Discovering Poetry Therapy
It's difficult to make a living as a Poet. Most Poets become teachers following an academic path. I was definitely on the academic path as I worked through Creative Writing/Literary Cultural Theory degrees at Carnegie Mellon University. Upon moving to Seattle, I continued thinking the academic path was the only choice. I tried graduate school. I tried competitions where you send in monetary reading/entry fees to get discovered by "legitimate" publishers/presses. Professors told me it was important to win those competitions. The reality was I usually got an old fashioned rejection letter, and my hard earned dollars had subsidized the career of the "winner."
Then an interesting thing happened. I got married. I got pregnant on my honeymoon. I wrote about my child constantly. We worked hard to get ready, taking pre-natal classes, learning hypno-birthing. We were prepared. I wrote about my child constantly.
Then, on March 11, 1999 at 4:47pm, my son Dakota died at birth. Dead. Not a crying, hungry baby, but a dead one, purple lips, bruised body, marks of strangulation from being knotted in his own umbilical cord.
To say the least, academia did not know how to deal with my intense grief, emotional writing, cries of pain and desire to die along with my child. Professors want form. They want experience, revision, dedication to The Craft. I was dying. Academia could not help me, did not want to help me, had no idea how to classify my "emotional" works.
After spending nine months writing my son into existence, I began revising alright! Revising my life, trying desperately to resurrect my son through poetry, making every effort to not jump out the nearest window.
My husband pleaded with me to stay alive, to write out my fears, anger, sadness. I refused to send my works to random editors and academics. I refused to give them the chance to kill my son all over again by suggesting I revise, rewrite, bottle my grief into this form or that one. My son was already bottled in a marble jar, his little body cremated into sticky ashes. No way would random editors tell me to stuff my son into their particular requirements.
So my husband and I started KotaPress to publish my grief writings and my husband's artworks. KotaPress became our safe haven for expressing anger, sadness, disappointment, recovery through art. Work was published at http://www.KotaPress.com, and we did print editions, too. We started providing free copies of Mrs. Duck and The Woman to bereaved families.
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