The Best American Poetry

Bodies, baby. About a poem by Tom Healy [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Well when it remembers to rain it certainly remembers how to do it! It’s been storming off and on here in the spring of early-twenty first century Brooklyn and just now the birds are whistling hosannas to the sun.

This is the fourth iteration of my newfangled blog here at BAP; the old fang, long in the tooth, deep in the truth, was about poets equally established, Dickinson, Bishop, and Szymborska, Keats, Yeats, and Stevens; the new fangs, familiar with fresher truth and bluer truth, are poets of my age, era-wise; wise beyond error.

I pick the poem first, for the slinky pleasure of it, then ask myself why and type to you my answer. This one is so goddamn dead-on real about where so many of us actually live a good part of our painful inner lives that I want you to read it before I say more. It’s by the wonderful poet Tom Healy, whose deep and compelling book is What the Right Hand Knows.

Mirror, Mirror

What do we do when we hate our bodies?

A good coat helps.

Some know how to pull off a hat.

 

And there are paints, lighting, knives, needles,

various kinds of resignation,

the laugh in the mirror, the lie

 

of saying it doesn’t matter.

There is also the company we keep:

surgeons and dermatologists,

 

faith healers and instruction-givers,

tailors of cashmere and skin

who send their bills for holding

 

our shame-red hands, raw

from the slipping rope,

the same hands with which we tremble

 

ever so slightly, holding novels in bed,

concentrating on the organization

of pain and joy

 

we say is another mirror,

a depth, a conjure in which we might meet

someone who says touch me.

 -       Tom Healy

Isn’t that brill? Being American is such a weird endeavor. First wave first world. For most of history every generation knew famine. Rich or poor, you saw people starve and you either starved too, or at least did without. Food was just not there. Letters home from the New World didn’t only describe what people ate here, they described the shops themselves and sometimes said things like – “There are ten kinds of fruit at the market and five kinds of meat – while you in the old world count as a market a slab of wood balanced between two rocks and displaying three wilted carrots, some sad greens, and a short pile of slightly putrid chicken feet.” They worried over their poor emaciated bodies and dreamed of heaven as an endless feast.

Then within a generation of the first people to have enough food across their lifetimes, we started worrying about the sad avoirdupois of bodies, and fantasize about ourselves as trim as a sail. Thin as a rail. Humanity has a genius for despair. I’ve got a lot to say about this in The Happiness Myth, just fyi.

Then too, fat isn’t our only beastly burden, though it is the one that chases me around the table. There are those who hate their faces, bemoan their feet, decry their dimples, abhor their pimples, lament their foreheads drifting ever up and over, hate their flatbread bosoms, resent their unwieldy ample hills (as Whitman described Brooklyn’s terrain). Then we all die and except for Taft and Eleanor Roosevelt, nobody much cares what we once looked like. Can you imagine Gertrude Stein eating Lean Cuisines? Socrates (often called ugly by his contemporaries) consulting surgeons for a fresher face?

I love Healy’s poem here for its compassion, its sympathy for the human agony of being befleshed. I also love the ending wherein our escape from this horror is in literature where we find, not quite a mirror but at least something we call a mirror, and there find ourselves inhabiting a better body, and asked by someone lither to come hither.

Let us tattoo this poem to the inside of our skulls and when in line for swimsuits or squash-blossom quesadilla, or confronted with dance-class mirrors, let our eyes roll back until we can read the words and see our kinder inner side.

Don’t kill yourself, and I shall return to encourage you yet again.

Love,

Jennifer

Cicadas and a Poem by Jennifer L. Knox [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Blue skies, pink cherry trees, yellow and red tulips, new-green leaves. As your correspondent from Brooklyn I report that all this color is exploding on the usual grey of asphalt and slate, dark blush of brick and brick-shade paint.

In a matter of days the magical Magicicadas will be here. These are the 17 year cicadas – who we haven’t seen since “the Macarena” was the top of the pops – and they will be creeping out of the ground in the millions on the East Coast, sometimes 1.5 million an acre. The nymphs crawling out of the dirt has been described as looking like boiling water. The males soon start singing for sex and hit an incredible 100 dB, deafening with desire, and the lady bugs flit their wings to them to come hither; then mostly lay their eggs in the sweetly named “chorus trees” where all that sound is singing like a torch of noise. Branches bow with the weight of the fertilized nests. Then within two months (by early July) the adults are all dead and the kids are back underground to suck the sweet sap of tree roots and wait until 2030 to emerge and buzz at us again.

