Read a F*cking Book Review – “Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme”

Are you in the right bathroom? Just kidding. GUESS WHAT weirdos, have I ever got some exciting news for you: Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme is a new collection of essays exploring the funny, messy, confusing, contradictory, liberating, confining, wet wild ride of gender from a powerhouse cross-section of the queer world’s smartest and sexiest writers, poets, musicians, activists and scholars. Did you just get excited?

The book is edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman and is published by the very-dear-to-my-heart Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver. (Sidenote: to my delight, this book is SUPER Canadian. The majority of the contributers are Canadian, and all of the -ORs are -OURs. It may seem silly but since I’ve been living in the States, reading it like, relaxed my eyeballs or something. Love me some CANCON.)

In case you weren’t already familiar, Ivan E. Coyote is a Canadian writer, storyteller, musician and filmmaker hailing from the YUKON. (You may recall the Yukon from its mention in the Calvin and Hobbes classic Yukon Ho!. Generally speaking, the Yukon is a place that even hardcore winter-weathering Canadians consider to be actually too cold.) Ivan came and spoke in one of my university classes in Montreal once and was charming and witty and engaging and brilliant. Zena Sharman is a gender and health researcher and self-described “femme dynamo”; the pair’s introduction is a transcription of an extended chat session between them, which I thought was cute, and also set the tone for the book’s feeling of right-now-now relevance. Nicely played.

If you’re a gender wonk, then you may have noticed that the title is a nod to Joan Nestle‘s groundbreaking and now-classic 1992 collection, The Persistent Desire: A Butch-Femme Reader (check it out if you haven’t, Nestle notes that copies of the 1992 edition can still be found in used bookstores and any university library worth its salt should have it too). In fact, Nestle herself provides the foreword to Persistence, in which she insightfully discusses the historical and cultural context of Persistent Desire, the continuing evolution of the language of gender and identity, and the importance of continuing the discussion:

At seventy, I have looked into the future, I have heard the new-old cries of don’t box us in, don’t be sure of how all this is going to turn out, we will forge new liberations in a time of endless war, we will work toward social justice in this world, carrying these complex bodies of desire with us, as much acts of the imagination as flesh and bone. We have cast off the anchors.

The words butch and femme are pretty loaded for some people — which is good! The book is as much of a reclamation as it is an explosion of our understanding of and experiences with butch and femme identities. It includes essays that cherish and celebrate butch and femme as well as seek to critique, expand, and redefine these categories. Most importantly, it offers playful and unique insights into the complexities of our fierce (and fiercely-vulnerable) messy-perfect queer lives. This is The Way That We Live for real.

In Coyote’s words:

“The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the word butch or femme. This books is a testament to the many beautiful ways butch and femme can be lived and embodied. It is our homage to the bodies that lived it before us, and it is our gift to those just discovering themselves.”

The list of contributers reads like the invite list to the greatest potluck ever: in addition to Coyote and Sharman, there’s friend-of-Autostraddle and beloved blogger Bevin Branlandingham of Queer Fat Femme, Canadian indie-folk countryboy Rae Spoon, author and activist Leah Lakshmi, poet and writer Zoe Whittall, trans activist and playhound S. Bear Bergman, one-woman-powerhouse Anna Camilleri (remember Taste This?), and on and on. It’s a bit daunting, actually. This collection is so packed full of writing (“a bit bloated” – Riese) that it’s almost overwhelming. Coyote and Sharman have done a good job, though, of putting cerebral academic entries beside the light and anecdotal, and it flows really nicely. It’s like a big gay all-you-can-eat buffet.

Most importantly, the writing is good! Most of it, anyway. And while I admittedly tend to get bored when I’m reading people talking about their own gender on and on, I found most of the essays really fascinating and engaging.

In “A Beautiful Creature,” Karleen Pendleton Jiménez recalls her experience of being butch and pregnant; Amber Dawn offers raw insight into the complicated experience of being a queer femme sex worker and its impact on her butch partners in “To All the Butches I Loved Between 1995 and 2005”; Rae Spoon laments his inability to chop wood effectively in “Femme Cowboy”; romham padraig gallacher reconciles trans and butch self-identities in “Home/Sickness: Self Diagnosis”; Bevin Branlandingham debunks the oft-ballyhooed “high maintenance” High Femme descriptor in “Rethinking High Maintenance: The Queer Fat Femme Guide to Not Blaming It on the Fact That You Don’t Like High Femmes,” and Leah Lakshmi rallies the troops in her brilliant “FEMME SHARK MANIFESTO”:

FEMME SHARKS AREN’T JUST DIMEPIECES AND TROPHY WIVES.
FUCK THAT!
WE MIGHT BE YOUR GIRL,
BUT WE’RE OUR OWN FEMMES.
WE RECOGNIZE THAT FEMMES ARE LEADERS OF OUR COMMUNITIES.
WE HOLD IT DOWN, CALM YOUR TEARS, ORGANIZE THE RALLY,
VISIT YOU IN JAIL, GET CHILDCARE HOOKED UP, LOAN YOU TWENTY DOLLARS.
FEMMES ARE WELDERS, AFTERSCHOOL TEACHERS, ABORTION
CLINIC WORKERS, STRIPPERS, WRITERS, FACTORY WORKERS,
MOMS, REVOLUTIONARIES DEDICATED TO TAKING THE SYSTEM
THE HELL DOWN SO WE CAN BE FREE!
…
WE’RE YOUR BEST GIRLFRIEND AND YOUR WORST
NIGHTMARE

It’s a must-have for the shelf of anyone who lives and loves and jams in this crazy world of mystical gendered bodies, and is a nice reminder that butch and femme are as past as they are present as they are future, and that there are as many ways to do masculinity and femininity and everything else as there are smart, freaky, quirky people walking around on this planet.

Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian Gray” Gets Uncensored and Totally Gay

It only took about 120 years, but modern society is apparently ready to handle The Gay in Oscar Wilde’s first and only novella, The Picture of Dorian Gray. See, the first published version of the gothic horror classic which tells the story of a young man who trades the purity of his soul for undying youth contained many more explicit homosexual overtones between the characters than in the version you probably read in English class. Passages which described the artist Basil Hallward’s feelings for Dorian Gray (which accentuated elements of homosexuality in Gray himself) were later deleted by Wilde’s editor, JM Stoddart, who felt it was far too “objectionable,” especially at a time when being gay in the United Kingdom was still illegal.
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Pure Poetry #35: Lesbian Poet Kay Ryan Wins the Pulitzer Prize

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – *Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – *Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – *Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – *Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari
#27 – 3/18/2011 – Jeffrey McDaniel by Julieanne
#28 – 3/20/2011 – *Dorothy Porter by Julia
#29 – 3/21/2011 – Sylvia Plath, by Riese
#30 – 3/24/2011 – *Poems About Being a Homogay, by Riese
#31 – 3/28/2011 – Mary Oliver by Morgan
#32 – 3/29/2011 – *Gertrude Stein + Mina Loy by Intern Emily
#33 – 3/29/2011 – * Sappho by Marisa Meltzer
#34 – 3/30/2011 – Stephen Dunn by Riese, Rachel, Intern Laura & Intern Emily
#35 – 4/19/2011 – * Kay Ryan Won a Pulitzer, by Carmen

• = lesbian
  

We know that technically Pure Poetry Week (s) is over, but sometimes the need arises to write another Pure Poetry and this is one of those times.

Kay Ryan, a total lezzer, won The Pulitzer Prize! However she’s concerned that the Pulitzer People don’t have a committee to inform Pulitzer Prize winners that they won the Pulitzer Prize because she found out from her friend, Kay Ryan you won a Pulitzer, on the phone. She won for her volume “The Best of It.”

Ryan’s accomplishments are many. In fact, according to the Academy of American Poets, the California girl has all of the accomplishments:

Ryan’s awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English Poetry Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included inThe Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.

Ryan’s poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus, among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the “It List” by Entertainment Weekly and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. In 2008, Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

But even now, as her Pulitzer Prize is slowly added into that conversation, Kay Ryan seems like more than those accomplishments.

Ryan’s work reflects a raw and intense emotionality, and in fact, her winning volume was inspired by some of her strongest feelings: Ryan wrote “The Best of It” because she wanted to stay at home with her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair. She had cancer, and Ryan saw writing the book as a process that could involve spending time with her.  Adair (you should really take a breath before this) passed away before the volume was published.

So, Kay Ryan has all of the feelings, too.

And Ryan may have all the feelings, but she also has all of the talent for forming succulent, short, sweet pieces about them. Some, like my favorite, “Home To Roost,” are also sassy. Kay Ryan keeps it real, guys:

Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small —
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

And some may surprise you with softness, like “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard:”

Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.

What makes Ryan so distinct in her writing style are not emotions that create the words, but the words that express the emotions. What really strikes me is not that I relate to the feeling, but that I relate to her voice. Kay Ryan sounds like me. She writes the way I think, in these short and extremely honest demarcated lines. It could be that we’re both hopelessly neurotic or hopelessly sensitive or hopelessly thoughtful, but I would like it instead to mean that Kay Ryan also considers herself bold, brave, and forthright.

I think Kay Ryan’s writing sounds like someone talking more to herself than to everyone else.

But I’m very glad everyone is listening.

Riese’s Team Pick: Longform Does National Magazine Awards

As you know, I spend 25% of my days daydreaming about what life would be like if everyone valued the importance of long-form journalism, 25% of my days daydreaming about what life would be like if we had any money so that I could write some long-ass investigative article about something Really Important, and the other 50%, well, that’s private.

In any event, the National Magazine Award Finalists were announced last week, and as the LA Times writer confesses: “The only problem with the American Society of Magazine Editors announcing the finalists for its print awards Tuesday is that now I have a really long reading list. Seriously, I could barely get to writing this post because I was dragged in by the stories that the awards link to (many are online, some are not).”

