Wrong is YOUR Name
On the poetics of wrongness; plus, a writing prompt
Dear reader,
I read Rachel Zucker’s essay “The Poetics of Wrongness,” and a miraculous feeling came over me. All of a sudden I wasn’t an overthinking, hypercritical, restless b*tch who really just needs to find a therapist and focus on understanding how my own wounds make life so unlivable. That is the miracle: the outrageous, bright-as-the-sun idea that maybe I’m not the problem here.
Zucker defined a poet as “one who feels wrong in a wrong world and is willing to speak even when doing so proves her wrong, ugly, broken, and complicit.” In another essay “Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood,” Zucker explains that she wrote her lecture on the poetics of wrongness because everyone around her was telling her that she was wrong. Writing about herself in the third person, she explains, “she felt so wrong she felt herself sinking and sinking into wrongness and realized poetry was always a place she had gone to when she felt wrong or wronged, not to feel better and, no, not to feel right, but to be in wrongness in some right relation.”
Last month, I started a course at Spirit Rock called A Year To Live that is inspired by Stephen Levine’s book by the same name. One of my classmates mentioned five transformative words that he learned from our teacher Vinny Ferraro: right now, it’s like this. The moment passed as the words remained in a nest of my questions. Is that phrase about acceptance—a way of tricking myself into being cool with whatever—or distance or truth?
I’m thinking now that it is more about taking a moment to see this moment, state, or condition with clarity. I think it is about the senses and getting as close to our own lives as we can. With Zucker’s words ringing in my mind, I offer this: What if we challenged the original phrase’s neutrality and gave ourselves a mantra for what we witness or experience as wrong? We go from noticing to naming: Right now, this is wrong.
I have only the power to name and love and suffer and die.
– Rachel Zucker
This reminds me of the comfort I never get from advice that asks me to immediately search for what I’m grateful for when I’m in distress—make a list! Go! Babies! Husband! Home! Water! Breath!—and I am supposed to feel better except I actually don’t. My really great boss told me a story about a guy with a tattoo that says “TWO” who reveals that it stands for “Things Work Out.” I feel no relief. Things Work Out for whom? Whose permanent and eternal truth is this? Not mine. Things Work Out so don’t stress what is actually stressful? Things Work Out so I let the uncomfortable feelings pass and *poof* into a cloud of inaction? I would rather accept the fuckery as fuckery. Right now, this is wrong. It might get better. I might have to do something about it (externally or internally). Still, right now, it’s messed up. And my body says, Thank you for saying that.
Among Zucker’s many definitions and descriptions of the poetics of wrongness emerged this one: “it is a poetics of what is.” That brings us back to Right now, it’s like this, but it doesn’t end there: “It is a poetics of what is, not what would be nice, and certainly not what is considered nice/best/normal/universal by those in power.” Living in my body, I am familiar with how the interests of those in power do not serve me, which is why I need words to anchor me while I face the decisions that have been made against me/us on a daily basis. “Right now, this is wrong,” I can say, feeling the ground beneath me instead of my hands going numb. My being is not wrong and the land is not wrong, but there is a wrong here, right now. To June Jordan’s I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name I add: Wrong is YOUR name. (You: U.S. government, You: Israel.)
You ever pick up a book with a subtitle like “Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation” and realize that it is not about the kind of suffering and liberation you had in mind? I get a similar feeling when I hear or read about acceptance or surrender as a mindfulness practice, when I read about how we all make ourselves suffer by resisting reality. To quote Zucker again: “There is a very big difference between being incarcerated in your body and having your body incarcerated.” I know that there is wisdom for me in those teachings, but it bothers me how rarely they acknowledge systemic oppression. I will continue to explore this, but in the meantime,
I invite you into the practice of conscious refusal.
Talk your shit with colleagues, neighbors, partners, and children: Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Point and yell. Whisper or write it down. Say it when you know it: Right now, this is wrong. Watch how it brings people together, inspires strikes, and gets the right people out of leadership positions. Feel how it calms the body, how you can settle into the coziest corner in your own body, when you tell yourself the truth.
Writing Prompt: Refusal
“Perhaps some people feel better when they write poetry. Perhaps some poems make the world less wrong. What I’m trying to explain is that a poet’s athleticism lies in her ability to stay in and with wrongness.”
– Rachel Zucker
Make a list of 10 things you do not accept or un/consciously refuse. Which wrongs feel closest to you right now? What are you supposed to accept but can’t (yet)?
Challenge this notion: Refusal is oppositional/antagonistic/hostile. Fill in the blank five times.
Refusal is ___.
Refusal is ___.
Refusal is ___.
Refusal is ___.
Refusal is ___.
Freewrite for ten minutes with these questions in mind:
What does refusal look, feel, sound like?
To what extent does refusal consume you? How do you refuse and keep living?
Consider what it means to have a “tantrum” and make space for yours on the page: “an uncontrolled outburst of anger or frustration”—go for it.
Write a poem that refuses something or emanates refusal.
Send me your poem, pleeeease!!!
THE STREAM
where I share writing/art that I have like from different literary magazines:
“Thick Time” (poem) by Tracy Fuad
“Being Here” and “5 Lives” (poems) by Theo Legro
“Bonus Child” (Essay?) by Beina Xu
In solidarity,
Yomalis
