poetry corner

 

Dear Reader,

I am sending some poems in, for approval or reproval, rejection or exception.  No, that is not one of the poems I sent in.  And this one following isn't either.  They wanted a poem for everyone, you know, a soft, pillowy, kind poem that doesn't let you feel time or sadness.  I like that kind too, and so I gave them some of my shortest, comfiest things.  Although, what do we mean by 'kind'?

This poem I am giving you is not kind, but it could be soft enough to crash into at speed, and it might not even need this title, borrowed from a C. S. Lewis book.  

Till We Have Faces

I once knew a woman who changed her name to Iris.  She once had a huge black dog, large enough that she could have ridden him.  He had the name of a Greek god.

I once knew a woman that the building was killing.  It made an air that depleted her vitality.  She would try not to enter the building; she would send in others, to be damaged unwittingly, one supposes.

I once knew a woman who said “read this book- it is for us.”  I met her again, much later, at another party, and she had a handbag with a telephone handset on it.  You could speak into her bag.

I once knew a woman who dug into her ancestry.  She made large cardboard tombstones for them.  

I once knew a woman whose father was a diplomat.  He built a motorhome out of teak and marble and drove it all over India.

I once knew a woman who played piano with real joy.  She wasn’t anyone you would know.   It was just her and her piano, pleasuring each other.  She came from a time when a lot of people knew how to play a piano.

I once knew a woman who warned me to never yield my position on the sidewalk; stand your ground, she said.

I knew four men:  they had the head of a rhino, a horse, a bear, an eagle.  They had all this confidence that I wanted for myself.  To steal it, of course, if necessary.  They would give it to you, but it wasn’t the real thing, they gave you confidence, they praised you, but only as much as it wasn’t taking anything from them.  They couldn’t really give confidence, they could loan it, like a plastic container with leftovers in it.  I thought they couldn’t give it because of greed, but a poet I know said they didn’t actually have confidence; that I was mistaken.  He said these four men had the same doubts as I did, as he did.  I wonder about that.

my year with the women

We Are All Alike, Eleanor Lowden.

Dear Books,

It's been about a year now, that I have been keeping track of the books I have read; in conjunction with a commitment to reading women authors.  I also include non-white writers (any gender), and trans or non-binary authors, but my favorites are from women like me*, writing about what it feels like to inhabit their bodies.

It isn't a total ban, either, I read some white men now and then; and, as I go along filling my head with predominately women's voices, or perhaps I should say: non male writers? I notice, I notice it hard, when I read one of these menwrit books that is trying to build a great castle, an empire, with words- all about their sex organs and oozing what have yous.  I know you think I am exaggerating, but try it- try 5 books in a row by women, and then pick up one of these men and see if you ken what I am getting at.

It's not that all the women (plus) are the same style/type of writing, and it isn't that I could pick them out in a blind taste test, it's something kind of small and ineffable.  Many women write in ways that have a very Male Voice, and some men write in a genderless way, too.  If I had to distill it all to one single difference, it might be a question mark.  The lack of definiteness, not authority or confidence, but a kind of inherent acknowledgement that the view is multiple, and this line, this sentence, can only be a snapshot.  Or, maybe the question mark is the sense of searching.  One thing, though, even if I cannot define it, it is there.

It's also not that I don't love, love a word castle, built out of strange and wonderous similes and inhabited by lonely princes of darkness and light.  No, I love that kind of thing, I really do.  I think what I am trying to tell you, is that I was surprised to find a such a definite feeling of difference.  

For the counters and statisticians, it has been 64 books by female and female-identifying writers, and 14 by men in 49 weeks- and that makes 88, and well, if I had counted sooner I'd have seen what a silly thing it was to start this calendar year off with a plan to try to read 50 books!  Oh, and I am not done with the women, not at all!  Check out this list of writers on my shelf still to be read:

Clarice Lispector

Han King

Lillian Hellman

Jenny Ditski

Dianna Athill

Maeve Brennan

Alice Munro

Lillian Faderman

Sara Ahmed

Eudora Welty

Donna Haraway

Eileen Chang

Jen Hatmaker

Samantha Harvey

Kathleen Hanna

Kate Zambreno

Ágota Kristóf

Saidiya Hartman

Tove Ditlevsen

Lydia Lunch

Kate Manne  

Barbara Comyns

Cristina Campo

Willa Cather

Janet Frame

Isabel Allende

Fleur Jaeggy

Inger Christensen

Esther Kinsky

Ellen Meloy

Eileen Chang

Agnes Smedley

Cookie Mueller

Claire Messud

Susana Kayson

Shirley Jackson

Margaret Drabble

Jean Rhys

Angela Carter

Anaïs Nin

If you are still wondering why anyone would read like this, well, let me put it this way:  These are my sisters, and they have millions of pages of wisdom to give me!  Who the hell am I to refuse such a gift?  

