The Best American Poetry

Why everything is going to be OK. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’m supposed to be cleaning!  I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend.  But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post.

I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good.  So.  What I want to tell you is pretty important.  I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States.  What great people I met.  Ridiculously cool people.  Ridunkulous.  And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420.   If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know.  I gave 6 talks in four days!  One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired.  Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me.

I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism.  There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community.  What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true.  It’s us. 

We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love.  We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion.  

The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds.

Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning.

There is no hidden world of meaning.  The feelings of meaning are the meaning.  It’s all true.

Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual.  We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another.  It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing. 

Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark?  Yes.  Come sit with us.  We're right here.  Turn on the light.

We must look after one another.  There is no heaven.  We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty.  It doesn’t matter all that much.  There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares?  Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end.  You are here.  It’s wonderful.  We made it into existence together. 

We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating.  Health Care, people!  Gorgeous African-American president and presidential family!  Now is the time to lift our voices up.  We are all there is.  We don’t have it for very long.  We have it right now.  America is a lot of things.  I know.  Tea party.  I know.  Beck, and not the good kind.  But it’s okay.

We are here together.  We can keep each other company.  We can see that if this is the world, if our consciousness is what we have of consciousness, than what we feel and what we make is very important indeed.  You’re sacred because you are, and it’s my job to support your awareness of the true and glorious reality that is.  It’s your job to support this awareness in the rest of us.  We are getting better at this.  We are going to get even better.  That's why everything is going to be okay.

Excellent work staying alive since last week, most of you.  Let’s try to do even better next week.

By the way, on my way home from the airport we got stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge and there we stayed for two and a half hours, my whole little family and me, from around 12:30 am to 3 am, when they finally backed us off the bridge.  Meanwhile we got out of our cars.  We heard someone had jumped and saw boats and helicopters shining lights.  Then we heard there was a woman who had climbed up into the bridge girders and was going to jump.  John encouraged me to walk down to where it was all happening; given what I’d been writing about lately, I should just go down and see.  So I did, there was a woman up there, a cop up there near her, I saw him hand her a cigarette, I saw him light it for her, I saw her talking to him, I saw her move her long, brown hair behind her ear. 

Like I said, she hadn’t come down when we left, they’d turned us around to get out, but I felt sure she’d come down, she was talking calmly for hours, there were tons of people everywhere.  We googled it when we got home but saw nothing of it.  Then yesterday saw a report.  She’d jumped.  After we were home in bed.  She’s in critical condition.  A 41-year-old woman from Long Island.  Like so many of us, or thereabouts.  So forgive me, bleaders, for repeating myself.   Stay, everybody.  No more going off the deep end.  Stay.  Let’s all give up together, right here, right now, and have chocolate cake.  But don’t give any to the dog, because chocolate isn’t good for dogs.

I love you like crazy,

 Jennifer

from the archive; first posted March 24, 2010

Winter, "with all its tits in the right bra cup" [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Have we considered that Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” was written for a winter’s day?  It depends what one calls lovely and what kind of temperament you woke up hoping for.  (For which you came up hoping.)  I’d like to have a responsive reading where every time I end my sentence with a preposition, the audience has to say the clause back to me, with all its tits in the right bra cup this time.  What are you waiting for now?  (For what now am I waiting?)   Sometimes the world arranges itself in Suessian piles, sometimes you have to help it along.  I can put up with anything but panic.  (Panic is what up with which is all you claim you cannot put.)  Clouds, calm down!!  Frozen nowhere is not just Superman’s lair of choice.  It is a privilege to be hiding in the end of January with you.  What do we weigh down today to keep from disappearing?  We weigh down the river today to keep from disappearing.  Do, I'd say.  He'd say, "Every fair from fair sometime declines, by chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed."  Because he knew how to talk to a ghostbuster of a girl like me.

from the archive; first posted January 28, 2009

Emily Dickinson's Atom Bomb Letters [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Darlingest Bleaders,

How I have missed you. And what obstacles I have had to defeat in order to at last rearrive here, panting, on the grass. Well, but, I’ve had mental adventures of which you will be the beneficiaries, so don’t mug. Or rather do, because I know it means you missed me.

I’ve been buzzy with otter projects, actual agents and actual editors wanting to see pages and rewrites too, but am now released by the holding pattern of stopping and waiting (and waiting), and so am at last writing to you.

Life has time for kids, time for sleeping, time for watching Firefly on Netflix, plus 30 Rock and American Idol, and time for work. Writing to you comes out of time for work, because there’s no other time for it to come out of. Granted I sometimes see Millionaire Matchmaker without having written to you, but rarely. Usually these are the only priorities that supersede you. So sorry you’ve been so long supersed.  I’m trying to save the world with rhetoric. It’s ex/hilarating /hausting.

Dudes, in one of my secret societies (I only have one, but I’m trying to confuse future forensics) (I confess this here because once, someone else in my secret society mentioned that they had other secret societies and it hurt my feelings, and I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of any of my cosocietans, should they happen to read this.) I said something and then some other guy said something obnoxious and so then I said something smartassy and the cosocietans really liked what I said. Want to know it? It was this: “Well what you said stung/k, but…” They liked that I goed stung/k. Isn’t following one thought to the next ex/hilarating /hausting? Anyway, the backslash locution at the end of the above paragraph made me think of that other one, stung/k. They are a shorthand usable by a culture that silent-reads its quips, so they needn’t be pronounceable.

Anyway. Emily Dickinson’s letters. I told you the class I’m teaching at Columbia this term is Poets and Their Letters, which I made up when they asked me what class I’d like to teach but I didn’t think they were going to pick it. All the other choices I gave them were things I’ve taught before. I’m concentrating the course on four poets whose verse I know very well, Keats, Dickinson, Bishop, and Stevens. In turn, in that order, we read their poems, then their letters. Next class we talk about Dickinson’s letters.

I gave them the green book (edited by Johnson), a nice big Selected Letters of ED. To prep, this week I read it straight through. Some journey. I feel like a restrung viola.