HOWEVER NOW THEY ARE — Longform.org has the complete text of all the pieces nominated for 2011 National Magazine Awards on its website.

If you read all of them, you’ll be 75% smarter by the end of the day. We just wanted you to know that there are lots of intelligent voices on the internet. They’re just not so loud sometimes.

Stronger Than Yesterday, “Venus With Biceps” Do It Nothin’ But Their Way

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David L. Chapman has been writing books about bodybuilding and the photography of muscular males for a long time. For example he wrote Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Body Building, American Hunks: The Muscular Male Body in Popular Culture, 1860-1970, and Comin’ at Ya!: The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield. After all that it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that in his search for historical depictions of bodybuilders and strongmen, he discovered images of strongwomen, too.

And yet, here I am — surprised!

I wasn’t sure which part of his newest book, Venus With Biceps, surprised me the most. Was it the fact that he found so many photographs? The fact that, compared to pictures of strongmen, relatively few images of strongwomen exist? Or was it the fact that nobody had thought to collect these images in one place before?

Because this is the first time anyone has compiled a collection of these images — 356 pages worth — and the result is something truly spectacular. Women with elaborate up-dos and absurdly corseted waistlines fill the pages; it’s enough to make you marvel at the sheer athleticism it must take to lift weights without being able to physically draw breath.

Many of his subjects were employed in the entertainment industry. Women who displayed strength that was considered “unusual” for women to possess were seen as oddities or freaks, and could usually find ample opportunity to make a few bucks as performers in circus and stage shows.

One performer, stage name was Charmion, was mistaken for a man so often that she created something called the “Trapeze Disrobing Act,” which is basically exactly what it sounds like. While swinging on the trapeze, she would take off as much clothing as local indecent exposure laws would allow (hint: not much). By today’s standards, the act itself is fairly tame stuff, but it raises an interesting point: strongwomen at the time were so determined to prove they were female that they would take off their clothes for an audience. It wasn’t about appearing sexy, it was about providing evidence of their biological sex. People just couldn’t believe that a woman could be that strong.

The American humor magazine, PUCK, attacked the issue of female strength and exercise in this very early satire. In 1880, the problem of women who wanted to gain strength and (by extension) self-determination was the real subject of this illustration.

Women have always been discouraged from doing sports for two main reasons: moral propriety, and the risk of injury. It’s assumed that women will be more concerned about possible injuries than men will — that concern for our reproductive organs will deter us from participating in sports. If fear of damaging reproductive organs deterred anyone from playing sports, men’s sports would not exist. The assumption here is that family values trump our own personal desires to achieve. Also that we even want to have children, or that we were born with female reproductive organs.

Modern day strongwomen who participate in bodybuilding competitions see their sport as an opportunity to provide an antidote to old-fashioned ideas about the female form. Natural bodybuilder Marla Battles began training and competing eight years ago, as a 40th birthday present to herself. “It’s about seeing what your body has the potential to do,” she says. “We learn something about ourselves every time we go onstage.” For most competitors, bodybuilding is about exploring the body’s capabilities. Katy Wayman-White acknowledged that her career as a bodybuilder has helped her sons appreciate strength as beauty. “They think it’s normal. I was a single mother raising three boys for a long time. They think strength IS beauty.”

There had been muscular women before Lisa Lyon — many of them, but they never really had the right combination of sexiness and muscularity to make them stars. Lisa was different. She had a thin, strong physique and knew how to show it off. suddenly, female bodybuilding had a spokeswoman who looked different from the beauty queens who had previously populated the posing platforms of women’s bodybuilding. She balanced her muscularity with her femininity, and intoxicating mixture for the general public. This exercise photo is from a 1980 feature article on Lyons in Iron Man magazine.

I love that this book exists because so many people still believe that women need to look a certain way, use their bodies a certain way, be in the world in a certain way in order to be women. Strength is for everyone. Pictures like these serve as a great starting point for conversations about the history of women in sports, about gender performance, about what constitutes beauty and why we create standards for strength based on gender. But more than that, these pictures, and these women, are proof that there have always been women who weren’t afraid to push the boundaries of social convention.

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Images and excerpts provided by Arsenal Pulp Press.
Thumbnail image: Mildred Burke, female pro-wrestler from the mid-1930s to early 1950s. Burke established the World Women’s Wrestling Association.

Pure Poetry #34: Of All Poets, Stephen Dunn

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – *Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – *Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – *Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – *Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari
#27 – 3/18/2011 – Jeffrey McDaniel by Julieanne
#28 – 3/20/2011 – *Dorothy Porter by Julia
#29 – 3/21/2011 – Sylvia Plath, by Riese
#30 – 3/24/2011 – *Poems About Being a Homogay, by Riese
#31 – 3/28/2011 – Mary Oliver by Morgan
#32 – 3/29/2011 – *Gertrude Stein + Mina Loy by Intern Emily
#33 – 3/29/2011 – Sappho by Marisa Meltzer
#34 – 3/30/2011 – Stephen Dunn by Riese, Rachel, Intern Laura & Intern Emily

• = lesbian
  

“I admire a great gaggle of contemporary poets whom I regard as a veritable pantheon of secular gods, but Stephen Dunn is my favorite living poet, my high priest of vertically rendered experience. I love his work so much that it seems that he should be dead. You understand.”

– Erik Campbell, The Accidental Plagiarist

Original Illustration for Autostraddle by Maja

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We’ve decided to end Pure Poetry Month with a megapost about our favorite poet of all time. He’s not a lesbian, unfortunately, but he changed our lives just the same and could change yours and has changed, we assume, many lives along the way.

Stephen Dunn was born in 1939 in New York City. Once upon a time he was a basketball player, another time he went to school for writing at Hofstra and then at Syracuse. Stephen Dunn won the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, the National Poetry Series Award and a ton of National Endowment For the Arts situations. He has taught poetry and writing at Columbia, Syracuse, the University of Washington, Princeton, the University of Michigan, Wichita State University and others.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Different Hours, published in 2000. He lives in New Jersey sometimes and Maryland sometimes.

We love him.

Let’s go.

Riese:

I don’t know how to talk about Stephen Dunn, because Stephen Dunn has already dedicated his life to talking about me so talking about him seems redundant.

Those of us who think we know
the same secrets
are silent together most of the time

– from ‘those of us who think we know’

He doesn’t know that he’s talking about me. I mean he’s a middle-aged — well, he must be past 60 by now — white guy who lives, I think, in New Jersey.

I met Stephen Dunn before I knew Stephen Dunn because he was the first poet to visit my first writing class during my first year at Interlochen Arts Academy.

At the time I was still anti-poetry. I didn’t know he was such a big deal. I remember writing notes to my roommate about Ovaltine vs. Swiss Miss while he read.

I wish I’d known then what I know now about how much he knows me, I have so many questions for him. No I don’t. I wouldn’t say a word.

In large groups, create a corner
in the middle of a room.

I remember one line that he read though, from “The Routine Things Around the House.” I realized this line was the truest thing I’d ever read, it described the only solace I knew for “what to do with pain,” and it reminded me of me feeling how I felt when terrible things happened. I used that line to explain myself so many times I don’t even need the book to write it down:

When Mother died I thought:
now I’ll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable

A year later in a poetry workshop, a classmate mentioned her obsession with Stephen Dunn, and how she read New & Collected Poems every night all over again. I didn’t even like that girl. She was a bad poet.

But I’m obsessed with what people become obsessed with. Then I noticed everyone else had remained obsessed since he’d first arrived on campus — all my best friends were into him like teenagers are into Liz Phair or something. Some of my friends were into Liz Phair AND Stephen Dunn.

Why didn’t I notice the first time? He’s not inaccessible or esoteric. He’s one of the most accessible poets I’ve ever read.

It was me, not him.

I remember Stephen Dunn’s reading like you remember the first, incidental time you met your future girlfriend but had no idea at the time, how maybe you smiled at each other across the table and texted kindly the next day in a friendly manner and then boom five months later you’re re-hashing that first glance, turning it into legend, turning memory into forecasts.

Stephen Dunn is a language now. It’s a part of how I talk, and his words are equals to our own in relationships with my Interlochen friends Krista and Ingrid.

“Remember Each From Different Heights, Ris,” Krista wrote me when a boy had just broken my heart. “Remember the bruise turning perfectly white.” And Ingrid, who’d made me a card with Each From Different Heights on it the year prior, so it was right there when Krista brought it up. Right there for me to reference it.+

Each From Different Heights

That time I thought I was in love
and calmly said so
was not much different from the time
I was truly in love
and slept poorly and spoke out loud
to the wall
and discovered the hidden genius
of my hands

And the times I felt less in love,
less than someone
were, to be honest, not so different
either.

Each was ridiculous in its own way
and each was tender, yes,
sometimes even the false is tender.

I am astounded
by the various kisses we’re capable of.
Each from different heights
diminished, which is simply the law.

And the big bruise
from the longer fall looked perfectly white
in a few years.
That astounded me most of all.

I was 19 when he did a reading at The University of Michigan and I wrote it up for The Michigan Daily. I wondered if Stephen would see it. He was teaching MFA students that year.

…and the class proceeded to debate
what’s fucking, what’s making love,
and the importance of context, tact
the bon mot. I leaned towards those

who favored fucking; they were funnier
and seemed to have more experience
with the happy varieties of their subject.

– from decorum

Once we were in the same elevator, I think it was in Angell Hall. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to change our relationship — the one where I read everything he said and he didn’t know who I was.

It was weird to breathe air with him, just riding the elevator like two normal anonymous people. Afterwards I wrote him a letter and never sent it. I’m glad I never sent it.