All this puts me in the mind of a great poem by Jennifer L. Knox whose brilliant books are Drunk by Noon, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, and A Gringo Like Me. The poem has nothing to do with cicadas, but it is about the magic of listening with your eyes, and brains.

Babies in Silent Movies

How’d they make it cry so loud?
You know under the ragtime roll’s
a wail that’d peel paint, can see
the blond brows crimped like claws
under the gingham bonnet, cheeks
red hot despite spectrumlessness.
Maybe a lackey’s pinching its thigh
beneath the table. A good mother’d
shrug off the short pricks of pain one
outgrows to keep a kid back then that fat.

- Jennifer L. Knox

 

Quiet yelling and black-and-white red. I love the rhythm of this, “the blond brows crimped like claws” – it just tumbles along at a double-quick. Behind it there’s this mother making a hard calculation to pinch the baby rich, or rich enough eat, anyway.

 

She’s right to call the mother good, too, despite the obvious argument against it. Who among us doesn’t have to goose ourself into doing what’s good for us? What would we do without literature to remind us that no one escapes these dear-inflicted pinches? A lot goes on under the table, or out of range of sound and color. It takes so much imagination to know we’re not alone. I try hard to remember on my own, but art is always surprising me with the sound I can’t hear, the shades I can’t see, the unknowable pain of others. And like I say, I’m really trying! Well, I’m awake again now. Here’s hoping it lasts.

 

Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

 

Love,

 

Jennifer

 

 

Spring Notes and a Poem by Mark Bibbins [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

 

How’re things? By me they’re pretty good. The sun, of late, has brightened my cold dark heart a bit, let a little light into the eternal dungeon of the winter's mind. I’ve got some seeds and seedlings into our patch of dirt: broccoli, tomatoes, scallions, basil, eggplant, corn, and I’m looking forward to the tending as much as the eventual harvest. Today is chilly and dim with laden clouds, but for the gardener, rain takes on a sweeter threat.

 

I’m offering today a poem by Mark Bibbins whose fabulous books are Sky Lounge and The Dance of No Hard Feelings. I love this one because it looks at a city with the smart eyes of someone who has seen it change, and changed with it.

 

Apology to This Neighborhood, the Two Before, the Next

 

Hipsters get to say

at least I’m not trendy

and the trendy turn

 

it around and they’re

right too.  People go

to nightclubs.  They

 

stand outside, freezing,

wearing more perfume than

clothing, and shriek until

 

the cops come on

horseback and close

down the street.  Insert

 

terrible things here about

we all get what someone

else pays for.  Too bad

 

I never cared enough

about Chelsea

but nobody could

 

have made it better

than Schuyler anyway

so why bother.  Yes

 

we’re part of the problem

wherever we go

and it’s the only way

 

we manage to be punctual,

showing up just in time

for the real decline.

- Mark Bibbins

 

One reason it is good to be older is that the history of places runs through your mind when you walk around, especially if you live in a city like New York that changes all the time. Of course it’s hard to see Chelsea no longer what Chelsea used to mean, and the East Village no longer what the East Village used to be, but it is good to know the morphing pulse of the city you live in. As they often do, Bibbins’s poem here has a comical voice and weary eyes, and a wise awareness of what his own presence brings to the place he is discussing, even to the point of our showing up bringing on the final real decline -- but we know it’s not all decline since it’s a good thing the poet showed up.

 

My camera broke last year and I didn’t replace it until recently. I put the old memory card into the new body and there were pictures from a year ago and the kids were smaller and all the objects in the house were shifted. Time is a crazy arrow. Nothing to do but cultivate the garden and try to not let the world whittle you down as you go.