Talking about letters in this class has led me to realize that even for those who do not write their blog posts as letters, these days the closest thing to what once were letters, are blog posts. The email has too much brevity, too little gravitas, it compares to the scribble on a visiting card. But the blog, like the letter, is given more than an ounce of thought, and less than a gallon. It has more like a pint of poise and a quart of purpose. Just right for an afternoon’s diversion.

Emily, Emily. It is impertinent to be as I am, pert and in print, but I feel twinny with you. I think we had similar childhoods (talk about jenny from the hood, that’s the hood) in a way – isolated -- and similar strategies for walking it off.

She starts writing these atom bomb letters at 13. It felt strange to read page by page and watch her age. At first the message was the medium’s inadequacy: Her chief theme as a child was to berate the shortage of letters in return. As she got older, she lashed love onto the page with equal passion. Then something cracks leading into the 1860s and she goes nuts just totally saying what she feels like saying even if what she’s using ain’t words. As you all know, I too stood in the long lines at the DPV and took the test and showed my ID and now have a full poetic license, for forms, free verse, language, concrete, rap or pop, there’s nothing with a steering wheel that I don’t got a right to ride. You wanna hear how my girl talks?

Here’s her second letter to Higginson, year is 1862. She'd sent him a few poems and he'd sent back suggested changes:

<<<
MR. HIGGINSON,--Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude, but I was ill, and write to-day from my pillow.

Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask, though they might not differ. While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb.

You asked how old I was? I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter, sir.

I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.

You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he never returned. Soon after my tutor died, and for several years my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more, but he was not contented I be his scholar, so he left the land.

You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious, except me, and address an eclipse, every morning, whom they call their "Father."

But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or witchcraft?

You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.

I read Miss Prescott's Circumstance, but it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.

Two editors of journals came to my father's house this winter, and asked me for my mind, and when I asked them "why" they said I was penurious, and they would use it for the world.

I could not weigh myself, myself. My size felt small to me. I read your chapters in the Atlantic, and experienced honor for you. I was sure you would not reject a confiding question.

Is this, sir, what you asked me to tell you? Your friend,

E. DICKINSON.
>>>

Isn’t she perfect? Don’t you just want to cook her into a pie and eat her? Sorry is that weird? Can we read this part again: “I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.” He had written an article of advice to the young poet that was published in the Atlantic, and that is what made her think to write to him.

Name a Song (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)

Hey Bleaders

Collaboration continues. Picture and 6 Stanzas.

In other news, Cry if you want to, Hecht said to herself, who wouldn't listen, and maybe you.

Love,

Jennifer

 

Rapture

The two-tone girl, mouth wide open, head-back,
squinting blind at the rock-stars on the stage. Screaming.

Louder than the music; so loud out here
that in her head it must have been astounding.

Above her, on the stage, the musicians keep playing.
They sway their elegant teen-aged hips to music even they

can only feel. Outside, geese fly overhead, honking.
Dogs listen with their bodies and then bark.

Wings bat at the ancient night air so that it rushes,
like love out of breath, beneath the flock.

A man says listen and stretches his neck to do it.
A woman says Iisten and covers her eyes with her hands.

photo © Reuben Radding
poem by Jennifer Michael Hecht
from The Next Ancient World (Tupelo, 2001); first published in Poetry (2000).
http://amzn.com/0971031002

 

 

 

Propagation of the Species (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)

Dearest Bleaders, 

So, yeah. As I keep sort of explaining. There's this photographer Reuben Radding whom I only know online, through our dear mutual friend Yvany Peery. He posted one of his photos, an important hand outside the window of a big black car, and Yvany commented that it reminded her of one of my poems, of which she offered a big chunk, about how sometimes when Stalin retouched Trotsky out of photos, he forgot the hand on the shoulder of the person next to him, so there's this floating hand, leftover. The point is, Yvany bossed us to do more match ups and it is fun so far and careful work. Here's our third on purpose. 

 

 

From On The Propagation of the Species

We parse the problem, nouning out the principle
players: friends, families, prospects. I interview
the possibility of a child;
ask it questions. Intone the word: Interested?
Then: Want to learn the word for widget?
Want to read Beowulf? Want to get named?

Shall we grin and bear it?
I admit, existence is where woeful
was conjured. Nonetheless, to recommend it,
there is Jell-O; average rainfall; the anchovy
app at Luna’s; and the fact that in the middle, many
change their minds on the whole shebang — get
a good one off in both directions. But you and I
are going to have to choose.

It is our autobiography
we are eating; you snooze you
lose. Still, in the midst of going too slowly,
all hell has been known to break loose.

A gang of snails attacks a tree sloth, steals her wallet.
Down at the station, police chief
questions: How’d they get ya?

Sloth says, I dunno, it all happened so fast.

 

The photo was taken by Rueben Radding in Brooklyn, NY in 2015. The poem excerpt is from my second poetry book, Funny (Wisconsin, 2005). It was first published in In Posse, where you can see it in its entirety. It occurs to me that it was also in the Best American Poetry Anthology 2005, when it was special edited by Paul Muldoon. I wrote it when I was figuring out whether to have kids. I did. I'm nodding at how well it reminds me of that feeling of trying to figure out if the odds were in favor of such a drastic move.

I'm writing prose right now on the mystery of why people have children and I'm taking the stance that it is a real mystery. I get why they're okay with it once they do it, the kids are rewarding as hell. But how do we know that before it happens? Why would anyone take on such a responsibility, expense, potential for pain. I'm starting to think there is no answer to that question. Better to just ask how we feel when we have done it, and how it feels when we have not. Happy Mothersday-Late.

Anyway, I'm sharing these here, so far weekly, and I hope you are glad about it. 

Honeycomb out.

 

On the Past Denied (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)

Dearest Bleaders,

Photographer Reuben Radding and I have again matched a poem of mine, from my most recent book Who Said (Copper Canyon, 2013) to one of his recent photographs. The poem, you'll likely note, is a Dickinsonian adventure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Past Denied

A lot like pushing a rope,
or shove-budging the Earth
it’s tough to ditch a shadow,
by means of bob and jerk.

We are, where we, were.
We’re, one, time-lapsed, blur.
Our past with sweet derision
we, can, not, inter.

The thing we hide returns
just as it turns, to leave
and speaks a hope, that doubts
as, fervently, as it believes.

