Every time I go out tarted up, and by all accounts looking lovely, I come home very lonely. However, I seem to get a lot more attention from men when I am in line at the market in my jeans with my hair pulled back. I feel much more coquettish and happy with myself when I am dolled up, but, considering the results, it seems that I should lay off the blue shadow and the whorish lips. Should I sacrifice my aesthetics to get results? Or should I follow my instincts and wait for the proper man to follow my scent?
Five weeks ago I met a wonderful guy. We fell for each other, hard (ouchie!). When we were together we snogged, sang, laughed, drank primitivo, looked at medieval tapestries, listened to Leonard Cohen. When we were apart we talked, emailed, text messaged, posted to each other's Facebook Walls, commented on each other's blogs, sent notes by carrier pigeon, practiced telepathy. It was bliss, but it took up all our time. Now both of us have a lot of work to catch up on, and we haven't exchanged more than a few lines in days. He seems fine, but I am starting to resemble Sylvia Plath's less stable sister.
1. Do you think I need to adjust my medication?
2. Can anything be done with these lines from my poem draft, working title "Wrestling the Angel"?
O creature of light, creature of darkness,
your grasp slips. I fall,
down, down, down,
down, headfirst, bumfirst,
legs asplay, arms tucked.
Bloody, bloody, bloody hell,
bloody hell.
In Spain,
they say, there is a river that flows against the tendencies. No one knows how it is done, though speculation runs the gamut from black magic to magnetic. Up and over the Pyrenees, it spills itself so that the shepherds must hitch up their pantalones or suffer tickling by gardas.
Somewhere, then, a counter-river flows along with expectations, pools about the lowest places: formicating vortices. The terminus where it runs dry -- in bygone times a temple shrine -- is nowadays a workmen's pub that smells of beer and yellow cheese and sundry corporal temptations.
Out the back they've dug a trough, immaculated to St. Michael, as the hand-writ signage says: para su relevacion,
muchachos, renew the
precipitation cycle! Pesetas spinning
on the bar and wide palms raised to slap them down. The drunken gamblers all have gathered to see the auguries of Car:
wings and bloody feathers scattered by a hint of evening wind. The old man thumbs a wrinkled dewclaw, the divinator's only gew-gaw: the rosary parsing the sage's time. Now his lone nystagmic eye (a brown egg boiling in a vat of lime), unmoored from the world of things, indicates an empty bird-cage:
"Gentlemen, that cockatiel will nibble its string ere the coins are beaten flat."
One of the advantages of being married to the Italian translator of many Best American Poets is that I get to along for the weekend when the Poets win their Italian poetry prizes.
As I was taking this picture, a woman in the piazza suddenly understood what was going on, and, as they say, much laughter ensued. But it wasn't all fun and games for this weekend of the Premio Laudomia Bonanni (sponsored by La CARISPAQ, the major savings bank of L'Aquila): whew, Mark worked hard for his Bonanni Prize!
Friedrich von Hugel was a late 19th early 20th century Baron and Catholic lay theologian. At a time when “Modernists” within the Church were proposing an almost purely intellectual version of the religion, and a backlash against this Modernism was strong and extreme, Von Hugel tried to offer a middle way, which hoped to use rationalism to prove that something was true about God and religion.
I love a lot of strange things about the strange Yeats poem, “Vacillation.”
I wrote about it in The Happiness Myth because even though we all know that depression or to put it mildly “a bad mood” sometimes just settles on a person, without reason, we almost only find the idea that it happens for happiness too, in poetry. Jane Kenyon’s “Happiness” is a great example and so is this stanza from the Yeats poem:
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
Yet, my friends (if I may folksy you), that’s not what I came here to talk about. It is, rather, the last stanza of this poem. As you will see, it is from this bit of writ that I take the name of my Wednesdays blog here. I should mention that Yeats got it from the Bible, wherein Samson ripped a lion to pieces and later felt like visiting the carcass and he did and a hive bees had built a honeycomb in there, and Samson stole the honey and feasted on it. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young Fury, with a sweet tooth. The tooth is pointy, and the point is that I hope I have now prepared you to love this stanza as much as I. Yeats comes down with his feet of clay firmly on the ground, a guy you could bring to a skeptics meeting and not have to work too hard to make it make sense. Vacillating from the delights of the sea of faith to the delights of meaning what you say and saying what you mean, Yeats has sympathy for the sea of leaping, but it isn't the way he sees it. I love him for it.
Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we
Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?