 

Courage my friends! Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

 

Love,

 

Jennifer

With a Poem by Cate Marvin (and a few words about Boston) I start a new phase of The Lion and the Honeycomb [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

I’ve been away so long! Been tending a few other fireplaces, to wit, I’ve got two books coming out in the fall; also changes in husband’s work has given me more time alone with my kids, now seven and eight, which, of course, leaves less time alone with words. To be scathingly honest it might be truer to say I simply couldn’t get my blogging fire lit of late, but look now, I’ve got a spark and some tinder, and hope for smoke.

My idea is to return to the blog but with a new focus: poems I love by contemporary poets. In the past I wrote mostly about the greats of our common canon, especially Bishop, Plath, O’Hara, Dickinson, Milton, Yates, Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot, Auden, Wordsworth, Keats, Stevens, Blake, well, you get the type. Now I’ll be offering poems by the living and wonderful. We start with this intense little fascination by Cate Marvin, author of the terrific books World’s Tallest Disaster and Fragment of the Head of a Queen, both with Sarabande.

Why I Am Afraid of Turning the Page

Spokes, spooks: your tinsel hair weaves the wheel

that streams through my dreams of battle. Another

apocalypse, and your weird blondeness cycling in

and out of the march: down in a bunker, we hunker,

can hear the boots from miles off clop. We tend to

our flowers in the meantime. And in the meantime,

a daughter is born. She begins as a mere inch, lost

in the folds of a sheet; it's horror to lose her before

she's yet born. Night nurses embody the darkness.

Only your brain remains, floating in a jar that sits

in a lab far off, some place away, and terribly far.

Your skull no longer exists, its ash has been lifted

to wind from a mountain's top by brothers, friends.

I am no friend. According to them. Accordion, the

child pulls its witching wind between its opposite

handles: the lungs of the thing grieve, and that is

its noise. She writhes the floor in tantrum. When

you climbed the sides of the house spider-wise to

let yourself in, unlocked the front door, let me in

to climb up into your attic the last time I saw you

that infected cat rubbed its face against my hand.

Wanting to keep it. No, you said. We are friends.

I wear my green jacket with the furred hood. You

pushed me against chain-length. Today is the day

that the planet circles the night we began. A child

is born. Night nurses coagulate her glassed-in crib.

Your organs, distant, still float the darkness of jars.

- Cate Marvin

There’s a deep drumbeat, heartbeat, that jogs us down the midnight hallways of this poem. Or is it only the gloaming, night not yet come fully down? There are secrets here, but also confidences rendered, something terrifying yet also the glory of birth, possibilities of life and the awful proximity of death.

"I am no friend. According to them. Accordion,…"

The poem pushes and pulls, accordions, it runs and is rocked to a stop by a chain length, it is intimate but lonely, feels full of regret. If I read it twice I feel less abandoned, less the lark rising of a heart at horror and harmed, alone.

This has been a hard week for the country, the Boston Marathon bombing breaking our collective lungs and leaving us stunning with weary strength. Some people on facebonk, as I like to call it, have said it’s wrong to reel from a crime so common in the world, but I say, then you’ve never been near one, because when you’re near one it hurts like hell. You trauma. You burst. When 9/11 happened I was writing Doubt: A History and I was writing on doubt in the world of the Ancient Jews, and just up to crafting the section on the destruction of the Temple. When I started writing I didn’t know a thing about why that event scarred the people of the Temple so badly, broke their belonging, turned them into the people of the book. After our local disaster (I was writing in the East Village, only neighborhoods away), I knew way too much. It howls you. It hollows your head.

I offer this poem now because I’d been thinking of leading with it for a few days, and given the circumstances felt it was best to keep with what poetry does for readers of poetry, not always to stir us to filmic emotions, but instead to take us into the self and into the self of others, looking around with a flickering flame and finding our way through the strange, strained dream that is living.

Gracious it’s nice being back. I've missed you. Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

September Day [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Well the top news is the warm sun has a chilled breeze these mornings and the sprites and delights are back at school. Everyone’s summers were something, busy or quiet, no one’s summer was exactly like anyone else’s.  Presumably as long as you noticed some of yours it was as much of hot days as was needful. Here's us fishing in Prospect Park.

We talked about Bishop’s “One Art” in class last week, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” how she smiles and smiles and lies. The art of losing is doable, but it doesn’t even know the word master. Everyone is an ever apprentice to it.

The art of losing isn't hard to master; 

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

The garden was let get overgrown this summer. About a year and a half ago we got a puppy and she ripped up the grass with her running and digging. It got so bad there was no grass left and groundcover came in that looked pretty and we left it at that.

Go know groundcover will turn into bushes if allowed - take over the whole place. Too hot out and too distracted with kids and books to get out there and keep things in check so now it’s a bit of a job. Maybe that’s a lie about the kids and books, there was just time with weeding out of mind.

People let things get overgrown, I know, it’s not just us. Nature takes your papers and gets lush. Silverware drawer thins, sink goes much with ceramic and steel, gets lush. I tell myself to hush.

I’ve been writing my book and just handed it in for review. It’s smaller than it is large and has a thing to say that, I’d say, got said. Writing it is what kept me --I think-- from writing to you, though as we all know who’ve tried it, feeling up to writing live is not always what it’s been, it goes lush and thin. But it is true that with a book to write that’s what I wrote.

The book really wants to make a few claims about one point. The title is Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It. The thing is that suicide gets lumped in with other progressive issues, rights to make all sorts of personal choices, but I think this one is special and needs to be looked at on its own. I’ve found some historical precedent for saying it is wrong, and for some good reasons.

Bishop’s poem starts out thin and gets lush losing first only little things like keys and later losing whole continents and worse, the imagined loss of the beloved.

Now we’ve got two huge piles of weeds pulled up or clippered off. Branches of good things gone too far as well. But at least there’s a little air where the air should be.

What we need is a little air. Bishop’s poem, like most great art, thickens up and then pulls its own weeds.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

 

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. 

Write it! Like disaster. After a whole poem of writing it out of disaster. Well, I won’t speak to real heartache loss this afternoon – given the date it would be too much to do-- but will hew to the side of the loss of a season, the welcome loss of overgrown brush, the sweet yet pangful finish of a project. Each lets in a little air, the sudden room for something else. Even just a breath. 

I hope you’ve been well. Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Good news; Exit from the Monkey House [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

We’ve got a white sky here, no snow on the ground, but the air so cold the leaves all look ashen green which somehow comes off looking like another shade of sky-white. A silver shade of jade.

This great earth is going to roll from this end of March to the other and the sky is going to wisp into blue and the sun is going to start batting us around her bright spots. I am a purveyor of fine doubt but this I can guarantee you.

Things are going going going here and that is good. If you’ve been following this blog a while you know that I wrote something here about suicide – an argument against it – which was picked up and published a bunch of other places, even in a print version in the Boston Globe. I’ve also mentioned, since then, that I was hoping to write a book about it. I think I’ve had the title for a few years now. It’s Stay. Now I have a subtitle too, so it goes: Stay: A History of Suicide and a Philosophy Against it.

Anyway the incredibly great news is that I found a wonderful publisher for the book, Yale University Press. And it is the trade division, which means the more popular less academic offices. Which is perfect. So I’ve been writing it. And that is great too, though hard of course, because everything is, especially big things, which a book, almost by definition is. (that’s what she said) The manuscript is due August 2012. Then almost a month later I was given the extremely wonderful news that Copper Canyon is going to come out with my new poetry book, Who Said.

These are two insanely good pieces of news which I’ve been meaning to tell you for about a month now. The truth is I’d been having quite a long dry season at the job of selling book proposals and the economy being what it has been these last few years I had just been feeling so low about it all that when the good news started coming I couldn’t react to it very fast. Part of me was elated, but a large monkey part of my heart and mind were left behind for quite some time. So I’m announcing my news here as if it just happened, because for the part of me that can write to you about it, it did.

Speaking of monkeys, they’ve closed the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo. I’m feeling kind of special because I was one of the last people in it, sort of. They just closed it Monday, and I and my little family just happened to visit it last Wednesday. Zoos used to arrange themselves by animal type – the big cat pavilion, for instance, or the bear house – but while that offered a kind of taxonomic lesson, it was better for the animals to be in environments that matched the ones they came from, and it was better for people to learn how animals actually live rather than just how to draw a chart of them. Now instead of the Monkey House you have areas like Madagascar and the Congo. Which are great.

Still if you’re around my age you’ll notice that by now the number of things that have gotten rewritten is hitting new highs. In one of the great magic tricks of all time, regard the brontosaurus, so small at either end, as Monty Python pointed out, so very large in the middle. But really consider its solitary gigantic beauty in all its graceful grey goodness, smell the hide of the boundless beast, marvel at her shoe size, a foot print like a goddess, or a tree stump, and once you can feel the breath of her as she snoops her huge skull into your airspace so that eyes the size of hubcaps can take you in, once you really have her in your sights, witness but she is gone. Science.

Think also what became of Pluto. Now Mary’s Velvet Eyes Keep John Up Nights, yes, but we don’t know what kind of punctuation to use. Is it is question? For all we know it is a question. It is not a question. Period.

Equally marvelous is that when I was a child it seemed half “the free world” was tempted by the idea of bombing Russia right off Europe’s flank. Seriously, millions of people considered that if we just rid ourselves of these demonic slavs peace would reign for all time. It’s hard to know how things are going to look.

I remember reading Welcome to the Monkey House probably earlier than I should have and without question it was my gateway to everything from Emily Dickinson to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. You know a book that greets you like a friend will age, but you don’t expect its titular subject to be retired. Welcome to the Madagascar Area doesn’t have the same awful ring.

Anyway, that’s what I came to say to you today. Cherish your monkey house. Cherish it while you have it. Cherish it when it is gone. It was beautiful to see the box of monkey house and its box rooms of monkey after monkey, clambering and having a look at us. Knowing we are fleeting visitors. It was dim in there, like the monkeys like it, including me.

It was my husband’s idea to go to the zoo. I try to agree to all adventures because my own inclination is to stay home and work, and it takes effort to not work, I’m efforting every day, like a war, as I mentioned in my previous post, to not put myself through the stress of so much work but rather to put myself through the stress of learning to be comfortable unstressed. So I went to the zoo instead of working that day. And now I have a memory of something I’ve seen a bunch of times in my life (I’m from around here) but this time with my two little kids and my husband and the four of us looking in at the wise guys on the other side. And it was dim, like I said, easy to lose a kid, sure, but also easy on the eyes.

It looks like we are all going to have to keep showing up for things because they close them down and you want to get a little for yourself on the way out. Or maybe that’s not my message at all. Maybe instead I want to ask all of us to have the strength to peek under the surface of things just like all the new zoo exhibits try to help us do. There is something worth looking twice at in every day. Someone should make a note of it! I kid. I just want to say I wish I could stay enthralled like I am right now, writing to you. I wish I could stay on top of all this wanting and waiting and feel the emergency of connection like I do, with you, right now, but I know I have to go back to my life now wherein I sometimes feel this white winter sky and nothing else.

But we’ll be okay if we go to the adventure or if we stay home. We just have to try to keep changing and at the same time, try to get used to ourselves. We keep up the existential zoo for each other and I’m writing to you because I need you to keep up the existential zoo for me too. Have faith in your future self to know something that you don’t know, something that makes this whole brontosaurus okay. Keep trying. Snake it til you bake it. Don’t kill yourself, and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Goodbye WS; Hello to you in this dark evening season [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’m sure lots of people reading this blog know we lost a staggeringly great poet, Wisława Szymborska, a few weeks ago. It was Feb 1; she was 88. I can’t help giving us this one of her poems right now.

Museum

Here are plates with no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.

Here’s a fan–where is the maiden’s blush?
Here are swords–where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.

Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his mustache on Exhibit Number…

Eight. Metals, clay and feathers celebrate
their silent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper’s silly hairpin giggles.

The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot.

As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!

Well at 88 she outlasted a lot of dresses. Still, it sucks. No more of those poems.  I had always hoped to meet her. One thing I always Iove about her, evident here, is how much it pissed her off that the world didn't hold meaning in a visible way: how battlegrounds for instance went back to parks, a shudder shared by many but also more subtle situations too, like how you might have been at a railway station one day, even though you weren't, and how odd that it happened anyway, the meetings, the thefts, even without you. "A suitcase disappeared, not mine."

As for me friends, life continues to present itself as a war, a hot war against bleak feelings. Is this feeling thing that is me a biological thing or a thing amid the world with a usage quite askew? I may now know a thing or two about the answers to my offset typesetting, but I also have to dine on a good deal of doubt. What I can see is that life requires a dire pressing forward without leaving a sufficiently convincing trail of flower petals to find one's way back to the beginning.

Instead it's all beginning and all middle, all the time, and you just have to keep rowing even when the scenery changes on one side and stays precisely the same on the other, and other magic tricks of reality. Maybe that's a kind of growing, you're on a riverboat and after some point the inner coast of the river is always the same few houses and yards, while the outer coast starts blurring by peopled with odd beings carrying small electronics. You don't age like leaves falling onto a pile of snow, you age like snow melting off a pile of leaves, you arrive rising up from underneath. 

It's the dark side of the year my bleaders, mid february and dark and rainy with a little spritz of spring here and there. As is my habit, I'm speaking now to those of you fighting the darkness like a war, at all costs, this is the season to fight this thing, the darkness of life, life's rotten disjointment. I'm a believer in stories and stories get into your fiber about what you should be doing and how much it takes to feel alright, and I'm a believer in changing your fiber to fit a better story. It just takes a lot longer than your average hot war. It takes gallons of therapy, of one sort or another. And these gallons are gallions and this war is a land air and water war, and we have to fight for a story that makes it alright. We have to fight our own fiber.

Get some Szymborska, let her rock you from the beyond. Plus, you know, keep up the fight with your dress! Seriously. We need you. I need you, on my side. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Spring of February First [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dear Bleaders,

The sun came out today. Blue sky and small white clouds. I don’t care, being human is such a poke in the eye. I throw myself out there though and I’m much better. I know in my guts nothing will help but I remember as a dry fact that sun and nature can jigger the register. And it’s true.

Weather this warm on the first of February is all wrong but it feels so right. My tree art is painting pictures with its spinning and is casting constellations of sun dots tripling over everything. The circles of light play over tree trunk and branches and fences and over the ground, so it looks like a burbling stream catching spots of light as it runs vertically as well as horizontally, racing around in a wide circle. In the photo here I capture two or three of the circles of light, in real life ten or more arive at once across the tree and branches.

To my memory most of the great nineteenth-century novelists were crazy for listing the flowers they’d see on their walks, names and descriptions, how each looked singularly and as a sudden mass, scents at onset and in decline. I’m not downright Dickinsonian in my habits but I live such that my lingering outdoors in something like nature is most likely to happen in my own little backyard. This time of year there are fewer surprises than in the other seasons, though nature always has a bit of a show for you, even just the shapes of the dried leaves, but mostly I am delighted by the speckled dalliance of my tree art as it tickles this grey brown season into a little giggle. Also, the pitch black puppy chases the shining spots of light. 

I'm going to hear the poets at Cornelia St Cafe tonight, Jennifer L. Knox, Marion Wren and Amy Lawless -- they are going to rock. Maybe I'll see you there.

Love,

Jennifer

Ideal Idyll of an Idle Idol in the Ides of Winter [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dear Bleaders,

Last week I wrote to you. The post started, “I don’t know how I’m going to get the gumption or gusto to write this post.” Then cursor blink. I blinked back. Today I wrote this post, this paragraph being a post-post prolog. This time as you can see I wrote the post, but still I sat blinking at it, mulling should I post it.

I show up just to say Hi, but once I start writing it comes out a bit, I’m gonna say depressed, and I’m not exactly, or I don’t feel like being publically, so I hold back. But then an old friend wrote and told me he was having a hell of a time of it, grieving a bad loss. So I said to my hamletty, hesitating self, ah post your low notes in minor key, they might resound somewhere and who am I to be so strict a censor. Anyway, Dear Bleader,

If April is the cruelest month why are we so sad in winter? If April looks at our sadness and shoves flowers in our faces, shouldn’t that mean we perk up a bit when abandoned to the cold? Forget “At least it’s not raining,” here comes “At least it’s not April.” “At least there are no flowers.” I never saw the best minds of my generation though I felt around for them. Some were destroyed by madness starved hysterical but most, if not quite mudders, could at least keep the tops of their boots above the water.

