I am of two minds about pretty much everything—I’ll growl against the Death of the Book but when I have to move my books to a new household, I wish death upon my books. Moving my books makes me ask the great philosophical question of the age, “What is a book?” The object, the thing on the shelf with paper and stitching and all those words, letters like ants toiling in an antfarm. What books do I send away, what books do I keep, in my home, in my office, in the lackadaisical lending library? The ones that fill my home, then, are well-beloved because so ponderous. They are souvenirs. Souvenirs of having spent a period of my life with the book (I will always remember that Christmas with Buddenbrooks; that feverish “vacation” in Cabo with Thom Gunn’s Man with Night Sweats; the nowhere legal proofreading job mostly spent reading Proust with Jessica). Those books are near my bed. So are the ones that I re-read when I’m sick at heart (always poetry when I am sick at heart, ALWAYS, I read poetry like the broken-hearted drunk-dialing old lovers).
And there are the books that have been signed by their authors. I like the signature, for the same souvenir reason—Borges said, “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.” I like to be surrounded by the bodies of these remarkable people. Call me morbid. People are their books, they really are. The book that should have made the author’s career because she is better than those reviews, I cradle in my arms like an ignored child.
Among my signed editions, I have a very special collection of souvenirs, books signed in a very special way. They have the frisson of intimacy to them. They say, literally (and I know how that word is thrown around these days, so literally, “literally”), “For Brian-You were great in bed!” And there are, as of this writing, 69 volumes with this inscription. “Never have I experienced such pleasure,” writes Dan Chaon in my copy of Await Your Reply, “You have touched me in places I did not know existed.” “What a magic wand (wink wink),” extols Achy Obejas on the title page of Ruins. Are any of these inscriptions true? Why ask? You are people dedicated to literature. Fiction is epistemologically truer than history. Back off. Let’s just say this collection of “souvenirs” is based on a true story.
Many have wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Few have balked. Some have slipped around it with “You were great in bread” and “You were great in bed, wish I had been there.” The most vulgar and enthusiastic signators are the children’s book authors and the academics—they never get to be naughty, and here’s that big chance.
But it’s the poets—oh, you poets. You talk like the demons who threaten Buffy the Vampire Slayer before she stabs the shit out of them, all obscure hyperbole, metaphor, and blank verse. “With thanks for our nocturnal maneuvers together.” “Thanatos grappling with eros: the memory lingers….” Come on you guys. You want into the library or not? There’s a script. Stick to the script.
This is the part where I say, thank GOD there is no script for poetry. If I ask you to stick to the script, don’t listen to me.
Books are great in bed. My friend Gwenan was reminiscing this week about the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez about first reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, “I read it over a weekend in 1986, only stopping to eat and sleep. It was like an affair.” I love my favorite writers the way I love lovers. My favorite place to have a writer is in bed. From boyhood, I took my favorite books to bed, and hid under the covers with them. Paul Bunyan, for example. Work Giant. Among other things. Paul Bunyan, you were great in bed.
There have been poets who have pleased me with their inscriptions and their poetry. I have taken them to bed—if not in the flesh, then in the word. I have wrestled with them, thanatos and eros. In the next few days, I’m going to feature a few bedmates of mine, poems by poets who know what “good in bed” means.
Leslie McGrath is a fine poetic bedmate of mine, and here is a beautiful poem to kick us off—something to wrinkle the sheets of her first collection, Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (Main Street Rag, 2009). By way of introduction, it is my opinion that every self-respecting poet should have a decent cunnilingus poem. Even if it’s a theoretical cunnilingus poem, which is the sort of cunnilingus poem I would write. McGrath’s cunnilingus poem is a real cunnilingus poem. Listen to the other beats in her line; sometimes what you think is meter is a lyricism of beats, a lubrication of alliteration and all the other marvelous figures of repetition that the up and down and round and round of sex and dance and fun. McGrath can teach us all something about motion in the ocean!
Oooo Oooo
I like animals with faces
like yours; animals
who stand on all twos, whose
bicameral hearts
beat hot cha-chas
in thoracic palaces
while a hip’s marimba lick
goes noticed, goes
goddamn she fine
while all the while
those hands they
skitter, slip up, rake down,
part me like a monkey
splits a mango, sticks
his animal mouth in there, his
animal tongue in there, his
animal face like yours.
Watch for lots more poetic bedroom activity this week in the new, repaired Best American Poetry!
