“You Were Never a Locomotive”

Check out the expanding myspace account of my boyfriend & cohorts newest musical venture: You Were Never a Locomotive.

Happy Mother’s Day!

I love you, Momma. And I send love to mothers everywhere. I’ll let Alela Diane sing it better than I can say it:

(Oh my Mama
She gave me these feathered breaths
Oh my Mama
She told me use your voice,
My little bird

She said sing sing sing sing sing sing melodies
And she sang sang sang sang sang sang melodies

Oh my Mama
She did give me fancy feet
I’ll be dancing on
And I’ll tap tap tap my toes
Into those creaking floorboards

Oh my Mama
She took my little hand and held on tight
Oh the Mamas
Give the waters of their wells
Oh the Mamas
Give the babies this very dirt we’re walking on
Oh my Mama
She gave me these feathered breaths
And your Mama
She gave you those feathered breaths too

And when the sky drops all those feathers
And when the birds sing in the morning
I’ll be a mama
I’ll have a daughter
I’ll be a mama
I’ll have a daughter

And I’ll give her melodies
I’ll give her melodies
(repeat)

And she’ll be
My little bird
And then she’ll fly
She’ll fly )

my own momma and me:

my grandmother’s note to her mother from the early 1920’s:

and Post Secret has some beautiful, heart-wrenching and raw mother’s day posts, including this one:

“Morning Song”
by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

I always thought ‘chrysalis’ was a beautiful word. . .

I SPENT MONDAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C. with two of my closest friends.  We decided to take a day trip, like the dozens we’ve taken throughout the last four years (generally, to visit the “Nash Gal” (national gallery), as my friends are Art History majors, and I love/produce art…).  We decided, without discussing it, that a trip to the National Gallery or the Freer-Sackler would be too painful, too reminiscent.  So, instead, we spent the day first at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and then at the National Museum of Natural History, by way of a hot-dog stand.  

I don’t often use this blog as such an explicitly cathartic place, a place of emotional release, as well as creative.  But, I need it now.  You see, my friends are graduating on Saturday morning, and dispersing immediately afterward from our college town.  I, on the other hand, due to my maladjustment back to collegiate life stateside (post-study abroad in London) and lingering, sometimes dormant, lately overactive issues with mental health (i.e. depression, panic and generalized anxiety disorders), am sticking around for another 5 weeks of classes before I can be deemed an Alumnus.  I’ll be on the sidelines Saturday, though I get to participate in all of the other rites of passage occurring this week: “dead week” trips to the beach, the city, parties, proper shouldering of tears, graduation ball, a reception of senior English majors, etceteras.  One thing is missing: my family.  My friends are even insisting that I bring my cap and gown to the festivities in a bag, for the sake of picture-taking afterwards.  I traded receiving that piece of paper in a few days, for retaining my peace of mind (to a higher degree) over the past several months, and don’t regret the decision.  Though, I inhabit a completely liminal space for the time being, everyone assures me that this is mere detail, unimportant on a larger scale.  I’m young– it’s hard to see that far ahead.

As a pretty young child I remember my mother telling me that I had my father’s penchant for disliking and clumsily negotiating transitions.  This one is no exception.  I have events and dresses lined up for the next few days, followed by Mother’s Day (and visiting the closest mother possible, Mark’s), while calling mine with the sure result of a flood of tears.  When I was a child, I got in the car everyday after school and melted down, just tears.  My personality is an extreme one: hypersensitive, creative, overwhelmed, empathetic.  I don’t know an existence that doesn’t involve feelings of shouldering the whole world, or of having paper-thin skin.  It is an affliction every bit as much as it is the most beautiful part about myself.  Not that I am a biological essentialist, but my personality bleeds through even to my physical and biological make-up: I am thin as if my resources are primarily mental and spiritual, not physical, my skin is extraordinarily sensitive to touch, I’m hypersensitive to temperature, my hunger comes on as extreme pangs, and is satiated almost immediately, and I could go on. . .  I contemplate often why some cave-person such as myself would have been preserved through natural selection.  How did society deem my particular breed of human being worth preserving.  I feel things so deeply, and it has caused me extraordinary pain and suffering.  But, it is the well from which my creativity stems.  

