May Theme : MOTHER
"Mothers are the ultimate scapegoats for our personal and political failings"
In what is a clear capitulation on my part to the sentimentality of corporate America’s holiday calendar, I’ve chosen the theme for A Poet’s Notebook this month to be: mother. At same time, it’s something I’ve always wanted to teach a seminar on and never have. The figure, the experience, the symbol, the blessing/curse of mother. From drag culture to Christianity, pagan goddesses and the real identity of Anonymous, what is not tethered to the true myth of mother? The poet I will focus on this month is César Vallejo, whose mother (and ensuing) absence I read as central to his imagination and elegiac sense of life.
—From a very early age, I was in love with my mother as the center of the universe. In 2016, the morning after she died, a stranger responded on Facebook to my status update about her death with three simple words: “The absolute loss.” That always bring me comfort for some reason.
—On the book jacket to Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (2018):