I brought my best friend Becky to that reading he did at U of M, a Westchester-bred sorority girl who liked Between Angels so much that she’d built an entire photography project around it. I got her that book for her birthday. When I took Advanced Photo that year I took pictures of Becky and this boy Adam for a visual presentation of After Making Love (which Laura discusses, below), but then someone stole it from the Photography classroom. I wonder why.

stephen dunn on the shelf in my old apartment

Most of my best friends know Stephen Dunn because Stephen Dunn is the very first thing I give them for the very first holiday we ever share, but only if I can hand it to them, it’s not the kind of thing you can mail.

I was 20 when I met another best friend, Natalie, and now we speak in a language that consists of our actual personalities augmented by Ani DiFranco lyrics, Lorrie Moore quotes and Stephen Dunn poems.

Here, let me help you, then you me,

——>otherwise we’ll die.

– from kindness

In Wisconsin for a weekend in October of my fourth year of college : Krista and Ingrid and I got cheese curds in a bag and raspberries from the Farmers Market and were eating at their house and taking turns reading Stephen Dunn poems to each other.

Ingrid read “Beautiful Women” and said “I dedicate this to you two because you are the most beautiful women I know,” which we thought was funny because everyone knew Ingrid was the most beautiful woman in the world. We’d gone to high school together. We knew these things.

More things come to them,
and they have more to hide.
All around them: mirrors, eyes
—–>In any case
they are different from other women
and like great athletes have trouble
making friends, and trusting a world
quick to praise.

But she was right. It wasn’t about high school or cheekbones, it was about being exactly who we were/are which is beautiful, all of us.

I wanted to stay in Madison forever with them on that floor, on that mattress, with those words. But I couldn’t — I had to go back to Michigan, to my condo and my boyfriend and the life I’d chosen but didn’t want anymore.

It was like this with him, eventually:

The Answers

Why did you leave me?

We had grown tired together. Don’t you remember?
We’d grown tired together, were going through the motions.

Why did you leave me?

I don’t know, really. There was comfort in that tiredness.
There was love.

Why did you leave me?

You began to correct my embellishments in public.
You wouldn’t let me tell my stories.

Why did you leave me?

She is… I don’t wish to be
any more cruel than I’ve been

You son-of-a-bitch.

Why did you leave me?

I was already gone.
I just brought my body with me.

Why did you leave me?

You found out and I found I couldn’t give her up.
I was as shocked as you were.

Why didn’t you lie to me?

I was already lying to you. It was hard work.
All of it suddenly felt like hard work.

Why did you leave me?

I wanted to try monogamy again.
I wanted the freedom to be monogamous.

You fucker. You fucking son-of-a-bitch.

Why did you leave me?

I wanted you both. I thought I could be faithful
to each of you. You shouldn’t have made me choose.

Don’t you know what betrayal is?

I never thought of it as betrayal. More like one pleasure
of mine you should never have known.

You really are quite an awful man.

Why did you leave me?

It was time to leave.
The hour of leaving had come.

Why did you leave me?

It would take too long to explain. Please
don’t ask me to explain.

Will you not explain it to me?

No, I will not explain it to you. I’ll say anything
rather than explain it to you. Even things that sound true.

These two lines are perfect. I’ve repeated an infinite number of times:

I was already gone.
I just brought my body with me.

So, then Krista was driving me to the bus station. She asked me if my boyfriend loved words. I said he did not. I knew, she knew, we all knew it. I’d already left, but my body lingered on. I came home wanting to touch no-one.

I’ve come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I turn
the key and they’re all lost
in food or homework, even the dogs
are preoccupied with themselves,
I desire only to ease
back in, the mail, a drink,
but tonight the body-hungers have set out
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.

– from i come home wanting to touch everything

Krista spent an entire day hunting down The Insistence of Beauty — where “The Answers” is from — when it first came out. By this point we were living together in Manhattan. When I got home from work she handed me my copy:  Ris, I think Stephen Dunn is getting divorced and I think he cheated on his wife or something.

But it wasn’t just the divorce making sneaky appearances in The Insistence of Beauty — though it was that. But it was also losing trust in love, or in the world, or in anything you once deemed reliable or eternal.

It was how people felt right after 9/11 which was right before our early 20s and so by this point in time — the point of when we read this book –we’d already stopped trusting things. It set the tone. That things could be one way, and then another. I trusted no one because that’s what happens after two or three people break your trust, you call the whole thing off. Then the world just reinforces that belief. I didn’t think anyone could write about it without sounding tacky, unless they’d been there, or knew somebody.

It was a relief, then, to learn that Stephen Dunn knew it too.

Grudges

Easy for almost anything to occur.
Even if we’ve scraped the sky, we can be rubble.
For years those men felt one way, acted another.

Ground zero, is it possible to get lower?
Now we had a new definition of the personal,
knew almost anything could occur.

It just takes a little training to blur
a motive, lie low while planning the terrible,
get good at acting one way, feeling another.

Yet who among us doesn’t harbor
a grudge or secret? So much isn’t erasable;
it follows that almost anything can occur,

like men ascending into the democracy of air
without intending to land, the useful veil
of having said one thing, meaning another.

Before you know it something’s over.
Suddenly someone’s missing at the table.
It’s easy (I know it) for anything to occur
when men feel one way, act another.

That last part reminded me of Joan Didion, from The Year of Magical Thinking:

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

And I wrote those things down in my diary over and over again: Before you know it something’s over, life changes in the instant, in the ordinary instant, it’s easy, you sit down to dinner and suddenly someone’s missing at the table. Over and over. It felt true.

Here are just a few of the other things he said that now I think about constantly, and maybe accidentally write myself sometimes, thinking it’s my own idea:

I do not mind living
like this. I cannot bear
living like this.
Oh, everything’s true
at different times
in the capacious day.

(from Between Angels)

There are always the simple events
of your life
that you might try to convert into legend.
(from Some Things I Wanted to Say to You)

I’ve known an edginess, come evening,
when I haven’t chosen to be alone, but am…
(from Night Truths)

Tell your lovers the world
robs us in so many ways
that a caress is your way
of taking something back.
Tell the dogs and the horses
you love them more than cars.
Speak to everything
would be my advice.

(from Some Things I Wanted to Say to You)

Intelligence warmed by generosity
is inner beauty, and what’s worse
some physically beautiful women have it,
and we have to be strapped and handcuffed
to the mast, or be ruined.

(from “Beautiful Women“)

When you get together
you must feel everyone has brought
his fierce privacy with him
and is ready to share it. Prepare
yourself though to keep something back;
there’s a center in you
you are simply a comedian without…
(from How to Be Happy: Another Memo to Myself)

If you want to love Stephen Dunn then a good/ideal place to start is New & Selected Poems (1974-1994). It has so many of my favorites in it. He wrote a non-fiction book too, called Waking Light, with this essay in it about Truth that I based my whole life on. Here’s the books you should read, in order:

1. New & Selected Poems (1974-1994)
2. Between Angels
3. The Insistence of Beauty
4. Loosestrife
5. Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs
6. Different Hours
7. Walking Light
8. Landscape at the End of the Century
9. Everything Else in the World
10. Local Visitations

I said in the beginning that I always buy Stephen Dunn for a new friend when they’re still new, and that I try to make everyone I love, love him too. But I’ve never bought Stephen Dunn for a girlfriend or boyfriend. I’m afraid. What if I see the book, untouched, on the counter? What if they read one thing and ignore the rest? I couldn’t handle it. I have come prepared to hold something back.

+

Stephen Dunn plays ping-pong at Rollins College

+

Intern Laura:

I don’t know how to talk about things I like so I’m going to talk about me. I liked Stephen Dunn because I learned about him during the year that I learned that I didn’t actually hate poetry. I thought I hated it because poetry is about feelings and I spent a lot of time not feeling up until then. Not because something was wrong or I was damaged or anything, just because I was afraid I would do it wrong. Feelings are messy and poetry is hard if you like everything to have a place. I’m kind of a perfectionist.

This is what brought me to AP English, since I didn’t actually have any specific love for literature. I used to devour books, but I’d slowly forgotten about what books can do as I isolated myself in ambition. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is what made a little crack in my shell during the first week of class because I felt like there wasn’t time. And then “To His Coy Mistress” because it made me laugh and it was written 400 years ago and that’s crazy.

Then my teacher told me I had to write more to practice and so I started by copying things down that I liked so that I wouldn’t mess up. I wrote down those two and then some more. I realized other people’s words weren’t enough and so slowly I started reporting my days to my journal. Every night I wrote how things looked that day and who I saw and where I went.

One day I read “Essay on the Personal” on Riese’s blog and I thought that some of the things he said were about me. I was practicing for all the things I hadn’t felt yet and realizing that now I had more than just things to report because life was feeling like more than just that.

I forgot about him until, having felt a lot of things, I took my lonely-again heart to books for comfort.

After Making Love

No one should ask the other,
“What were you thinking?”

No one, that is,
who doesn’t want to hear about the past

and its inhabitants,
or the strange loneliness of the present

filled, even as it may be, with pleasure
or those snapshots

of the future, different heads,
on different bodies.

Some people actually desire honesty.
They must never have broken

ino their own solitary houses
after having misplaced the key,

never seen with an intruder’s eyes
what is theirs.

I missed my family and I missed the friends I’d made and wished highs didn’t have to come with such low lows. Unlike me, Stephen Dunn’s poems recognized the grey. They weren’t too obvious in their sadness but they spoke about it perfectly. I bought “New and Collected Poems” and read through it in my room because the park next to the bookstore seemed too public and too expected and his poems were neither of those things.

I got through my heartache by listening to it during the day and listening to Ira Glass at night. I worked on my balancing act and moved my headquarters to a tiny room that gets enough sun.

