The Best American Poetry

Dickinson's Letters, Racism in Poetry Today [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Darlingest Bleaders,

How I have missed you. And what obstacles I have had to defeat in order to at last rearrive here, panting, on the grass. Well, but, I’ve had mental adventures of which you will be the beneficiaries, so don’t mug. Or rather do, because I know it means you missed me.

I’ve been buzzy with otter projects, actual agents and actual editors wanting to see pages and rewrites too, but am now released by the holding pattern of stopping and waiting (and waiting), and so am at last writing to you.

Life has time for kids, time for sleeping, time for watching Firefly on Netflix, plus 30 Rock and American Idol, and time for work. Writing to you comes out of time for work, because there’s no other time for it to come out of. Granted I sometimes see Millionaire Matchmaker without having written to you, but rarely. Usually these are the only priorities that supersede you. So sorry you’ve been so long supersed.  I’m trying to save the world with rhetoric. It’s ex/hilarating /hausting.

Dudes, in one of my secret societies (I only have one, but I’m trying to confuse future forensics) (I confess this here because once, someone else in my secret society mentioned that they had other secret societies and it hurt my feelings, and I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of any of my cosocietans, should they happen to read this.) I said something and then some other guy said something obnoxious and so then I said something smartassy and the cosocietans really liked what I said. Want to know it? It was this: “Well what you said stung/k, but…” They liked that I goed stung/k. Isn’t following one thought to the next ex/hilarating /hausting? Anyway, the backslash locution at the end of the above paragraph made me think of that other one, stung/k. They are a shorthand usable by a culture that silent-reads its quips, so they needn’t be pronounceable.

Kiss and Stop Working [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I should make myself a cup of tea before starting this. Wait, okay? Okay I’m back. I also looked at some stuff on Facebook before starting in again. Considered a game of Bejeweled Blitz but powered through the craving and here I am, just where I want to be, leaning into the mouth of this gun-metal pipe to tell some things to your much endeared conch shell ear, elsewhere likewise pressed against. Coo-coo you, are you home? I’m here.

This hilariously named period we now inhabit, the Spring Semester, I have returned to my what’s the matter Alma Columbia to teach a poetry seminar which I invented for them and offered among a spectrum of courses all the others of which I have taught before, but not this one. It’s Poets and Their letters. This poet got the letters p, h, and d there, and it is an freak storm of the heart to be back there now, across the quad from the history department, talking about Keats and watching College Walk Philip with snow. Fill up.

Also, I’ve been teaching Keats a long time now (and he’s still mistaking Cortez for Balboa!), sneaking him into the curriculum through 14 years as a history professor (tenured by the time I left, my friends. remember, if your going to leave a sure thing paycheck, do it right before the economy collapses) and then hot and heavy each of the five years teaching poetry at the New School MFA program, but never before had I thought to say Read the six great odes at home and come in and we’ll talk about them as if they were the rich felt petals of one six-petalled flower – nurtured by the man whose name was writ on water. Let’s read the six as if they were all that was left you from a bygone parent whom you lost so young you can barely remember the odor of home.

So we did, in this order: “To Autumn” we read together on day one, to rev their motors, then yesterday in class: "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Indolence.”

I’d also had them read at home, btw, and not for nothin’: “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” “This Living Hand” and “Why Did I Laugh Tonight.” These we didn’t yet get to in class but I think they steep the scene of the odes as a flower in a swamp-deep green that helps it to be seen.

Your hot breath discovers my face and says, Nu, Hecht, was there something to learn?

Jew ever notice we call the diminuative a “little pisher” and the long in the tooth an “alta cocker?” Five thousand years of culture and everybody’s in the bathroom. Well, it was a long drive.