At last I land, on ground
unfirm, to balance theft and duty
I reckon flesh, and history,
as real as truth and beauty.

photo © Reuben Radding http://www.reubenradding.com
poem © Jennifer Michael Hecht http://tinyurl.com/hofhadt

Happy poetry month, spring will come, experience assures me. Dreary as the coming week may be, the earth will turn towards the sun and we don't have to do anything to help it.

Love,

Jennifer

Oughta be in Pictures (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)

Hi again Bleaders,

 

I wanted to show you this. 

 

On fb the photographer Reuben Radding and I have stumbled into a collaboration. Here's the first official one. RR had posted a photo on his page and our mutual friend posted a poem of mine in the comments, and she was right, it was a compelling match up. So we're going agin. 

Reuben Radding

April 18 at 12:40pm · New York ·

 

History

Even Eve, the only soul in all of time
to never have to wait for love,
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade-in all of Eden
to have but been a child.

In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace,
that she might have a story of herself to tell
in some other place.

photo © Reuben Radding text © Jennifer Michael Hecht
http://www.reubenradding.com http://tinyurl.com/hofhadt

The the girl in nature but confined, the grown woman walking away, the line between adulthood and childhood formed by the other children, in stages of growth, and the main girl's amazing expression which could mean several things. I see the face of being surprised while doing something illicit, or just about to pounce, or.

I hope you are all well, but the very questions thus phrased informs me that this is impossible. To the woeful, courage! To the vibrant, maybe write another line?

Love,

Jennifer

Poets on Thanksgiving: A Roundup [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Thanksgiving
 

Later, after dinner, we examine your uncle’s photos

of trees, flowers, waterfalls, birds

until I just can’t stand it another second.

I am not at one with nature.  Never was.

Some of the people can be fooled all of the time,

even when you yawn right in their faces.

 

Guests, or ghosts, have taken over the house,

lounging in the living room, watching t.v.

Ugly images of war and politics are all I see.

Cancel the rest of the holidays, please, until this

knot can be untied and our hearts released.

 

-- Terence Winch

 

Happy Thanksgivukkah from Over Here [by Moira Egan, 2013]

"I'm already sick of turkey" (by Karen Resta, 2012)

Boxed in, Blue Humorous and Bleary Eyed (Bildungsroman Holiday by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

How to Chop a Fuckton of Onions (more Bildungsroman Holiday, by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Bildungsroman Holiday (by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Thanksgiving, 1977, Albany NY (by Stacey Harwood, 2010)

A Poem for Thanksgiving (by Martha Silano, 2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2009)

A Poem for Thanksgiving Week (by Laura Orem, 2009)

Venerdi Nero (?) by Moira Egan (2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (2009 - photograph)

"We Gather Together" (2009 - video)

A Thanksgiving Post (by Laura Orem, 2008)

Thanksgiving and Black Friday (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2008)

Your Brain on Turkey and Fixings (by Martha Silano, 2008)

Live Poetry Blogging on Thanksgiving (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

(Not so) Live Blogging, 10:54 pm [(by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Live Thanksgiving Blogging 12:26 pm (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Happy Spanksgiving, from the flarflist [by Sharon Mesmer, 2008]

Pre-Thanksgiving Emergency Narrowly Averted (by Martha Silano, 2008)

Rhapsody in Despair and Wonder, and notes on my return - Jennifer Michael Hecht

Dear Bleaders,

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold. Also spent a lot of time in realms of muck, and the town of what the. But I’m back here in my page away from page, The Lion and the Honeycomb, on BAP. Its title refers to the way Yeats used a phrase from the Biblical story of Samson. I’ll tell you more about it next time, or read back, I talked about it here a few years back. 

For now I just want to say that I'm doing pretty well moodwise but how I feel about the world right now is like the visceral feeling of dropping I got when my son fixed a broken-in-pieces mug handle with a few well-placed wraps of blue masking tape. 

I posted an unpublished poem on Facebook, because it spoke to what I was feeling after the Paris attacks, so I'm publishing it here now. I’d worked on it for some time, but it only got finished in the wake of that tragedy. All the bombings and killing is horrific, in general, and each for their own reasons. I lived in Paris for a year doing my PhD research, which later became my first book, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France. And a great number of us have visited, it hurts more when you've been there so the place really exists as a physical memory.

But also, Paris means things to us. France was losing at industrialism in the late 19th century, so it consciously chose to go with exquisite beauty experiences: fine art, perfume, wine, jewelry, fine food, haute couture, and romance. Paris is the most visited city in the world because of it. Also, the French Revolution invented some political ideals central to our self image as a secular democracy. I just wanted to point out that we are mourning people and also something pretty and idealistic that we have internalized, and that just got slashed.

 The poem is obviously about all the terror and violence, how history changes, and how it boggles the mind.

 

Rhapsody in Despair and Wonder

He was worst until something worse came.

For gum he used girls fed spearmint for days.

Things repeat, but they are not the same.

 

Blood has been bad, here comes boiling rain.

He combed his beard with the ribs of boys.

He was worst until something worse came.

 

Daily he flayed his dogs, yet later in the game

indignity grew more systematic. Worse.

It repeats. It’s the ever in never again.

 

Now old vile terrors look man-sized and tame.

Look away for air. Rest here in line eleven.

They were the worst until new blades came.

 

Howl, howl, howl, said Lear to Cordelia, too late.

Bark a dirge of lost worlds, and loss again.

The first was worst, and then much worse came.

Things repeat and they are not the same.

 

Jennifer Michael Hecht, Nov 2015

 

I'll be posting again, when I can but at least once a month. I've missed you all terribly, but as we know, there is a season for this and a season for that and if you fight it over here, something gets lost over there. More news and rumination soon.

Love,

Jennifer

Don't Let Robin Williams' Darkness Spread [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

(Ed note: Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It has written extensively about suicide here. In this piece, published yesterday in the New York Daily News, she cautions that celebrity suicides can trigger more deaths.)

Losing Robin Williams hurts. Many millions of people loved him wholeheartedly. Others saw him as brilliant but a little too earnest, which now seems like a lovely offense.

So the pain is widespread. It makes sense that we are talking about it in the media and on the Internet.

