Introduction to Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986-2020 by Hilda Raz

I have long admired the immediacy and spontaneity that merges with a distancing tone of voice in the poetry of Hilda Raz—that ability she has to tell something of the everyday and make it tough, to move through the discursive to imagistic lyric all in one poem, and especially across books. It’s that “I’m as hard as nails listening” aspect that sees through difficult times and confronting situations with acceptance but refusal to give in as well. Raz’s is a poetry of real inner strength expressed through a boldness of diction, with often surprising twists and turns in the figurative to disturb any easy reception, often moving against its own grain.

There’s an ongoing conversation with Adrienne Rich in Hilda Raz’s work—the early Rich but more the middle or later Rich—but that’s the incident of being an essential feminist in an often inimical patriarchal America. And she offers other strong ways through too, with poems that talk and also compile experience and observation with tactile precision and purpose. By which I mean that we’re welcomed into the buildings of the poems, though they are often wild cards that take us places aside from their familiar and sharing talk. There are some incredible pastoral inversions to be encountered, and the comforts of intimacy are always complex, with things not necessarily as they seem. Place is a dynamic of land and people, and their impacts on each other, and their conversations. Be it in Nebraska or New Mexico, we know where we are and why place needs to be talked about.

It’s the affirmations that Raz’s poems contain—as much as their sometimes bitter and always forceful (and frequently ironic) critiques of consumer capitalism that cares nothing for communities or the natural environment—that lifts us; this affirmation-critique dynamic of her books, and especially at work across this entire volume. I sometimes think of the activism of Denise Levertov, but poetically rather than in on-site presence (which is not to suggest Raz hasn’t been on-site at protests), but really I am talking about a mode of articulation, the manner of address of protest. Levertov’s voice was so public, Raz’s so immediately to hand and often enacted within the teaching environment across decades—its own kind of public. We can all learn from these articulations of every woman, every “woman of power,” and a deeply sensitive respect for difference. Raz’s intense awareness of the politics and vulnerabilities of the body, along with its strengths and wonders, is spoken through the mouths of her poems.

Antecedents for a poet are a complex array of people, texts, songs, traditions, rebellions, engagements, refusals, and so much more. We can add many other elements to this array—the point being that no single poem is made in a vacuum and that no matter how much individual poems are trying to connect with or distance themselves from poetries that come before, they are also in dialogue with and debate those pasts.

Hilda Raz is a poet who has both embraced and investigated her connections with many pasts but always with a degree of respect for difference and the politics and ethics of where and how one manages examinations of the past, of heritage and inheritance. Her poems are full of surprising twists and turns that so often go counter to the general meaning of the poem itself; so even when an event of memory, an incident or story, is being recounted or retold, it is with these provisos of why and how in place.

I have known Hilda Raz’s poetry since the late ’90s, but it was really her remarkable book Trans that shifted ways of reading poetry for me and prompted further considerations in myself about what I might or might not privilege myself to comment on in both poetry and general conversation—interpret outside my own physical experience. Raz’s book doesn’t give me answers and doesn’t claim it should or can, but it is a dialogue of her own that will prompt many different responses from readers that will necessarily come out of their own experiences. Such dialogues are not ours alone but always part of other people’s dialogues with their own lives. And the respect for the independence and agency of others’ lives, even when they intersect, or even intimately or familiarly connect with our own, remains separate, autonomous, and does not have to justify itself.

Where does this leave the poet using poems as a way of interfacing with world, with their experience that necessarily draws other people’s biographies into their own? I asked all these questions when I first read Trans and still offer no answers. What I can do is offer my respect for all journeys as being their own journeys, contingent in coexistence but not in ultimate need for mutuality.

Trans opens with a Rilke poem and moves on to questions of what is self-examination in the context of another’s transition, no matter how close they are to the poet, how much their lives are implicated by heritage and familial ties. Because, of course, we are all intact and autonomous beings, and we all have the right not to be as others, not to be partitioned in any way at all—to live with an agency and rights to be who we are, and Raz believes this emphatically.

But being supportive is never enough; it’s also a questioning of who we are when we’re being supportive, and a poet intrudes with every attempt to work through change, confronting or expressing admiration as a poem might do, or both, and much else. But Raz is working through rights of involvement as a mother and wondering what they can be. Discourse around the oppression of trans rights is more active in 2022 than it was in 2001 (but not nearly enough, not yet—there is a long way to go in the rights issues around such necessities and choices). Addressing prejudices now is more broadly active than it was even twenty years ago, but lack of respect often aligns with acts of accommodation that can be as hurtful and offensive as denials.

