Larissa Shmailo: In Paran

Over the last month, I have spent a good deal of time with Larissa Shmailo's In Paran, released by Blazevox this year. I have had a hard time coming up with a workable angle, although I like the book very much. Shmailo incorporates elements of many different strains and styles, but I think the overriding characteristic of the book is its affirmative tone. This does not preclude a tragic element, but the book wraps its tragedies in a gauze of playfulness and whimsy. There are many poems in the book that, if one were being uncharitable, one could call cute; it would be more charitable (and more accurate, as far as I am concerned) to call them charming. The lightness of the book is charming, much in the manner of certain New York School poets (and Shmailo is, in fact, a New York poet.) Shmailo's extensive use of rhyme and anaphora tie the book in to what is commonly known as spoken word poetry; but this is spoken word with chops, from a poet who has clearly done her homework and is as comfortable with John Milton as she is with Bob Holman. There is also a certain kind of resonance with the kind of poetry we have seen from someone like Dottie Lasky, only done with more depth, solidity, and gravitas. Much of the book addresses real-world themes directly- love, aging, poverty, an engagement with different mythologies (often with a sense of them being debunked.) The book is enjoyable for a variety of reasons, but there is a fundamental pleasure that Shmailo takes in language that is impossible to hide and (for me at least) impossible not to be seduced by. Language is found to be ultimately redemptive, a means by which the poet can transcend the bounds of material reality. There is not a sense of futility at work, but of triumph, of being able to say things that need to be said. Writing these poems seems to have been palliative for Shmailo, and the joy of a kind of release shines through every line. Because she has the chops to make them stick, the poems not only convey this sense of release but allow us to share it. The book, as a whole, is cathartic, and takes us on a journey where pain is acknowledged but pleasure is never forgotten.

The first poem in the book, Personal, is characteristic:

I want to know
what makes you
tick.

I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.

Tell me

which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you

which villanelle sings you
which jailbreaker springs you
which Uncle Sam wants you
which calculus daunts you
which lullaby lulls you
which confidence gulls you
which apple you'll bite from
which hither you'll welcome

what
makes
me

forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning

to know
what
makes you
tick.

What I especially like about this poem is the way that edges of maturity show up to redeem what would otherwise be child-like. There is a dark subtext in lines like "unlearn all the learning" and "ignore the guilt-ridden" that let us know in no uncertain terms that this is a voice of experience. Yet all the gravitas is balanced by a kind of pure delight in rhyme and anaphora, which gives an unmistakable impression of the upbeat, the positive. "Which apple you'll bite from," of course, is a manifestation of the Miltonic that I have already alluded to. There are also intimations of Personism, but untwisted by sideways motion, expressed with admirable directness. This is the rare kind of poem that can be equally good read on a page and spoken aloud. Shmailo has just the right blend of savvy and smarts to create something durable enough to sit on the page and accessible enough to work out loud. Shmailo's mastery is not the kind that comes easily, and in fact this is a deceptively simple poem. It would be easy to say that the atmosphere of the thing is rather cliched, until you look at the anaphoric bits and realize that not one cliche is included. All the "ions" and "neural nets" are not there by accident; they are the work of an excellent craftsman (or crafts-woman) who knows how to construct something interesting that yet breezes by as naturally and easily as you please. In fact, this is a poem that on a certain level encourages us to take it for granted. You can breeze through it without noticing all the intriguing bits, but it takes time and effort to fully appreciate the care that went into its construction. It cannot be anything but the product of many years of hard work. In poetry, as in everything else, making it look easy is a very difficult trick to pull off. Shmailo does it here. An even more bravura demonstration of this complexity-that-seems-simple is in The No-Net World:

Deep in your heart, you always believed
There was a barrier, a secret shield
Keeping you safe from the street
Secretly, you knew
Your good shoes and your warm lined gloves
Kept you apart, and safe
From the man with the cup in his hand
And the boy with the cardboard sign
And the woman with the bloated legs
And the girl with the begging eyes
From the weathered madwoman railing at God
And the shadows at the ashcan fires
From the need to ask, no choices left:
Mister, can you please...?

What did you, from the cushioned world
Of buffers, alternatives, other ways to turn
Of loans from family friends
Of credit cards and healthy children
Of grocers who smiled because they knew how well you ate:
What did you have in common with the concrete world of need?
Secretly, you knew, so surely you believed
You could never fall so low

Welcome to the no-net world.

Then I got fired one day
I got fired one day
Lost my job and then my house
I got fired one day.

Now your debts mount up like garbage and a layoff's coming soon
And you have to see a doctor and insurance just pays half
And your folks who lent you money just can't help you anymore
And the loans are coming due; still, the force field is there,
In the lining of the gloves, in the good if now used shoes
You will never stand like that goddamned bum
Holding the door at the bank
Too tired to whore or steal
Saying, Please ma'am, please ma'am, please...

Then I got HIV
I got HIV
They found out
I lost my kids
I got HIV

You would never see
Hunger on the face of your child
When she came home from school there would always be
Apples and rice and chicken and beans
Milk and carrots and peas
Now there's two days left till payday and just one last can of corn
And she's home, laughing hungry, hi, I'm home, ma, what's for lunch?

Welcome to the no-net world

Are you hungry? Good:
Ready, set, line-up, let's go:
You can get on line on Monday for the lunch meal that's on Tuesday
and the shelter line's for Thursday but you have to sign up Monday
But you stayed there just last Wednesday so you can't come back till Friday.

And the Food Stamps place is downtown
And the welfare place is uptown
And the Medicaid is westside
And the hospital is eastside
No I can't give you a token
No I can't give you a token
No I can't give you a token
Don't you know you'll only drink?

Hell, yes.

Like a child praying to god
You believed in forever
You thought home and hearth were,
Not for everyone of course,
But surely for you:

Only in the nightmares
Rare unremembered dreams
Did you stand by the door of the bank
Saying
Yes ma'am, God bless you ma'am
Please.

Don't get sick.
Don't let anyone you love get sick.
Don't be mentally ill.
Don't lose your job.
Don't be without money for a second.
Don't make any mistakes.

Welcome to the no-net world.

The greatness of this poem to me is how it is simultaneously very now and also very universal. We are in the middle of a Depression in America, and the reality that Shmailo paints, while not pretty, is accurate for a large number of people. There are few things less humane I can think of than the way America deals with its sick and impoverished. Millions of people run around without health insurance, and to live in this day and age without health insurance is very much a no net existence. So I can comfortably call this an American Depression poem, circa 2009. The refrains and repetitions give the poem a jazzy edge, that lightens things up significantly, and reminds me of Auden's Refugee Blues. Yet the poem seems too earnest as a whole for me to call it post-avant. I do not consider this, however, to be a problem, as the earnest quality of the poem makes it more engaging and (let's face it) we do not want creepy all the time. This poem has many things about it that align it, not only with spoken word poetry but with all forms and manners of oral poetry, going back to Whitman and through the Beats, and in fact Shmailo has recorded this. It is incantatory in the best sense of the word, a poem that could knock an audience dead at a reading, just as it knocks me dead when I read it in her book. Maybe this is because, unlike many spoken word artists, Shmailo sneaks sophistication in the back door- there is an edge here of self-consciousness, a "you" speaking to "you," implying a continuing interior monologue. The "I" is not a typical lyric "I" either, but a generalized I meant to signify characters in the poem, is if this were a kind of Greek chorus. All in all, as with Personal, this is a complex construct that seems simple. It may wind up being one of the signature poems of our era, and I feel that it deserves to be.

In Paran is a very rich read, and I cannot do justice to it in a review of this length. I will only point out a few more strains at work in the book, that animate it, and hope that some people who read me may seek it out. Shmailo is based in New York, and many poem in the book demonstrate a genius loci engagement with New York (and Brooklyn) such as Williamsburg Poem. There are more current events tackled, and some historical events too, such as in Exorcism (Found Poem), which deals with the My Lai massacres during the Vietnam War. The essential thread running through all these strains is Shmailo's voice, which never wavers either in the directness of its engagements or in its delight in language. This book is highly recommended to anyone who has any doubt that poetry in 2009 is as vital as it has ever been. It has all the populism of Ginsberg, and then some. If the stars align correctly, it is my hope that the people will come.

Madwoman Exercises a Civil Right 1996

(Still true today? Up to you.)

It isn’t like other illnesses, people say. True.  People who are blind can write off their readers and dressers, the people and things they need to get to work are tax-deductible.  Can you imagine a similar right for mentally ill people, someone to help them - probably on a temporary basis - to get to work?  I can.  My question is: can you?

The friends and loved ones of deaf people have installed TTD lines on every major phone system in the nation,  have founded a college,  have sat in courtrooms for years to get their significant deaf others jobs.  Can you imagine a college for us? 

It might be cheaper to send ambulettes to the homes of the orthopedically disabled than to design and operate special chair lift buses.  But that would be too socially isolating, would make them feel different.   So there are chair-lifts on every ....New York City.... bus and passengers don’t mind giving up a seat or waiting as the driver helps them aboard.  

How many blind and deaf people are there?  It doesn’t matter -  we put Braille in the elevators and the ATMS,  and volume control on pay phones because they are worth it.  How many people use chairs?  Again, it doesn’t matter - every new building in the nation must have wheelchair access and a big bathroom stall.   How much does that cost?  It doesn’t matter.  It’s important.

Mentally ill people are making progress.  Pete Domenici, who has a mentally ill daughter, discovered his insurance isn’t paying her bills. Insurance for mental illness caps at about $10,000 a year in most states; cardiac illness, by contrast, caps at about $1,000,0000.  Insurance parity has carried in a few states but is far from commom.

Seeing a loved one suffering from a “physical illness” is stressful, but not a moral failing on the part of the sufferer.   It is distressing to see someone seize or throw-up, but usually not reason to avoid them afterwards.  It is wrong to abandon a friend with AIDS dementia, a wife with cancer (it is done, but frowned upon).  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness stills  warns practitioners to carefully distinguish between Axis I diagnoses and organic brain disease.  “Oh, she was angry and irritable because she had a brain tumor.”  We understand, it’s all right.  After all, anyone could get a brain tumor, and as the AIDS educators have worked so hard to point out,  anybody could get AIDS.   Anybody - even Superman - could wind up in a chair.

But mental illness is different.   It’s not like other illnesses:  the basic norms of social conduct and communication are violated.  It is unpredictable, hard to take.   And there is always the suspicion, even among the most enlightened, that “they” bring it on themselves.  80 percent of Americans, according to a recent survey, don’t believe mental illness exists.  Thomas Szasz  (M.D) calls it bad interpersonal game playing, an issue of morals, bad habits, cowardice,  not the realm of a scientist but of a priest.  We are possessed by the devil, undisciplined, over-react to stress, practicing learned helplessness.   It’s considered a triumph that today, probably, the majority of direct-care mental health workers, who undergo little or no training for their work,  don’t think their mentally ill clients are  David Berkowitz.

We are difficult patients, the mental health field keeps telling us,  frustrating and difficult.  Recovery is slow, rare.  On top of our neurobiological disorders,  the reality of which some professionals have come to accept,  there are the behaviors, probably common to most people under stress and in pain, but most frequently diagnosed as part of treatment for the mentally ill, and with which we are often permanently labeled:  arrested development,  self-destructive, manipulative-exploitative, masochistic, and  just plain selfish.  With this baggage, until recently, only a few religious orders wanted anything to do with us at all.  It takes very special people to work with the mentally ill, we are told.   The average person is comforted by that thought as he stops seeing and calling a mentally ill friend, feeling far less guilt than he would avoiding a friend with a “physical illness."  

