This comic is based on a few lines from the introduction to William Carlos Williams in The Oxford Anthology of American Poetry that made me laugh:
“I write in the American idiom, “ Williams noted, “and for many years I have been using what I call the variable foot.” One of the secrets of American poetry is that no one knows what “the variable foot” really is.
from the archive; first posted December 7, 2016
This is the poem where no one drowns in summer
Or propranolol, gyves or sluices or falls in love with Sister Wendy.
No one pisses off a dock, no one is pixilated
Or doll-like, no one gets high and sticks up a bodega;
No one wakes this morning believing his or her life is like
The reassembled pieces of a torn up letter, nothing clots or tethers.
This is the poem where no one fingers
A violet scar on the back of a cowboy’s neck, no one pleasures
Herself in the rank nest of her father’s deer stand.
Nothing is pale, nothing shattered, nothing crevé or pálida.
This is the poem that does not collage, appropriate, ventriloquize
Frank O’Hara or holla, that does not try to squeeze
Into the skinny jeans of erasures or pantoums.
This is the poem from which the ornate nomenclature of ornithology,
Minerology, cytomorphology and all the other ologies is absent
Together with the word “absent”; in which nothing scuds. There are no tufts
And the tin cans of romance remain undented.
This is the poem in which there are no apparently endless permutations
Of light and darkness, where constellations do not wheel
And sex is not like anything except perhaps a brief shriek down a forever
Recycling water slide.
This is the poem that does not invoke abstruse principles
Of particle physics to delineate certain properties of fifties hairdo’s,
Does not pretend to tap the phone lines of the dead
Or ingenuously indulge in the fantasy of the soul.
This is you’ll be glad to know the poem bereft of sun-spunk.
That does not keen the passing of passenger trains
Or Mr. Furman my fifth grade teacher.
This is the poem without scent, without footsteps.
In other words this is the poem that closes the door
And locks itself in behind it.
No castanets, no pie, no drones or luminescent,
No hickies or Sweet Jesus, no animals whatsoever.
Well, maybe one. Because how strange, how cynical and impoverished
Would a poem have to be to refuse admittance to a horse,
And while we’re at it while he’s still around, say,
Good old Robert Bly to see it with such clear eyes,
The white flake of snow that that has just fallen on its mane?
from The American Journal of Poetry Drawing of Daniel Lawless by Nin Andrews.
from the archive; first posted March 25, 2013
originally posted on April 20, 2015.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Sick with a cold I am, but I still love this day along with all of the trappings—the gold-embossed Cupids, roses, candles, slinky lingerie, sonnets, and chocolate. Who can resist the chocolate? And to think the day was invented by Chaucer. Perhaps we poets should invent a few more days worthy of celebration? I vote for a day for dreaming, or at least sleeping-in as long as possible. No peeking at the clock. In fact, no clocks allowed. Or how about a day of kindness, or at least of caring for others including the woebegone, the piqued, the miffed, the melancholy, and the dejected. Or maybe something simpler—a day for collecting words and expressions you loved once but no longer hear or use, words like suasive, addlepated, spindle-legged, vulpine, folderol, and cattywampus. I have to think, but given a day, I think we could have a regular word party. And expressions--yes, expressions like: Where in the Dickens is it? Or, You're about as busy as a cow's tail in summer time. Or, I do declare. And, Do go on, meaning, You wanna dig that grave a little deeper?
Sometimes I think reading Dorothy Parker is like reading a witty love-advice columnist. There is also this poem:
Unfortunate Coincidence
By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying--
Lady, make a note of this:
one of you is lying.
This comic is based on a few lines from the introduction to William Carlos William in The Oxford Anthology of American Poetry that made me laugh:
“I write in the American idiom, “ Williams noted, “and for many years I have been using what I call the variable foot.” One of the secrets of American poetry is that no one knows what “the variable foot” really is.
Forgive the political nature of this comic--I like to think of this blog as a sacred space where we all breathe more easily. But all week I have been thinking of this Edward Lear poem. And how as a girl, whenever my mother read it, I would complain that you can't possibly go to sea in a sieve--
to which she answered:
Why, there's nothing to worry about! Because you can always sleep in a crockery-jar with your feet wrapped in pinky paper, all folded neat, and fastened with a pin.
I think that's my favorite stanza of the poem:
The water it soon came in, it did,
The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
And they fastened it down with a pin.
And they passed the night in a crockery-jar,
And each of them said, ‘How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
While round in our Sieve we spin!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
Nicole Santalucia and I were talking about po-biz, and I thought of this comic. As I told her, I don't mean to offend anyone. After all we are all in this together, needing each other's support and favors. But as Nicole put it:
This is the drug, the race and chase, what the MFA machine is pumping out. The goal should be building writing communities and connections between each other instead of trying to be "the one." Can't many of us be "the ones"? There are so many good poets today and we need to stop racing one another. On the other hand, in order to get a teaching job all this stuff needs to happen and there are only so many teaching jobs . .