*  Like me, in this case, means a woman who writes.  It's also extra dear to my heart and enlivening when the women authors are within ten years or so of my age.

PS  If you want to hear a few favorites, well; The Price of Salt, The Quest for Christa T., What Kingdom, Astragal, To Throw Away Unopened, The Last Samurai, The Lady with the Little Fox Fur, The Old Child, All Passion Spent, Checkout 19, The Lover, Small Things Like These, and here is one old dead white guy for you:  A Room with a View.

Kairosis: or, Another Exhortation!

 

Colette is very photogenic!

Dear Ones, 

Oh!  I want to read this to you, sitting very close; I want to be the one to show this thing of beauty, but, but it won't be intimate enough, you or I will feel clumsy, or unsure, and then it will just be another pile of words. You must read it alone; you must be awed by it and face the wonder alone.

My dearest literary love (at this moment, because I reserve the right to change my paramour parameters) is the memoir-ish sound of womens' voices.  This one, and this one, and this one, this one, this one, and oh!  Claire-Louise Bennett most of all right now.  I hadn't near enough of these kind of voices when I was younger- I had a few, to be sure, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine L'Engle come to mind, Jeannette Winterson: but now, well, now my shelves are overflowing with good guidance and the words of my people.   

Don't leave me waxing and gushing, hyperbol-izing, and superlative-ating all over the place; please, if you have ever done a thing (which was hopefully to read Helen DeWitt!) will you now, please, also do this one thing, too???  Pond, Pond, POND!!  

PS  More wonderful women writers that might lead you to a "moment of psychological integration in time:" 

Annie Ernaux

Colette

Jenny Erpenbeck

Sheila Heti

Lauren Groff

bell hooks

Carrie Brownstein

Patti Smith

Tove Jansson

Kelly Link

Annie Dillard

Lydia Yukanvitch

Sandra Sisneros

Amy Sillman

Rumor Godden

PPS  Now, maybe, maybe you have finished it, and you want a little more about it, and in that case, but no sooner, you may want to read this.  But, do not read it before you read Pond!

PPPS  Okay, well, since you asked, I love it because I don't think that I am using my first language, either, but if I were, if I could, it would sound just exactly like Pond.  Also:  

There was a storm, an old storm, going around and around the mountain, visiting the mountain again perhaps after who knows how long, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere.

Where it would immediately alight upon the dreadful contents therein and deliver the entire catalogue to those parts of the imagination that will gladly make a lurid potion from goose fat and unrefined sea salt. 

 

Not a metaphor, nothing like that- I'd never want the monster to stand for something, that's for sure.

As if making the world smaller because of all the intact explanations that need to occur in order for one thing to become another thing. 

It's a devil to know what to take seriously.

And didn't I immediately discover that melancholia brought something out in me that felt more authentic and effortless than anything I'd previously alchemized. 

It's been watching me all along, all my life, coming and going- and I don't know what it sees as it stands there, I don't know that it is not in fact becoming a little afraid of me- and I have to be doubly careful I think, not to frighten it away, because between you and me I can't be at all sure where it is I'd be without it. 

 

 

 

why doesn't anyone tell me these things?

 

Dear Know it Not,

Why, why doesn't anyone tell me these things?  Why doesn't anyone tell me about Lizzy Mercier Descloux?  Or Tove Jansson?  Or Eve Babitz, Helen DeWitt, Josephine Wiggs, Bikini Kill?  What about Lizzie Araminto?  Or Rebecca Solnit?  P J Harvey?  Lydia Lunch?  Wanda Jackson?  

Who did I have, as a role model in the mass media of television as a young person?  I had Wives (Mary Tyler Moore, Elizabeth Montgomery), I had Whores (Suzanne Somers, Loretta Swit), one single Worker (Mary Tyler Moore), and I had this one lone person, this outlaw, this woman with a gender challenging name, this one person that seemed like she might be writing her own rules.  I am grateful to her!  Suzi Quatro is our Girl Friday!

Check her out here, where I first met her; and here, here, and here, and now.

Bonus track!  And a nice website.

curtained & draped

 

Easter Hat, from Draped, Anonymous Women, by artist Patty Carroll.

