The Best American Poetry

Good news; Exit from the Monkey House [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

We’ve got a white sky here, no snow on the ground, but the air so cold the leaves all look ashen green which somehow comes off looking like another shade of sky-white. A silver shade of jade.

This great earth is going to roll from this end of March to the other and the sky is going to wisp into blue and the sun is going to start batting us around her bright spots. I am a purveyor of fine doubt but this I can guarantee you.

Things are going going going here and that is good. If you’ve been following this blog a while you know that I wrote something here about suicide – an argument against it – which was picked up and published a bunch of other places, even in a print version in the Boston Globe. I’ve also mentioned, since then, that I was hoping to write a book about it. I think I’ve had the title for a few years now. It’s Stay. Now I have a subtitle too, so it goes: Stay: A History of Suicide and a Philosophy Against it.

Anyway the incredibly great news is that I found a wonderful publisher for the book, Yale University Press. And it is the trade division, which means the more popular less academic offices. Which is perfect. So I’ve been writing it. And that is great too, though hard of course, because everything is, especially big things, which a book, almost by definition is. (that’s what she said) The manuscript is due August 2012. Then almost a month later I was given the extremely wonderful news that Copper Canyon is going to come out with my new poetry book, Who Said.

These are two insanely good pieces of news which I’ve been meaning to tell you for about a month now. The truth is I’d been having quite a long dry season at the job of selling book proposals and the economy being what it has been these last few years I had just been feeling so low about it all that when the good news started coming I couldn’t react to it very fast. Part of me was elated, but a large monkey part of my heart and mind were left behind for quite some time. So I’m announcing my news here as if it just happened, because for the part of me that can write to you about it, it did.

Speaking of monkeys, they’ve closed the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo. I’m feeling kind of special because I was one of the last people in it, sort of. They just closed it Monday, and I and my little family just happened to visit it last Wednesday. Zoos used to arrange themselves by animal type – the big cat pavilion, for instance, or the bear house – but while that offered a kind of taxonomic lesson, it was better for the animals to be in environments that matched the ones they came from, and it was better for people to learn how animals actually live rather than just how to draw a chart of them. Now instead of the Monkey House you have areas like Madagascar and the Congo. Which are great.

Still if you’re around my age you’ll notice that by now the number of things that have gotten rewritten is hitting new highs. In one of the great magic tricks of all time, regard the brontosaurus, so small at either end, as Monty Python pointed out, so very large in the middle. But really consider its solitary gigantic beauty in all its graceful grey goodness, smell the hide of the boundless beast, marvel at her shoe size, a foot print like a goddess, or a tree stump, and once you can feel the breath of her as she snoops her huge skull into your airspace so that eyes the size of hubcaps can take you in, once you really have her in your sights, witness but she is gone. Science.

Think also what became of Pluto. Now Mary’s Velvet Eyes Keep John Up Nights, yes, but we don’t know what kind of punctuation to use. Is it is question? For all we know it is a question. It is not a question. Period.

Equally marvelous is that when I was a child it seemed half “the free world” was tempted by the idea of bombing Russia right off Europe’s flank. Seriously, millions of people considered that if we just rid ourselves of these demonic slavs peace would reign for all time. It’s hard to know how things are going to look.

I remember reading Welcome to the Monkey House probably earlier than I should have and without question it was my gateway to everything from Emily Dickinson to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. You know a book that greets you like a friend will age, but you don’t expect its titular subject to be retired. Welcome to the Madagascar Area doesn’t have the same awful ring.

Anyway, that’s what I came to say to you today. Cherish your monkey house. Cherish it while you have it. Cherish it when it is gone. It was beautiful to see the box of monkey house and its box rooms of monkey after monkey, clambering and having a look at us. Knowing we are fleeting visitors. It was dim in there, like the monkeys like it, including me.

It was my husband’s idea to go to the zoo. I try to agree to all adventures because my own inclination is to stay home and work, and it takes effort to not work, I’m efforting every day, like a war, as I mentioned in my previous post, to not put myself through the stress of so much work but rather to put myself through the stress of learning to be comfortable unstressed. So I went to the zoo instead of working that day. And now I have a memory of something I’ve seen a bunch of times in my life (I’m from around here) but this time with my two little kids and my husband and the four of us looking in at the wise guys on the other side. And it was dim, like I said, easy to lose a kid, sure, but also easy on the eyes.

It looks like we are all going to have to keep showing up for things because they close them down and you want to get a little for yourself on the way out. Or maybe that’s not my message at all. Maybe instead I want to ask all of us to have the strength to peek under the surface of things just like all the new zoo exhibits try to help us do. There is something worth looking twice at in every day. Someone should make a note of it! I kid. I just want to say I wish I could stay enthralled like I am right now, writing to you. I wish I could stay on top of all this wanting and waiting and feel the emergency of connection like I do, with you, right now, but I know I have to go back to my life now wherein I sometimes feel this white winter sky and nothing else.

