what we do to survive

Kelefa Smith's article in this week's New Yorker, "Word", www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/12/06/101206crat_atlarge_sanneh about the poetics of hip-hop, has me focusing on poetry as a mechanism of survival. Among other rappers, this piece uses Jay-Z, who just published a book of his lyrics, Decoded, as representative of hip hop culture and lyrics. Of particular interest, according to Smith, are his anecdotes and footnotes - a collection of the ideas, thoughts, situations that inspired him. He began his 'career' selling crack, before he seriously started writing rhymes. I imagine there was an instinct to survival both in what brought Jay-Z to selling drugs and what led him to start and pursue writing and rapping.

So, my life and Jay-Z's are not and have not been real similar if you look from the outside, but that doesn't stop me from feeling kinship with him when it comes to writing, and possibly, when it comes to an instinct toward survival that has a creative impulse.

Of many "life-changing" experiences for me, working as a home hospice social worker for six and a half years is one of the primary ones. I began this work when my oldest child was six months old. I remember that my first day out, shadowing a nurse, we visited an impoverished young mother dying of cancer and being cared for a by her young adult son, a elderly man who lived alone, but had visits and some help from family, and a mentally ill woman , cared for by her parents, who was dying of a disfiguring and cancer of her face and throat. Every day at work was an intense experience. I had to improvise my way through helping people in ways that I never imagined - answering questions like "what is going to happen to me when I die," holding trash cans for near strangers while they threw up in them, rocking a teenage girl in my arms while the funeral home workers took her father's body away. All this while I was raising babies (our second child came along after a couple years). My husband travelled a good deal. I was exhausted physically and mentally so much of the time. I felt a simultaneous sense of deep appreciation for my life and a sense that I was close to laying down to die myself. This is when I started really writing poetry. When I say really writing it, I mean I was compelled. I got up at 5 or 5:30 in the morning for years, because that was the only quiet time of my day and I wrote. I took workshops. I read other people's poetry. I had to do it, in a way. Looking back, I think I had to do it to survive.

Where does mental health figure in to this? As humans, we have a lot of choices of what we can try to do to survive. I am not saying I have never had a self-destructive impulse. I've bought and "snuck" cigarettes lots of times over the years because I somehow felt I 'deserved' a cigarette. And that's one example, only. There's a line from the Bruce Springsteen song, Devils and Dust, something like, "when what we do to survive kills the things we love/ fear's a dangerous thing/ it'll turn your heart black you can trust." I agree that fear is a dangerous thing. So, I wonder about the impulse and choice toward positive, life-affirming, creative survival instincts. How can we all develop these, search for these, love something in ourselves (our spirit, if you will) and then create rather the quash or destruct? If you are reading this and find yourself in a place that feels desperate and you find yourself coping by means that you know are self-destructive, I challenge you to look for something creative, something that brings you some pleasure and even if it is in the secret of the dawn, because you are worried you're not "good" at it - just do it.

In that spirit, I am attaching my very first hip-hop lyric I ever wrote. Yesterday! It was for one of the teens in my teen poetry group. I don't think it's 'good' in a critical sense, but this is about taking chances and creative means of survival. You can laugh if you want, I can't hear you. Take care, everybody.

For G

I am the cool cat,
the top cat,
the cat in the cradle,
the everlasting cat,
the cat in the hat.
I am the cat of all trades,
the cat's pajamas,
the mad cat,
the sad cat,
the feral cat,
the domesti-cated cat.
I step with careful paws.
Beware - claws.
This is my caterwaul.
My rage, love, fear, longing - raw.
Humpty Dumpty - he broke in his fall.
Not like me;
this is how I arrive.
Feet first, head up.
Nine lives.