Dear Confidante,

I am working on the mysteries, still.  What is identity?  Yes, we have spoken of this, and I think I mentioned my panic at being asked to define one for myself.  I have been digging at it sporadically, in my usual, unkempt garden kind of way, and I found this artist, this photographer, Patty Carroll.  She'll knock you out of your socks; enjoy the ride!

The One Hundredth Anniversary

Alice Smith, S. J. de Crasse, and G. H. Halleran sell copies of The Suffragist in Boston, Mass.  Bettmann/Getty          

This image comes from The Atlantic.



 

Dear Worried,

I think where we might be getting into trouble is in thinking that we are somehow smarter than we were some time ago.  It's so nice to feel like we are getting somewhere and celebrate the schadenfreude of how much better it is now.  Of course, yes, it is much better now.  We have no plague and we can vote, and steel can be made into tools, and no one needs to grind acorns at the rock by the river. 

And yet.  We do all this on the backs of those that came before us and we will be the stepped upon of the future, so make sure you are good and sturdy. 

Here is a scholarly article on just what we are celebrating/complaining about, and to mark the 100th anniversary of a women's right to vote in the United States, I give you Girl, a poem by Olivia Gatwood.



i don't think i'll ever not be one
even when the dozen grays sprouting
from my temple take hold and spread
like a sterling fungus across my scalp,
even when the skin on my hands is loose
as a duvet, draped across my knuckles,
even when i know everything there is to know
about heartbreak or envy or the mortality
of my parents, i think, even then i'll want
to be called girl, no matter the mouth
it comes from or how they mean it,
girl, the curling smoke after a sparkler
spatters into the dark, girl, sweet spoon of crystal sugar
at the bottom of my coffee, girl, whole mouth
of whipped cream at the birthday party, say girl,
i think, i'll never die, i'll never stop running
through sprinklers or climbing out of open windows
i'll never pass up a jar of free dum dums
i'll never stop riping out the hangnail with my teeth
i'm a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl
girl next door sunbathing in the driveway
i wanna be them all at once, i wanna be
all the girls i've ever loved,
mean girls, shy girls, loud girls, my girls,
all of us angry on our porches,
rolled tobacco resting on our bottom lips
our bodies are the only things we own,
leave our kids with nothing when we die
we'll still be girls then too, we'll still be pretty,
still be loved, still be soft to the touch
pink lip and powdered nose in the casket
a dozen sobbing men in stiff suits
yes, even then, we are girls
especially then, we are girls
silent and dead and still
the life of the party.



**********



And here is Ms Gatwood reading Girl, and more, from her terrific book, Life of the Party.

Fairy Tale

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers,

My friend M. is an artist- many of my friends are- and this is a fairy tale, not because it isn't true, but because it is. 

Once upon a time, when I was a Young Reader, I read about salons and happenings and clubs of people throughout history who met to talk shop -- to change the shape of meaning of all kinds,  These were my people, as they say now.  But they were all in books, weren't they?  to begin with, perhaps, but now I find all my conversations, all my thoughts and ideas are witnessed and comprised of folks who adore thinking and making manifest their ideas.

My pal M. the artist collects snapshots of people.  They come from thrift shops and antique stalls, and they are selected, in part, for consonance with a theme;  "A gaggle of women," say, or "people dancing."  They are all sizes and dates.  They are like a handful of human time, grabbed out of the great gyre of the anthropocene, and they have become un-tethered from their stories, from their kin, their families and friends. 

They are a little sad and a little lonely, to my mind, and I think, perhaps, to my friend M.'s mind also.  In fact, I think that 'collecting' these photographic orphans of time is actually a way to repair the losses.  To find a way to treasure these moments anew.  She has not seen their alone-ness as a deficit so much as a reason to care, an impetus to love these relatives and friends of who knows who -- they are her family and friends now, and they join many more.

In my initial one dimensional thoughts, I saw only what was missing, and not a place that invited something -- invited narrative and affection.  I have a few photos like this myself.  I collected old postcards, and when you flip and sift through them in antique shops, sometimes a stray snapshot of similar dimension is in the between.   I have a few, a very few, portraits of women like this, and I have adopted them as my audience, my readers, and my viewers, in my studio.  One, in particular, in a hat, with a very intentional gaze is the muse of elegance and strength.  Another woman, on the running board of a car, she is my muse of adventure.  For many years, I carried an image of Lucy Lawless as Xena, Warrior Princess and Martha Stewart in my wallet- because any question of what to do under any circumstance can be answered by their combined expertise. 