Anyway, right, what I learned from the odic bloom. Well, endings are good too, even though they break your heart, they are voluptuous and full and also, face it, half the time they’re all we’ve got. Also, deep pain and deep pleasure seem to come together, and it is hard to squash a grape for the juice by just the strength of your tongue, but you won’t die of thirst while you're trying. Next, timeless feelings and the fanciful imagination are both great escapes from the nettled woes of life, but they are both just shy of fully and steadily convincing, they waver out of sight and into hearing. Next, to hell with writing about love or war, I build a temple in my brain to liturgize the life of the mind. Finally, not to give those two hunks of perfection a shortened shrift, but if it's simple, it's simple. Kiss and stop working.

So, look, the Poetry Brothel is going to do an offsite show at the AWP (the Associated Writers and Writer’s Programs big annual conference, in DC this time, this weekend) and John and I are going to go down and be part of it, I pervertedly as myself, stage named The Professor, and my husband as Jack Chance, the MC. Click "events" here.  Or do a search for it or me on this long busy page AWP .

It’s at The Gibson, 2009 14th Street NW, Washington, DC, Thursday night 8pm to 1 am, and costs fifteen bucks, but, you know, bring more. Show up and I will oracularly privatize your omens in exchange for a skinflint’s hint of some government mint. Also, possibly on Thursday afternoon and certainly on Friday morning to evening I shall be hanging around the lobby and bar saying hi to poets who say hi to me. Be that poet. I shall be me. Free talisman to anyone who works the poe-verb tintinnabulation into their meetin' greetin' me. Serious as a dog star, I will have talismen in my pocket and will be happy to see you. 

Okay, as always, Do not kill yourself. Listen to Peggy Lee, when she’s done with romancin’ (If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancin’. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball. If that’s all. There is.)

xox

Jennifer

Oh, ps, my big book Doubt: A History, which made me the minor famous atheist that I am today, is being translated again, this time into Arabic! Eep. Well, ya got one life, might as well mix it up a little. Je t’embrasse.

Also, you should rent Examined Life from Netflix, it's by Astra Taylor who I linked you to last post talking about unschooling, it's a great movie on philosophy. Seriously, check out this piece of it here. Starts with Cornel West quoting Yeats. You're gonna love it.

Here a tiny ninja waves to me. I'm in the warm house telephotoing, when I see its little hand hailing me. Hail friend! Spring will come, and yet that dinosaur will never reach you.

Snow [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest darlingest Bleaders,

This is beginning to seem like kind of a lot of snow. Am I wrong? I grew up around these parts and it seems to me when I was a kid there were a lot of winters in which there was this much snow, but that might have been situational as at the time I was very much shorter.

The philosopher tells us to remember to factor in changes in perspective, the meteorologist tells us we've smoke-stacked our planet right out of whack, which is whack; the poet tells us the world in dark and white is something pleasing,but then, it is worth considering that the poet almost never has to shovel. 

I'm enjoying Mirov's posts and am inspired to send you off in my directions, linkily speaking. On music try Jace Clayton. Check out Astra Taylor on unschooling in this video! Listen to Benjamin Walker's Too Much Information. I like everything artist Peggy Nelson does. And, as always, you should so be going to the Poetry Brothel (yes that's me in the photo).

Okay, I love all you arty philosophical freaks and insist that you keep up all your bad behavior. I wish I could say more but have suit up to go pick up the kiddies in the blizzie.  If you need more of me, read the old posts or buy a book! They're cheap! And it cheers me up when they appear to be selling. Yes, like all pets, I'm that petty. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again. OTG* there is a lot of snow on my tree jewelry.

Love,

Jennifer

*Oh Their God. In my house when someone sneezes, we say "einstein". wink.

Battersea, Atheism, Russell, and Me [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’ve missed you! It’s been almost a month since I last posted, I guess I needed a rest from even my pleasures. But here I am, back and ready to exhaust myself anew.

So what's shakin'? Same old around here. I've been named one of the 25 most influential living atheists. To which I say, "You call this living?" No, but seriously folks. It is super fun, and brings new readers (hi new readers!) but oddly does not come with a large cash award. So I remain beholden to poetry for my amusement. I thought today I'd try to unravel some thoughts on time travel, or rather, as it is more commonly noted, some thoughts on history.