And creativity is my true joy, like a mantric trance, of gliding brushes, shaving words, sculpting visions and language, and cloth into things, into beauty.  I’m not superior to persons-at-large by any means.  I’ve meet others like myself occasionally through the years, and have held them as dear friends and admired acquaintances.  My very dear mentor here at school has a five year-old daughter who “collects” things.  It is imperative that she knows every day whether or not she has pockets in her dress.  Otherwise, the collected treasures are tucked into her socks and shoes, stowed in her pencil box, etc.  They are broken hair barrettes, buttons, particularly beautiful rocks. . . in short, anything that strikes her as beautiful and discarded.  I did that as a child, and proscribed these particular objects with spiritual weight.  What is beautiful is necessarily transcendental– a little shard of “God” or whatever denotation makes you feel comfortable.  I hope I live my whole life never losing that wonder, that appreciation for the ordinary beauties.  Coincidentally, this same child, has professed her intent to become “an artist who draws bugs” when she grows up, so enraptured is she by their delicate beauty.  (I too was a bug kid, a flower kid, a down-in-the-dirt, hands on animals, unafraid and not squeamish– which I attribute to my father, who (as a science teacher), was forever exposing us to the names of things in nature, to the way it ticked, to its mysticism and its science.

So, at the Holocaust Memorial Museum on Monday, I am ashamed to say that I tucked away only a very few things which stirred me deeply.  I am even more ashamed to say that the crowdedness of the museum, and the obviously disrespectful behavior of a group of middle school children who were moving through the main exhibit at about my pace, inspired the opposite of compassion in my heart, until i checked myself, wanting to reach out to them instead.  Or, at least, quiet them.  I need the contemplative quiet.  I did find a few things I hadn’t noticed on my previous trips to the museum.  For one, the photography of Roman Vishniac, which capture 1930’s Berlin, entranced me:

As did a couple of poems scattered throughout the exhibit.  One of which, as it turns out, is a segment of a longer poem by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (b. 1933):

 

"The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar.
The trees look ominous,
                      like judges.
Here all things scream silently,
                               and, baring my head,
slowly I feel myself
                    turning gray.
And I myself
            am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here."

The few hours spent there were as sobering and spiritual as always.  I came away, remembering a lot of things discussed in my Religion Seminar on Elie Wiesel (which I took in Fall 2006), and I purchased a book in the bookshop about the contemporary genocide in Darfur, from an interesting new series called “African Voices” (essentially, condensed histories of African conflicts designed as introductions to better educate Western readers).  The experience also reminded me of a stirring memorial I saw at The Great Synagogue in Budapest several years ago, that was really impactful:

But it was the butterflies, at the Natural History Museum, that really provided a spiritual, joyful, powerful experience for me.  I have always thought that ‘chrysalis’ was a beautiful word; and, like many middle class kids, my third grade classroom had a butterfly garden in which we watched the full four stages of monarch’s.  My strong emotional tie to butterflies stems in part from this experience.  I remember releasing the monarchs on the school lawn, and later finding one whose wings had not been properly unfolded, and couldn’t fly.  I named him “Crumple” and took him home, where he lived in our upstairs playroom under the constant care of my little brother and me for his full two-week life span.  I memorized everything about his movements.  We fed him sugar water in the lid to a jar, and I loved to watch his “tongue” uncoil to take in the artificial nectar.  To me, he was fascinating, and ethereally beautiful, and one of my very favorite pets (though the mammal, reptile, crustacean, and fish companions were many when I was growing up).  

The incredible spiritual experience I had in the indoor butterfly garden was exactly the kind of contemplative, uplifting, inspiring, energizing event that I need at this moment in my life.  I am only saddened that my film malfunctioned somehow and the photos were lost.  However, I intend to revisit the butterflies soon, like a mecca, and spend the better part of the day in the entire museum (taxidermy is also one of my latent interests, as the incredible art form that it actually is.)  Both are good raw material for metaphors, of course.  It’s getting awfully late, and this post is winding down.  I only wanted to share the Wikipedia article about Butterfly life-cycles, in particular, these passages about chrysalis, which bear uncanny, and almost too-obvious-to-mention, resemblance to the kind of presipice I find myself faced with at the present time:

A chrysalis (Latin chrysallis, from Greek χρυσαλλίς = chrysallís, pl: chrysalides) or nympha is the pupal stage of butterflies. The term is derived from the metallic gold-colouration found in the pupae of many butterflies referred to by the Greek term χρυσός (chrysós) for gold…

Like other types of pupae, the chrysalis stage in most butterflies is one in which there is little movement. However, some butterfly pupae are capable of moving the abdominal segments to produce sounds or to scare away potential predators. Within the chrysalis, growth and differentiation occur. The adult butterfly emerges (ecloses) from this and expands its wings by pumping haemolymph into the wing veins.^[2] This sudden and rapid change from pupa to imago is called metamorphosis.

 And, I’ll leave you (brave readers who have made it this far) with an image of a vacated luna moth cocoon:

and a brief quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s book Letters to a Young Poet:

Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist.  Then take your fate upon yourself and bear it, its burdens and its greatness, without ever asking for that reward which might come from without.  For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.  (13)

 

 

new art and bags on Etsy!

japan gives us the cutest “polaroids” ever imagined…

I want one of these:

because it can make these:  (and they are so cute)

Tatting Lace: an original poetic series

(Original Cover Art by me)

<>

Tatting Lace

“For, we look back through our mothers, if we are women.”
- Virginia Woolf

“Every leaf/ defines its limits. All roots have their histories.”
- Derek Walcott

The sea beneath the cliffs
is the blue in my mother’s eyes,
it came from the blue in her mother’s eyes
thrown on down the line
By my family who worked the fields
On borrowed land above the ocean.
My family worked the field on borrowed land.
Higher hills do not provide
For hearts born of coral and moss,
Where rain won’t flow beyond the stream,
And water is captive to the well.
- Alela Diane

<>

In memory of
Isabel Blackwell Roberts
(b. 1925 - d. 1977)

~

and for my anchors,
you know who you are.
thank you.

<>

Table of Contents

Part I: The Lark’s Head Knot

3 Yellow Jasmine
4 Scoliosis
5 Spring 1961
6 Dune Flower
7 Dexter Ernest Brown
8 Alchemical Hypnosis

Part II: The Timber-Hitch

9 Jane Iradelle Williams Blackwell
11 John Hamlin Blackwell
12 The Children’s Hospital
13 Tatting Lace
14 Veneration
15 Private Benjamin Franklin Roberts, 20
16 Winter
17 Giles Monroe Roberts
I. Leg Braces
II. The Crooked Spoon

Part III: Patterns in Notation

18 Coral
19 Orange Blossoms
20 After the Hurricane
21 Molting
22 Spawning
23 Untitled
24 After the Hurricane II
25 Villanelle

<>

Part I:
The Lark’s-Head Knot

Yellow Jasmine

On her porch, the willows were webbed
into a wicker caste of time: chairs
painted white as plaited bones. They hunched
with the weight of the spilling, yellow-throated vines,
lolling poison tongues. I had always known
their long faces from the open honeysuckle vine–
which trumpets to eat, and which to let languish.

Every piece, a poison: gold and green
as my mother’s eyes, the dreamed vine draped
serpentine limbs, open-throated, triplicate
singled in rhyme. The vine-insignia of my home,
bearing the name Carolin’. So, every child learns
its laced brutality. How lethal the familiar,
the overly-beautiful vine.

<>

Scoliosis

Suspended, like moons, sliced and strung-up
along a crooked wire, the blurry bones hung.
I wanted to be left alone

with the round warble of the negative,
to press it, as he did– with a snap–
to the backlit window-box. He talked

of a naturally bowed head. And I could see
the bent neck of an egret at the scummy marsh-edge
reading the mud for the silvered brows of fish.

