This week, I want to share a piece that appears in my book, Public Abstract, but which never was published in a literary magazine or elsewhere. It addresses my decision to abstain from parenting, a decision I made as young girl and from which I have not wavered. (Why, you might ask? Read the poem: I try to address that question. I don’t know if I succeed.) It is a subject that I had tried to write about for a long time before it eventually took the form of a “lyric essay” that comprises a short section within the book. The poem ambles around the topic , attempting to access it from different angles and by way of various archives: literary history, personal history, medical history, (search history). As I wrote it, it became as much about the process of assembling these methods as it did about its subject matter and rhetorical questions. I want the piece to show its work, which is why I turned to a prose form that offered me a bit more space and leniency to braid and unbrid different tones and textures. I drew also on my studies of the prose poem and haibun to incorporate so-called poetic elements, including one snippet of “rejected” verse proper. I hope you enjoy reading it. Content warnings: addiction, abortion, medical trauma.
On Invention
1.
In De Inventione, Cicero suggests “that which is concerned in the discussion and explanation of things has three parts: fable, history, and argument.” Fables, he says, are statements that are “neither true nor probable.” His example: “Huge winged snakes, join’d by one common yoke.” “History,” rather, is “an account of exploits which have been performed, removed from the recollection of our own age: [. . .] ‘Appius declared war against the Carthaginians.’” “Argument,” he says, “is an imaginary case, which still might have happened.”
2.
In the fable of my life, my brother was born an addict, crested into this world with blue lips, sucking the fentanyl lollipop. When he came forth, the world was already full of me. In my early memories, I argue with myself not to stab my own eye with a kitchen knife; I pick at the fragile, taut skin over my larynx until it bleeds and scabs — rituals to stave off this other girl, whose dark ideas often seem sane and rational: the imaginary case. Our history is that my brother started using young. I became the child sister of the child addict. The children of the parents of an addict. The argument: teenagers, aging backwards. Huge winged snakes joined by a common yoke.
3.
I found the full text to Cicero’s De Inventione, which he wrote between 91 and 88 BC, online while searching for the transcript of a story I heard on NPR about the future of food processing. “The rift between the reinvention camp and the deinvention camp has existed for decades,” explained journalist Amanda Little. “One side covets the past, the other side covets the future.” The word “deinvention” caught my ear, so I Googled it. Cicero’s text was the first viable result, under a music video and “Try this search again with reinvention?” Deinvention. An invented word, signifying the opposite. De Inventione. When a word emerges from the ether like a tender cotyledon, I snip it up.
4.
I tried to use it in a poem. “Deinvention,” I thought, was an apt and complicated metaphor for a tubal ligation procedure I am considering: the “deinvention” of an ideal of womanhood tied to mothering, of personhood tied to parenting. The poem was not viable, but I have collected it here in a pail:
Call it deinvention
Little big procedure
Of the mind —
As if a fable came
Unstitched within
Me by a hand
Beneath the table5.
My mother was also the child sister of a child addict. Before me, three generations have parented addict sons — Mildred, Ann, and Lynn each spending their lives with their horns locked to their sons’ horns, in love and in agony. My decision to abstain from parenthood (a privilege I do not take for granted) is locked, in part, to this argument. But this history, unlike Cicero’s definition, is undetached. Abject. Attached to my recollection. Early memories shadowed by later ones. In the fable of my family, addiction is passed from hand to hand like a hot coal. My brother holds it, palm open.
6.
When I tried an IUD, I bled down my legs as I was led to the ultrasound room. They pressed the device against me and told me it was normal. When I still had pain a month later, they told me it was normal to have pain for a month. To have pain for three months. To have pain for up to a year. Their argument: to “give it time” — the imaginary case. When I had it removed, I wept. It landed on a silver tray with a wet resonance. Deinvention. I got on the pill, which made my periods worse. That’s abnormal, the nurses told me. As if a fable came unstitched within me by a hand beneath the table.
7.
I invent a future version of myself who changes her mind about parenting. Knife gestating knife. But she’s unviable. I deinvent her, close the leather book. I unhook her from her wooden yoke. From her brother, from her uncles. From her mothers. You don’t want a child like your brother, a therapist asks without asking. But what about if you have a child like you? A girl, tethered to her silence. Spelling, by accident, “ligation” as “litigation” on my consultation request form — a little on the nose. In the fable of my life, I was born childless. History congeals into fable, and fable, argument. One side covets the past, the other the future.
*
Copyright, Jane Hufman, Public Abstract, American Poetry Review, 2023. With thanks to my mother and brother, who helped me fact-check.
I wanted to offer this piece publicly both to celebrate the upcoming one-year anniversary of my book’s publication (!), and in the spirit of an upcoming online class I am teaching for a program called Poet Camp, organized by Sarah Ann Winn. The class is called “Mutant Genres: Writing Prose Poetry and Poetic Prose,” and it will be held via Google meet on Sunday, September 29, from 1 to 5 pm ET. The session will be recorded for registrants, for those who can’t commit to the whole four hours. We will explore writing that hybridizes poetry and prose: the lyric essay and the prose poem, as well as forms that fall in between.
Register here: https://poetcamp.com/mutant-genres-with-jane-huffman/
More soon,
Jane