There is nothing stranger you can do to your mind than to give it history. Take Rosalie, for instance. She is walking through a village early morning in England and looking at the charming houses and ingratiating streams. She walks a long time as the grey sky mists and clears to blue, and back to grey and misty. Rosie's okay and her good shoes are holding up too. She smells the world and feels it in her belly. Her mind is rattling around in there, wondering what it’s doing here, but the rest of her is feasting on the moment.

Now Rosie goes into a café and starts reading the big grey book on the counter beside her, a history of this same town in which she’s been wandering. The sky starts storming outside, inside they seem glad to have her, so she gets comfortable and lunch hours go by.

By the time the sky gets light again, it is already getting dimmer, past tea, before dinner, and she heads out to snake the streets home to her hostel. But now she knows everything about Battersea. Why is Battersea inland, for instance? Because it used to be on the coast but the sea was so brutal in its marauding erosion that the townspeople picked up and left, stopped in a quiet place just south of London and named their dry new encampment with the old wet name they’d always known. Much later Bertrand Russell would deliver, here, one of his most powerful and influential speeches on the purposes of man under the godless heavens.

As Rosie walks homeward the aspect of the natives changes. Now she everywhere sees the odd pluck it must require to lift yourself up and all your neighbors and redirect your browser to another world, inland, and name it Battersea again. Battersea forever.

The human mind, I think, has two modes: Present and Historical. Both are good. In the first you are an animal, in the second, just a god. The first smells baking bread. The second knows this is the same bread Henry the Fifth smelt just before he dealt his quiverblow against the fearsome French, who were all man and five times as many but their arrows, ahem, fell short. Englishmen now in their beds have wished they’d been there to see it for centuries now. Englishmen, for Chrissake, get out of bed already.

Let’s make the village a concept and do this again. Rosalie is an agnostic. She has heard the argument that no one can prove a negative and believes it. Then she wanders into a café and reads a big book on doubt as she waits out the rain. Now she knows that the term agnosticism was invented only a hundred years ago by Thomas Henry Huxley, and has no intellectual pedigree to speak of. Huxley made it up having read about Skepticism, which is a philosophically robust proposition that asks how we can know anything at all, given the limitations of our minds and our tiny, animal perspective. Skepticism is thousands of years old and has been brilliantly explored in every age. Agnosticism is the logic of Skepticism applied to only one question, the question of whether one particular people’s imagined idea of the supernatural actually exists.

To be sensible, either you are a Skeptic about all things, which allows you to be a profoundly interesting thinker but does not allow you to claim to know anything about the world; or you are a rationalist, which means you gather evidence, try to minimize your cultural bias, and make conclusions. If you make your decisions by rationalism, you can certainly say that an idea is not to be considered as at all valid if it has no evidence to argue for it being true. In Skepticism I have to allow that possibly all of life is happening in the dream of a cosmic elephant; in rationalism, I do not. It is philosophical nonsense to take Skepticism and apply it to one belief. In rationalism, it is possible to rule on the validity of a conjecture that has no evidence.

Huxley made up agnosticism because he wanted to leave room for people to be atheists but still keep a line of hope. But that is massively wrong-headed. When people confront the truth they get used to it and see that it is not so bad. So there is no afterlife. Big deal. Life is enough. When you are dead, you are so dead that nothing should matter to you about it. When you are alive, you’re alive. Every moment is so huge, there is so much of it, and we take in so little of it. You want more life at the end? You’re hardly using the life you have now. None of us are. We already have more than we can handle. Your job is to try to know the present and the past, to expand into the now, in part by knowing what was.

Some people get on a plane to change where they are but you can transform your surroundings as well as your inner world with just a touch of new knowing.

Having researched and written Doubt: A History and The Happiness Myth I find myself in a land unexpected. Richer and twisty. Aware of how an inland people still braves battering by the sea. History emancipates and reconfigures so the way home looks different than the way we’ve just been.