He touched the tendons of my neck, joking softly
of the books that’d bent my head
in subjugation. But, in the clicking dial

of the goniometer, I heard instead
the warning of her half-century tied to him,
as hunched Narcissus to the blind pond’s edge.

<>

Spring 1961

He’d run off and someone told her this time
about his father’s bolero-tie being passed on
with his weakness for mothering thighs.

And she’d raged–womb-heavy with his third child,
flying bird-like inside the glass house she kept
with a pound cake and entertainment smiles.

And, Moma said, she’d ripped the carpet up
and the wallpaper aside, then taken the girls
to the beauty shop to have their strawberry

hair cut into pixie-styles. He came home this time
with the African purple diamond for her right hand.
And he sold the green cadillac with brown paper bags

of hair still inside. And she took him back
that spring before her sister died.

<>

Dune Flower

I was enticed by your dark, stylish eye
amongst all that white, the brambles,
dollar weeds. Like the brazen sister of
the Black-Eyed Susans in my Grandmother’s
front garden, you raged in a subtle frame
of azure and salt-thick air. Splinters,
prickers, sea-oats. To all these Southern Belles
you danced flamenco, a sibylline play,
a fire hushed-up. Your skirts spread around
the gaping black fuzz, truncated and fringed,
sinful pink-orange, and yellow. Each petal
seemed a slice of fabric, a cut of fruit,
to be stitched up, to cover you, like so
much lace piled up over brown legs.

<>

(I know, two academic boring posts in 24 hours…): my seminar thesis!

Whitney R. Roberts

Dr. Scanlon

ENGL 458: Seminar in American Long Poems

28 April 2008

Vocalized Landscapes in the Contemporary American Long Poem:
Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris

“Yet, America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles
with imagination, and it will not wait long for meters.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The resonance of poetry relies on a relationship to the immutable foundations of human identity and orientation: a relationship to the natural world, to other man, and to the divine. Prior to the contemporary era, the prestigious genre of the long poem fit rather neatly into the categories of epic (the scope of which implied historical, cultural, and national claims, as well as a sanction by the divine), and lyric sequence or cycle (which centered nearly exclusively on the subject of love, between persons, or between a person and the divine). In the contemporary world, the formidable grasp of the collective human understanding on a definitive divinity, and various national/tribal allegiances, have become less clear due to the forces of technology and the shifting geopolitical landscape. Postcolonial diaspora communities, of which America is an “early” example, present particularly complex liminal spaces for the forging of a “Supreme Fiction.” Therefore, in contemporary poetry, attention gathers on the subject of landscape, and nature, as a medium for collective identity formation.
The supremacy of landscape as a source of inspiration is by no means an innovation of contemporary poetry, of course; a look at the Romantic and Transcendentalist schools provides both the Colonizer’s and Colonized view of the privilege of natural metaphors. There is an important cognitive leap, however, between the use of landscape by the likes of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats and the vocalization of the landscape in the works of contemporary poets, such as Glück and Walcott. Wordsworth’s daffodils are but flowers, symbols onto which the poet projects his or her own emotions and perceptions of the world. It would be ludicrous to say that Walcott and Glück are not also, on some level, forcing their own “emotions” onto the landscapes they write about; however, the vocalization of these landscapes, in their own right, grants them a sort of agency in the poem. The landscape, rather than a mirror to the human condition, becomes a viable, interactive character in the poem.
The consistency of a mediating landscape acts as the necessary supremely coherent element, which prevents the long poem’s dissolving. This higher language belonging to a vocal landscape cements the new identity of the poet-prophet In the works of Omeros and The Wild Iris, legitimizing his/her strivings into such an extended genre, by granting access to a supreme text– that of nature. The American writer of the long poem, in commune with the “true text” of the natural world, finds a wellspring of identity, meaning, healing, and transcendence, sufficient to ground the scope of a contemporary epic, whether communal or personal.

how entrepreneurial…!!!!!

I created an Etsy account, to sell my original paintings, collages, handicrafts, clothes, etc.
Take a look:
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5828336

Sociolinguistics seminar paper.

Whitney R. Roberts
Dr. Wake
LING 302: Sociolinguistics
Fall 2007

Code-switching and the Age of Speakers:
Negotiation of Intergenerational Identity within the Family Structure

It is well-established in the Sociolinguistic academic community that code-switching, whether between distinctly classified languages, or merely between dialects of one language, functions as social currency and carries significance among speech-communities. Different languages, and indeed different dialects or accents within one language, fall along a spectrum from colloquial to formal speech, denoting the appropriate context for the use of each language/dialect/accent. Linguistically, each of these varieties is equally valid and interesting for the methodological study of human speech-patterns as they intersect social behaviors.
Given, also, that sociolinguists have documented many cultures and languages which change in form given the age of the speaker and of the addressee, there seems to be one gap in this research. Therefore, a qualitative study was needed to discover how code-switching can function as a means of linguistic deference to addressee’s of higher social standing, particularly those older than the speaker. This use of code-switching to acknowledge the seniority of the addressee should be particularly pronounced in languages where there is no inherent phonological or grammatical signifier of social dignity or gender, such as English. As opposed to languages such as Japanese and German, English makes no distinction between the formal and informal uses of speech in the forms of different pronouns, etc. Rather, this distinction, when made, takes the form of certain dialectical signifiers, such as “Ma’am” and “Sir” in Southern American English. Similarly, English lacks the gender-indicators of some Romance languages, such as Spanish feminine and masculine endings of nouns; this void in the specificity of language is filled, in English, by dialect and context, rather than by grammar. Which is not to say, of course, that there are not meaning-bearing dialects and codes in other languages; it is more important to this study that English has no formal outlet for the denotation of status and age.
How does code-switching function in the negotiation of family identity? Is the presence or absence of code-switching related to the age of speakers? It is impractical to talk about the social currency of dialects without mentioning the early works of linguists Fischer and Labov. Introducing Sociolinguistics makes no secret of the fact that “speech can serve to mark the distinctiveness of people not just in terms of their region, but also in terms of their sex and social standing.” (eds. Mesthrie, Swann, Deumert, Leap, 76). To conduct my study, I collected data from four different conversations between two or three speakers, and employed comparative discourse analysis to chart the use of SoAE and SAE among different pairings of speakers:

Questons about linguistic structure, about language change, about meaning, about language acquisition, about social roles and relations, about communication, and about identity. What distinguishes discourse analysis from other branches of linguistics is not the questions [...] but the ways they try to answer them: by analyzing discourse. (Johnstone 103)

The first study was a “control;” it featured myself (a speaker of Standard American English (SAE), raised in a home where Southern American English (SoAE) is the primary dialect, and thus able to code-switch), and a peer of my same age who is a speaker of SAE. I did not code-switch, and remained in SAE throughout the thirty-minute conversation. The second data collection featured my conversation with my brother, who is twenty-one months younger than myself, and a primary speaker of SoAE. In this conversation, also casual and about thirty minutes in length, I maintained mostly SAE, with code-switching apparent surrounding certain topics (i.e. shared childhood memories). The third conversation occurred between myself and my grandmother, a speaker of SoAE; throughout this extended conversation (nearly two hours of tape) I maintained the dialect of SoAE, complete with phonological and grammatical markers, and colloquial, regionally-specific idiomatic expressions and nomenclature. The final conversation that I recorded for my study had three participants: myself, my mother (a native speaker of SoAE), and my great-aunt (a native speaker of SoAE); in this conversation, as well, I maintained SoAE for nearly all of my speech acts.
The SoAE observed in my discourse samples belongs primarily to the specific “Lowcountry Dialect” of the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. It differs in some phonological markers from the dialect known as “Inland South,” and is best described in the Atlas of North American English, as follows:

The outer boundary of the South is defined by glide deletion of /ay/ before voiced consonants and finally. Speakers shown [on dialectology map] have glide deletion before voiced obstruents (wide, size, five, etc.) and finally (high, my, etc)…The South is also marked by various stages of the Southern Shift, and by the Back Upglide Shift in law, caught, water, etc.(Lavov)

textiles. (or, my version of a “study break.”)