But it is also a real problem. Mass celebrations of people who kill themselves, even beloved people, can send the wrong message and influence others toward hurting themselves.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/don-robin-darkness-spread-article-1.1901235#ixzz3AMtQeqEN

 

TONIGHT: 22nd Annual Poets House Showcase Opening

The 22nd Annual Poets House Showcase Opening TONIGHT Thursday June 26, 2014 10 River Terrace New York, NY 10282 • 5:30-7:00pm Opening Reception • 7:00pm Readings by Meena Alexander, Jennifer Michael Hecht, David Lehman, and Rachel Zucker Meena Alexander, Jennifer Michael Hecht, David Lehman, and Rachel Zucker The Annual Poets House Showcase has become the go-to event for poets, publishers, and literary lovers to discover what’s new in the world of poetry. This year’s exhibition, featuring almost 3,000 volumes from over 700 sources – from micro-presses to major publishing houses – opens with readings and festivities, and will be on view through August 16. The Showcase opens for viewing TONIGHT, Thursday June 26 at 5:30pm. At 7:00pm, this year’s Opening Readings will be by renowned poet and CUNY Grad professor Meena Alexander from Birthplace with Buried Stones (Triquarterly); acclaimed nonfiction author and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht, from Who Said (Copper Canyon Press); poet and long-time Best American Poetry series editor David Lehman, from his New and Selected Poems (Scribner); and poet Rachel Zucker, from The Pedestrians (Wave Books).

It is nice to be known, to be called out specially by the uncanny. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders!

So a poem is in my head today, and I thought of you.

The Song of Wandering Aengus - W. B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

 

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

 

(1899)

 

This is what happens when you carve a hazel wand to use as a fishing rod. You catch a magic trout who turns into a glimmering girl who calls you by your name.

Not much on her beauty, my friends, but the repeated bliss of her magically knowing his name. It is nice to be known, to be called out specially by the uncanny.

And what a fantasy of certainty and conviction. Certain that he needs her, convinced he’ll find her. Then five full lines on what that pleasure will look like and how long it will last.

It’s a story about a god of Irish Mythology, Aengus, understood to be a god of love and poetic inspiration. I think Yeats made up this particular story, but his theme sure is looking for one's love and having a blissful reunion. Also, a lot of bloody kin-killing.

His story begins when the Dagda (and important father god) had an affair with Nechtan’s wife, Boann. To hide the affair, the Dagda made the sun stand still for nine months so that Aengus was conceived, gestated, and born on the same day. 

When he grew up, Aengus tricked the Dagda out of his grand home, the Brú na Boinne (famed for its passage tombs). He arrived after the Dagda had divided his land among his children. There was nothing left. So Aengus asked dad if he could live in Brú for "a day and a night", and the Dagda agreed. But Irish has no indefinite article so “a day and a night” is identical to “day and night,” so Aengus, pointing this out, took possession of the Brú permanently. Theft by grammatical interpretation!

Aengus famously killed his step-father for killing his foster-father; slew a poet for lying about his brother’s sex life; killed his foster mother for jealously turning a horse goddess into a pool of water, etc.

He fell in love with a girl he had seen in his dreams. His mother searched Ireland for her for a year, then his father the Dagma did the same. A year later the King of Munster found out where she was.

Aengus went to the lake of the Dragon's Mouth and found a hundred and fifty girls chained up in pairs, with his girl, Caer, among them. The girls were regularly turned into swans and Aengus was told he could marry Caer if he could identify her as a swan. Aengus did, then turned himself into a swan, and the two flew away, singing. Their song put all listeners asleep for three days.

Aengus had a foster son Diarmuid, who died young. Aengus took his body back to the Brú where he breathed life into it whenever he wanted to talk.

Shall we worry about shame and money, health and the health of our friends? Or shall we spend some time with Aengus, doing things he might have done? Lately I've been thinking of the sea-dark wine, and the winedark sea. The sea cold fish and the fishcold sea. It does the trick, poor Odyssus wasting all that time in clever exiles, weeping on the shore when we first meet him. Penelope weeping in their bed.

Today though, Aengus and his transformations. Well, I guess I just felt like talking. Hope you are well. Check out my new website if you want jennifermichaelhecht.com. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Bleaders, I have missed you. You ver always on mine mind. Terrific poet Anthony Madrid [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

So good to talk to you again! Much have I traveled in the realms of gold - though not overland, nor by sea. Just Brooklyn and the realms of gold. Still, many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

A coupla times I felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

So yeah, sorry I've been a little silent, was on the peak in Darien. I'm bragging and much ashamed for it, but I have been using thinking to thwart actual deaths, and am moved by it. Still broke, if anyone's counting, as I've bitched about here over many a hitch, but happy anyway.

Have a look at my new website and some fascinating, moving responses to my new book against suicide, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It. (Maybe peek at my new poetry book too: Who Said, Copper Canyon.)

Anyway, was reading a great newish poet, Anthony Madrid and felt like I had to rush to share some with you:

I TOO HAVE BEEN TO CANDYLAND

 

I TOO have been to Candyland, but I found myself missing the death cult.

I missed the spectacle of the wounded bones being opened and instrumented.

 

Bill Varner, when he was still just a boy, wrote a stunning line of Arabic verse.

He wrote: “The crescent moon is a scimitar; the sun, a severed head.”

 

¡Gran cantar! and this, when he still had to keep his books in a locker!

And he’d never even held hands with a girl—God! Penn State in the 1980s!

 

In those days, we all sat at the feet of a pig poet, deaf in one ear. One of these

Dreadful “white-haired lovers”—oh, but he knew how to touch fire to fuse!

 

That little stick of fire apt to launch a poetic career! But what is it now?

Merely a billowing cloud of humidity floating out of a tree.

 

Every turtle, snake, and bird is “born again”—oh, isn’t that so? The first time,

Out the fêted cloaca—and the next, through the top of the shell.

 

The “I” is Greek, the “it” Italian, and Dickinson is our Ghalib. But that

Ridiculous piece of dirt you’re kissing on can never be anything but.

 

Shut your eyes to what a worm he is, concentrate on his caress—but know

Every half-truth is bound to call up its suppressed synoptic double.

