Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else

Source Credits

Source Credits Page 1. “I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet.” Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1991). Page 6. “In what furnace? In what brain?” William Blake, adapted from “In what furnace was thy brain?” from “The Tyger,” in Songs of Innocence and Experience (Oxford University Press, 1990). Page 9. “For my sake and for all our sakes.” James Joyce, in Ulysses (Random House, 1986). Page 16. “Muscles better and nerves more.” e.e. cummings, from “i like my body when it is with your,” in 100 Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1994). Page 16. “Who’s ever been naked?” Alice Notley, from “Rita, a Red Rose, Hates Her Clothes,” in Disobedience (Penguin Press, 2001). Page 22. “What the hell is she building in there?” Tom Waits, adapted from “What’s He Building?” in Mule Variations (Anti/Epitaph, 2004). Page 23. “You think your temper is the worst in the world, but mine used to be just like it.” Louisa May Alcott, in Little Women (Signet Classics, 2004). Page 24. “Now my belly is as noble as my heart.” Gabriela Mistral, from “Poem of the Mothers,” in Poems and Prose Poems by Gabriela Mistral (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Page 27. “The person you choose is someone you would feel alright with in lifeand -death levels of tripping.” Ina May Gaskin, from Spiritual Midwifery (Summertown, Tenn.: The Book Publishing Company, 1977). Page 27. “These were pains one could follow with one’s mind.” Margaret Mead, in Blackberry Winter (New York: Morrow, 1972). Page 30. “She would bring down the little birds.” Robert Duncan, from “My Mother Would Be a Falconress,” in Bending the Bow. Copyright © 1968 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing. Page 35. “The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum Books, 2004). Page 43. “Boarded the train there’s no getting off.” Sylvia Plath, in The Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes (New York: Harper and Row, 1981). Page 49. “All our progress is an unfolding.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Intellect,” in Essays: First Series (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). Page 51. “I won’t be pregnant anymore, and that is where the emptiness begins.” Jenny Boully, from “He Wrote in Code,” in One Love Affair (Brooklyn: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006). Page 68. “Does my fat ass make my fat ass look fat?” Refrigerator magnet. Page 71. “This is the secret world of the oracle. How can you hope to understand her before you know what she is really like?” J. M. Coetzee, in Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003). Page 73. “I want to hold myself to you but you are myself.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006). Page 78. “A woman is always hampered.” Gustave Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, translated by Geoffrey Wall (Penguin Classics, 2002). Page 80. “My mother-in-law’s other car is a broom.” Bumper sticker. Page 83. “Motherhood in our present social state is the sign and seal, the means and methods of a woman’s bondage; it forges chains of her own flesh and blood; it weaves chords of her own love and instinct.” Mona Caird, in The Daughters of Danaus (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1989). Page 83. “True liberty is not defined by a relationship between desire and its satisfaction, but by a relationship between thought and action.” Simone Weil, in Oppression and Liberty, translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie (London: Routledge and Paul, 1958). Page 83. “Stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury.” Euripides, in Medea, translated by Ian Johnston (Arlington, Vir.: Richer Resources Publications, 2008). Page 83. “To return to her . . . to repossess and be repossessed by her.” Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Bantam Books, 1977). Page 84. “Into the yolk and white of the one shell.” William Butler Yeats, from “Among School Children,” in The Tower (Scribner, 2004). Page 92. “I’m a mother to begin with.” Bernadette Mayer, in The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (Stockbridge, Mass.: Hard Press, 1994). ...