Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems

Notes

Notes I provided author’s notes for my second and third books. They were created with the primary intention of encouraging students (and those whose curiosity is piqued by my subject matter) to investigate my references further. I’ve provided notes here for the new work in Cell Traffic as well as original (and updated ) notes from the works published earlier. Further comment, links to articles, and information that inspires my writing can be found at HeidErdrich.com. Notes to Cell Traffic The title of this collection, Cell Traffic, suggests movement, small units passing back and forth, busy telecommunications, internet chatter and terrorist groups, the sale or traffic in DNA or body parts or bones, indigenousness and ancestral inheritance, migration through procreation, and other biological processes . I mean for all of these notions and more to come into play for readers, not just with the new poems collected here but as a through-line carried, to some extent, throughout all of my books. That said, Cell Traffic takes its title from the term based on the scientific fact that cells have been found to move from the fetal body to the maternal body and vice versa. The result of cell traffic is called microchimerism, the existence of cells within us that are not genetically our own. The poems “Microchimerism ” and “Little Souvenirs from the DNA Trading Post,” as well as others in this collection, include quotes from and make reference to a 2002 paper by Dr. Judith G. Hall and from a profile of Dr. Diana Bianchi in Tufts Medicine, 2005, written by Bruce Morgan (editor). You can see the profile of Dr. Bianchi based on Morgan’s article at: http://www.tufts.edu/home/feature/?p=bianchi and, if you first sign in, you can read the 2002 presentation titled “Fetal Determinants of Adult Health” by Dr. Judith G. Hall, at http://www.medscape.org/ viewarticle/432305. My younger sister Angie Erdrich is a human being of great integrity, a gifted visual artist, and a mother of four. She is a pediatrician who has worked with American Indian populations her entire career. We have Angie to thank (or blame) for turning me on to the fascinating world of cell traffic. She sent me an article about maternal-fetal cell traffic research, and the more I learned, 200 the more I felt that knowledge of how our cells act answered basic spiritual questions and upheld my own intuitions about my connections to my children . It seems a hopeful field of study, too, as the role of fetal cells in protecting the mother is becoming understood, or at least written about, in ways that strike me as feminist and positive. More is known about other kinds of microchimerism all the time—all of it just too darn interesting. Sometimes a person, born singularly, can be a blood chimera (hence the title “Blood Chimera”)— meaning the person’s blood type is not straightforwardly his or hers but may be the result of having once been, at a very early stage of fetal development, a twin—to put a complex thing very simply. I read about such things in, among other sources, an article written by Claire Ainsworth titled “The Stranger Within” (New Scientist, November 2003)—the article quoted on the epigraph page opening this book. As in my earlier work, popular notions of science often trigger my poetry in Cell Traffic. The poem “Thrifty Gene, Lucky Gene” responds to the idea of the “thrifty gene,” described as the gene that allows some people to gain weight easily. “Brain Scan” was written after I heard Dr. Amen (author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life) on public television describing how brain imaging could be used to help relationships. “Mitochondrial Eve” was written some time between 2007 and 2010. The talented Gwen Westerman wrote a poem of the same title and I hope I did not steal it from her. Perhaps we share a mitochondrial mother and the idea was within us both? In any case, “mitochondrial Eve” is a phrase I’ve heard used to describe the original genetic ancestor from whom all humanity is said to descend. Such science is constantly debunked and debated and, at one point, reports that there were actually seven mitochondrial Eves made the news. My poem “Seven Mothers” also makes reference to the idea of the original seven genetic mothers. The subject is worth an internet search. There are a few curious articles speculating on how mitochondrial...