The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,
Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,
Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands
perchance
Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once
Had scooped out pharaoh's mummy. I -- though heart
might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief
What seems most welcome in the tomb -- play a pre-
destined part.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?
So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on
your head.
So tell me what you think if you have any thoughts regarding anything. See you next Wednesday. Jennifer
Every time I show someone my sequence of six hundred spelunking sonnets, the response is to say they're songs of sex. But how could they be, when I haven't gotten any for months? (Years, really. I'm very good in bed, or would be, but women seem not to respond to my pick-up lines, or anyway not to respond in quite the way I'd like. I've got my trailer all decked-out to make it cozy for cuddling, if you know what I mean, so I'm ready if I could just get a babe to come home with me, but it may not help that I'm overdue for a little dental work.)
Maybe you could help me with this concluding couplet from one of the sonnets?
No mere nick in the earth is that warm grave
In the wooded hill, but a very cave.
Sometimes you have to let the poems and the witty banter, the in-between-poem-talk, stand for themselves. Katy Lederer is the author of Winter Sex (poetry), Poker Face (memoir), and her new poetry collection, The Heaven-Sent Leaf, recently released from BOA Editions:
“I’m just going to read from the new book. It’s a series of forty-five poems based on my experience working at a hedge fund, where I discovered that money can be a very creative thing.”
“I didn’t bring on the economic crisis.”
"My roommate is here, I think. We were on the Upper West Side bemoaning how everyone there has black couches and not enough art. This poem ('In the Flower Store Next Door') is based on a large apartment complex and a flower store that thrives on sending flowers solely to the people who live there.”
"A number of these poems play with the term brainworker, which was coined by Galbraith in The Affluent Society, and relates to the well-educated white-collar worker. Galbraith had the idea that economics pre-WWII were based on ideas of scarcity and after WWII, economics were based on abundance and what to do with this abundance. Check out his book."
David Lehman in conversation with Michael Braziller "Auden in New York" Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 7:00pm
at
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: [email protected])
For extra credit, who was Philoctetes? (1) Important Greek. (2) Character in Sophocles. (3) Archery champion. (4) Character in Edmund Wilson. (5) Tefillin.
I am in love with a thoughtless, self-centered poet who regularly drives me into constant despair. On the upside this anguish has fueled 149 books and still writing. Should I continue this suffering and write another 149 books or shall I entertain a new line of work? One that doesn't involve thoughtless, self-centered poets and massive sad creation?
Signed,
Edna Goldbloom
Expression
Apeish sunflower, holy thorn
snapdragoning up my canvas
my blue agates, my orchid moss all nigh long.
Nothing grieved, horn toned
spiking lotus, this decree varnished.
With his whore he sat watching “The O’Reilly Factor”
In the Four Seasons, Laguna. After a time He nodded off, dreamed he was young again, Preparing for the big game or watching professional Wrestling with Ron Feiger. The year was 1967.
Waking, he saw his whore had gone Along with his wallet. What remained was the note
She scrawled: “Fuck you!” He laughed
Out loud! His billion was in the Cayman Islands, Invisible but also by some miracle everywhere, Intimate, close as the nearest Web connection or ATM.
Well, last night we discovered to whom Don Draper mailed Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency in Episode 1 of this season's run of Mad Men. When Don asked the recipient if she'd read it, she said that she had, that it had reminded her of New York and that (I think) it made her sad (or did she say that it made her worried? Help me out). In any event, I wonder if she had a particular O'Hara poem in mind. I love it that they tied up this loose end.
--sdh
p.s. The title of next Sunday's season finale is "Meditations in an Emergency." Maybe FOH will make an appearance.
Bienvenue aux etats-unis ou liberation rules, mein liebchen. So generous of you to offer line edits. Here's one that's been bugging me. It comes at the end of the eighth stanza of a nine-stanza poem, and it arrives as a rhetorical climax: "We must love one another or die." It sounds good, I know, but it's untrue -- we're going to die no matter what -- and I have this old-fashioned notion that poetry and truth should go together like wahrheit und dichtung or conjugal love and Alberto Moravia. What should I do? Junk the stanza? Junk the poem? Can you think of a way to save the line? Like maybe changing "or" to "and"? For your muse-inspired vice and advice I thank you in advance of the guard. Ton ami PS How about "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder"? That's another line I'm not quite satisfied with. I rejected the idea of modulating from verse to prose dialogue at this point with a hunky gang boss saying, "I don't want my brother coming out of that bathroom with only his dick in his hand."
