My great friend and longtime editor Miriam got her start, as so many of us do, editing porn. She worked for a group of magazines aimed at the straight male market with names that sound classy (High Society, Swank, Club International, Juggs (everybody wants sex to be something akin to putting on the Ritz—if you want to find a gay bar in Europe, just look for the “gentleman’s club” sign featuring the tuxedo, top hat, and monocle of a silhouetted Mr. Peanut (are we out of all the parentheticals yet?))). Miriam’s job was to “clean up” the letters to the editor, full of reader fantasies and experiences. And yes, as you may have suspected, she was also the author of many of the letters.
“There were a lot of real ones,” she reflected on those golden days of yore. “The guys who wrote about liking boobs needed the most work. All those misspellings, the bad grammar, the dull repetitive motorboating.” But the letters written by the perverts? The constructors of auto-erotic Rube Goldberg machines, the purveyors of props made from ordinary household appliances, the dreams of naked cheerleading pyramids and mile-high encounters—“they were always well-written and hardly needed my edits.” Just as I suspected: the perverts are smarter and more creative.
I’m not saying Maureen McLane wrote letters to Swank, but I’ve never seen a line of poetry she wrote that I felt the need to edit, even if they are fragmentary, momentary, glimpsed, gone. Perhaps that is because it doesn’t seem as if McLane entirely crafted the rhyme and rhythm of her poems—I love that it is as if she is a force of nature, one that chisels the words and images out of the glaciers or granite she writes about. McLane is always finding the lyricism in the world, or carving it out of the rock and putting it on the page. Like Paul Bunyan, she knows how to move large things around a landscape with ease and elegance. She sits upon the roof of each poetic shanty and squeezes the logs so tightly together that no chinking is necessary.
Incarnation
Some are gay
In an old way.
It has its charms.
The kids are like
Hey…wassup…
Except they don’t say
Wassup. Hey.
The women with children
Who are nonetheless
Virgins. Mrs. Dalloway.
The body a nest
Of sockets
And unplugged cords.
The body without
Organs has finally arrived
Its wireless folds
Almost tangible.
Years ago
I wanted to die
When you made me feel
We were fungible,
Everything repeatable.
Later I floated
Like a spirit
In a spirit photograph
Above my life.
I shared a skin
with my skin.
I was in
my life not of.
I hovered above.
Then I descended
A millennial reincarnation
Surprising myself o
Out of that ghost.
Carnations grow
In sandy soil.
You can touch
Them. Hey.
And there are things that other people say, which sound like music to her and us, she quotes somebody saying, in “Glacial Erratic”,
“I need to write
Good fast music.
All my good music
Is slow.”
She may have said that and quoted herself, or somebody else may have said that, but it seems the battle cry of This Blue, McLane’s latest set of songs just out this month (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). This month I am the guy carrying around this new volume, even if Maureen hasn’t signed it for me yet. I love that she is not afraid to give voice to base thoughts as well as wise ones, so that she opens the door to the body, in the mind/body dialogue.
She’s always respectful and sometimes abashed by environment and time, the continuum where life goes on. The pastoral plenty can sometimes overwhelm. “There are too many cedars here,” she laments in “Haunt”, a poem in her previous collection, after a poem in which there are a lot of cedars, which leads to putting her elbows in bird shit. “Have I been resting my elbows in birdshit?” she asks, then, “I have been resting/my elbows in birdshit!” The world, like the mind, is fecund. Sometimes we get our elbows dirty.
In This Blue there’s plenty of perv: “All Good” has boy anuses, “That Man” may be Sappho with a low opinion of that man, and there are boobs, libertines, and sex in “Tell Us What Happened After We Left”
They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century
They were not kidding
when they said they were blinded
by a vision of love.
It was not just a manner
of speaking or feeling
though it’s hard to say
how the dead
really felt harder
even than knowing the living.
You are so opaque
to me your brief moments
of apparent transparency
seem fraudulent windows
in a Brutalist structure
everyone admires.
The effort your life
requires exhausts me.
I am not kidding.
“The body is a nest of unplugged cords.” Maureen McLane is so good at plugging us in and getting plugged in. You will love This Blue. You want somebody smart in bed. Because heavy petting is more fun and less work than heavy editing.
This is wonderful.
Posted by: Lyz | April 23, 2014 at 11:26 AM