“Pack enough dirt to your chest for armor but the pricks still come through and you know this, that any deliberate exposure to power is resistance by example.”
– Dana DiGiulio
This is an essay about trauma writing, addressed specifically though not exclusively to writers seeking community. I want it to be interesting, stunning, kind—but above all, useful, and I am writing it as a teacher, not a therapist. In my classrooms over the years, one rule is paramount: write as yourself, in any language you want, as long as you don’t keep anyone else from writing. I think this is a good rule because it looks different in different places, yet its compass always works. I think writing as ourselves means writing as humans, which necessitates trauma—which necessitates beauty, terror, freedom, difference, and love. It necessitates it all.
One reason why I want this essay to be useful is because I care. I want to care, which is part of my own vow to poetry. I think of Kathy Acker’s Eurydice, sitting alone in the underworld on a red bed with flaming red hair. The flames, her color, fill the room. “She’s mad,” writes Acker, “which has nothing to do with anything. She lives in her own world because she makes the whole world hers.” Eurydice’s anger is holy. It’s majestic. She must feel it; there’s no way around that. But as she sits in it, it negates her. Acker says it turns her to “nothing,” which Eurydice hates. At first, this is a horrific calculus—you’re negated, and you’re in your body. This is one way to consider trauma: a state of being that is not, in fact, being at all.
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