I used to work all day and some of the night, reading and writing. At some point I noticed as a side note that I was a bit miserable. Counsel was to work many fewer hours. That took long enough, struggling to do that, coming to believe it was better for the work to be at it less anyway. I’d been hiding in there, hard work though it had been. Now I’m out part of the time and part of that time am awfully oppressed by time.

It seems I’m not much in the mood for most things but maybe it is more that I can’t forgive anything for its part in the disappointment, the general wanting for more. Wanting terribly without knowing what you are wanting leads to some interesting investigations, not least a stint with a ukulele. It was orange and I loved it until I started to be mowed down a little lower each practice that got no better, finally I put it up on a shelf like canning for someone else’s winter.

I talk to the departed. If you had stayed, you might have learned, as I have, to shout at the shadow of your marauding paint-splattered mother, and you, sunshine, you might have said to the big-bad dad of speaking, “Hey, you do not do. Not anymore, black shoe.”

They didn’t want to eat the plums in the fridge which someone else was saving as a possible way to shake off the terrible compromises of the night and face the blank, hungry day. They did not want to eat them. They left them behind.

Is that what I have travelled gladly beyond? That is what I have travelled gladly beyond, and at this point will eat any unguarded plums anywhere, without apology. With the desperate hand of betrayal hoping to leave behind, in the plum dish, a little of my excess bitterness for all the plums that by now have been purloined, most often by the fates, from me, and my imaginary better life, from which I lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, and barely daring to breathe or ach du.

I took the plums but couldn’t eat them. I’ve still got them. They have become that thing absurd, the dream deferred, now raisins. In the sun I still have some faith, even when through a closed window it can be a warm feeling almost as nice as drugs used to be. Did you read the piece by Donald Hall in the New Yorker this week? It is an essay on looking out the window, old, and between pages on birds and snow he reports on his life with a phrase for each decade, his thirties bad, his forties forgotten because he was drunk, fifties a good total change of life. Each brings so many questions none of which he there answers. We’re in the middle of so many adventures. Life, I’ve long said, is a decent book with a terrible pacing problem.

I love my office but it is not a well-insulated room and sitting thinking and typing gets to be cold work lately. 

Well bleads, that is as far as I got before. Now I’ll just add that I do have some actual things to tell you and that if the sun hits me just right I will be back to tell you them soon. Oh and if you feel like coming out, I’m reading this Sunday at 6pm at Le Poisson Rouge.

I know it is a cold, hard season and many places, including my own, have gone without the benefit of snow. But look to your decades, eat your raisons, post your posts. Try not to be drunk through your entire forties unlike Donald Hall. No but seriously, it’s hard, all these slow motion changes and lightening flash results. Everything will be all right. At least it’s not April.

Love,

Jennifer

 

Christopher Hitchens RIP [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,
I've told you guys before about how Christopher Hitchens borrowed a mite too liberally from my book Doubt: A History, though he cited a lot he definitely did not give credit when it was most painfully due. (I made all that plain in an otherwise extremely positive review of the book and we had some electronic chat about it and suffice to say the man liked my work and just hadn't quite realized how much was indeed mine, i.e. original research and ideas). I'd mostly forgiven him by then and I'd forgiven him entirely upon hearing his diagnoses. I had disagreed with much of his politics too -- I'm not much of a nun hunter and I think taking time out to bash the Clintons exhaustively in a world as corrupt as our is a little jambon-fisted (clumsey in a european way) -- but as he got sicker I thought more of the Hitchens of Letter to a Young Contrarian. And of course his God is Not Great is a hilarious and eye-prying romp through religion's manifold attempts to sway the genuinely curious Hitch, and how they all fail spectacularly. If you haven't read it you really should. 
An editor over at the Ottowa Citizen asked me to write up an atheist's take on CH's godless predicament now that the end was likely soon. Thought I'd share it with you.
Hope you're enjoying the warmish cold. Big hugs. Don't give up. Shout "courage" to strangers. Or give up and shout nothing. But don't kill yourself. I shall return to encourage you again. 
Love,
Jennifer