The Room and the World

The room was room enough for one
or maybe two if the two had just
discovered each other and were one.
Outside of the room was the world
which had a key to the room, and knowing
a little about the world he knew
how pointless it was to change the lock.
He knew the world could enter the room
anytime it wanted, but for the present
the world was content to do its damage
elsewhere, which the television recorded.
Always, he kept in his mind the story of a man
hanging from a cliff, how the wildflowers
growing there looked lovelier than ever.
That was how he felt about his one chair
and the geometry of the hangers in his closet
and the bed that fit him like a body shirt.
Sometimes the world would breathe heavily
outside the door because it was obscene
and could not help itself. It was this
that led him eventually to love the world
for its pressure and essential sadness.
One day he just found himself opening
the door, allowing the inevitable.
The world came in and filled the room.
It seemed so familiar with everything.

But one day soon when I’ve learned enough, I’ll move to a room that has space for more than just me. I think what Stephen Dunn does so well is love other people. It’s too easy to be a complete shit and think that you’re the only person in the world who feels like you and not be brave enough to go out and discover that you’re not.

I was watching an interview with Sam Beam (my other favorite poet) and he was talking about how you can’t say “Do you remember when we had french fries?” because that only means something to one or two people, you have to look bigger.

Next: Intern Emily, Natalie and Rachel talk about how precisely they also love Stephen Dunn

Pure Poetry #33: Sappho Was a Right-On Woman by Marisa Meltzer

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari
#27 – 3/18/2011 – Jeffrey McDaniel by Julieanne
#28 – 3/20/2011 – Dorothy Porter by Julia
#29 – 3/21/2011 – Sylvia Plath, by Riese
#30 – 3/24/2011 – Poems About Being a Homogay, by Riese
#31 – 3/28/2011 – Mary Oliver by Morgan
#32 – 3/29/2011 – Gertrude Stein + Mina Loy by Intern Emily
#33 – 3/29/2011 – Sappho by Marisa Meltzer

After I told Laneia I wanted to write about Sappho, she made sure to point out that I didn’t have to write about a lesbian. Which is really cute; I love how she was trying to let me fully showcase my heterosexuality or something.

Except I kinda only care about lesbian poets — Sappho, Eileen Myles, Adrienne Rich — I mean, what was I supposed to write about, “To His Coy Mistress,” or something?

Anyway, my high school had this thing in the yearbook where seniors got a half-page for photos, quotes, whatever. So if you look at the Stevenson School’s 1995 senior pages, you’ll find a photo of me wearing a Heavens to Betsy shirt on the first day of senior year, a fragment from a Sonic Youth song (“angels are dreaming of you”–so Britney of me), and the lyrics to Beat Happening‘s “Indian Summer.” I was the kind of teenager who was really into the ephemerality of being a teenager. It’s not like I wasn’t miserable and bored, I was just a little in love with the idea of teenagehood being this short, idealized moment. Obviously I topped it all off with a poem by Sappho.

I had read The Secret History during a particularly impressionable time and had this general obsession with The Classic World. I also spent a lot of time hanging out at a local women’s bookstore called Herland (I know: AMAZING, I’m so sad I don’t have the purple Herland tee with their kind of tree of life/Gaia logo on it anymore) and might have gotten into Sappho that way. Regardless, it remains the only poem I know by heart:

You will not remember it but
Let me tell you this
Someone in some
Future time
Will think of us

I’m probably getting the line breaks wrong and maybe even misquoting it. I would google it but I like the version in my head, so just go with it. It’s perfect, you know? Nostalgic and a little romantic. It spoke both to my desire to leave a mark but also to be cool and self-conscious enough to be a little removed from showing that I cared. I also like that it doesn’t rhyme. It’s easy to memorize and it has a certain topical flexibility, so you can recite it to someone in bed but also during a crucial pep talk.

Marisa Meltzer is the author of How Sassy Changed my Life and Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music. This is her tumblr.

Read A F*cking Book Club #3: We’re Reading Bastard Out Of Carolina!

Hello internet friends! Were you sad without a book to read for Autostraddle Book Club? Or did you instead experience an emotion approaching ‘happiness’ or ‘contentment’ because you weren’t reading a book where the protagonist was undergoing major life problems coupled with substance and/or other kinds of abuse? Well, either way, that time is over now. I know it’s been like forever or whatever, so here are the last two, in case you’ve forgotten what the deal is:

Eileen Myles’ Inferno
Ali Liebegott’s The IHOP Papers

We’re going to read Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, which is kind of lesbian (and, like, actual contemporary literary) canon but which is also the first book in this series that I haven’t already read. So I’m right there with you guys! Laughing, crying, forgetting which page I left off on and accidentally reading over the same heartbreaking scene that made me have to put the book down temporarily last time! Oh I’m excited already. Important fact to note: continuing with an unintentional theme, this book deals in part with child abuse/sexual assault/rape, and if reading about those things is hurtful to you, please do not read this book.

If you feel like you can read about those things and be ok, then please do read this book, because I have read Two or Three Things I Know For Sure and I can tell you that Dorothy Allison is not fucking around. She is incredibly talented and pitiless; she tells her truth with precision and brutal honesty and also a kindness for herself and you, the reader, that is hard to forget. Here is one of my favorite passages from Two or Three Things:

They would come at me, those girls who were not really girls anymore. Grown up, wounded, hurt and terrible. Pained and desperate. Mean and angry. Hungry and unable to say just what they needed. Scared, aching, they came into my bed like I could fix it. And every time I would try. I would do anything a woman wanted as long as she didn’t want too much of me. As long as I could hide behind her need, I could make her believe anything. I would tell her stories. I would bury her in them. I have buried more women than I am willing to admit. I have told more lies than I can stand.

I never thought about what I needed, how hurt and desperate I was, how mean and angry and dangerous. When I finally saw it, the grief I had been hiding even from myself, the world seemed to stop while I looked. For a year, then another, I kept myself safe, away from anyone, any feeling that might prompt that rage, that screaming need to hurt somebody back…

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

– Dorothy Allison, Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure

We are not reading that book though, we are reading a different book, we are reading Bastard Out Of Carolina because I really wanna read it finally. It’s a fairly well-known novel even for people who aren’t huge homos, and was even made into a movie which I feel personally has the most incongruous movie poster/VHS cover of all time. I can’t tell you that you absolutely HAVE HAVE HAVE to read it. But Laneia and Sarah can!

WHAT IS THIS, LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE BARBIE?

Laneia:

She moved her brood of kids into an apartment building downtown, a second-floor frame walk-up with a shaky wide porch hanging off one side. No matter where she lived, Alma always had a porch.

I read Bastard Out of Carolina the same summer that I consumed Rubyfruit Jungle, To Kill a Mockingbird and most of Tipping the Velvet, among others. I don’t know — I was going through some feelings. The main theme of that summer was ‘Who the Fuck am I / What is This World.’ Dorothy Allison had been hyped up to some degree, so I didn’t expect to care about this Ruth Anne Boatwright, because of course I was above all hype, etc.

I read the book in one weekend. I read it on my steps in the pouring rain, chain-smoking and dying for a pimiento cheese sandwich. My accent came back. I started to remember what it had felt like to have to be mean sometimes — not because you were mean, but because the world was. I remembered not trusting anyone but your family and that isolation and vulnerability, but also strength. I mean, it was perfect, this book.

I don’t know how the south looks to people who didn’t sit on porches there all summer. I guess it can look romantic? Or even stupid? Dorothy Allison takes all of that away — the romance and the ignorance. Ruth Anne Boatwright is the furthest thing from stupid. She’s not precious or overstated either. The perfect balance of Bastard Out of Carolina is ridiculous.

Sarah:

I firmly believe that every lesbian in the world should read Bastard Out of Carolina. I would love if every human person in the world read it, but let’s get real, I met a guy last week who had never read a female author, so. In any case, if you like Autostraddle, I promise that you will love this book.

I personally connect with this book on a bunch of levels, not just in relation to sexuality. That’s certainly part of it; sexuality and “otherness” are strong undercurrents in Bastard, especially if you’re already tuned into that sort of thing. Beyond that, this is a story about family, in all it’s fucked up iterations. It’s about place (specifically the American South, but the lessons translate anywhere) and how the places we inhabit shape not only our lives but ourselves. It’s about being a strong woman and all that comes with it, the tough shit and the sisterhood alike. It’s about being an outcast. And can’t we all relate to that?

I would venture to call this book To Kill A Mockingbird for queers. It has a lot of the same soul, with a few twists. It gripped me in the same way; I picked it up and couldn’t put it down for days. This is the kind of novel you want to re-read every year, the kind you can’t get off your mind months after you’ve finished it. If you’re into gritty fiction with real substance that hits close to home, then “Bastard Out of Carolina” is required reading.

ARE YOU GOING TO BUY IT? DID YOU BUY IT YET. I JUST WANNA READ BOOKS WITH YOU GUYS.

Book club meeting will be on, oh, May 16th. Just so that no one, including and perhaps especially myself, has an excuse not to have it read. Ok? Ok good. SEE YOU THEN.

Pure Poetry #32: Gertrude Stein & Mina Loy

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#21 – 3/10/2011 – Poems I Like, by Tao Lin
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari
#27 – 3/18/2011 – Jeffrey McDaniel by Julieanne
#28 – 3/20/2011 – Dorothy Porter by Julia
#29 – 3/21/2011 – Sylvia Plath, by Riese
#30 – 3/24/2011 – Poems About Being a Homogay, by Riese
#31 – 3/28/2011 – Mary Oliver by Morgan
#32 – 3/29/2011 – Gertrude Stein + Mina Loy by Intern Emily

According to Mary E. Galvin, who wrote a book about Modernist queer writers which I used for my essay about Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy, who was not queer, Gertrude Stein is the most famous lesbian ever aside from Sappho (she wrote this before Ellen & Portia took over the world).

