me in the first place or the violence, some of it sexualized, that I had witnessed in my home (I should add that neither of the two men who sexually abused me were family members.); and part of the helplessness, once I hit puberty, came from the fact that, like every other adolescent I have known, I was convinced the world would never understand me anyway.

I have been, for as long as I can remember, a voracious reader. If I didn't have to earn a living, attend to my son, my wife, my friends and all the other facets of my life that make it mine, I would love nothing more than to spend my time reading. When I was in elementary school, I read through the entire science fiction section in the children's section of the library across the street from where I lived and so the head librarian gave me permission to go to the other side of the building and take out books from the young adult and adult sections. The stories, of course, were an escape for me, and the worlds created by Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, Larry Niven and others became worlds that I carried around inside me, that I could enter whenever I wanted to, but, and this thought has just occurred to me now, I don't remember ever thinking that I wanted to write stories the way they did. The literature that captured my imagination in terms of whether or not it was a kind of literature I might one day be able to produce was poetry.

There was something about the voice of a poem, the way a poem seemed to embody the voice in which it spoke, that compelled me. The voice in a poem was not the voice of a character, or at least not in the ways that characters in novels had voices. Rather, the voice that spoke in the poems I read seemed to me to be speaking moments chiseled onto the page and into time, moments of clarity. They were saying what was important to say, what they had worked themselves up to be able to say, and somehow that saying encompassed and included not the fictional world of a novel, but the real world in which I lived. I don't mean that I thought the poems were speaking to me, but rather that, in their speaking, through their speaking, the world was made manifest. I would not have said it this way at the time, but I think what I was responding to was poetry's capacity for naming, something I have written about here.

I think now that the reason telling stories did not occur to me, that when I decided to express myself in writing, I chose poetry, is that I was not yet ready to tell my stories, which is ironic, since I think that some of the strongest poems I have written, some of the strongest poems in The Silence Of Men, are narrative poems. It took me a long time to understand that narrative is also a form of naming and that naming what narratives name is a deeply political act, and that it is, in fact, the competing narratives in the Middle East and among feminists that make the two situations I started out talking about so intractable. Because there is the politicized naming of ideology and the naming you arrive at at the end of an exploration, the name you discover because you have looked at something deeply enough, that its name presents itself to you. I am thinking of Khaled Mattawa wrote in the Introduction to Without An Alphabet, Without A Face, his translations of the the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef: "Poetry can only be an exploration of ideology, not a means of expressing belief in it."

The early poems in which I attempted to name my experiece of abuse were almost entirely concerned with expressing my belief in my own victimization; I was not interested in exploring what had happened to me. Nonetheless, those poems broke the silence in which I had felt myself to be shrouded, and when I chose to call my first book of poems after the poems called "The Silence Of Men," it was because I felt I had finally written a poem that named what is at the center of my writing. Here it is: