Psychic Space, A New Workshop, and Estranging the Familiar

Hello everyone,

This past weekend was my birthday, and I thought about reposting one of my previous birthday posts.

Here’s one on misfits, mystery, and “not fitting” (with a prompt at the end).

And here’s another one, about taking needed psychic space (with another exercise at the end).

(I’ve removed the paywall from both.)

But I decided I wanted to re-send the piece below about Robert Hayden’s poem “American Journal” and the value of estranging the familiar. I often feel like the alien in this poem, overwhelmed and perplexed,

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here among them        the americans        this baffling
multi people        extremes and variegations        their
noise        restlessness        their almost frightening
energy        how best describe these aliens in my
reports to The Counselors

But I will also admit that like the speaker of this poem, I am “curiously drawn” to something in us.

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much violence        much that repels        i am attracted
none the less        their variousness their ingenuity
their elan vital        and that some thing        essence
quiddity        i cannot penetrate or name

*
In the name of taking a pause here at the “hinge of the year” near my solar return and the summer solstice, I’m going to take short pause from my Substack. I will pause the payments (for paid subscriptions) for July and August. But in the next few weeks, I will also be announcing a new offering that consolidates the work I’ve put in over these past years on my courses and mentoring of other writers. The offering will be available in September. In the meantime, I’ll teach one special topic Zoom workshop in August on “Estranging the Familiar” in prose poems and lyric flash!

Thank you for being here and for reading. And dear fellow earthlings, thank you for being part of the variousness and elan that is us— the us that comes from We, the People.

Love,

Joanna

Estranging the Familiar (originally posted July 5th, 2024)

I stayed inside yesterday (July 4th), thinking I might read all day, but mostly binge-watching a show on Netflix in which Kiefer Sutherland unexpectedly becomes president (Designated Survivor). My son is in the mountains with my parents for a few days, and I’m trying to find the right mix of getting things done, letting my brain drift around in a creative way, and letting my brain just … rest. Anyway, Designated Survivor had the right mix of diverting entertainment and end-times panic to make it feel like a good choice for Independence Day. [Note: This show went downhill for me after the first few episodes.]

While I watched, I thought about what art can do at a time like this. (Here we are at another time “like this.” Still/again.) The arts and entertainment can be diverting, sure, but they play other roles. For example, I recently listened to RuPaul (on the Ten Percent Happier podcast) discuss the connection he felt with Monty Python as a young person. RuPaul has discussed this elsewhere, as well, the way Monty Python helped him understand that there were others in the world who get the importance of irreverence and fun in this life— who, perhaps, understand that societies and identities as we’ve constructed them are just that, constructs. As such, power structures can continually be reexamined, at times through satire and camp and absurdist comedy. (Lest you think I’m making too much of comedy, think about Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which brilliantly showed the ridiculousness of the fascist dictator. Now think about the value of living in a society in which these kinds of critiques are even possible.)

I was also thinking about the poem “American Journal,” by one of my favorite poets, Robert Hayden. The poem describes American society from the point of view of an alien sent to report back. Here are the first two stanzas:

[from “American Journal” by Robert Hayden]

here among them        the americans        this baffling
multi people        extremes and variegations        their
noise        restlessness        their almost frightening
energy        how best describe these aliens in my
reports to The Counselors

disguise myself in order to study them unobserved
adapting their varied pigmentations        white black
red brown yellow        the imprecise and strangering
distinctions by which they live        by which they
justify their cruelties to one another

What Hayden achieves in this poem is a “defamiliarization” of our usual ways of looking at American society. Through the conceit of the alien’s report back, as well as the wonderful poetic “report” language of Hayden’s narrator (“the imprecise and strangering/ distinctions by which they live”), we can see the violence, the “noise,” the “restlessness” of American culture anew.

The end of the poem wonderfully, strangely captures the odd mix of fear, overwhelm, and feeling of being (confusingly) charmed that this nation can engender:

confess i am curiously drawn        unmentionable        to
the americans        doubt i could exist among them for
long however        psychic demands far too severe
much violence        much that repels        i am attracted
none the less        their variousness their ingenuity
their elan vital        and that some thing        essence
quiddity        i cannot penetrate or name

We can look to Russian-Soviet literary critic Viktor Shklovsky for a discussion of the role of defamiliarization in art. Here’s a passage about Shklovsky from Ben Ehrenreich at The Nation:

The point for Shklovsky was to find a way to shake ourselves out of this collective stupor so that we might see the world in all its startling brightness and, presumably, act on what we see. (An unacknowledged politics hides behind Shklovsky’s poetics, a quasi-anarchist insistence on permanent revolt, but that is an argument for another essay.) For this, “man has been given the tool of art,” which—and this is where ostranenie [defamiliarization/estrangement] comes in—employs various tactics to defamiliarize the world, to allow us to see it as if for the first time. If it is anything, art is oppositional and insurrectionary, and literature an authorial conspiracy to overthrow anachronistic modes of thought. “Art,” Shklovsky wrote in A Sentimental Journey, “is fundamentally ironic and destructive. It revitalizes the world.”

Of course, the Soviet Union developed into a place that lacked the artistic freedom and irreverence that Shklovsky valued. Per Ehrenreich, “Shklovsky’s Formalism made him, in the words of an unnamed KGB interrogator … , ‘an enemy of the real world and [of] socialist realism in literature.’”

So, in thinking about what it means (or can mean) to be American and to be a poet/artist, I’m thinking about the constant need to estrange the familiar narratives, to look at our history and ourselves with fresh eyes. To seek a nuanced and compassionate understanding of what our society has been and can be. To speak while the speaking’s good …

Writing idea:

Try using the form of a haibun to estrange the familiar.

Via poets.org, the haibun is “a form that originated in Japan, is a work that combines haiku and prose where the prose poem typically describes an environment and precedes a haiku.” (Here’s a post by Aimee Nezhukumatathil about how writing contemporary haibuns that align with the more traditional description of environment and evoking of the Japanese concept of aware, or “the quality of certain objects to evoke longing, sadness, or immediate sympathy.”)

I’m suggesting that you experiment with the form of a prose poem plus a few short lines haiku-like lines of poetry in a way that perhaps evokes this concept of aware, but also shows the reader something new about “Americanness” as you understand or experience it. (Or, if you’re not American, you can write about your own nation or general human society, if you like!)

Below is a haibun-like piece I wrote that is set mostly in summer 2020, but also references my response to the events of January 6, 2021. It orignially appeared at Rise Up Review.

(after a poem by Alexis Orgera) ​

*

My son waters the grass in one spot, the graceful parabola of questionable play that buys me a few minutes. I tell him that after I finish my sketch, he can mist me with the hose. Only mist. 

“I’ll put it on FLOWER,” he says, turning it to JET. 

*

I’m a white woman running from a small brown boy laughing. Both of us laughing. 

*

Two men clean someone’s Mercedes on the street. I have never seen this car before. The people across the street have two or three expensive cars, but I don’t know where this one came from. But then, my mind often skims over automobiles. Mercedes, Audi … “My other car’s a Range Rover.” Where, these days, do we rove?

The men cleaning the car are Black, and one laughs with us while the other doesn’t seem to want to look. A white man comes out to give them instructions. 

*

I allow this play for something to do. During the pandemic the country burned and choked. Two men washed another man’s car. My son sprayed me with a hose. 

We go inside. I close the blinds, dry us off. Feed him dinner. Build an elaborate fort.  

*

All spring we stay—all summer—through the autumn we stay—winter—

*

Dear all of us, 

There is no graceful geometry 

to this grief. National 

fabric, that veil. 

Scritch and skitter 

in the night. Or—

scaling walls

in daylight. Bad

apples. Death

spiral. Same

nightmare wearing 

the flag. 

We.

Thanks for being here! If you appreciate this post, you could “tip” me on ko-fi.

Find out about the upcoming writing courses I offer through my business, Muse, here.

Check out my August Zoom-based workshop, “Estranging the Familiar: Prose Poem & Lyric Flash” which I’m excited about, if you’d like to snag a spot there!