Even the recovering mentally ill are somehow too disturbing to be around, and tolerated only if they never mention their illness and treatment.   Our leadership,  our strongest potential spokespeople, the functioning mentally ill,  the recovering mentally ill who work and have families and look “normal,”  who could be a bridge for us to the public at large, are counseled by doctors and friends not to mention the fact of their illness. It’s often good advice.  Like gay people of past decades, the risks of coming out are too high - shunning,  lost promotions (remember Thomas Eagleton?), the social burden on children.  So these hidden mentally ill,  who, under severe handicap, have fought serious, often devastating illness to raise families,  hold jobs, and contribute to society,  are silent.   What is the cost of this silence?

When a person who is blind or in a wheelchair eschews disability payments and comes to work every day,  we admire them.  One of the finest things about Americans is our admiration of people who overcome obstacles. Why is this admiration denied mentally ill people?

A few years ago,  a group of visually impaired people and their loved ones picketed a TV station because one of their sitcoms showed a blind man in a store gleefully breaking property as he unsuccessfully navigated the aisles with his cane.  That kind of depiction isolates us,  said the protesters,  makes people think we can’t live and work in society.   The salient point here is not the first amendment issues.  It is the firm conviction that visually impaired people deserve the right to live and work in society.   For the mentally ill, the jury is still out.

Mentally ill people are often difficult, there is no doubt on that score.  Sick people tend to be difficult.   Being ridiculed and shamed for having an illness makes it worse.  And of course the medical bills, only fully covered if you enter the disability system,  don’t help.  Accommodations for the mentally ill, say the ADA experts, are difficult.  Let’s face it, recent court rulings have said,  if you are sick enough to need accommodations, you are probably too sick too work.  Yet the thousands, possibly millions of mentally ill employees who have learned to accommodate themselves, who have successfully hidden their illnesses behind more accepted reasons for occasional sick leave, prove this wrong  (but try asking about psychiatric coverage on a job interview).

There are millions of us, everywhere.  We sit next to you at the office and listen to you joke about crazy people;  if we were to make such jokes about your diabetes, you would be appalled.

We may see insurance parity in our lifetime.  The time may come when a mentally ill person might get tax write-offs for services he or she needs to successfully work, but I doubt it ( Special transportation?  A dresser?  Are you crazy?  Well, yes...). Will we ever see an America that says -   maybe, just maybe, this could happen to me?  As long as our illness is a matter of bad habits, I don’t think so.   As long as our symptoms, expressed behaviorally, are viewed as iconic and communicative - probably not.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that people under stress can and do  “break down” that makes us so frightening.  Perhaps it is the very ubiquity of our illness,  our common human susceptibility to emotional pain makes people shun the mentally ill  - after all,  unlike cancer,  it truly may be catching.

.. ..

As I am writing, hundreds of cyclists are returning to New York from a Boston AIDS cyclathon.  Princess Diana is being mourned - the television shows her embracing AIDS babies,  urging others to be unafraid of them,  teaching the public that these children and all people with HIV need and deserve human contact and love.  Perhaps the mentally ill,  including those denied jobs and apartments and left homeless,  will one day merit a royal hug too.  In the interim, equal medical coverage and the right not to hide our disability in the work place and society at large will help.

We, mentally ill people,  may not be that different from you , with our mutant genes and imbalanced neurochemistries and our illnesses that mimic the temporary disorders of thought and emotion that other people experience.  We - some twenty to forty million Americans - drink grape soda, buy television sets, select HMOs, and corporate America might wake up to that fact and profit by it.  If we are not different, then like any of you, we need human contact - the formal and informal social networks that keep all people sane,  and without which any human being regresses.  We simply are looking for the Braille in the elevator or a door handle we can reach to show we are welcome.  ....

Learn how to join.

   Today the annual votecast in the Third Annual New Century Music Awards 'People's Choice' begins- you pick the winners, and I hope that you pick "Warsaw Ghetto."

You can vote once a day from your computer and the voting will run til the day before our live annual awards show at Wicked Willys on May 6th. See below for show info and the list of nominated songs and albums.

Here's the Bravenet link to vote- you can vote daily. Vote now:

http://pub38.bravenet.com/vote/vote.php?usernum=3230623564

Scroll down to see the nominated songs and albums!

And thanks for your help!

Love,
Larissa

revery about intoxicated turtles

the fruit has turned again

alcohol fragrant

smile at the thought of them

lolling on a beach

inverted and drunk and certain of

turning rightside again

every wave an ally

tomorrow the eggs will hatch and the
young will

race to the sea, Darwinically pursued

by rapacious winged predators

half will die the rest will find the
sea

and live.

the fruit has turned again

alcohol fragrant

smile at the thought of them

lolling on a beach

inverted and drunk and certain of

turning rightside again

A Good Reason to Hyperventilate ....

Exorcism,
a poetry CD by Larissa Shmailo

Normally, as a hardcore nitrogen-oxygen addict, I do not want my breath taken away; I tend to kick like and incensed ostrich on such occasions. That said, honesty compels the admission that there is one poet who regularly leaves me breathless and makes me like it, and that would be Larissa Shmailo.  Ms. Shmailo is shaking her fist at the Fates and Furies in a powerhouse of a new CD, Exorcism. At first contact, you might find yourself disquieted (to put it mildly) by many of her subjects and much of her imagery: passion (especially the darker ones), dancing with Death—or even with the Devil.....

            I have lost considerable sleep over time, haunted by lines such as “… I will slash my wrists,/And from my wrists will come ants and tired shopkeepers …” (“At the Top of My Lungs”) and “I am the people who … said The Lord’s Prayer and the Shma Yisroel as the Nazis led them to the gas chamber …” (“Warsaw Ghetto”).  ....

A catalogue of pain, fear, and despair, you might ask? Perhaps, but Ms. Shmailo can produce shafts of light to remind the cosmic darkness that it cannot have every victory.  Sometimes sardonically, as in “Dancing with the Devil” (“... I love dancing with someone who can really lead.”), sometimes with pure passion, as in “My First Hurricane” (“I have known tempests, squalls, and gentle rain./You are my first hurricane.”), sometimes in sardonic passion, as in “How to Meet and Dance with Your Death” (“Find two men, one dark and one light; they will be your guides. It is good if you like them, but they must not be your lover—your lover always blocks your view of Death …”)....

Ms. Shmailo has said many of her poems are “affirmative … triumphant, against all odds.”  She notes that “ … even dying in a good cause is a triumph.” But many such battles are hard-won (one might even call some of them pyrrhic); some of her characters do not even survive to savor (and, in a perversion created by contemporary society—the mass media in particular) protect their victories.

Still, we can take satisfaction in Ms. Shmailo’s artistic triumphs; the unusual situations, the adventurous viewpoints, surprising images or stunning turn of phrases just around the corner, and moments of unabashedly steamy love … “He follows her with his voice; she sees him with her skin,/and drinks him with her hands, in the storm touch which/will crush his chest against her breast …” (“He follows her”).  ....

Larissa Shmailo’s CD, Exorcism (produced by SongCrew) is best enjoyed in the company of her recent chapbook, A Cure for Suicide (Červenà Barva Press).....

Now if the flight attendants would please request the Captain to release the oxygen masks, I just might be able to reclaim enough breath to hold out until we reach the terminal gate.....

Writer, artist, and editor R.S Dunn is the author of such books as Zen Yentas in Bondage, Horse Latitudes, and Baffled in Baloneyville, and the prime cause of the CD, Sickly Minutes.....