Dear “DL” (if them's your REAL initials, Bub). I might handle this in a couple of ways. Now, I am assuming you aren’t concerned with meter here, yes? If that's the case then you could extend the line by not even very much and that would take care of your issues of truthiness:
We must love one another else die of it.
We must love one another or die from it.
(Or some variation of the above)
Because: it doesn't negate other ways of dying, nor does it technically suggest that dying is an avoidable event.
Now, if you ARE watching your meter here, you could sneak a wee ‘we’ in there, oui?, and then- VOILA!- you got yourself an alexandrine line:
We must love one another else we die of it.
(Hmmm, though if I were the owner of this line, I might change ‘else’ to ‘lest’ because that further clouds the mystery-- will we die of the loving or of the not loving?)
Also, your own suggestion of ‘and’ ain’t half bad.
How do you get over someone who left you when you really, really think he was the most perfectly suited person to you that you'll find?
Also, here is a line of poetry I’d like you to edit.
"Another wonder of the world, smaller than you imagined. Larger, too – like women can be large and small in anger."
Thank you,
Vivica Caliente De L’Amour (not the poet’s real name)
Dear Vivica,
There is no such thing as getting “over.” There’s getting along. There’s getting down on it (Kool & the Gang are still together, did you know that?). And there is, of course, getting off. But over? No, my sister. If this break up were, say, a hedge maze, then your fear that this boy might have been the most and only perfect match for you would be the axe-wielding Jack Nicholson bearing down, down, down on the Shelley Duval of your self-confidence. What you need to do is get THROUGH the maze, Miss Mousie. You must be a chin-up trooper and, like Valerie Bertinelli, take it one day at a time. Go out. With friends and on dates, both. And do your work. Write your poems. A stereotype it may be, but it’s this kind of shit that poetry’s all about. And trust me: He wasn’t the man for you.
Besides, the only perfectly-suited man I know is Mr. Cave, and here is a picture of him in one of those dapper suits.
As for your lines:
“Wonder of the world” I worry is too cliché, even with the way you undercut that cliché by extending the metaphor. Also, I’m concerned about the large women. Unless you want your reader to think of the ladies as fat and then have that assumption repealed at the end of the line, “in anger” comes too late in the clause. Is there something else that this wonder can be besides large or small? Can the women be wonderful and terrible in anger and the initial “wonder” be revised to something else? In any case, I like very much this metaphor, however you decide to play it out.
I am saddened to announce that I am no longer able to serve as Foreign Correspondent for the illustrious and estimable Best American Poetry Blog. Nein, nein. For, these days, I am no longer over-seas, but stateside. I am not anymore far-off but quite, very quite near-by. I have sloughed my alien shell for native skin. Ich bin kein Berliner. Alas, my broke-ass heart and her two cats done took a fly-fly in a big ole metal-bird back across that little drink of water that separates Europe from America and that self-same heart, singed though it’s been, shattered though it is, and shut-the-fuck-upped as it ever will be, now grocery shops for one and sleeps alone in a bed made for two. (It is, however, an outstanding bed, I should note, purchased from Craigs List and be-linened with divine plum purple satin sheets). I am — bluntly stated — no longer a diamond in the duodenum. Which is to say: an exquisite foreign body lodged in an orifice in which it don’t belong. Adieu, Confederatio Helvetica. A-mother-effin’-dieu.
But worry thou not. From the burned up bones of the position of Correspondent rises a fresh Phoenix, a right rickety witch, a me-of-the-BAP-blog version 2.0. I shall be (for the next week anyway) your Coeur Despondent… your very own Miz Lonesome Heart, here at your simple service, where I shall avail myself and my self’s (occasionally veiled) usefulness to you, my friends, all and only for you.
Give me your tired, your poor, your befuddled messes— I shall give you the answer you seek (though, Achtung, it may be one you do not wish to know). Tell me your tale of woe, my Pet — I’ll soothe you with the balm of mine own empathies. Offer up your worst on the altar of my advice. I’m here for you, Boo. And I really mean it.
In addition, I’m offering line-edits of single stanzas of poems.
So send your questions and lines of poetry to my email address: jilly (at) essbaum (dot) com. No problem too big, no stanza too buggered. You will, of course, remain anonymous.
In addition to the above nonsense, you may be subject to seven days of blathering on topics including but not limited to: details concerning the American half of my following-Nick-Cave-on-tour tour (my favorite topic), further extrapolations on the merits and mysteries of Old Time Radio (my other favorite topic), and why you should be reading my friends' books (my other, other favorite topic).
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark