The New York School Diaspora (Part Five): Nin Andrews [by Angela Ball]

Sometimes I feel so inspired
after Ulalume González de LeónI think I am flying. Yes, flying far away. So far away, in fact, that between you and me, I am at a loss for words. So this is what it’s like to be an artist, I think. Which brings me to the question: if I had to choose between being bliss and writing about it, which would I choose?

Oh Yellow Bird, I sigh as I gaze outside. Oh Yellow Sun, Yellow Mood flooding my office with longing, I want to surrender to you. I want to give up all my bad habits.

I am so filled with happiness, I do not write. I cannot. What should I do? I finally ask you, my dearest poet friend. You don’t answer. So I watch you. I do what you do.

Word by word, line by line, I change my mind. I change my mood, my laundry, my socks. I change the sun into wind, the wind into clouds and grief. I talk about my soul as if it were a shroud, my heart as if it were lost. Then I change it into a sparrow, an egg, a frying pan.

Yes, I lie. Today, I am a poet. I write lies.

Nin Andrews is the author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in many literary reviews and anthologies including Ploughshares, The Paris Review, The Best of the Prose Poem, and four volumes of Best American Poetry. She has translated the prose poems of Henri Michaux and edited an anthology of them titled Someone Wants to Steal My Name (Cleveland State University Press). Her most recent book, The Last Orgasm, was published by Etruscan Press in 2020.

In writing this poem, I was thinking how inspiration is the crack cocaine of writers—that there’s a high when the rush of ideas and images and words coalesces in the mind and begins to form a poem, an essay, a story. But there are also those days when the high is there, but one can lack the ability to translate it into words. I wanted to describe the distance that sometimes opens up between what I feel and what I can express, between what I say and what I mean, between what I describe and what I actually see. I was also thinking of the Mexican poet, Ulalume González de León, and how she often addresses that which cannot be put into words.
--Nin Andrews

The New York School Diaspora, Part Five: Nin Andrews

Nin Andrews’s poem, “Sometimes I feel so inspired,” like the poems of Frank O’Hara, engages the mutable and its quandaries, the seemingly competing needs to experience bliss and to write it. Here, as in O’Hara, there are friends to consult: “What should I do?” . . .”You don’t answer. So I watch you. I do what you do.” The vexed question, Be or Write: O’Hara evaded it. Or rather, surrendered to both, as Andrews does in this poem inspired by Ulalume González de León.

Like Mayakovsky, O’Hara and Andrews are clouds in human dress, implicated in the bliss of vapor’s changing shapes. O’Hara’s heart resides in his pocket, “it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy”; Andrews’ changes hers into beauty, nourishment, practicality: “a sparrow, an egg, a frying pan.” As O’Hara says, “The eagerness of objects to / be what we are afraid to do / cannot help but move us.”

“Sometimes I feel so inspired” is an encounter of sensibility with world. To read is like strapping oneself to an experienced parachutist. We land on the fact of poetry and its seminal prevarication.

--Angela Ball

Comments

[Jill Newnham]

Wonderful post about a wondrous poet.

[David Lehman]

An admirable formulation: <<< “Sometimes I feel so inspired” is an encounter of sensibility with world. To read is like strapping oneself to an experienced parachutist. We land on the fact of poetry and its seminal prevarication. >>> Brava.

[Angela Ball]

Thank you, Jill Newnham and David Lehman, for your appreciations.