 

Close your eyes and moan softly, your head full of packed cotton—but know

Every hidden camera’s cockpit must one day be delivered of its black box.

 

         This is from Anthony Madrid's 2012 first book, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say. The whole book's great.

Love to you all, even the mean one. I can almost hear the thaw! Soon we will be miserable, but warmer! And perhaps intermittently delighted by the sun. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

xoxJennifer

The "No Hemlock Rock" came before Stay; and a poem by Lisa Marie Basile [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

 

Hope you holiweeked nicely, fattened up for the frost. I never really took down my garden from this summer, I’ll wait for a warm day and try to turn it all over. It's looking a like a tomato’s idea of a haunted house. I was getting gorgeous tomatoes as late as October but then what Keats said happened, Autumn set budding more and still more, later flowers for the bees, until they thought warm days would never cease, for summer as o’erbrimmed their clammy cells. So there are a lot of green tomatoes out there in various forms of shock (they dreamed warm days would never cease).

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot, I’ll tell you more about it later.

Right now I want to tell you a quick story and then introduce a great new poet, Lisa Marie Basile.

Story first.

Sometimes for no reason to do with when they were written, two books come out at once. Happened to me in 2003, with Doubt: A History, and The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France. One was with Harper and one with Columbia Univ Press, so pretty different audiences, and it was very tricky to try to get word out about them at the same time.

Now it is happening again, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It has come out at the same time, late October, as my new poetry book, Who Said, 7 years in the making. Of course prose is going to get more attention, but it’s been hard not seeing reviews or responses to Who Said. 

I wake up this morning and Garrison Keillor has put up one of the poems from Who Said, and reads it, on his Writer’s Almanac podcast/website. Of course I’m super happy about this.

But it made me want to say that this poem and maybe two others in the book deal with suicide. (One or two say goodbye in somewhat cryptic ways; one that imagines Socrates not killing himself, then stepping back from the public stage -- becoming locally known for his figs.)

It just happened that GK picked this one, just at the moment Stay, the argument against suicide, was getting some attention.

Last time I posted I showed a bit of what Who Said is about. [Click this link or on the side of this website “Jennifer Michael Hecht: The Lion and the Honeycomb” to see this, and all my posts.]

I guess I also want to say that the poem GK chose is the very first thing I wrote on the subject.

I wrote the book because I wrote a blog post (here on BAP) after two poet friends (they were friends too) took their own lives, less than two years apart, and that blog post went a little viral and was published in the Boston Globe. I got a lot of emails about it which made me feel I had to pursue thinking this through, so I wrote a book proposal. But I wrote the poem after only one of them had killed herself.

I first published it here, on this site. Its ideas really are at the heart of what I say in the blog post (even for all its historical take on suicide), and also at the heart of what I say in the book (even for all its research and further thought).

True, It doesn't mention the second big idea against suicide: that you owe it to your future self to stay alive. (I have good stats that most people [one large study showed 94 percent 25 years later] who are thwarted in very serious suicide attempts [like they jumped from a killing height and somehow survived], are glad they survived and don't do it again. and other suggestions that you shouldn't let one of your moods murder all the others]. Still, it shakes me up to read the poem now.

Hearing Garrison Keillor read it is, for me, a stunner.

So that's my story.

Now I present to you the wonderful Lisa Marie Basile. She’s got a new book soon, her first poetry book, apocryphal – out in 2014 with Noctuary Press. Here’s a poem from that book.

  

today my father came to pray

black denim & brown suede

    a little tattoo of something holy

    only he isn’t holy

he was raised at church     & in fields of flora

in the back seat of the family Ambassador sedan

    his eyes the color of that caballero tan

pinching his sister     those pretty curls

setting fire to stacks of Playboy magazines.

 

when he prayed he did so in Italian. & i know this

because i’ve dressed as the Madonna before:

 

head down,

hands clasped

polyester veil

a little pushup bra,

with some bubble gum & beach spray.

 

when you hear a man’s apologies

you are embarrassed by his honesty,

 

    makes you feel petty, small

    and dishonorable.

--

I love the deft depiction of a situation and an inner life, both strange and secret and yet exceedingly well observed.

Look her up, she's had some interesting press lately.

Oh and if you're interested from my last post, it all worked out, I was on Hardball on Friday, with Ron Reagan.

Here comes 2014 friends! Don't kill yourself and I will return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Hardball. Not Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Fancy Dog, here for no reason.

 

 

Dear Bleaders,

I find it hard to believe that, down that long road, *nobody* said it would be easy. I think someone’s given me a hard wrong on that account. I was gonna say bum steer, but despite the fun of saying bum, and thinking steer: I don’t know what a bum steer is. Wait, I’ll google. Back. It’s about steering a boat backwards requiring a lookout at one end shouting info to the guy on the other end (who does the actual steering) via a bucket train of informing shouters. It went wrong badly often, because: telephone game.

Anyway, easy’s been a bit of a hard wrong because the heat's been out for days – we’re not part of the national freeze-off, our furnace just said “yo Ima die” on the day before Christmas when people who fix things for a living are off somewhere living.

So we got to light a fire in the fireplace, which beguilingly calms both my son and I. Daughter and husband enjoy it, but me and the lad have a couple of tight spots in our ghost machines and need a little maintenance. Like the fire. Tinker tinker.

Turns out that having a lovely fire for the sake of a cozy evening is totally different from maintaining one so your children don’t become CuteCicles. BrooklynIce. FrozeAfriend. A LOT of work. Wood is maddeningly short lived, you’re not burning some logs, you’re feeding a maw, who has to be tempted to stay gorging because we need the heat of the beast.

Guess what? Tomorrow, (Fri 27, 7pm) I’m going to be on Hardball with Chris Matthews, (guest host Michael Smerconish, who I really like - can be tough, but  contemplative).

I was supposed to be on on Thurs but they told me if I could do it Friday we could have Ron Reagan with us. I had to reschedule a phone interview to do it but I was like, yes please – I’ve spoken at the same event with him (the Freedom From Religion Foundation awarded me "Freethinker of the Year" in 2009, and they gave an award to Reagan and one to Ursula Leguin, her award was called “The Emperor has no clothes". (TEHNC). Reagan was charming and dishy and great. Leguin silenced the house with a story about how she had always thought the boy who said TEHNC! was a rude, ill-raised child. You’re supposed to go along with the cultures traditions and manners. There were good lies, like royal nudity and the NSA, and that little boy was supposed to lie them along with his betters. Fun way to look at the story but not in this crowd in that moment.

