The Midwinter Constellation
Written in semi-quarantine with my two young daughters in 2018 (my husband had a stomach virus and we were trying to avoid infecting my mother, whose home we were visiting for Christmas), my contribution to this project was eerily predictive of how I and millions of other parents would experience the pandemic of 2020: alone with needy children, sick or tending the sick or fearing sickness, unable to find time to work or think, sleep broken, hands raw from washing, rage and frustration barely contained. But it also presaged the forms of virtual connection that we would find in spring 2020: early on Midwinter Day 2018, I worried that I'd been locked out of the Google Doc, out of participating in this community just as I was locked in my childhood bedroom. Then, suddenly, alone with my children, I was in the company of so many others. I could read, write, and even dictate this collective poem from my phone while nursing a baby, running errands, putting children to bed — compositional practices I borrowed from Mayer.
Four years before, when my oldest daughter was a year old, I'd attended another Midwinter Day event, a marathon reading in Brooklyn. I'd read from the poem's third section, where Mayer and her own two young daughters go out to do errands in downtown Lenox. In the lines I read aloud, the exasperation of caring for small children — "Marie trips over her own boots / And hits her head on a brick / Sophia's mittens come off"1 — mingles with tenderness and empathy — Marie's tantrum at the library is "a violent willful outburst of rage and annoyance / Like not having a room of one's own or the love of another"2 — and none of this can be separated from Mayer's poetics. We — poets, mothers, children — all long for our own space, to have our own way, but Mayer shows how we can make art out of the distraction, isolation, and communion of motherhood, of daily life. The books the family checks out from the library — Edmund Wilson's "literary chronicle" The Bit Between My Teeth, Curious George, Pepys's Diaries — remind us that life and art are made of all these things jumbled together, that chronicles have power. Mayer might make writing amid motherhood look easier than it is — even with weeks of dream practice, not many of us could have written something like Midwinter Day, at least not on our own! — but she also shows us what is possible. On that morning, from the isolation of motherhood and quarantine, I joined a company of poets — something that Mayer, and then this project, opened the door for me to do.
Caolan Madden's poems and essays can be found in various journals and anthologies, including Victorian Poetry and We Are the Baby-Sitters Club. She is the author of the poetry chapbook VAST NECROHOL (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018). Find her on Twitter @caolanm.