But Gertrude, who I affectionately refer to in my head as “Gerty Steinberg” (why??), was more than just a lesbian, obviously. She was a lesbian writer. She wrote lesbian fiction and lesbian plays and also lesbian poetry which is relevant to us because it’s pure poetry week and we’re gay, or something. Wikipedia says that Gerty was a Republican and in 1934 thought Hitler should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but, like, I dunno, it’s Wikipedia and I haven’t read that anywhere else.

gerty & alice b. toklas

To be honest, the essay I wrote was not about Gerty’s life, so I don’t really know much about it. I hear she was a lesbian, and can’t really talk about anything else. But I do want to talk about her poetry.

Gerty only published one book of poetry in her lifetime, called Tender Buttons. It’s a fascinatingly weird thing, divided into three parts called Objects, Food, and Rooms. Gerty experimented with “verbal” cubism and prose poetry, and the result is a bunch of poems that look like absolute nonsense words relating to objects, food, and rooms, repeating themselves leaving you very confused.

For example, A Box:

Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.

But a lot of Tender Buttons is about domestic space, and when you consider Gerty’s domestic space, it’s with another woman, so she’s writing from a female perspective about a home with no husband. Pretty cool for her time, huh?

Gertrude Stein also wrote a lot of things laced with sexual imagery, specifically lesbian sexual imagery. Take this line from Objects:

Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers.

(When I was doing research about this, someone suggested that ‘Ada’ was Alice’s nickname (Gerty’s partner), and ‘Aider’ is a play on ‘Ada’, as in, aid her, like, help her orgasm.)

I wish that I could find an online version of A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow: A Love Story because also according to someone whom I read while doing research, ‘cow’ really means ‘orgasm’. Fun times.

Anyways, the point is that you should read Tender Buttons. Also, “tender buttons”? FEMALE EROGENOUS ZONES.

Now, moving on to Mina Loy. You might be wondering a) who is Mina Loy and b) why did I decide to stick her in a post with Gerty. Well, Mina Loy was also a Modernist poet (like Gertrude, though she was born later and lived longer), and she and Gerty were friends. Cool right?

In her time, Mina Loy was well known in North America and Europe, and now she is known nowhere. But you guys, Mina Loy was an awesome feminist single mother criticizer of the Patriarchy! She was popular with a lot of people, including one Ezra Pound who thought her work was so intelligent he invented the term ‘logopoeia’ to describe it.

laneia??

Mina Loy claimed that she was “not a poet” despite writing over 300 poems. Unfortunately, most of them are not online. She also wrote a poem about Gertrude Stein, added in after her essay about Gerty:

Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word

She also wrote a poem about giving birth, which was a big Thing back in 1923. From Parturition:

Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life-stir
I am that cat

Read all of Lunar Baedecker here, and if you have the chance, read some books with Mina Loy’s poetry in them! It’s kind of tricky since most of her stuff has been out of print since forever. The Lost Lunar Baedecker is a good place to start since it’s a compilation of a lot of her work.

Mina Loy was a feisty woman and I feel very affectionate towards her. I feel like if she were alive today she would be a super woman who kicks Maggie Gallagher in the face. Also, poetry!

Pure Poetry #31: Mary Oliver

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#21 – 3/10/2011 – Poems I Like, by Tao Lin
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari
#27 – 3/18/2011 – Jeffrey McDaniel by Julieanne
#28 – 3/20/2011 – Dorothy Porter by Julia
#29 – 3/21/2011 – Sylvia Plath, by Riese
#30 – 3/24/2011 – Poems About Being a Homogay, by Riese
#31 – 3/28/2011 – Mary Oliver by Morgan

Mary Oliver writes poetry about nature. She’s published an insane amount of poetry and prose and won a Pulitzer Prize. She takes long walks and lives in Provincetown, MA, which is on the same island where I grew up. She grew up in Ohio and skipped school to read Whitman and Thoreau in the woods.

Sometimes teaching yourself works out for the better.

Mary Oliver on poetry:
“…I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple–or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.”

She’s a master of creating that “place to enter”. Mary Oliver turns words into breathing shining nature, in the physical and philosophical sense.

Nature makes sense. We’re nature! What we do, what we feel and who we love all comes down to following or rejecting nature, and nature is what drives nature to exist. Circles! Mary Oliver sees the points where nature (the will/feelings kind) parallels nature (the sticks/twigs kind), and puts those understandings into words. She stacks layers of subtlety in scenes of the natural world to create dreamy realities full of connections and epiphanies.

This poem is long, but I feel like it fits:

The Dogfish

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?

—

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

—

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

—

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?

Slowly

—

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

—

You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

—

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

—

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

Mary Oliver’s poems feel like lessons. They’re a bit like fables set over landscapes. Her poetry feels both calm and important. It’s unjudging and observant. It makes me want to plan and do great things and see everything and think.

Pure poetry to live by:
“Be good natured and untidy in your exuberance.”

“there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted-”

“So quickly, without a moment’s notice does the miraculous swerve and point to us, demanding that we be its willing servant.”

“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”

Pure Poetry #30: These Poems Are Gay, Just Like You

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari
#27 – 3/18/2011 – Jeffrey McDaniel by Julieanne
#28 – 3/20/2011 – Dorothy Porter by Julia
#29 – 3/21/2011 – Sylvia Plath, by Riese
#30 – 3/24/2011 – Poems About Being a Homogay, by Riese

Today’s special edition of Pure Poetry contains a variety of poems from lots of different lesbos, a bisexual or two and one dude about the experience of being a giant lez. For more on lesbian poets, check out Ten Lesbian & Bisexual Poets To Fall in Love With.

For The Straight Folks Who Don’t Mind Gays But Wish They Weren’t So Blatant

by Pat Parker

You know, some people got a lot of nerve.
Sometimes I don’t believe the things I see and hear.

Have you met the woman who’s shocked by two women kissing
and in the same breath, tells you she is pregnant?
BUT gays, shouldn’t be so blatant.

Or this straight couple sits next to you in a movie and
you can’t hear the dialogue because of the sound effects.
BUT gays shouldn’t be so blatant.

And the woman in your office spends an entire lunch hour
talking about her new bikini drawers and how much
her husband likes them.
BUT gays shouldn’t be so blatant.

Or the “hip” chick in your class rattling like a mile a minute
while you’re trying to get stoned in the john, about the
camping trip she took with her musician boyfriend.
BUT gays shouldn’t be so blatant.

You go in a public bathroom and all over the walls there’s John loves
Mary, Janice digs Richard, Pepe loves Delores, etc., etc.
BUT gays shouldn’t be so blatant.

Or you go to an amusement park and there’s a tunnel of love
and pictures of straights painted on the front and grinning
couples are coming in and out.
BUT gays shouldn’t be so blatant.

Fact is, blatant heterosexuals are all over the place.
Supermarkets, movies, on your job, in church, in books, on television every day
day and night, every place-even- in gay bars and they want gay
men and woman to go and hide in the closet.

So to you straight folks I say, “Sure, I’ll go if you go too”
BUT I’m polite so, after you.

personal ad
from Pelt, by Daphne Gottlieb

via queerbrownxx.tumblr.com

Your anatomy
could be
our destiny.
You have:
2 aorta
hot, red and sweet
2 ventricles
that suck and pump;
4 chambers
that make
you throb
inside.

Make a fist.
They say your fist
is roughly
the size of your heart.
I’m looking for
the well-hung woman.

Changing What We Mean

by Eloise Klein Healy

Turning your back, you button your blouse. That’s new.
You redirect the conversation. A man
has entered it. Your therapist has given you
permission to discuss this with me, the word
you’ve been looking for in desire.
You can now say “heterosexual” with me. We mean

different things when we say it. I mean
the life I left behind forever. For you, it’s a new
beginning, a stab at being normal again, a desire
to enter the world with a man
instead of a woman, and of course, there’s the word
you won’t claim for yourself anymore, you

who have children to think of, you
who have put me in line behind them and mean
to keep the order clear. It’s really my word
against yours anymore in this new
language, in this battle over how a man
is about to enter this closed room of desire

we’ve gingerly exchanged keys to, but desire
isn’t what’s at issue anyway, you
say to me. Instead I learn a man
can protect you in a way a woman only means
to but never can, and my world is too new
when there’s real life out there, word

after word for how normal looks, each word
cutting like scissors a profile of desire—
a man facing a woman, nothing particularly new
or interesting to me. I’ve wanted only to face you
and the world simultaneously, say what I mean
with my body, my choice to not be a man,

to be a woman with you, forget the man’s
part or how his body is the word
for what touch can contain, what love means.
If this were only about desire,
you say, I’d still desire you.
But it isn’t passion we’re defining, new

consequences emerge when a man and desire
are part of the words we hurl, you
changing how you mean loving—this terrible final news.

A private public space
by Bob Hicok

You can’t trust lesbians. You invite them

to your party and they don’t come,
they’re too busy tending vaginal
flowers, hating football, walking their golden
and chocolate labs. X gave me a poem

in which she was in love with a woman
and the church but the church
couldn’t accept four breasts in one bed.
When I asked if our coworkers knew,

she dropped her head and I said nothing
for years until this morning I realized
no one reads poems: my secrets and hers
are safe in verse. I knew she’d have enjoyed

the Beaujolais and I want to meet Dianne,
Mona Lisa, Betty, Alice,
the name’s been changed
to protect women who can’t stand in a room
holding hands because you can’t trust
heterosexuals to love love, however
it comes. So I recorded

the party for her, for them, the mic
a bit away from the action
to catch the feel of waves touching shore
and letting go, the wash of moods
across the hours of drink and yes, some grapes
were thrown and I breathed
the quickening revelation
of a cigarette, someone said “I gave up
underwear for Lent” and I hope

they play the tape while making love.
As if finally the world’s made happy
by who they are, laughing with, not at
the nipple lick clit kiss hug
in bed and after, the on and on
of meals and moons and bills
and burning days of pretending
they don’t exist. “Who’s she? Just

a friend.” And oceans are merely dew
upon the land.

The Floating Poem, Unnumbered
from The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich

Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine — tender, delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests
just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come —
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there —
the live, insatiable dance of your nipples in my mouth —
your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting years for you
in my rose-wet cave–whatever happens, this is.

First Fig
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

We Could Be Soulmates

from The Beautiful by Michelle Tea

bree grant via detroitbred.tumblr.com

hey now tall girl
aren’t you bored
all by yourself in your mess room
smoking pot till your head spins
out of your pillow
don’t you want to be my
sister we can cut
ourselves open and
share what’s inside smear it
altogether so there’s a forever
with my name sliding through
your veins we could be
bloodsisters like two sweaty girls
in a backyard hideout you know
it might sound catholic or
it might sound cliche but you
look like the virgin to me and
i want to be that holy child
chewing at your nipple
i’ve seen you m
moving down valencia your
sharp bones poking at your clothes
when you walk it looks like dancin’ and
hey there tall girl
don’t you know you
sucked the heart right
out of my throat
this is serious
we could be soulmates you
are in my dreams like destiny
got me tossing back shots of whiskey shots
of scotch trying
to get back
to the taste
of your
teeth
i’m waxing alcoholic, trying
to get back to the smell
of your mouth
breathe it into my face
like a kind of masturbation
tall girl don’t you know
not to be givin’ tattoos with
your eyes and when you
curl those lips like
the most perfect wave i
wish i was a surfer,
i’m not even blonde i
found a recipe for desperate seduction
in the back of this book you need
cinnamon ground antler and the
pulverized eggshell of an
infertile dove but
it’s enough to call out prayers
for the accident of seeing you
on the street your tall head poking
the sky hey there
tall girl
don’t you want a sister or
at least a cup of
coffee?

Sappho’s Reply

by Rita Mae Brown

My voice rings down through thousands of years
To coil around your body and give you strength,
You who have wept in direct sunlight,
Who have hungered in invisible chains
Tremble to the cadence of my legacy:
An army of lovers shall not fail.

from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
translated by Ann Carson

] of desire
]
] for when I look at you
] such a Hermione

] and to yellowhaired Helen I liken you
]
] among mortal women, know this
] from every care
] you could release me

]
] dewy riverbanks
] to last all night long

[]

Sarah Kay on TED

Something to start your day! Turn off everything (except your access to the internet) and watch poet Sarah Kay open a window in your soul.

“When I meet you, in that moment, I am no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But, in that instant, I get to share your present and you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So, if you tell me I can do the impossible, I’ll probably laugh at you. I don’t know if I could change the world, yet, because I don’t know that much about it. And, I don’t know that much about reincarnation, either; but, if you make me laugh hard enough sometimes I forget what century I’m in. This isn’t my first time here. This isn’t my last time here. There aren’t the last words I’ll share, but just in case I’m trying my hardest to get it right this time around.”

Pure Poetry #29: Sylvia Plath is Depressing

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari
#27 – 3/18/2011 – Jeffrey McDaniel by Julieanne
#28 – 3/20/2011 – Dorothy Porter by Julia
#29 – 3/21/2011 – Sylvia Plath, by Riese

I hated legendary depressive Sylvia Plath from approximately the date of my introduction to Sylvia Plath (September, 1997) until almost exactly ten years later (September, 2007). She was just putting it all out there, you know? The vast, vacant depths of sadness, and how lonely but intimate that kind of consistent, inexplicable otherness could feel.

I am vertical
But I would rather be horizontal.
-i am vertical-

It was just out there, like you opened your front door and there was Sylvia Plath, crying on your porch with her hair messed up. Or so I figured, from skimming Ariel.

They call it “confessional poetry.” Which sounds so indulgent.

+

A Brief Biography of Sylvia Plath

+

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts, and started writing right away at the age of 11. Sylvia Plath’s father died whe she was only 8. She attempted suicide while an undergrad at Smith College but still managed to graduate and go on to Cambridge with a scholarship. There she met Ted Hughes, who she later married, and who later left her for another woman. Plath published her most famous book of poems, Ariel, around this time. In 1963 she published The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel, under a pseudonym. That same year, at the age of 30, she stuck her head in the oven and died by suicide.

End of Biography

+

“I always expect lips to curl whenever I dare to mention that my favourite poet is Sylvia Plath. There seems to be an expectation that you have to be an intense adolescent girl to really appreciate Plath.”
– poet Helen Kitson, Envoi Magazine

+

I blame myself, mostly, for my hatred of Sylvia Plath, but really honestly I blame “Amber,” my first roommate at boarding school.

Within 24 hours of meeting Amber, she’d informed me — and really anyone within earshot — that she’d tried to commit suicide three times, that her father, a well-respected doctor, beat her, and that she’d had sex with four guys. Her present boyfriend, an alum of our school who seemed to be using Amber as an excuse to never grow up/leave campus, was one of those guys who always wears shorts, even in the winter. He was a “shorts guy. ” Amber decorated the wall around her bed with quotes of things she herself had said. She called them “Amberisms.”

Within 24 days of our meeting, Amber still didn’t know anything about me. She never asked. Eventually it came up that my Dad had died two years prior but she was shockingly unaffected and quickly returned to her own narrative. My resentment of her was tempered by sympathy, but then overruled by aggravation and then taken hostage by self-loathing.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
-mad girls love song-

The thing is, she put it all out there, you know? Amber did. Like she hadn’t gotten the memo that grunge was over and Kurt Cobain was dead and we’d all decided to be happy now.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
-the applicant-

Amber had read Ariel cover-to-cover within hours of picking it up for our Poetry workshop and LOVED IT. I felt I didn’t actually have to read Sylvia Plath to LOATHE her because I was regularly forced to read and evaluate poems inspired by Sylvia Plath, composed by Amber, with titles like “Fade to Black” and “Locked in the Bathroom.”

I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
-daddy-

And so to me, Sylvia Plath was Amber. It’s unfair, isn’t it? Sylvia Plath didn’t deserve that. But it was easier for me, at that time, to believe depression wasn’t entirely “real.” Like it’s really just an issue of mind-over-matter and truly anyone, even me (repeatedly diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder when all I wanted was to be normal), even Amber, was capable of being just as happy as the wide-eyed Betty Boop cartooned on the midriff-exposing “belly shirt” she wore almost every day.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
–lady lazarus-

I eventually disliked Amber for a lot of less complicated reasons — she hoodwinked me out of a classroom job later that year, stole my CDs, ate my Cheetos and frequently locked me out of the room to have secret sex with her enormous boyfriend. We had nothing in common besides the only thing we’d never talk about.

I guess when you’re a teenager you read so many terrible teenage therapy poems (inspired by Sylvia Plath or Trent Reznor or Elizabeth Wurtzel) about darkness that by the time someone hands you Sylvia Plath you’re like OH GOD SHUT UP ABOUT YOURSELF ALREADY.

That’s a mistake.

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.”
-elm-

+

illustration by mishka colombo

“There are so many things in Sylvia’s life which echo with young people now. A dependent mother who needs you to be happy and successful. An absent father. A woman trying to make it in a man’s literary world. Working and having children at the same time.”

– elizabeth sigmund (a friend of sylvia’s)

There are so many things I didn’t know/understand when I was 15 that I know/understand now — like that Sylvia Plath was brave. She told the truth of her life and of mental illness at a time when women weren’t supposed to. She’s still not my favorite poet, but there’s still something good there.

At 14, she had this to say:

How frail the human heart must be
a mirrored pool of thought.
–i thought i could not be hurt-

There’s not much wallowing, just brute-force verse, just language in fists, just up to your elbows in ridiculously vivid imagery, just truth. She didn’t want attention or sympathy. If Sylvia Plath was a blog, she’d prefer “thank you, this makes me feel better about being me” to “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

I didn’t know yet how to talk about sadness without sounding pitiful because I hadn’t seen it done. I judged Sylvia Plath by her fans.

+

Ten years or so later, various catastrophes led me to surrender to my own diagnosis (significantly less serious than the bipolar disorder Plath struggled with, which is one hell of a mental illness, especially back then) and the treatment without feeling like I’d given up my pride by doing so.

But was there a place for that in my writing? In anyone’s?

Yes.

Because it’s never the big things that spark a lightbulb — hey, I know this story, this story’s like mine — “hopelessness” is too big. It’s the other things. The smaller things. The unexpected similarities between you and someone else that strike a previously unseen chord of recognition.

“What a thrill—
My thumb instead of an onion.”
– Cut

Some underlined quotes from The Bell Jar:

“The only thing was, when I tried to picture myself in some job, briskly jotting down line after line of shorthand, my mind went blank.”

“The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.”

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”

“I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”

+

In 2007, on a lunch break from a temp job, I marched into Barnes & Noble and finally picked up The Bell Jar. I was teetering on the verge of a brief agoraphobic depressive episode that’d last into the winter and I figured I had nothing left to lose w/r/t sanity. Everything meant something new now that I was older and had grappled with my own demons. Plath was fresh in my mind when shit stubbornly hit the fan all winter long and I wrote and wrote about it.

Every woman adores a Facist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
– daddy-

Women who dare to share are usually accused of “oversharing.” But good writing is never just about sharing pieces of your life and declaring them good because they’re true. Good writing is when you manage to talk about yourself and everyone else at the same time.

And g-damn if that isn’t the most powerful story a woman can tell — a queer can tell, a transperson can tell, a person of color can tell — the truth of your life, the world splitting open, and so forth.

+

Sometimes, on workshop days, I’d feel like Amber just walked into our poetry class and set her heart on the table, and we all sat there and watched it bleed and talked about it, and she left it up there for the rest of class just so we wouldn’t forget it, even though she’d stopped paying attention to us, and then she took a bit of it back and slapped it on her sleeve and left the classroom.

G-d bless Amber for going on, for living, for certainly growing out of her own ridiculous adolescence as we all did — for doing everything in spite of everything. And G-d bless Sylvia Plath, in all of her “self-centered” glory, for being a thing Amber could relate to — because part of what makes these mental illness memoirs appear so self-centered is that well — depression is a self-centered experience. Befriending a fellow depressive is occasionally even more self-destructive than keeping it to yourself (which is why books/poems about it are so important), so depression walls you off like that. Everything IS about you because nobody else understands what the fuck is wrong with you. Or at least they didn’t, then.

The best one can hope for is, I think, what Plath accomplished: she utilized the distance between her and the rest of the world to deepen her perspective and tenacity and speak the truth of her life. And beautifully, too.

Her God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

– from lady lazarus-

Original illustration of Sylvia Plath for Autostraddle.com provided by and copyright Michelle Mishka Colombo 2011

Pure Poetry #28 : Dorothy Porter

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari
#27 – 3/18/2011 – Jeffrey McDaniel by Julieanne
#28 – 3/21/2011 – Dorothy Porter by Julia

Gorgeous Breasts

After our first time

…we went to a Chinese restaurant

…and counted on our

……..charged fingers

the relatives

the friends

…who’d never be the same

we were breathless

in the high wind

of our secret

You really need to know about Dorothy Porter. She was an Australian poet, an out lesbian, and basically awesome. She was a highly influential poet on the Australian scene, and was also considered to be one of Australia’s most influential lesbians. She sadly passed away in 2008 aged only 54 following a long struggle with breast cancer.

She wrote this about her long term partner:

“My At-Last Lover”
Your face sleeps

………illuminated

in the early morning

………warmth

…………..of my slack arm

you’re my at-last sound asleep

…………..child

you’re my cat

………with a dreaming paw

…………..flexing in my hand

you’re my raw storm

…………..gorgeously spent

and what am I, darling?

Exhausted

and full of trapped bubbles

………like honeycomb

“Poetry’s like sex – you can’t fake an orgasm.” Porter was a great advocate of simple, clear, concise poetry, and her own work is stripped back, bursting with striking imagery and natural themes and sometimes very funny:

“Style”
In love I’ve got no style

my heart is decked out

in bright pink tracksuit pants

Porter was a great advocate of the verse novel, a rare and difficult breed where the balance between poetry and narrative has to be just right. I think this is where Porter shines brightest.

Her verse novel, The Monkey’s Mask is a noir-esque murder mystery featuring a lesbian private detective. In verse. It sounds impossible, but Porter pulls it off with aplomb, The Monkey’s Mask is not only a gripping thriller, but it is full of excellent individual poems. Basically, Porter wrote a book that is stripped back so just the good stuff is left.

Speaking of the good stuff, Porter knows how to write a sex scene:

“First Move”
she’s turning her hand

moist palm

…………..into mine

her skin

you could hear my heart

……..in Perth

she picks up my hand

I swallow my tongue

she brings my hand

to her mouth

and sucks my ring

…………..finger

‘you’re trembling’

she says

my other hand

floats to her

touches her throat

her perfume

her eyes

the hot tip

of her tongue.

They also made The Monkey’s Mask into a movie, starring Susie Porter and Kelly McGillis. While it is in no way as good as the book and you should totally read the book instead of watching the movie, I feel that the poster is probably relevant to your interests:

The dominant theme in Porter’s work is love and passion, and it’s no surprise then that the one volume that collects work from across her career is called Love Poems. This is another one she wrote for her long term partner:

The Bee Hut
There’s a damp melancholy

in T’ang poetry

that smudges

the lovely jade

precision.

I love Walt Whitman’s

spunky company

but under his bardic

whistling

I can hear his lonely heart

howling

at the turned back

of some deaf rough trade

So many poets

starve

in the cold faery spaces

between their frost-bitten ears.

How lucky I am

to hear you, darling,

coming up the stairs

to smell the coffee

floating ahead of you

like my favourite incense.

Jess’s Team Pick: The “It Gets Better” Book

Culled and adapted from the 6,000+ videos submitted on YouTube (we made one too), the new book version — It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living — features handpicked essays and letters from contributors famous and obscure, gay and straight, including Barack Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, David Sedaris, Suze Orman, Hillary Clinton and Autostraddle’s own Gabrielle Rivera!

Inspired by the hoards of rich and famous celebrities voicing what she felt to be empty promises, Gabrielle’s #ItGetsBetter video stood out from the thousands and caught the attention of Dan Savage because she contradicts the entire thesis of the campaign:

“…as a gay woman of color, I just want to let the youth know that it kinda doesn’t get better. I’m gonna be real. I’m not rich, I’m brown and I look like probably most of you. It doesn’t get better, but what does happen is that you get stronger. You realize what’s going on, you see how people are, you see how the world is. And, as an adult, you learn how to deal with it.”

We initially discovered Gabrielle last summer through “Spanish Girls Are Beautiful,” the 20 minute short film she made  in 2007 and made her spill the details on How [She] Turned Straight Actors Into Badass Butch Queers In Three Days Flat.  She recently voiced her frustration with the Oscars not giving any love to “For Colored Girls” and introduced you to her favorite poet/musician/playwright, Rock Wilk.

Check out her story in the Lambda Award winning Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, her interview with My Latino Voice and gabriellerivera.com.

Pure Poetry #27: Jeffrey McDaniel

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari
#27 – 3/18/2011 – Jeffrey McDaniel by Julieanne

A poetry professor asked us to bring a poem to class and share it with everyone. I wanted to bypass Szymborska and Auden and Lowell and find someone we hadn’t read in class, so I got lost in my university’s Poetry Center.

I wound up in the M’s and plucked Splinter Factory from the shelf: a small, paperback of Jeffrey McDaniel’s poems. I opened it up to “The Archipelago of Kisses”:

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn’t be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The wish you’d quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get
older, kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s
red door just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don’t water the kiss with whiskey.
It’ll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,
and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

You guys. It was like hearing an old friend’s voice over the phone. Or, listening to a song you’d never heard before, but knew it was meant to be a part of your life somehow. McDaniel has been described as “one of the few poets that has successfully united the distant cousins of poetry: spoken word and written poetry.”

The Quiet World
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
and proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

Pure Poetry #26: Lee Harwood

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese
#26 – 3/17/2011 – Lee Harwood by Mari

Some rich guy from my school was holding a sweet sixteen party and invited all 250 people from my grade. There was a lot of alcohol. I was fifteen and due to self-perceived bad-assery, I became very drunk. Like a normal fifteen year old at a party, I started to recite poetry – “Tabacaria” by Fernando Pessoa (there is an English translation, Tobacco Shop, but it butchers the poem) – one of my friends then kissed me. My other friend became jealous and joined in. And that, homodarlings, was the first time I kissed girls. Later that night I would be showered by yet another friend (a whole different story) and all of this because of the power of pure poetry.

I am pretty much obsessed with poetry, but not very faithful to my poets. I devour an author, turn him/her inside out and then move on. I sometimes come back, but only to those very very special ones. Lee Harwood is one of them.

He was friends with John Ashbery and other cool people from the New York School. Lee Harwood was associated with the British Poetry Revival in the 60s and 70s, which was an exciting time to be a wide-eyed. He was part of the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall (London) on June 11, 1965. It was this huge event that brought Allen Ginsberg and an audience of over 7,000 people. Can you imagine? Seven thousand people. You’d probably have around 300 – 400 today, and over half of them would be completely disingenuous.

Here’s the first in a series of clips from Wholly Communion, a film that document the International Poetry Incarnation:

I like Harwood’s poetry because it’s kind of all over the place without being noisy about it. It is simple, mostly like a collage of images that pop into his mind and it has a nice cadence to it, like if I were hearing the ocean. There’s not a strain of pretention in it, so you can just make yourself at home and breathe quietly while he talks about beautiful ladies. I don’t know if this makes any sense but I like warming the pages in the sun for a bit before reading them.

Maybe pick up a copy of Collected Poems (Harwood).

Soft White (1968)
When the sea is as grey as her eyes
On these days for sure the soft white
mist blown in from the ocean the town dissolving
It all adds up her bare shoulders
Nakedness rolling in from the sea
on winter afternoons – a fine rain
looking down on the sand & shingle
the waves breaking on the shore & white

It is impossible to deny what
taken by surprise then wonder
the many details of her body
to be held first now then later

In body & mind the fine rain outside
on winter afternoons the nakedness
of her bare shoulders as grey as her eyes
the sea rushing up the beach as white as

The whole outline called ‘geography’
meeting at a set of erotic points
lips shoulders breasts stomach
the town dissolves sex thighs legs

Outside then across her nakedness
it rains in the afternoon then the wonder
her body so young & firm dissolves the town
in winter grey as her eyes

+++

QASIDA (1971)
it’s that
the quiet room
the window open, trees outside
“blowing” in the wind.
the colour is called green.
the sky.
the colour is called blue.
(sigh) the crickets singing

windows open. You move . . .
No, not so much a moving
but the artificiality of containment
in one skin. “No man an island” (ha-ha Buddha)
. . . lonesome, huh?

THE music, THE pictures
(go walkabout)
Small wavy lines on the horizon

somewhere over the distant horizon
the distant city (I hadn’t thought of this,
but pull it in) and you

the children are sleeping
and you’re probably sitting in the big chair
reading or sewing something
It’s quarter past nine
I find you beautiful

***

the words come slowly. No . . .
your tongue the lips moving
the words reach out –
crude symbols – the hieroglyphs
sounds, not pictures

the touching beyond this –
I touch you

in the water
as though I’m in you

that joy
and skipping in the street
the children hanging on our arms

***

You know . . . – the signals (on the horizon?)
“blocked off” the ships at night
keep moving

these clear areas beyond the clutter
that clearing

on summer nights as we lie together . . .

there are green trees in the street
yes, there is the whole existence of
our bodies lying naked together
the two skins touching
the coolness of your breasts
the touch

The setting . . .
it doesn’t really matter
We know
So much goes on around us

on the quay they’re playing music
we’ll eat and dance there,
when the wind gets cold
we’ll put our sweaters on
it’s that simple, really . . .