We looked at each other in wonder and went on with things as if she’d given us the opposite speech. Apparently it really is hard to the point of near impossibility to say “Thenk” which is how I am pronouncing TEHNC, the acronym of “The emperor has no clothes.”

So yeah, Hardball on tv. To talk about this Politico article I wrote because Politico emailed me and said, wanna write something for us about atheism and Barney Frank coming out as atheist only after leaving office (though he’d bravely came out as gay in 1987), Politico asked me to talk to him and told his people that it would be nice if he’d call me so we could chat about it, which he did. It was highly wily to have that voice on my phone fighting back at my gentle but persistent questions.

Anyway, I just now (Nov '13) have two books out, a poetry book that took 7 years to write, and a prose book that took 4 years to write, but I’m getting to be on television because of this article I was assigned to and wrote in 5 days. It's got 2028 comments, which is at least a grand an a half more than I've ever gotten before. 

This is a classic tale in the writer’s life, and kind of charming though it feels a little ankles over neck nape.

Stay, my prose book (Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It) is definitely getting some attention too. Like this great brainpickings take on it.

But it’s been a hush on the poetry book, Who Said, (Copper Canyon Nov ’13). I’m a poet before anything and I always have been, so it it’s hard, like having a friend away and in danger, you figure all will be well but there’re some minor cords in the swish of your hair. Here’s what I came up with to tempt you to the book: poetry. (Frost's poem follows this one)

Not Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening

I
“Promises to keep,” was a lie, he had nothing. Through
the woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict’s
talk of quitting as she’s smacking at a vein. He was always
going into the woods. It was he who wrote, “The only way

around is through.” You’d think a shrink, but no, a poet.
He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holds
promises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fill
with a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steers

his horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzard
is a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm,
lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They go
deeper, sky gets darker. It’s the darkest night of the year.

II
He had no promises to keep, nothing pending. Had no bed
to head to, measurably away in miles. He was a freak like me,
monster of the dawn. Whose woods these are I think I know,
his house is in the village though. In the middle of life

he found himself lost in a dark woods. I discovered myself
in a somber forest. In between my breasts and breaths I got
lost. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I’ve got promises
to keep, smiles to go before I leap. I’m going into the woods.

They’re lovely dark, and deep, which is what I want, deep lovely

darkness. No one has asked, let alone taken, a promise of me, 

no one will notice if I choose bed or rug, couch or forest deep.
It doesn’t matter where I sleep. It doesn’t matter where I sleep.

-----

(for reference see below:) (Oh and I couldnt fix the formating in the above last stanza, should look like the others.)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
BY ROBERT FROST
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

-

This sort of thing goes on in a lot of the book’s poems. The book opens thusly:

Key

Some half the poems in this book
from an iconic work a way was took
and as when obeying the rules of the dead,
you’re right to ask yourself, “Who said?”

To know which strangers are old friends
There’s a clutch of classics at the end.
Most of you will hardly need them
still our life of nights rereads them.

For those of you at the brick road’s start:
echo’s stolen golden tongue (my heart).
For those who’ve been around before
I’m offering, humbly, a little bit more.

--

Hey, the heat’s fixed! Now we’re on easy street. Oh so that’s who said It would be easy. From now on, “Most people never said it would be easy!” Change approved. Psyched to go on Hardball, it’s not exactly scary but it do focus the mind.

Okay. Here comes the new year. Even February. Even July. Much of it will be horrible, as usual, but there will be some very good days and a few surprises.

Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Poem by Tommy Pico [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders!

It's been about six months since my last post - I've been super busy getting my two new books to press. They both came out last month and it's been very exciting - and sometimes a lot to handle. More on that soon.

Right now I want to introduce you to a wonderful young poet who I met when he was in the MFA Program at the New School, Tommy Pico. His poetry is great; he grew up on the rez and writes movingly about it; he's been a community builder in poetry, starting reading series, putting out a magazine, etc. 

Pico has an app coming out in January with his poetry collection on it. I'll tell you more about that when it comes out. For now, here's a poem of his:

Inheritance

1. My mother was voted “best legs” in her senior high school yearbook, despite the fact that she was also student body president and editor in chief of the school paper. Only boys got superlatives like, “Most Likely to Succeed.”

2. Doctors say that Indians are predisposed to a lot of illnesses, like alcoholism and diabetes. At the clinic, patient history starts the first time you get sick. They ask me why don’t I eat, nearly commit me when I say because my great grandfather’s horses were stolen in 1890.

3. Myths aren't told to make things seem down to earth.

4. Thinking all the time vs Giving up (the butt).

5. Cigarette habit that kicks in around the third drink and the right lung.

6. Things that make me want to run: I) Seeing other people run. II) Eating a whole pizza. III) Everyone adoring the same person.

7. Upon being drafted into Vietnam, my father guided tanks through minefields in the jungle when he was very young. I have never not once walked in the wrong direction surfacing from the subway.

8. Waiting to be moved.

9. Waiting to be introduced.

 10. Always wanting to raise my hand first. 

11. My father's unfinished collection of poetry is called, "In the Days of Tall Cans and Short Hopes."

12. Songs to sing when the roommates are gone vs songs to sing at karaoke vs songs to listen to, pretending. 

13. Collections: do they get better, or just bigger?

14. Devin at Blue Olive. James at Pine State. Barry at Cup. Angelo at Dave & Busters. Jean Baptiste at Point Ephemere. Eric at Pop In. Federico at Monster Ronsons. BigGuySF365 at Adam4Adam. Me at Gmail.

15. There must be a word for this in some romance language, for looking down at your legs and seeing mom; for looking down at your hands and seeing dad. 

---

Great, right? Alright, more soon. I've missed you all terribly and hope to now start blogging at you regularly again. As always, don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

love,

Jennifer

Storm's a comin'; and a poem by Marilyn Nelson [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dear Bleaders,

It is going to storm here soon, it’s not due until tonight, but the wind is already doing weird things to the leaves. I'm hoping my little garden withstands it. Here's a photo of my bean stalks yearning up the white fence I gave them, and in the background the first crop of tomatoes. 