Russell’s speech (in 1927) was “Why I Am Not a Christian,” and it was published and republished and for several generations it was a downright sacred text for those flying their kite with nothing but wind and skill. For more on that and a thousand other inspirations, see Doubt: A History and The Happiness Myth.

It was, btw, over the Battersea Power Station that Pink Floyd floated their pig on the wing. On the Animals cover (1977). Life, friends, is boring. That’s why John Berryman drank so much, so much of the time. His mother was right too: Ever to admit you are bored means you have no inner resources. I admit now that, like everyone else, I have no inner resources. By contrast though, I have quite a lot of outer resources, and not always in the tankard. With history hissing gory about the storied past, and the smell of the bread, baking in one’s olfactoric imagination, it begins to be possible to still the spinning day down to something distillable, and store it, and become your own oracle.

Rosalie notices that everything has changed, but that she, in some ways, at least, is the same, and has kept her name. It’s still me. It's still Rosalie. It's still Battersea. It’s still you too, and since it is, you need to know your history. It makes the run from the gun to the sun a lot more fun.

Alright, I love you, as you know. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

 

 

Munar Eclipse (mooner? looner?) [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders, 

I saw the eclipse video here and thought I'd show you what I saw too.

A few nights ago I brought my canon out to shoot the moon get shy. It was baby dentist time (tooth hurty) in the am and I was up anyway. It was beautiful, it didn’t go dark like if the moon is in front of the sun, instead it went reddish as it passed through the shadow of the earth. The only tripod I had was two feet aground and elbows on a barbeque, so there are none that are all too stable. It’s hard not to play with that once you see what the moving moon looks like – alive! - in the preview screen. I put up some more pics on Dear Fonzie.

In our regret we remember that the key to a thing is to get a sense of its humor.  A game player gets to know the joke of a game, the load of its dice, what it likes to give you right after it has given you an extra life. 

There is part of the story where she still doesn’t realize something, but comes to be aware there is something that needs remembering.  I am supposed to remember something big. The problem of my life.  I know what I’m trying to stop forgetting, but I can’t remember it.  Life is a detective story with a pacing problem.  Days scream through long minutes and there are days of long phases even in the midst of change.

Change is arresting, stops us in its tracks. We are not in a rational world, ticking with a clock's tock. We escape by enacting our attention. We look closely at a coffee drop on the desk settling into a nickel-size spill that won’t change again on its own aside from a slow evaporation, draining to the center, retellable only in poetry or time-lapse photography. You’re in your chair. Everything is real. There are planets and equations, there are explanations.  Benadryl works because it is  a vascoconstrictor, inhibiting the vascodialator effects of histamine. Noon is noon. Imagination, the wild mind, doesn’t alter any of it.

Yet noon is not noon everywhere at once. The wild mind alters all of it. You are not at your desk. You are in the coffee drop, just spilled, bouncing in concentric circles, and even now, in the midst of all this action and reaction you are also stopping to fear what is coming, the drying, and also long for it. The endless stillness on the desk top. A slow ascent into the air. A sticky ring adheres to the desk’s surface. The rest will rise into the room, the clouds.  Midday rolls around the planet like phases of the moon. That’s the humor of it. The humor of my catastrophe is forgetting and remembering that I forget. Pecking at remembering as peek-checking at a pocket picture book. Noon is not noon everywhere at once, it rolls around like the phases of the moon.  

What was I saying? I’d like to hire someone else to forgive my trespassers, but not you. You, my friend, have been through quite enough. Have a nice cup of coffee and accept my congratulations on the happy return of the season with you in it, still punching with the rolls. I’ll let Carl Sandberg play us out…

 

Was ever a dream a drum

or a drum a dream?

Can a drummer drum a dream

or a dreamer dream a drum?

The drum in a dream

pounds loud to the dreamer.

Now the moon tonight over Indiana

is a fire-drum of a phantom dreamer.