("What If You Slept" has always been one of my favorite poems.)
The other day I was listening to two of my poet-friends complain bitterly about their parents. Among other things, they talked of how they wished their folks had an interest in literature. No one in their families read books. I couldn’t join in. After all, I grew up in a house of wall-to-wall books. I will never be as literate as my parents, and I owe much of what I know about poetry to my mother who read aloud from my earliest memories. I used to frustrate her to no end, asking her to stop when I liked a line or poem, and read it again. And then again.
Not again? she’d say.
Just one more time, I’d say. And we’d go around and around.
And in my mind, later, I would play with the lines. So as a girl this poem might be:
What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there—there was a rain shower
And when you awoke,
You were soaked to the bone . . .
Or:
And there—you discovered secret powers
And when you awoke
You could see through walls . . .
Or:
And there—your soul was made of sugar and flour
And when you awoke
You knew you were destined to be a baker . . .
Or:
And there—you climbed to the tip of God’s tower . . .
And when you awoke
You were still holding an angel by the finger . . .
I would keep going and going. This was one of the ways I passed my time. I called this game making-and-filling-in-the-blanks. I always liked games of fill-in-the-blank. My mother said if I continued in this way, I would never remember the correct versions of poems. She was right.
1. Different Ways to Say Fuck
I had five eye operations as a girl. After each one, I imagined myself emerging with perfect and uncrossed eyes. I would wait anxiously for the day I could peel back the bandage. But the surgeries were never entirely successful. The doctor always suggested that I have just one more operation.
These operations were complicated by my reaction to the anesthesia. The eye doctor had difficulty waking me after surgery. He once called me his Sleeping Beauty, but it was a sleep that worried him. I was sick, too, and usually confined to bed for a week or two afterwards.
During that time of recovery, my mother would visit my room with a pile of old books to read aloud. She always chose volumes of myths, fairy tales, poetry, parables, or folk tales, usually antiquated books with beautiful pictures and ornate language. She read one story after another, hour after hour, as I lay, dozing, hypnotized by her beautiful reading voice. A former school teacher, she liked to ask questions about the stories. My answers, she complained, didn’t stay close to the text. I usually told her what a story reminded me of.
When I was eight and recovering from my third operation, for example, my mother read me the myth of Persephone. I said the myth made me think of a fight I had had with Trig, the farmhand’s son, a fight that began when he asked, You see what those cats are doing? pointing at the mating tabbies, Tigger and Rain. People do that, too. Only they call it fucking. And one day I’m gonna’ fuck your sister, Sal. I couldn’t help it. I slugged him as hard as I could. That was the day I got my first black eye.
My sister, I told my mother, was like Persephone. Only she wasn’t stolen yet.
My mother blinked a few times before saying, You shouldn’t get in fights. It’s not ladylike. And then she added, Don’t ever use that word again. And you know which word I mean. If you ever tell a story like that, find another way to say that word.
What other way? I asked.
Think about it, she said. You’re a smart child. For every word you use, for every sentence you speak, there are many other and better words or sentences to say the same thing.
For years after I thought of different ways to say fuck.
***
In my freshman year in college, I had a nervous breakdown. I rarely talk about this. Instead I prefer to edit that year out of my life. But the fact remains; I developed what I called a stutter in my mind. I felt as if I were becoming a stuck-record, going over and over the same sentences, thoughts, and ideas.
I don’t know if this experience is particularly unusual—after all, many people obsess. But it became a problem when I was writing. I would try to write a paragraph, but struggle to get past the first line. I would write and rewrite it as many as ten times. Then I would do the same with the second sentence and the third. When I completed a paragraph, I would revise it.
I would also change my topic, or my approach to a topic.
This problem began when I had a certain professor, Dr. B., who assigned an essay a week and then insisted on examining every sentence his students wrote, suggesting alternate ways of saying the same thing. He wanted to open us up to the possibilities of the imagination, grammar, and the English Language.
I can still hear his voice in my head as he read aloud one of my essays, pausing again and again to say, This sentence works okay, but how could you say it differently? Or, Are you certain that’s how you want to say this? If I didn’t answer, he would suggest alternatives.
After a while I saw every sentence as many sentences, or as a potential multiple choice test.
Worse were the grammatical options the professor offered. In this paragraph, he said once, I see three compound sentences in a row. Why not rearrange the third sentence so that you have an introductory subordinate clause? And break up the second sentence into two simple, declarative sentences.
A grammarian I will never be.
Soon my choice of sentence structure became another kind of multiple choice test. Or a game show. Will it be sentence structure number 1, 2, or 3?
