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I got this (Fence) book, Not For Mothers Only, Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing (editors, Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff) for, not surprisingly, Mother’s Day. But more on that later. The back cover shows (but in color) a piece of Gilian Conoly’s erasures, “from Mr. B’s Poof and Dare,” made from a copy of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which Conoly says,

my mother used when raising me…Perhaps Gillis [Conoley's daughter] will one day transform What to Expect When You’re Expecting into another art. If so, may a rose pop up from my grave.

These erasures. My first thought was, “You get to do that?” I mean, I knew you did that: it was an exercise that I was introduced to in undergrad school (by Charles Clifton, beloved poetry workshop instructor, wherever you are) — and really liked. Somewhere, among old teaching papers and such paraphernalia, I could probably find my attempt at making something out of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snowman.”

So, it’s not really “You can do that” so much as “I wish I had done that.” Felt free to do it. Appropriating this particular material — Spock’s manual — and making it her own through erasing seems particularly appropriate: isn’t that exactly how it happens, what has to happen, with such a source?

Conoly makes visible (art) of this transformation. Which I’m also thinking of this in the context of Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” (Harper, February 2007), which The Washington Post considered yesterday. (Writing Under The Influence: Jonathan Lethem Ponders a Good Side to Plagiarism) (If:Book also discusses the essay and Lethem’s ideas, and provides a YouTube link to a 50-minute talk with Lethem from the Authors@Google series.)

After 10 pages of carefully constructed argument against “those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other,” Lethem reveals that just about every line in his piece is something he “stole, warped, and cobbled together” from the work of others. He then annotates his borrowings, reporting, for example, that the “culture as a market” quote derives from “The Tyranny of Copyright?,” by Robert Boynton, in the New York Times Magazine. (WaPo)

My entry title comes from Lethem’s essay, (my emphasis) which of course, comes from somewhere else, he reveals.

Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.

Let us add to the activities of quoting, cutting and pasting, stitching, quilting, pastiching, erasing.

Now back to the business of the poetry anthology. I had an email, from Fence Books, pointing to the Washington Post’s review (here) and expressing bemusement at the review’s closing paragraph:

Not for Mothers Only is an odd title for a poetry anthology that seems to be precisely for mothers; it’s wishful thinking on the part of the editors that anyone else is going to be much interested in an anthology dealing with the “life-changing joys and rigors of motherhood.”

and countering with

Here, full of wishes indeed, is a snippet of coeditor Rebecca Wolff’s introduction to the anthology: “Plainly put, i was horrified to be confronted by, and to confront in myself, the sense that these poems, growing like wild, thorny, rose tattoos out of the dense, durational, contentious, irreplaceable organic material of child-getting, child-raising, were somehow less than: less “universal” than, less communicable than any other poem on earth—than poems about text; poems about learning; poems about cars. poems about sound, poems about song, poems about color and space and time. . . . Bullshit! everyone gets born, and everyone has a mother, or at the very least knows someone who does. I suppose most people have cars, too, but most people do not emerge from between their car’s legs, or out of their car’s belly, naked and squalling. At least not as a newborn.”

The WaPo’s mechanism (Technorati) for listing blogs that are discussing this review lists very few. Follow Silliman’s Blog, and you see the review listed among several other items; and check out the discussion there, and you see no one saying anything about this review or this book. Alice Ostriker writes in the anthology’s introduction that things have changed since she first set out writing poems about motherhood, finding herself an accidental taboo-breaker with men walking out when she read her poem sequence “Once More Out of Darkness.” She says:

Poets who write as mothers are thick on the ground now. Yet fathers still send sons (and now daughters) to war, and nursing mothers are still supposed to be invisible.

(Below, a [poor] scan of one of Conoly’s erasures, “from Mr. B’s Poof and Dare”)