These orphaned photos after all, belong to our family, they are us, really.  We had a book, you know, on the shelf, all my years, called The Family of Man (which we all know means the family of all beings, because we are not so foolish as to let semiotics keep us from trying on a glass slipper).

This book's spine is all I remember of it- who knows now what was in it, and I won't check, but you can, if you must -- because that is all I needed of that books' message:  we are family, the family, one family.

This is why, dear friends of time and space, near and far, today's suggestion for a project for you is to seek out the glass slipper;  to find artists and thinkers to talk with.  Or, to find some people to imagine you would like to meet,  Or, at least to read the spines of books.  Or, to love one another.

 

Good Morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Disrobed,

 

Are you dressed yet?  I am not; I often write to you first thing, from my bed.  Yes, it is intimate, and you might blush a bit;  I do.  I write to you after a cup of coffee and when the cat has settled into a furry puddle, and while the birds are still singing outside the window.

 

I keep my legs under the covers, and set the computer on my lap- this always pinches my wrists oddly, and I look forward to saying one day "I have these problems in my wrists because I wrote letters in bed for many years."  I have a tatty old silk robe that I put on for cooler mornings, and on warmer ones, like this one, I am usually in a short knit cotton nightgown, a nightie.  Both the tatty robe and the nightie are pink.  I have been sewing my own sleepwear these days, embroidering the binding in small trailing blossoms, because it looks better than the stuff I could buy in stores.  Sometimes I dab on a rose scented perfume before I go to bed.  Think of all this la vie en rose as you read on.

 

Yesterday I heard a compelling collection of short stories on Selected Shorts-  it was from a compendium of pieces on Women in Clothes.  The last work, titled Nothing, is a gem of a poem by Lisa Robertson, and I hope you will take a few minutes to listen to it- I would rather have given you the text to read, but, just like my viscose navy floral short sleeve blouse with the lilac piping I could not find it anywhere.  The poem can be found on the audio file at 50 minutes and 50 seconds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Invisible Woman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello  Dears,

I had a plastic model kit when I was a youth: The Visible Woman.  Her skin was clear plastic, with veins, I think, and the skeleton fitted inside of it, and all the organs could also be fitted around the plastic bones.  You painted parts of it, as I recall, the lungs, a lot of things with interesting, sculptural shapes that I cannot remember the names of.  I really loved this model; to take it apart, and fit it back together-  I never wanted to glue it, because then you would not be able to take each piece out and feel its shape- what's more, you'd have had to choose whether you would glue in the fetus or not:  Was the visible woman a Mother, a creator of life, a nurturer of the future generations?  Or was she a care-free single gal, a free-spirited Muse who could toss her things into a ruck sack and take off for a month?  Hard choices.  I'd be damned if I was going to make them.

About a month and a half ago, I got that Carrie Brownstein haircut I have been wanting.  This wouldn't have been anything worth mentioning to you, except for the fact that I had let my hair grow quite long, over the last three years.  When I had it cut, two/thirds of it, old, ancient hair from the time before the big trees, was swept up and tossed out.  That was great- the entire reason I was willing to face growing it long in the first place was the anticipation of the delicious pleasure of seeing it fallen all around me.  Molly Ringwald calls long hair 'boyfriend hair.'  I was looking ahead, to a time where having long hair would have felt even more ridiculous, so I grew it longer than it had ever been in all my years.  But, you are right, this is nothing in geological time, and so what of it?

The thing is, only one person noticed.  Now isn't that odd?  I have been waiting for people to mention it to me, but now, nearly seven weeks later, I have come to the conclusion that no one is going to notice.  I have become, as they say that you do, old enough to be invisible.  Now, now, let's shed no tears over it- I knew this day was coming, you read about it everywhere!  The thing I was not prepared for was that I would become invisible to the people I know.  I thought it would be strangers, employers, silly boys, young women in form-fitting stretchy fabrics;  hip people, pop musicians, and the well-heeled.  I wasn't going to miss their notice in the first place.  But, the people I see each week?  Who knew I would become invisible to them? 

I think, because I like to think the things I like, that I will chalk this up to achieving a presence that has gone beyond the visible.  Yes, you should share this little joke with me, and then you should adopt it, preemptively, as your new mantra.  There is power, my dear sisters, even in being invisible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

PS 

If you doubt me, try something subversive and see if you don't get away with it easily.  Here is another little something.