"Lunching with Elaine Equi" [by David Lehman]

Sometimes, when lunching alone, I bring Elaine Equi along for company,
rereading Ripple Effect sipping a cup of strong black coffee and slipping
into the room where Fairfield Porter paints the light, and solitude
rhymes with altitude, attitude, multitude, lassitude, and beatitude.
That’s how I see and hear things, too. And the music is “John Coltrane’s
Central Park West,” where Elaine names the tenor saxophonist playing
“if [she] were having an affair / with myself as a married man.” Now if
we’re talking shop I’d have to pause here to talk about the line-breaks
because her rhythms her timing depend on them and the rhythm
and wit of her poems is their greatness, often achieved in short lines,
bite-size bits, though her prose poems are pretty amazing, too, such as
“Ultra Confessional” (the shoplifting stage follows the age of living in
“Victorian  novels on the verge of swooning”) and “Found in Translation,”
which praises not only “whatever cannot be killed by the translator”
but all translations, even bad ones, because reading itself
is a version of translation, a chain of logic leading to the epiphany
that “it would be great to learn French in order to read
William Carlos Williams.” The “perversely patriotic” narrator
of one of Elaine’s poems liked S & M before terrorism killed it
on the evening news. I know what she means but share her confidence
that new sources of inspiration will continue to show up
as two beautiful hookers helping her decide what to wear.

Comments

[بازی دخترانه آنلاین]

nice, Taking time and real effort to make a good post. Cool! Thank you for sharing this post.

[John Stickney]

I have spent some of my lunches with poetry collections by Equi and by Lehman.
Got a chance to review both years ago in a Cleveland Ohio alt weekly.
Time well spent.

[Angela Ball]

So well said, David Lehman.