 

-

Nice, right? Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

 

Love,

Jennifer

ps tree jewelry looks nice on an icy night. new pics of beaded trees also soon on dear fonzie, for all you avid decorative naturists. For all you decorative naturalists, nice ink but put some clothes on, it's cold out there. 

The No Hemlock Rock [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darling Bleaders,

It's a rainy sunday, all the clay tree jewelry I made for the tree out my window is whipping around in the stormy air. Much of it is essentially of pancake dimensions so spins in the wind.

I wrote to you Friday, and I usually write you every two or three weeks lately, so I'll just explain by saying that if this stage of my life has taught me anything it is do it when it's hot, and when it's not, don't even try. Also, I signed off saying that I'd tell you something later, so that left a pregnant pause. (Can we start a reality show called I Didn't Know it was a Pregnant Pause! It could be about the awkwardly officious.)

But what were we talking about? Ah yes. I promised you my poem in answer to C DdA's.

It's become the leap off point for my grand campaign. Campaign title-wise, I've been noodling around with "pro-living." It is a campaign against suicide. I don't mean end of life care suicide, I mean screw-this despair suicide.

As I said here the other day, an old friend killed herself in 2007. I wrote the below poem sometime after that, speaking to myself as much as to others. Then this past Christmas another old friend (also friends with the first) took her own life. I needed to post something to the community we all shared, poetry in America, but I didn't want to just post the poem, because over the two and a half years I'd come to see that people could read a lot of varied things from the poem, which is good for a poem, but not good for an open letter or a manifesto, which is what I wrote instead. Since than, this past year, I've been researching this subject and thinking about what it all means. Oddly, I still believe everything in the poem, but with much more context. Anyway here's my poem.

The No Hemlock Rock

Don’t kill yourself.  Don’t kill yourself.

Don’t.  Eat a donut, be a blown nut.

That is, if you’re going to kill yourself,

stand on a street corner rhyming

seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with

racket.  Allow medical terms.

Rave and fail.  Be an absurd living ghost,

if necessary, but don’t kill yourself.

 

Let your friends know that something has

passed, or be glad they’ve guessed.

But don't kill yourself.  If you stay, but are

bat crazy you will batter their hearts

in blooming scores of anguish; but kill

yourself, and hundreds of other people die.

 

Poison yourself, it poisons the well;

shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome.

I will give badges to everyone who’s figured

this out about suicide, and hence

refused it.  I am grateful.  Stay. Thank

you for staying.  Please stay.  You

are my hero for staying.  I know

about it, and am grateful you stay.

 

Eat a donut.  Rhyme opus with lotus.

Rope is bogus, psychosis.  Stay.

Hocus Pocus.  Hocus Pocus.

Do not kill yourself.  I won’t either.

 

 

From this distance I'm just charmed to see how much I equate interesting rhymes with abandonless bliss.

I'm bringing all this up because December gets to be a difficult season for a lot of people and sometimes the blue comes out of the blue. So be prepared for it. Get through it to rue another day. The open letter/ manifesto is easy to find online. Well, I guess I'll link to it, I just fear seeming a barker on something too somber to bark for, but what can I say? I want you to stay. And I want you to have something ready to say if someone you love starts teetering near the neighborhood abyss. Say, We need you desperately. 

Love,

Jennifer

ps  The Boston Globe asked to publish a (slightly cleaned up) version, here, if you prefer.

pps While waiting to be seen by a professional, fill a notebook with color.

 

 

Freaks come sit by me [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darling Bleaders,

There are a lot of ways to tell a story and one way is that sometime after my friend SH took her life I was teaching Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems in the MFA Program at the New School and happened upon Bishop’s translations of the Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s great poem, “Don’t kill yourself.” It made my brows raise because I hadn’t quite ever thought of just saying, “Don’t kill yourself,” and furthermore, saying it twice. Stacey recently posted it on this site, but here it is in full again.

Don’t Kill Yourself

Carlos, keep calm, love

is what you’re seeing now;

today a kiss, tomorrow no kiss,

day after day tomorrow’s Sunday

and nobody knows what will happen

Monday.

 

It’s useless to resist

or to commit suicide.

Don’t kill yourself. Don’t kill yourself!

Keep all of yourself for the nuptials

coming nobody knows when,

that is, if they ever come.

 

Love, Carlos, tellurian,

spent the night with you,

and now your insides are raising

an ineffable racket,

prayers,

victrolas,

saints crossing themselves,

ads for better soap,

a racket of which nobody

knows the why or wherefore.

 

In the meantime, you go on your way

vertical, melancholy.

You’re the palm tree, you’re the cry

nobody heard in the theatre

and all the lights went out.

Love in the dark, no, love

in the daylight, is always sad,

sad, Carlos, my boy,

but tell it to nobody,

nobody knows nor shall know.

 

Is that a great poem or what? The first time I read it I loved the lines that I loved but I was sorry it said what it says instead of what I wanted it to say.

Drummond de Andrade will never be considered a truly great poet because his last name is too long and hard to remember, but he did have a way with words.  He’s a Brazillian poet, lived from 1902 to 1987 and here, in this poem, he is in what Liz Lemon on 30 Rock would call a Relationship Lizastrophe, a heart-storm tizzy having had an actual encounter with another human creature (of which there are nearly 7 billion, but all of them oddly alone).  Can I translate this poem to prose for us?  It says: 

Carlos, me, stop freaking out.  You’ve been kissed.  Maybe you’ll get another kiss tomorrow, maybe not, ad infinitum.  Nothing can be done about this exciting series of possibilities.  The only way to stop it would be to kill yourself, so do not do that.  Just stay and hope for more kisses, even sex. 

You are freaking out because you have spent the night feeling enraptured by love, a common thing in the world.  (The word “tellurian” just means earth-thing, thing of the earth.) Your insides are going nuts with panic and emotion, also pretty normal.  The feelings and hormones and thoughts going on my head right now are a cacophony, like a symphony of prayers, old record players, Catholic signs and wonders, commercials for soap and better living.  There’s no way to make any sense of this racket inside. 

Meanwhile you are walking around town, looking normal but with such a banged up heart that you are identifying with every passing tree.  When someone lets out one of those moans that might be anything, might just be the sigh of sitting down, it’s such a relief.  “Oh!” someone cries out and you agree. “Oh,” me too. And the lights go out in the theater. Me too.

Carlos is alone and says to himself that love, especially in the light of day, is always sad, and it is true, but it is not all that is true, and he knows it, calling himself a boy to hint that someone too young to know is trying to know, while nearby, also inside the poet, is the sublime and graceful knowing.  See what he says, in the last lines?  “tell it to nobody, nobody knows nor shall know.”  He’s closing the poem there, tucking his scarf into his overcoat.  But also he’s counseling himself to keep the crazy hidden, keep the despair hidden, he says, "Hide it" but he’s telling us. 

He knows it's safer to keep it to himself, but he still manages to get it on paper and hand it out across the century to me, and I can take it and I can say thank you Carlos Drummond de A…. I wish I could remember your name. I get stuck on the Andrade part.

Now friends, what I wanted the poem to say was less, “Self, don’t flee from feeling, even though it is so scary that you almost feel like running off a ledge,” and more, “Friends, selves, countrymen of the realms of gold, sisters of outrageous despair, Don’t kill yourselves.”

I wanted to say: We have to talk to each other.  We broken.  We need to keep drinking tea or wine and tell each other the one thing we don’t have to trance out to hear: I was there.  It sucked.  It was insane, the things I said to myself to stay sane.  You too?  Got a hot hot brain from coping too long all up in your head alone? Don’t kill yourself. Come over and drink coffee or beer with us and tell us.  The people who do not ever feel this way pity us.  Maybe you don’t want to be pitied, but I’m ready to accept that being someone who has a hard time feeling okay is often awful, as awful as other awful things, and that’s how it is for me, so pity away, ye normals, and freaks come sit by me.

That’s not what I ended up writing in my poem. But I’ll tell you more about that later.

Love,

Jennifer

Frank O'Hara; Empire State; Happy Hanukkah [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dear Bleaders,

Well now, isn’t winter arriving apace? My son asks me which is the first season. Good question, kid. It’s one of the very few sets we don’t call out for alpha and omega, seasons. Should we order it so everything gets born at the start, feasts, gleans, and blows apart? Or let’s mix it up so we are born in the white snow and the rest of life is a revelation of relief.

Today’s got a blue and white mottled sky, really light and bright on spots of the white, elsewhere a few bits gun metal. The gun metal is dull and very high on the window, when I look at it my eyeballs are raised in a way that tugs on the back of my brain and makes me feel a luxurious physical sense of the onset of crying without the least actual crying. Writing that has made me laugh. Now more of the sky is getting gunny and it’s become entirely funny.

Two days ago in class we did Frank O’Hara, I tell them to get the collected and I give a list of ones not to miss. Then whichever ones come up in class we talk about. It’s incredibly fun. This one is coming to mind right now. It’s an early one and most of the stuff that goes on in most of his poems are not herein on display, all those newspapers and movie stars, jazz songs, the exact time and the weather, but there is already the backswing of the phrasing and the secret sorrow placed casually on a coaster on a marble table top. (“I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton/ at 7:15 and go straight to dinner/ and I don’t know the people who will feed me”)

It’s got a tonguey title, sorry to say. Just call it When I was a child. or Imagine!

 Autobiographia Literaria

 When I was a child

I played by myself in a 

corner of the schoolyard

 all alone. 

 

I hated dolls and I

hated games, animals were

not friendly and birds 

flew away. 

 

If anyone was looking 

for me I hid behind a 

tree and cried out "I am

an orphan." 

 

And here I am, the 

center of all beauty! 

writing these poems!

Imagine!

 

There you have it. As I’ve previously advised, if you are losing your mind, or even just getting tired of following it around the room, describe something. Then you too can be at the center of all beauty.

Happy Hanukah!  Here’s something I wrote for the New York Times about Hanukah, a lively discussion follows. I think you have to be a subscriber to see it, sorry about that.

Take it easy on yourself you magnificent coconut. 

Love,

Jennifer  

 

PS This past Sunday we took the kids to the top of the Empire State so they could see how high up some things are, how low the rest, and how big the world is. In the first picture, above, we looked down. Now look up. xox

 

Birthday, Thanksgiving, Black Friday [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dearest Bleaders,

This poem was first published in the New York Times, having been commissioned by them, on the theme.

Black Friday Reverie   

                                           

Thanksgiving was my birthday this year
and I find two holidays in one is not
efficient.  In fact, barely anything gets 
done; neither the bird nor the passage 
of the year is digested.  Luckily, Black 
Friday offers new pleasures while remaining
a stolen day; a day after.  There is shopping,
the streets, or the hilarious malls, but I will 
stay home with the leftovers and use

the time to rethink, turkey leg in hand like
a king.  Pumpkin pie, solid soup of
pummeled end-of-summer. Chestnuts and 
sausage chunks from stuffing plucked 
regally, like an ape leisurely denuding 
a blueberry bush of its fruit.  Maybe I mean 
Cleopatra’s teeth accepting red grapes from
a solicitous lunk of nubility.  Same image. 
The hand feeds, the mouth gets fed.  You

too?  Mother ate turkey in the maternity? 
Imagine, you not-born in late Novembers, 
if every few years a bird adjoined your 
candles. Think, too, who comes to eat 
that bird.  Those whose faces look like
yours; those nearly-yous and knew you 
whens; those have your same ill eases.  
How’s the sciatica?  Fine, how’s yours? 
The world is old.  Cleopatra might

have liked Black Friday.  It’s as engaging 
as a barge with a fast gold sofa.  She also 
might have liked aging. At least preferred 
it to the asp.  Yellow leaf patterned 
sunlight dazzles the wall with its dapple.
It’s all happening now, as I write. This is
journalism.  No part of the memoir 
is untrue.  Though I probably will
go to the mall, if everyone else goes.