Here’s a great poem for you. It takes you into something secret. It’s by Marilyn Nelson from her The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems. She's also got a great new New and Selected called Faster Than Light.

Lonely Eagles

for Daniel “Chappie” James, General USAF             
and for the 332d Fighter Group

Being black in America

was the Original Catch,

so no one was surprised

by 22:

The segregated airstrips,

separate camps.

They did the jobs

they’d been trained to do.

 

Black ground crews kept them in the air;

black flight surgeons kept them alive;

the whole Group removed their headgear

when another pilot died.

 

They were known by their names:

“Ace” and “Lucky,”

“Sky-hawk Johnny,” “Mr. Death.”

And by their positions and planes.

Red Leader to Yellow Wing-man,

do you copy?

 

If you could find a fresh egg

you bought it and hid it

in your dopp-kit or your boot

until you could eat it alone.

On the night before a mission

you gave a buddy

your hiding-places

as solemnly

as a man dictating

his will.

There’s a chocolate bar

in my Bible;

my whiskey bottle

is inside my bedroll.

 

In beat-up Flying Tigers

that had seen action in Burma,

they shot down three German jets.

They were the only outfit

in the American Air Corps

to sink a destroyer

with fighter planes.

Fighter planes with names

like “By Request.”

Sometimes the radios

didn’t even work.

 

They called themselves

“Hell from Heaven.”

This Spookwaffe.

My father’s old friends.

 

It was always

maximum effort:

A whole squadron

of brother-men

raced across the tarmac

and mounted their planes.

 

            My tent-mate was a guy named Starks.

            The funny thing about me and Starks

            was that my air mattress leaked,

            and Starks’ didn’t.

            Every time we went up,

            I gave my mattress to Starks

            and put his on my cot.

 

            One day we were strafing a train.

            Strafing’s bad news:

            you have to fly so low and slow

            you’re a pretty clear target.

            My other wing-man and I

            exhausted our ammunition and got out.

            I recognized Starks

            by his red tail

            and his rudder’s trim-tabs.

            He couldn’t pull up his nose.

            He dived into the train

            and bought the farm.

 

            I found his chocolate,

            three eggs, and a full fifth

            of his hoarded-up whiskey.

            I used his mattress

            for the rest of my tour.

 

            It still bothers me, sometimes:

            I was sleeping

            on his breath.

                            -Marilyn Nelson  

Chocolate bars, and eggs, and whiskey turned into the substance of loss, to be taken in, to get drunk on. Cherished. Sleeping on a dead man’s breath. 

Stays with you.

Makes you look at your own chocolate and eggs and whiskey with smarter hands. 

Okay, stay away from the lightening and count to the thunder.

As to all the good you're doing, keep it up.

Also, keep your chin up (though not out in the rain).

Regarding all that is awful: it might get better,

will very likely change. Don't kill yourself

and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

 

 

Early Summer Due In, and a Poem from Major Jackson's Holding Company [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

Weather service says we’re in for a mini-heat-wave in my neck of the brick – temps in the 90s.

Right now a warm cloud has settled on the ground and wets us down. I’ve got the proofs of my two new books to correct at the same time, tricky balance, so I thought I’d set it all down and say hi to you. Also, there are tiny black flies on my heirloom tomato plants, but none on the cherries nor the beefsteak.  I am spritzing them with soap and water – the interweb says it will help.

Today I offer you a poem I love by Major Jackson, from his book Holding Company. He also wrote the wonderful Hoops.

Designer Kisses

I'm glum about your sportive flesh in the empire of blab, and the latest guy running his trendy tongue like a tantalizing surge over your molars, how droll. Love by a graveyard is redundant, but the skin is an obstacle course like Miami where we are inescapably consigned: tourists keeping the views new. What as yet we desire, our own fonts of adoration. By morning, we're laid out like liquid timepieces, each other's exercise in perpetual enchantment, for there is that beach in us that is untranslatable; footprints abound. I understand: you're at a clothes rack at Saks lifting a white linen blouse at tear's edge wondering.

By Major Jackson

Nice, right? I’m sure there are many ways to read the poem, but here is one: Your earnest partaking in the games of social media and at parties depresses me, as does the pictures you posted of yourself kissing that hipster (aren’t you the funny one). Love among the online rubble of your past relationships, and mine, feels less meaningful, but we better carry on while we are young, before we have an obstacle course of wrinkles on our faces and have to move to Florida. It’s dull there, but springbreakers and visits by families coming in to go to Disney keep things interesting. Today we don’t feel anything, we don’t know what we want, but we do still want people to click “like” when we post. Some nights we do too much to get this and then, by morning, a whole time cycle of our mood is recorded and before our eyes: time melted out into a spill. We are also perpetually enchanted with each other, and we have inner lives that are such a crowd of memories and interactions that we can’t actually translate that inner world into words; my mind is full of people, though right now I can’t think of anyone at all. Of course it is silly and unfair of me to imagine you always online or at parties, perhaps right now you are doing the most traditional thing a woman can do: textiles.

I can relate. Aren’t emotions exhausting?

Anyway, great poem. Enjoy the beastly hot week with a cold beverage.

Love,

Jennifer

Clouds, Potatoes, Timothy Donnelly [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

White sky out there seemed to call for this poem by Timothy Donnelly, of the wonderful Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit and The Cloud Corporation.

Epitaph by His Own Hand

From the morning he started

peeling his first potato

 

he felt like he'd been peeling

potatoes for eternity-

 

all that fell about his ankles

like clouds' inky shadows

 

smudged across pastures

of an afterlife clearly

 

put farther away from him

the harder he worked for it.

 

-Timothy Donnelly

 

It's true! Potato peelings look like clouds. Or rather like the shadows of clouds.

 

Every time you peel a potato you pick up just where you peeled your last potato. Life is just one long potato peel interrupted by weeks of nonsense and then returns, at last, to the spud and the knife.

 

No, but I like the misery of this little poem. Don’t always gnaw the heel of the bread, stop working hard for your reward.

