Todd Davis' "In the Kingdom of the Ditch"

Todd Davis' title poem in his book, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, requires several readings. The poem is only three couplets, but asks the reader to value and understand each word because of its brevity. The poem reads as one sentence, which forces each word to be dependent on the one preceding it. The first stanza doesn't make much sense without the second stanza and the second stanza does not stand independently from the third stanza. This form allows Davis to effectively use juxtaposition to communicate his theme. While he focuses on natural images, he contrasts that with man-made objects, such as lace, saucer and thimble.

From what I understood of the poem, I thought Davis was emphasizing the relationship between opposing or contrasting identities, and understanding how those play out in the natural world. The image of the shrew and the rat snake "seek[ing] after the same God," seems to draw from that theme. At his reading on Tuesday, Davis mentioned that violence is a part of nature, and not something we should necessarily condemn or dismiss as a negative thing because it is part of the way nature reproduces itself and maintains itself. I can see that idea very clearly in this poem, in that we see a predator and prey, who are still violent in some manner, but are both living with and within the natural world. From a Mennonite perspective, I think Davis is trying to speak to modern understandings of pacifism and offering a different perspective than the typical "violence is bad, peace is good," dichotomy. He complicates pacifism by offering that the natural world is violent, but not necessarily in a traumatic or destructive way.  

Di Brandt's "say to yourself each time"

Sunday (with a line from Di Brandt)

sit still stop your breathing look
at this holy world you inhabit look at
this indecent body you inhabit hold its
verve its sounds hold your breath in
these walls it is requiring so much of
our energy for you to exist are you
some kind of intruder a born thief
steal our innocence carry your love
all in your gut all in your mouth all
open and aching we are letting you
live stop prodding
sit still & listen

Reflection on "Sunday"
For this imitation/response to Di Brandt's "say to yourself each time," I tried imitating Brandt's form, namely through enjambment and lack of punctuation and capital letters. I also ended up using two of Brandt's lines, rather than just one. The first line of my poem is part of a line from Brandt's and the closing line of the poem is the same as Brandt's. Not using punctuation was actually harder than I initially thought it would be. I tend not to use periods in my work, so leaving those out wasn't much of a challenge, but when I looked over the poem, I noticed there were still a few commas here and there, so I removed them.

In terms of theme, I followed Brandt's themes and narratives with my own. From what I understood of "say to yourself each time," the voice/narrator of the poem is speaking to Brandt or at least to Mennonite women, demonstrating some of the silencing and control of women in the Mennonite church. "Sunday," follows in that theme, but in terms of things I learned and heard growing up in an Evangelical Covenant church.

"Bringing Home the Work" by Julia Kasdorf

In The Body and the Book, Julia Kasdorf examines her ethnic identity as a Mennonite writer. In her essay, "Bringing Home the Work," Kasdorf explores what it means to be a Mennonite writer writing for a Mennonite audience. She states, "I began to get migraine headaches...It didn't take much for me to realize that they were related to the prospect of publication, especially to the fear of my work being read by my family and the Mennonite relatives about whom I'd written" (Kasdorf 39). Kasdorf details the anxiety many ethnic writers have, and perhaps in general what writers of marginalized groups have about their work. The nature of marginalization often forces its members to bear the burden of representing their entire group, even if such an act is impossible to do. The anxiety Kasdorf has surrounding her published work as a Mennonite writer stems from the fear that she's getting it "wrong," and that the Mennonites in her audience will claim that what she wrote is not representative of their experience. She states, "It is essentially a fear of abandonment and dislocation that reaches back to the time when an outspoken dissenter––whether she was forced to leave or to conform to the community's will––lost dearly, either in terms of her context in the world or in terms of her own voice" (Kasdorf 43).

I am also familiar with this anxiety. Most of my poetry focuses on themes of reclamation in terms of my sexuality, body and gender. While I have some fear of what people who are heterosexual and/or male-identified will say about my work, most of the anxiety about my work stems from a fear of representing lesbian and queer women in an inaccurate way. I, like Kasdorf, have a fear that showing my work to other members of my communities will end up in isolation or otherwise some kind of anger with my work. However, my anxiety doesn't exactly mirror Kasdorf's experience; although I have this fear, it has yet to reach fruition. Where Kasdorf has been met with some anger, I've been met with support from my community.

Imagining Community: The Art of Sylvia Gross Bubalo

The work of poet and artist Sylvia Gross Bubalo features central themes of Mennonite culture, history and religion. In Imagining Community: The Art of Sylvia Gross Bubalo, Ann Hostetler states, "Bubalo [was] a visionary artist who created works that challenged and enrich our understanding of community" (Hostetler 7). Bubalo focused her work on both the individual and the community. One such piece that emphasized both these themes and struck me when I first saw it was Untitled (Two Women, Two Babies). The piece is an ink illustration of a black woman and white woman holding an infant of the opposite race with their arms wrapped around each other.

When thumbing through the catalog, Imagining Community, for Bubalo's gallery, I was immediately struck by both the complexity and simplicity of this piece. The piece resonates with a theme throughout all her work: contradiction, where she emphasizes both the individual and the community from which the individual arises, and more specifically in this piece, the tension that comes from interracial relationships, but also the harmony found within those relationships. The way the women are positioned physically connects them together, but from what I draw from this piece, she is still emphasizing their difference with the physical contrast of the black and white. 

The simplicity of the piece allows the reader to imagine the sort of conversations that could have arisen from this piece, both of the viewers and the subjects of the illustration. I personally imagine the two women having a dialogue about what support and solidarity between women looks like and how race complicates and aggravates that solidarity. Such questions and dialogues are central to community and to Bubalo's communication of Mennonite culture and history through her art and writing.

Untitled (Two Women, Two Babies), 1969
Ink on heavy Kodak paper, 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm) 

Introduction

This blog will detail my creative and reflective responses to the Mennonite literature I will be reading in Mennonite Literature this fall. I will be reading poetry, short stories and novels by Mennonite authors and poets such as, but not limited to, Sylvia Gross Bubalo, Miriam Toews, Julia Kasdorf, Jeff Gundy, Di Brandt and more.