In a few words, explain what this blog is about.
In my time as an editor, many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion?
I’ll tell you. Exactly … zero.
Sure, it’s a risk to ask for a raise. But women need to take risks — and to realize that at some point they will fail.
- Joanne Lipman, “The Mismeasure of Woman,” NYT
If you have spent time trying to establish the truth of things as they happened, to remember truthfully, it is unsettling to blithely delete a memory and rewrite it with a few keystrokes. But it is a necessity to rewrite the events of the past. It is a “Il faut que.” Must. The truth of events as they happened is, most often, too shapeless and arbitrary to be a poem. And sometimes the truth is more than can be believed. The poem cannot always sustain the shock of it.
It made me think about whether, as an author, you can [...] expose your nonfictional self as a joke or a fraud or an embarrassment or a nonentity or an animal. And I think you can’t, because there is always also the author part of you, who gets the surprise explosion of stories, essays, poems crashing into you and cracking you open, like unexpected sex with Zeus when he’s a lightning bolt. It might be pleasant and erotic, or it might be a bruising assault that leaves you hunched in the corner clutching your bottle of whiskey and praying to deities you don’t believe in. Either way, you’re less a “manipulated object” and more conduit for spectacular energy.
Nevertheless, the ship in a storm,
Foundering and powerless,
Can save itself -
It can dump its cargo
As a tithe,
An offering.
There is hope.
and also:
That first vision of yours was common knowledge.
What you see now is pitch darkness.
- Chorus in T-Hughes’s AGAMMEMNON. I like this version better than I expected to, although his line breaks are often completely unperformable. But apart from that, the register of the language is good.
Make Up For A Bad Poem With An Epigraph*.
One disgruntled parent sent an e-mail after a Snicket reading which read: “I was hoping that my kids would learn something about the writing process and all I got was ego and performance from you.”
.”And I thought,” says Handler, “That is the writing process. You’ve got ego and performance and that’s pretty much all there is. It’s you thinking that you have a story to tell, and it’s performance, which is going out and doing it. The rest of it is just ink and paper.”
- old salon interview w. snicket/handler
Ketchup:
1) Saw EURYDICE again over the weekend – this is the show at Single Carrot on North Ave where I got to do a chorus workshop for the Stones. This was the third time I’ve seen it. Closing weekend is sold out.
2) I had the opportunity to read some of my poems on Monday, which was fun. I read five depressing poems and one funny one. It was, I would argue, both egotistical and performative. The funny one, I realized, was sort of related to a poem I wrote for me, X, and A to read aloud at the end of TASP2 (2001), titled “I’m So Gone, I’m Not Even Here.”** Not in subject matter or form, but in funny. What kind of poet would I be if I had read five funny poems and one depressing one? A more popular one, I suppose.
3) And today I led a workshop at a high school in Towson on – yes! Greek choruses! This time in the Ted Hughes version of Agammemnon. Every time I get to do that, it makes everything worth it.
* By the way, an epigraph is the quote at the beginning of the poem, and an epigram is a catchy phrase, like this one: “Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris. / Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.” Thank you, Wikipedia, I mean Catullus.
**I wonder if a copy of that thing is buried somewhere in the one remaining box of papers I have yet to unpack.
A is walking, very quickly, up Charles Street to One World to get some work done, for once. It may or may not be Sukkot. Suddenly, A is approached by a group of decked-out Baltimore Jews, spearheaded by a small boy of about 5.
Kid: Are you Jewish?
A: Uh…yes.
Kid: Do you want to say the blessing with us?
A: Okay.
At which point, the kid recites the blessing with A, one word at a time.
This happened to me, as it did to many unsuspecting Hopkinsians. We had a nice conversation afterwards about Poland – I was carrying the bag from the festival, and they saw the Polish and wondered. These particular Jews were from Belgium, originally, although they’d all been born in the US. They tried to recruit me for their Chabad. Although I’m not going to get recruited on any kind of serious basis, I will probably go check it out at some point. I visited a Chicago Chabad two Yom Kippurs ago and it was very interesting to observe.
It was pretty awesome the first time, but the kid, and various other kids from the Chabad, staked out Charles all that day and the next day, accosting students and having them do the blessing. I eventually started telling them “You guys already got me.”
Please hold small children by the hand.
Don’t run or sit on escalators.
Make sure your shoe laces are tied.
Stand to the right. Hold on to the railing.
Thank you, MTA. Do you have a similar set of tips for how I am supposed to do other things in my life, besides ride escalators – and if so, can you also write them in loose tetra/pentameter, and print them on farecards so I can keep them in my pocket? Thanks.
APRIL
No one’s despair is like my despair-
You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
the tiresome outward signs; the man
pointedly weeding an entire forest,
the woman limping, refusing to change clothes
or wash her hair.
Do you suppose I care
if you speak to one another?
But I mean you to know
I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white
the wood violet.
- Louise Glück, “April,” The Wild Iris (1992)
I was alive, ten years old, when this book was published. I did not know it at the time, but it is nice to think that the book’s publication might have made some impact on the world I was living in, and thus also on me, even at ten. I bought it in undergrad at my professor’s recommendation. It has taken me a long time to read it carefully, although I read it as I have read most books of poetry before now – skimming, diving for a fish, getting out – but I am glad I have it now. It sees so distinctly.