 

Instead, look up at the clouds and see them from upside down, as if they were on the ground around your chair, flapping down from your lap as you sheer thin shapes off a bulbous, knotty loaf of the stuff, whatever it is. Busy day.

 

Don't kill yourself and I will return to encourage you yet again.

love,

Jennifer

Bodies, baby. About a poem by Tom Healy [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Well when it remembers to rain it certainly remembers how to do it! It’s been storming off and on here in the spring of early-twenty first century Brooklyn and just now the birds are whistling hosannas to the sun.

This is the fourth iteration of my newfangled blog here at BAP; the old fang, long in the tooth, deep in the truth, was about poets equally established, Dickinson, Bishop, and Szymborska, Keats, Yeats, and Stevens; the new fangs, familiar with fresher truth and bluer truth, are poets of my age, era-wise; wise beyond error.

I pick the poem first, for the slinky pleasure of it, then ask myself why and type to you my answer. This one is so goddamn dead-on real about where so many of us actually live a good part of our painful inner lives that I want you to read it before I say more. It’s by the wonderful poet Tom Healy, whose deep and compelling book is What the Right Hand Knows.

Mirror, Mirror

What do we do when we hate our bodies?

A good coat helps.

Some know how to pull off a hat.

 

And there are paints, lighting, knives, needles,

various kinds of resignation,

the laugh in the mirror, the lie

 

of saying it doesn’t matter.

There is also the company we keep:

surgeons and dermatologists,

 

faith healers and instruction-givers,

tailors of cashmere and skin

who send their bills for holding

 

our shame-red hands, raw

from the slipping rope,

the same hands with which we tremble

 

ever so slightly, holding novels in bed,

concentrating on the organization

of pain and joy

 

we say is another mirror,

a depth, a conjure in which we might meet

someone who says touch me.

 -       Tom Healy

Isn’t that brill? Being American is such a weird endeavor. First wave first world. For most of history every generation knew famine. Rich or poor, you saw people starve and you either starved too, or at least did without. Food was just not there. Letters home from the New World didn’t only describe what people ate here, they described the shops themselves and sometimes said things like – “There are ten kinds of fruit at the market and five kinds of meat – while you in the old world count as a market a slab of wood balanced between two rocks and displaying three wilted carrots, some sad greens, and a short pile of slightly putrid chicken feet.” They worried over their poor emaciated bodies and dreamed of heaven as an endless feast.

Then within a generation of the first people to have enough food across their lifetimes, we started worrying about the sad avoirdupois of bodies, and fantasize about ourselves as trim as a sail. Thin as a rail. Humanity has a genius for despair. I’ve got a lot to say about this in The Happiness Myth, just fyi.

Then too, fat isn’t our only beastly burden, though it is the one that chases me around the table. There are those who hate their faces, bemoan their feet, decry their dimples, abhor their pimples, lament their foreheads drifting ever up and over, hate their flatbread bosoms, resent their unwieldy ample hills (as Whitman described Brooklyn’s terrain). Then we all die and except for Taft and Eleanor Roosevelt, nobody much cares what we once looked like. Can you imagine Gertrude Stein eating Lean Cuisines? Socrates (often called ugly by his contemporaries) consulting surgeons for a fresher face?

I love Healy’s poem here for its compassion, its sympathy for the human agony of being befleshed. I also love the ending wherein our escape from this horror is in literature where we find, not quite a mirror but at least something we call a mirror, and there find ourselves inhabiting a better body, and asked by someone lither to come hither.

Let us tattoo this poem to the inside of our skulls and when in line for swimsuits or squash-blossom quesadilla, or confronted with dance-class mirrors, let our eyes roll back until we can read the words and see our kinder inner side.

Don’t kill yourself, and I shall return to encourage you yet again.

Love,

Jennifer

Cicadas and a Poem by Jennifer L. Knox [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Blue skies, pink cherry trees, yellow and red tulips, new-green leaves. As your correspondent from Brooklyn I report that all this color is exploding on the usual grey of asphalt and slate, dark blush of brick and brick-shade paint.

In a matter of days the magical Magicicadas will be here. These are the 17 year cicadas – who we haven’t seen since “the Macarena” was the top of the pops – and they will be creeping out of the ground in the millions on the East Coast, sometimes 1.5 million an acre. The nymphs crawling out of the dirt has been described as looking like boiling water. The males soon start singing for sex and hit an incredible 100 dB, deafening with desire, and the lady bugs flit their wings to them to come hither; then mostly lay their eggs in the sweetly named “chorus trees” where all that sound is singing like a torch of noise. Branches bow with the weight of the fertilized nests. Then within two months (by early July) the adults are all dead and the kids are back underground to suck the sweet sap of tree roots and wait until 2030 to emerge and buzz at us again.

All this puts me in the mind of a great poem by Jennifer L. Knox whose brilliant books are Drunk by Noon, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, and A Gringo Like Me. The poem has nothing to do with cicadas, but it is about the magic of listening with your eyes, and brains.

Babies in Silent Movies

How’d they make it cry so loud?
You know under the ragtime roll’s
a wail that’d peel paint, can see
the blond brows crimped like claws
under the gingham bonnet, cheeks
red hot despite spectrumlessness.
Maybe a lackey’s pinching its thigh
beneath the table. A good mother’d
shrug off the short pricks of pain one
outgrows to keep a kid back then that fat.

- Jennifer L. Knox

 

Quiet yelling and black-and-white red. I love the rhythm of this, “the blond brows crimped like claws” – it just tumbles along at a double-quick. Behind it there’s this mother making a hard calculation to pinch the baby rich, or rich enough eat, anyway.

 

She’s right to call the mother good, too, despite the obvious argument against it. Who among us doesn’t have to goose ourself into doing what’s good for us? What would we do without literature to remind us that no one escapes these dear-inflicted pinches? A lot goes on under the table, or out of range of sound and color. It takes so much imagination to know we’re not alone. I try hard to remember on my own, but art is always surprising me with the sound I can’t hear, the shades I can’t see, the unknowable pain of others. And like I say, I’m really trying! Well, I’m awake again now. Here’s hoping it lasts.

 

Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

 

Love,

 

Jennifer