***

. . . the dry fields
Up on the mountain sides
white doves (of course) glide
on the air-currents hang there

someone said tumble
“the sound of words as they tumble
from men’s mouths” (or something like that)

there are these areas,
not to be filled, but . . .

it’s a bare canvas, but not empty –
all there under the surface

This is not about writing,
but the whole process
You step off the porch into the dry field
You’re there
You see, you’re there
Now, take it from there . . .

Pure Poetry #25: Notes on Rainer “Rilke” Maria Rilke

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & Guest
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Sunday is Pure Poetry Edition, by Riese
#24 – 3/14/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily
#25 – 3/16/2011 – Rainer Maria Rilke, by Riese

You’ve heard of Letters to a Young Poet, it’s famous. It’s by Rilke, he was born in 1875 and died in 1921, which is before you were born. Did you see Kissing Jessica Stein, that movie I disliked but many young homos liked very much? One woman is drawn to the other based on a Rilke quote used in a personal ad. Also in the movie, Jessica Stein reads this quote out loud:

“It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.”

If you like that one, you might really love this one:

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all out tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

If you like that, or even if you just like “thinking” or “breathing,” you will like I Am Too Much Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone. Even if you ditch everything after the very first “enough,” you have a poem as grand and perfect as you could ever dream of —

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

The same person who got me into Jack Spicer got me more into Rilke. I was so excited to tell her how much I loved this one poem Lament and she told me she’d already memorized it. I think it was a game, where she delivered the poem from memory and I’d correct her from the book if she lost something. She messed up once or twice, I think.

I’m only good at accidentally memorizing things. I’ve memorized three lines of Lament (I would like to step out of my heart / and go walking beneath the enormous sky. / I would like to pray), the rest I will have to transcribe:

LAMENT

Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road…
When did it start?
I would like to step out my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is —
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city…

My copy of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke is psychotic, quaking with the manic energy I must have been picking up from the manics around me but never from inside me. I’ve used two different color pens, written strange things in the margins, apparently double-underlined several lines, employed brackets, and, by the looks of it, read the whole damn book, including the Introduction (I often skip Introductions).

Here are some parts I underlined vigorously:

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.
(from Autumn Day)

In the poem “Spanish Dancer” I have drawn a box (red brackets, black underlining) around the words “And all at once it is completely fine.” From “Tombs of the Hetaerae,” I apparently felt compelled to circle, several times, the words “silent crypt of sex.”

I’ve bracketed this:

Being dead filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.

-from Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.

Brackets, underlining, and a star in the margin:

For this is wrong, if anything is wrong:
not to enlarge the freedom of a love
with all the inner freedom one can summon.
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

-from Requiem for a Friend

Violently circled/bracketed single lines:

“Every angel is terrifying.”

“Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.”

“Didn’t you have to promise, a hundred times, not to die?“

“We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.”

“I don’t even know what songs would please you.”

“badly guesses presents.”

Rilke was important, this is the part where I tell you that. The why of it. His thoughts were important and new. Rilke wrote in German and was born in Prague. His mother was tore up over her daughter who’d died only a week after birth and so she dressed Rilke like a girl and treated him like a girl. This stopped when he started school but his compassion for women and preference towards lady-company never waned. He married twice.

“[Rilke] was, if anything, androgynous. The term has come to stand for our earliest bi- or pan-sexuality, and this is not quite what I mean. Androgyny is the pull inward, the erotic pull of the other we sense buried in the self… Rilke — partly because of that girl his mother had located at the center of his psychic life — was always drawn, first of all and finally, to the mysterious fact of his own existence. His own being was otherness to him. It compelled him in the way that sexual otherness compels lovers.”

–Robert Haass

Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures, the merely attained but
not yet beloved form.
(from “Turning Point“)

He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language.

Poetry has a way of making people stick around. Writing these poet spotlights this week(s) — and there’s still some left — I come back to the same people, the same places. I was remembering how we talked about stepping out of our hearts and walking beneath the enormous sky like it was a phrase as ordinary as English. We snuck in poetry in the same way I sneak in Ani lyrics with fellow Ani fans, the same way boys our age sneak Lebowski into everything.

I come back to boarding school, and to these four or five female friends from Interlochen who come in and out of my life, now, because we photocopy poems and put them on cardboard with magazine pictures and mail these poems to each other on our birthdays because you are never too old to collage. These moments where poetry felt so necessary I could say a thing like “poetry felt necessary” without feeling too heavy-handed.

I guess those were periods where I felt like writing was an important, necessary thing and it’s hard to remember that because now the world is just so fundamentally ridiculous. But taking poems seriously makes me feel like writing & reading makes us a part of something ancient and special. Even if I’m pretty sure I cannot possibly construct one more legible sentence today.

This is one of those times, too. This Poetry Week. I’m glad we’re doing this.

Aside from Lament, my favorite pieces of Rilke are from Letters to a Young Poet:

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this… I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do.

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must”, then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

In other words:

I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

Riese’s Team Pick: Emily Gould on Pure Poetry at Poetry Magazine

Earlier this week we discussed if we should ask Emily Gould if she wants to do a thing for Pure Poetry Week. We ultimately concluded that until I finish my essay/novel about her excellent book And the Heart Says Whatever, which I loved and Laneia loved and Natalie liked and B. hated and John Moon hated and Julia loved, we can’t really ask Emily Gould for anything. (That being said, Amazon Associates holds us responsible for at least 18 sales of And the Heart Says Whatever since it came out in May 2010).

Luckily for us AND YOU, she just-so-happened to write about poetry at poetry magazine this week! So we can just live vicarioously through them instead. It’s a good one for any of you still feeling hesitant about your ability to love poetry:

It turns out that unless you make a concerted effort in the direction of reading poetry, poetry doesn’t just traipse into your mind by chance. You have to seek poetry out and, at least at first, you have force yourself to swallow it. Like a scratchy vitamin. Those poems jammed into the middle of a page of text in a magazine: no one reads them, or if they do, they read them in the wrong mindset. A poem is not like a cartoon that provides an instantaneously assimilable commercial break, a respite from long-form narrative. A poem requires full attention in a way that prose does not, and worse, a poem is much harder to like because every word matters. In a 5,000-word story or article, a reader will forgive or just not notice an off metaphor, unfunny joke, or annoying word. But one false note destroys a poem, or at least destroys its rapport with a reader. In this way, a poem is as hard to like as a person.

Pure Poetry #24: Charles Bukowski

Pure Poetry Week(s):

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
#5 – 2/25/2011 – Leonard Cohen, by Crystal
#6 – 2/25/2011 – Staceyann Chin, by Carmen
#7 – 2/25/2011 – e.e. cummings, by Intern Emily
#8 – 2/27/2011 – Louise Glück, by Lindsay
#9 – 2/28/2011 – Shel Silverstein, by Intern Lily & a 12-year-old boy
#10 – 2/28/2011 – Michelle Tea, by Laneia
#11 – 2/28/2011 – Saul Williams, by Katrina Chicklett Danger
#12 – 3/2/2011 – Maya Angelou, by Laneia
#13 – 3/4/2011 – Jack Spicer, by Riese
#14 – 3/5/2011 – Diane DiPrima, by Sady Doyle
#15 – 3/6/2011 – Pablo Neruda, by Intern Laura
#16 – 3/7/2011 – Vanessa Hidary, by Lindsay
#17 – 3/7/2011 – Adrienne Rich, by Taylor
#18 – 3/8/2011 – Raymond Carver, by Riese
#19 – 3/9/2011 – Rock WILK, by Gabrielle
#20 – 3/9/2011 – Veronica Franco, by Queerie Bradshaw
#22 – 3/12/2011 – William Carlos Williams & Robert Creeley, by Becky
#23 – 3/13/2011 – NSFW Lesbosexy Sunday Knows Sex is Pure Poetry, by Everyone
#24 – 3/13/2011 – Charles Bukowski, by Intern Emily

Charles Bukowski was an old man with a white beard and a pot belly. He drank a lot of beer and stared at girls’ boobs and scratched his butt. Or at least that’s how I picture Charles when I read his most of his poetry.

On the back of my copy of The Pleasures of the Damned, the “definitive volume of Bukowski’s poems” (NYT book review), he is described as a “hard drinking wild man of literature and a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, [who] wrote unflinchingly about booze, work, and women, in raw street-tough poems whose truth has struck a chord with generations of readers”.

The truth is that I’m just writing this because I don’t want to write my essay. I’m actually not really sure if I like Bukowski that much (still deciding), but here are two Bukowski poems that I’m confident that I love a lot.

This is an excerpt from “Verdi”:

then too
I sometimes think of a
less stressful kind of
love-
it can and should be so
easy
like falling asleep
in a chair or
like a church full of
windows.

sad enough,
I wish only for that careless love
which is sweet
gentle
and which is now
(like
this light
over my head)
there only to serve me
while I
smoke smoke smoke
out of a certain center dressed
in an old brown shirt,

but I am caught under a pile of
bricks;
poetry is shot in the head
and walks down the alley
pissing on its legs.

friends, stop writing of
breathing
in this sky of fire.

This is “when you wait for the dawn to crawl through the screen like a burglar to take your life away” a title which I love a lot:

the snake had crawled the hole,
and she said,
tell me about
yourself.

and
I said,
I was beaten down
long ago
in some alley
in another
world.

and she said,
we’re all
like pigs
slapped down some lane,
our
grassbrains
singing
toward the
blade.

by
god,
you’re an
odd one,
I said.

we
sat there
smoking
cigarettes
at
5
in the morning.