Margaret Shultz

The Curriculum of the Curriculum  

We were assigned great writers of English  
literature. We read them for their power. Their  
power 

  to continue 

to be read 

in the dominant culture 

thus  

was held over us 

  as a compulsion  

what was studied was 

  the language  

which strangely  

was not considered 

 as a form  


 of force

although everything that existed  

was said to exist inside of it.  

Luckily I read Valerie Solanas who tells us:  

“Having stripped the world of conversation, friendship, and love, the male offers us these  paltry substitutes: ‘Great Art’ and ‘Culture.’”ⁱ

And Pauline Oliveros, who  

“imagine[s] a ‘continuous circulation of power’ enacted through performance.”ⁱⁱ


I am gathering these materials for a course proposal. 

 I do not mean this to be an academic question.  

A curriculum is a course of study 

  coming from corridor  

  or to run.

  Also, currency,  

the course of one’s life. 

  Let’s say it is my life that we are studying.  

A way we might enter this study is through  
who I have had power over 
and who has had power over me. 

You may read me but some knowledge enters elsewhere. 




There are things I will not tell you. 


I would say I wish to expose 

  how colleges’ tacit  

  acceptance of the high rate  

of rape, assault, harassment, gender-based violence  

is something we are taught to accept as  

normal.   

But I would also ask, what is hidden about this?  

  Is it not visible? And have the colleges  

  not burned?  

 I consider the concept hidden  

  and come to the feeling 




it is something more complex in who is hidden from whom.

  How could we continue?  

 Would there be anything left on the syllabus?  

 All these Latin words  

stuck on my tongue like caramel. 

Here is my curriculum for dancing, 

curriculum for durational movement, 

curriculum for tending one’s anger like a fruit  

  AKA  

curriculum for fighting for your life. 

   


I wish I could explain how when I say hidden 

I mean nothing is and  

everything. Very seriously. Approaching 

something like the subconscious rooms  

here is a proposal 

for the collective circulation  
of the hidden. 




The private entrance of the dancers 

  who makes their way across the floor  




in a movement without steps. 

ⁱ Valerie Solonas, SCUM Manifesto, 1968 
ⁱⁱ Description of Pauline Oliveros’s 1970 orchestral score, “To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of  Their Desperation,” publicrecordings.org/oliveros

The Doctor Tells Me  

To wait three days for antibiotics to reach the sinuses. The drugs have to do a kind of crawling through my body, breath by silted breath. I watch impatiently for their arrival, my lymphatic system oozes, a flooded map of passageways between blood and flesh. The university - my employer - changed the health insurance, co-pays accumulating as charges on my account. A “hold” on my “transcript” from a wash of fees. I want this poem to say something about infection but am interrupted by collection letters. This debt I owe, my body, each curve or cut a cost I will never pay. Blessings to the swollen stomach, the lingering inflammation in the lungs, throat. What am I owed for my lucid laboring? The passages work both ways: someday, I tell you, I will come collect.

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Margaret Shultz (pronouns: they/them) is a writer and teacher from Iowa City, Iowa. They are currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Arizona State University, and are an associate editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review. Margaret’s poems and other writing have appeared in Palimpsest, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Pinwheel Poetry, Afternoon Visitor, and elsewhere.