 

I've posted this poem a few years running now, roundabout this time of year, with various additional information (poem's origin story) (last year, with a dose of thanksgiving courage). Eat good. Don't worry. 

Much love,

Jennifer

Marcus Aurelius and More on Dapple [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dear Bleaders,

Still giving a lot of thought to dapple. It has dawned on me that beyond the biology of aesthetics, the dapple is ample in meaning. It is a little madness of indecision, of mood swing, or a beating heart in endless battle. It has dusked on me that all is opinion. I do no longer believe that all is opinion.

Tonight in class we are going to talk about Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, one of the greatest books, and Aurelius says a lot of things and sometimes their opposite but one thing he does say an especially lot is "All is opinion." All is not opinion. 

There is plenty that seems objective that is, in fact, opinion. The ways we live, as Montaigne advised us, are just too close a match with the way people around us live for there to be any other explanation for why we choose to live this way. 

But what Aurelius was talking about was heartache, depression, grief, despair, and disappointment. He called himself a Stoic and Stoicism had long claimed and developed the idea that we could think our way out of the pains of living. There were lots of different ways they used to reframe life so it didn't hurt so much. The big idea was that you are part of the giant machine of humanity and the universe and you shouldn't be taking so seriously the specifics of what happens to little you. Stuff's gonna happen. Roll with it. Aurelius tries to cheer up his own blue self, and you, thusly:

For with what art thou discontented? With the badness of men? Recall to thy mind this conclusion, that rational animals exist for one another, and that to endure is a part of justice, and that men do wrong involuntarily; and consider how many already, after mutual enmity, suspicion, hatred, and fighting, have been stretched dead, reduced to ashes; and be quiet at last.-

But perhaps thou art dissatisfied with that which is assigned to thee out of the universe.- Recall to thy recollection this alternative; either there is providence or atoms… and be quiet at last.- … 

But perhaps the desire of the thing called fame will torment thee.- See how soon everything is forgotten, and look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of the present, and the emptiness of applause, and the changeableness and want of judgment in those who pretend to give praise, and the narrowness of the space within which it is circumscribed, and be quiet at last.

Consider that the whole earth is a point, and how small a nook in it is this thy dwelling, and how few are there in it, and what kind of people are they who will praise thee. 

This then remains…all these things, which thou seest, change immediately and will no longer be; and constantly bear in mind how many of these changes thou hast already witnessed. The universe is transformation: life is opinion. 

I quote this in such length because I think it is wonderful and kind of hilarious. I love "endurance is part of justice" and I love "what kind of people are they who will praise you."

"Either there is providence or atoms" means either the universe has meaning or it is all just atoms, either way is fine. Why does stating this make it fine? I think because what we imagine by default is a meaningful universe that is temporarily in chaos, which makes us panic. Whereas saying that it is either meaningful, in which case all's well, or it is material and doesn't matter, in which case nothing can really be wrong because it doesn't matter.

But of course, it feels like it matters, and the feeling like it matters matters. 

I wrote something here: a few months ago that has been rolling around in my mind: "The idea is to try to let yourself feel what is happening to you, which, as the philosophers have told us, may as well be all in your head, and as the poets have told us, isn't."

I think there's something true in this, that poetry in particular and art in general is about how, in fact, all is not opinion, though it may seem to be by every available logic. That an older guy, an emperor, might be trying to calm you down from across the vast gap of two thousand years (he died in the year 189), is itself something that matters and that is beyond opinion. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As dapple demonstrates though, depending on who we are and at what point in our lives we are presently lingering, we are all in the process of learning lessons on opposite sides of this swinging truth: the terrible importance is an illusion, and also, your life is deep with worth and consequence.

I'm posting more dapple on Dear Fonzie, if you want to come visit. Endurance is a part justice. Courage! 

See you next time.

Love,

Jennifer