I also found myself pondering the use of commas, particularly the Oxford comma which he preferred to leave out but said, at least in some cases, is necessary. And the comma before which, which is used when which is nonrestrictive but not when which is restrictive, and which I still find confusing. A case in point: the which in the first sentence of this paragraph.
It’s just comma sense, the professor would joke, but I wasn’t sure I had it.
In addition, there were the professor’s obsessions, particularly with the conditional and subjunctive cases. He said on one of my papers, Your use of the subjunctive is correct here, I think, but not necessary because the conditional would serve just as well unless you really think uncertainty is paramount. You should know that use of the subjunctive is currently in decline in the English language. But the conditional is also not ideal. Why not write in a more assertive tone?
He especially disliked semicolons. He hated how we students used them willy nilly, saying, The link between two independent clauses must be logical if one is to use a semicolon, just as the link between human beings should be logical if they are to get married, but of course, it rarely is.
And there were also the problems with the elliptical clause, as in better than me vs. better than I, and the split infinitives, and sentences ending with a preposition.
Finally there was his suspicion of the zeugma. Your compound direct object, he said once, could be considered a zeugma, but I would want to know that you know what a zeugma is. And that you decided consciously to use one here. Otherwise consider changing or dropping this sentence.
Instead I said I needed to drop out for a while.
Why? he asked me, looking startled. I said that I had just changed too many sentences, paragraphs, and my mind. Sometimes there is no more time for decisions and indecisions and visions and revisions. I was trying to be funny.
I am sorry to hear that, he said, adding under his breath, That’s fucked up.
***
That fucked up experience, or mind-stutter as I call it, has haunted me ever since. I still rewrite excessively, trying and failing to correct my grammatical errors. I still think I should edit any piece of writing, at least one more time. I still dream I am in Dr. B.s class, writing and rewriting those weekly essays. And I remember many of essays from his class. After all, I tried to write them as many as twenty or thirty times.
Just last week I was reminded of the essay I wrote on Jane Eyre when I watched a video by the amazing Jen Campbell, who, in her witty and entertaining style, illuminated aspects of the text and offered her insights, including the idea that Bertha is an aspect of Jane. (Who else could get 4,000 people to watch a talk on Jane Eyre?)
I was reminded of my title from freshman year, In Defense of Bertha, and how I wrote that many women should have a mad woman in their attic. After all, I was meeting aspects of my own just then.
I remember how I wasn’t certain that I could or should write about madness, Bertha’s or my own. My professor pointed out, I spent entirely too much time in the conditional case, pondering and overusing the words like perhaps, probably, maybe, might, would, should, and could.
He added that women are more prone to this problem, which he called conditional-overuse, adding that men speak more naturally and emphatically, a comment which has stuck with me and might or might not be true. Perhaps and maybe. Either way, it’s maddening.
***
The more I worked on my Jane Eyre essay, the less I said about the book or Charlotte Bronte.
Instead I wrote about the fairytales my mother read aloud to me, specifically about the princesses in fairytale towers (Rapunzel, Maid Maleen, Sleeping Beauty) who were and weren’t like Bertha in her attic. The princesses were, instead, pre-Berthas. Prepubescent. Still waiting for their moment to be kissed and liberated. Or to be de-towered and deflowered.
Like Persephone, they were unwittingly waiting for a king to sweep them away. But would he be a king of the underworld or this world? And how could they not want to scream?
And then I began to digress even further . . .
I wondered whether fairytales ever put men in towers—or in some purgatorial space between heaven and earth. I concluded that there was one fairytale, The Seven Swans, where this is the case.
In The Seven Swans, seven brothers are trapped in the bodies of birds. And it is a girl, or their sister, who breaks the evil bird-spell and turns the swans back into men. But she doesn’t completely succeed. One brother is left with a wing in the place of an arm.
(Forgive me--I am short-changing the story here, skipping important details including the fact that the sister-savior of the story also spends time in a tower. And she is, of course, rescued and married to a king.)
I wondered if the sister worried forever after about the wing she didn’t fix? Did she stay awake at night, thinking of that single wing, dreaming of it rising out of her youngest brother’s back.
The wing, I think, is emblematic of how people live happily and unhappily ever after with their odd limbs, their crossed eyes, and troubled minds. Of how, after being poisoned or possessed, after becoming a bird or a sleeping princess or a prisoner of the underworld, one is marked for life. No matter how many hours of therapy one endures, a trace of the sleepiness or poison or the wing is still there. It can be tucked beneath a jacket or otherwise disguised. But the mind remembers, even if it wants to rewrite the past and make it perfect. And then rewrite it again.
I have always loved the image of a man with a single white wing.
Nin Andrews' most recent book, Why God Is a Woman, was published by BOA Editions. You can check out her website here.
In honor of Auden's birthday last week, I thought of this comic and of this lecture on Auden by David Lehman:
Radio
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
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