Hilda Raz tries to find a poetic path in understanding (which is not a given, nor necessarily a right) and engaging with many forms of transformation but also recognizing that it’s not as simple as an elision of journey as metaphor, as simple as “change” or “crossing over,” and that there’s also a “remaining the same” as much as a “going” and changing involved.

We can travel together. We don’t have to.

We—none of us as the roles cast for us, the stories not working out as we expect, or second-guess. Raz so often uses the conversational storytelling mode but doesn’t try to take over or occupy others’ stories. Her complexities evolve out of where others’ stories intersect with her own, and the nuance required in understanding those points—woman, mother, intellectual, activist, listener, poet. But her poems can be brazen—we see the working out process up close, and it’s not always comfortable, and it is sometimes very confronting.

Raz notes early in the Trans collection:

 

What to make of our profiles: age, religious preference, marital history, hobbies, our experience with Hale-Bopp, did we see the comet at all, note its tail as… what?

 

She records a few poems further on, in empathy with her ten-year-old child:

 

How long will it last? she asks,

meaning grief, and I haven’t the heart

to say a lifetime. Daughter.

—“Said to Sarah, Ten”

 

And it does, and it doesn’t. “Sarah,” as with any name, is a “giving” and is a reaching back and a projection forward, but it is never an entire story. Sarah was also Abraham’s wife. Sarah is also not Abraham’s wife. Names shift as signifiers. We are not our names, we are self-definitions in the context of social movements and associations. And we are victims of control, in the same way natural environments are controlled, and made toxic. It’s difficult not to let analogies slip into associations they’re not intended to merge with, but poetry does that, and we end up with the difficult space of frustration, fear, and doubt entangling with affirmation and differentiating of human rights and planetary life. There are transitions against oppressions (against gender profiling, and also as affirmations of the gender one knows one is or isn’t, and not what one is told one is), but there are also transitions against every person’s (and every group of people’s) well-being: such as environmental destruction. But transition can—even in a general sense—be overwhelmingly positive and generative and joyous. The crossing over becomes in the poem as the mother works toward a shared understanding of their new-old personal dynamic.

Raz constantly tries to find a way through to how poetry can say what it means and not completely abdicate authorial intent to the figurative philosophically (though a surrealist might push to do this, as might dismantlers and contesters of language vying with the unconscious—but I don’t think this is Hilda Raz’s main concern or aim as a poet, though she can be as challenging to the shape and form of language as any poet can be), while existentially engaging with the metaphoric as a generative, healing force. She can offend (not toward individuals but against gross wrongs as she perceives them). We encounter the poisonous spray, the fires on the prairie—all are active in her positioning herself as commentator, which she is compelled to be, but doubting herself, often with devastating self-examination fused with meditation on art, the natural world, a core feminism that is too often misread as a kind of trope, which it is not.

So many Raz poems are confrontations with negations around us, of the negatives and hypocrisies of accommodation, of the ease with which others judge what we are going through, even vicariously. In fact, the relationship between the experienced and vicariousness might be a major thread of Raz’s oeuvre because she refuses to allow the contradictions to be dismissed or ignored—she wants them to live and speak and assist us in our reconciliations with an often damaged and damaging existence.

The poem “Trans” is a mother’s struggle over her “brilliant daughter” not being a “daughter.” The mother’s therapy, the interjecting voices of the outside world, all come into the anxiety of role and obligation, of the false binary of responsibility and place in the world. The poem, like so many of Raz’s poems, works through the situation with various voicings in the story congruent with self-analysis, self-critique. If you want to read a poetry of honesty and often pain in working through things and even asking what right one has to work through them if not the person whose body is directly involved—in an effort to come to a just and genuine position of personal responsibility, of respect—then Raz’s poetry is exemplary in this. From this stanza in “Trans” with its discussion in terms of signs:

 

It’s the age, she said

not meaning puberty because he was long past,

thirty at his last birthday, but the times: everything

possible: hormones, surgery, way beyond unisex

jeans at the Mall, those cute flannel button-down shirts.

 

We move toward a strong self-awareness of what shouldn’t be said as much as what can…crossing into a mutual empathy, into the essence of humanity:

 

I try to conjure his voice: “Mom

since sunup the sky’s been dark but now we’re talking

I see the sun come out perfect

for a walk and when we’re through talking

I’m going out. Come with me?”

That voice: the same words and phrases, intonation

from me with his dad mixed in “like cake with too much

frosting,” as my student said tonight in class. Be honest

here. Love is the word he said in closing. “I love you,

Mom.” Transsexual—like life, not easy—in this century.

My kid. And me in the same boat with him, mine.

 

To me this seems a poem of integrity and respect—the transitions are flows and movements that preexist as much as postexist, that are forced into being dramatic and psychologically painful because of social expectation, because of the same worldview that leads to the toxification of the planet.

Raz never occludes contradictions and doesn’t have answers (and nor are answers required—the question is, whose business is it?), but she is a witness to her own processes, the truths around her, and the nature of affection, respect, and love. It’s intensely moving, but maybe because it’s just as it should be. Loss—where is? is transformed into we are, in essence. In searching for ourselves in those we are connected with in the past, the now, the future, we can grow by understanding difference as much as recognizable traits, and how much more sameness there is than we are willing to acknowledge. Difference can be about different kinds of sameness, too! The irony of control is expressed in poems like “Women & Men,” and this needs to be read against the activism of self-examination (especially in terms of broader social, familiar, environmental, and humanitarian concerns):

 

Women walk downtown holding their daughters’

hands, or can if they’re inclined,

each generation adding a link to the chain.

 

And in her examination of gender as external construction, but also internal affirmation of being, she never avoids the complexities (“Adam’s rib” reconsidered…), with the rhizomes and capillaries of pain and body, of embodiment and body, of what health is when it brings body and the sense of self into argument, stress, and sometimes trauma…the disrupted body (“Wonder Woman and the Disrupted Body”) and intactness, change, mutability:

 

Imagine Wonder Woman with one breast. Draw her costume.

Alter the top. Only one bracelet. Is it wider? The wooden boot.

 

And a few poems later, as a turning of empathy and the existence of analogy that is real and metaphorical, almost only able to configure as comfort in the space of a poem (“Aaron at Work/ Rain”):

 

By the light box propped in the window,

bare chested, scars rosy in artificial sun,

he crouches over his workbench.

 

Raz utilizes alignment in seemingly incongruous ways to compel hope, but it’s not easy, nor prescriptive.

“The dead” are never far away in Raz’s examination of self, and that bothers her. The connective tissue of names: family, people, tradition, sacred texts, the blasts of modernity. And how do we read this here and now in nonbinary ways? This is a question inherent in Raz’s self-examination of the effect of external events on herself and of how she feels about the effects of those events on others around her, and far from her too. Maybe we find intimations in an earlier poem (“G: But it’s still not all right with you?” from Divine Honors, 1997):

 

marriage, palm to palm, or

no distinctions, races, genders, each to each:

dear Darwin in his garden, counting earthworms.

 

and in “Doing the Puzzle/ Angry Voices” from Trans:

 

Every book that documents birth

puts onto gender a meaning.

 

Hilda Raz is a poet of very “diverse subject matter,” but always with the concentrations of her deeply felt concerns, her sense of responsibility to the poem, to others, to the biosphere, to herself. She observes, sometimes witnesses, ponders contradictions and whether or not they should be resolved; she steps out of her comfort zones; she takes risks in body, mind, and soul.

Another poet I see echoes of throughout the decades of this work is Maxine Kumin, and reaching the end of my read-through of this magnificent work of feminism, activism, humanism, environmentalism, acute storytelling observation, and respect for not-being-herself, which is not without its moments of humor and levity (though often wry, if not deeply ironic!), I come across the poem “Credo 23” and its epigraph: “I believe in…the grace of animals / in my keeping, the thrust to go on.”—Maxine Kumin. Yes. And the poem that it accompanies or is accompanied by (alone and in company are variegating themes of Raz, I think) is a wonderful “later Raz” (or more recent Raz!) contemplation of contraries…of nature and the domestication of, of walking and questioning, of being and a kind of preventing the nothingness. Aside from being an excellent cat poem (always, Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno” comes to mind, whether it should or shouldn’t!), it finishes with rabbits and change (good or bad, or good and bad), with the mutable, in her wonderfully controlled almost immutable stanza-shapes and line-making, holding the meditation in place:

 

High summer again; I am in its keeping.

Monsoon rains washed out our road.

The rabbits’ number escalates, more

and more each morning as we walk.

Through my dark glasses the world

continues its flicker. Aware, I’m here.