During one of the presentations given at the SFA symposium this weekend, a woman read an excerpt from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, famous Southern-ish (Florida?) writer, in which Ms. Rawlings described a near-calamitous episode featuring a shotgun, a chicken and a professor who just about lost a tooth on the bullet he found in his serving of bird. Southern food/lit/social politics folks love a good shoot-the-chicken story.
This brings to mind a near-calamitous dream I had while I was attempting to complete my graduate manuscript for my MFA. First of all, most of the poems in that manuscript are about using Southern cooking as a method for dealing with assorted racial identity issues that arise when you're a white girl from the South-- and you leave the South-- and people assume that a) you're a demonic racist asshole and/or b) you've slept with a sibling and/or c) you don't own shoes (anyone who cares to contest this one, I'd invite to tour my closet, except that you really can't walk in there because there are too damn many shoes in the way (last count: 65 pairs, not counting flip-flops because flip-flops do not really qualify as shoes, even if you THINK it's a fashionable idea to wear them to work.)). So, all that's just to say that I've been toying with notions of food and identity and politics for a while, now.
So the dream goes, I was somehow put in charge of offing chickens for some large family fete. I have a memory of being kept in the house as a child while my dad and some neighbor or other slaughtered chickens on our farm out in West Tennessee-- but other than a cloudy image of a pimply-looking already-quite-dead, featherless creature, I don't remember much of anything about the actual practice of chicken-killing. My dreaming self, however, determined that the best plan of attack would be to attempt snapping their scrawny li'l necks. As it turns out, I'm not the greatest at chicken-neck-wringing. It seems that I maimed and deformed quite a few chickens without learning an effective manner for actually breaking a chicken neck. In the chicken yard of my dreams, 20 or 30 chickens hopped about, shrieking in pain, with their heads all at half-mast. It seems that I was unable to kill them, and therefore, was readily inflicting pain on myriad god's little critters-- and was also failing in my duties toward the production of a bounteous feast. I was feeling pretty awful about my dream-self, I'll tell you what! It wasn't the best dream I've ever had.
Were I to play Freud with myself for a moment, I might point out that my inability to properly kill a chicken (where's a dream-gun when you need one?) serves as a most blade-like and incisive metaphor for how I felt about finishing my manuscript, and followingly, finishing grad school. In taking a third year to complete my degree, I felt confident I'd injured my manuscript pretty severely--it screamed and moaned and copped attitude with me on a daily basis. But I could no more find a way to heal it than I could find a way to kill it good and dead.
But Freud is passe and I'm no kinda analyst.
Why is it that I'm still relieved when I realize I don't really write poems anymore?
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