Crossing Borders
by the Editor
If there’s one thing this month’s EAP proves, it’s that crossing borders is the necessary step on the road to wisdom. As Mike Madrid points out (Social Outcast Top 10) , if you’re going to stay on your side of the border, or keep other people on theirs, you’re missing out on…well, on the world, actually.
And our writers cross borders. Michael James goes to Cambodia. Bob Irwin goes to Charposan, in Pakistan. Stephanie Sides goes to a dentist in Tijuana. Linda Sandoval sends one of her LA women to the heart of Mexico. Even Ask Wendy’s thinking about a fact finding mission to Oz.
Then there are the even more metaphoric crossings. Alice Nutter crosses over twice…from being a girl from the depressed town of Burnley to an anarchist punk rock and roll star to a working dramatist. Sean Watkin crosses over into the land of the HIV positive and reports the wisdom he finds there. Mat Capper interviews his own mother, who crossed over from being a teenage mom to internationally known scientist. Our new music editor, Max Vernon, meets the Trachtenburgs , a family that crosses all sorts of music/performance/art borders, too.
The crossing I found the most important of all, and the one I urge you all to read about and to pass on to others, is Shelly Wagner’ s terror-filled journey in her book The Andrew Poems. (From The Andrew Poems , and Harvey Lillywhite’s THE ANDREW POEMS: A Review from the Heart. ) Wagner wrote the book after her six year old son drowned behind their house while she had left him alone for a few brief moments. In those moments, she crossed over forever into a world where she could either choose to be overcome, or choose to wrestle with the despair she met on the road and name it and drag out of it wisdom the rest of us would probably rather not know. She despaired all right — how could she not? But she wrestled with the despair every step of the way, and reported on it, and in the process became a poet. That’s no compensation for her, but it’s a gift for us. Because that is what a poet is, or what a poet should be: one who wrestles with Reality, that one that is too much for the rest of us, and sings it back to us as best as she or he can.
When I read the poem EAP has reprinted here (Your Questions) , I went slowly, following her thought step by painful step. And I couldn’t help but think that if we would only listen, really listen, to what real poets say, we couldn’t help but change the world. If we’d listen when Rilke says “You must change your life.” If we would listen to William Blake. If we would listen to Baudelaire. Not to mention Wilfred Owen. Well. If we really would, we would have to begin our own journey of despair, and fear that the task in front of us was an impossible one. And then we’d have to change. We’d have to cross those borders we’ve been so scared of, those new frontiers. And who knows what we would find?
It would be impossible to really, truly read what Shelly has to say in Your Questions without recognizing the depth of the despair a mother feels on losing a child. And then it would become impossible to be responsible, in no matter how tangential a way, for the death of someone else’s child — no matter how far away. It would be impossible for Madeleine Albright, when questioned about the sanctions we imposed on Iraq that killed so many children, to call it an “acceptable price.” If you read Shelly’s poems, you would know there is no such thing.
(THE ANDREW POEMS by Shelly Wagner is available in bookshops, online — I got mine at amazon.com — , and at http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/BookPages/0896723194.html)