But we’ll be okay if we go to the adventure or if we stay home. We just have to try to keep changing and at the same time, try to get used to ourselves. We keep up the existential zoo for each other and I’m writing to you because I need you to keep up the existential zoo for me too. Have faith in your future self to know something that you don’t know, something that makes this whole brontosaurus okay. Keep trying. Snake it til you bake it. Don’t kill yourself, and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Goodbye WS; Hello to you in this dark evening season [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’m sure lots of people reading this blog know we lost a staggeringly great poet, Wisława Szymborska, a few weeks ago. It was Feb 1; she was 88. I can’t help giving us this one of her poems right now.

Museum

Here are plates with no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.

Here’s a fan–where is the maiden’s blush?
Here are swords–where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.

Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his mustache on Exhibit Number…

Eight. Metals, clay and feathers celebrate
their silent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper’s silly hairpin giggles.

The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot.

As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!

Well at 88 she outlasted a lot of dresses. Still, it sucks. No more of those poems.  I had always hoped to meet her. One thing I always Iove about her, evident here, is how much it pissed her off that the world didn't hold meaning in a visible way: how battlegrounds for instance went back to parks, a shudder shared by many but also more subtle situations too, like how you might have been at a railway station one day, even though you weren't, and how odd that it happened anyway, the meetings, the thefts, even without you. "A suitcase disappeared, not mine."

As for me friends, life continues to present itself as a war, a hot war against bleak feelings. Is this feeling thing that is me a biological thing or a thing amid the world with a usage quite askew? I may now know a thing or two about the answers to my offset typesetting, but I also have to dine on a good deal of doubt. What I can see is that life requires a dire pressing forward without leaving a sufficiently convincing trail of flower petals to find one's way back to the beginning.

Instead it's all beginning and all middle, all the time, and you just have to keep rowing even when the scenery changes on one side and stays precisely the same on the other, and other magic tricks of reality. Maybe that's a kind of growing, you're on a riverboat and after some point the inner coast of the river is always the same few houses and yards, while the outer coast starts blurring by peopled with odd beings carrying small electronics. You don't age like leaves falling onto a pile of snow, you age like snow melting off a pile of leaves, you arrive rising up from underneath. 

It's the dark side of the year my bleaders, mid february and dark and rainy with a little spritz of spring here and there. As is my habit, I'm speaking now to those of you fighting the darkness like a war, at all costs, this is the season to fight this thing, the darkness of life, life's rotten disjointment. I'm a believer in stories and stories get into your fiber about what you should be doing and how much it takes to feel alright, and I'm a believer in changing your fiber to fit a better story. It just takes a lot longer than your average hot war. It takes gallons of therapy, of one sort or another. And these gallons are gallions and this war is a land air and water war, and we have to fight for a story that makes it alright. We have to fight our own fiber.

Get some Szymborska, let her rock you from the beyond. Plus, you know, keep up the fight with your dress! Seriously. We need you. I need you, on my side. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Spring of February First [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dear Bleaders,

The sun came out today. Blue sky and small white clouds. I don’t care, being human is such a poke in the eye. I throw myself out there though and I’m much better. I know in my guts nothing will help but I remember as a dry fact that sun and nature can jigger the register. And it’s true.

Weather this warm on the first of February is all wrong but it feels so right. My tree art is painting pictures with its spinning and is casting constellations of sun dots tripling over everything. The circles of light play over tree trunk and branches and fences and over the ground, so it looks like a burbling stream catching spots of light as it runs vertically as well as horizontally, racing around in a wide circle. In the photo here I capture two or three of the circles of light, in real life ten or more arive at once across the tree and branches.

To my memory most of the great nineteenth-century novelists were crazy for listing the flowers they’d see on their walks, names and descriptions, how each looked singularly and as a sudden mass, scents at onset and in decline. I’m not downright Dickinsonian in my habits but I live such that my lingering outdoors in something like nature is most likely to happen in my own little backyard. This time of year there are fewer surprises than in the other seasons, though nature always has a bit of a show for you, even just the shapes of the dried leaves, but mostly I am delighted by the speckled dalliance of my tree art as it tickles this grey brown season into a little giggle. Also, the pitch black puppy chases the shining spots of light. 

I'm going to hear the poets at Cornelia St Cafe tonight, Jennifer L. Knox, Marion Wren and Amy Lawless -- they are going to rock. Maybe I'll see you there.

Love,

Jennifer

Ideal Idyll of an Idle Idol in the Ides of Winter [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dear Bleaders,

Last week I wrote to you. The post started, “I don’t know how I’m going to get the gumption or gusto to write this post.” Then cursor blink. I blinked back. Today I wrote this post, this paragraph being a post-post prolog. This time as you can see I wrote the post, but still I sat blinking at it, mulling should I post it.

I show up just to say Hi, but once I start writing it comes out a bit, I’m gonna say depressed, and I’m not exactly, or I don’t feel like being publically, so I hold back. But then an old friend wrote and told me he was having a hell of a time of it, grieving a bad loss. So I said to my hamletty, hesitating self, ah post your low notes in minor key, they might resound somewhere and who am I to be so strict a censor. Anyway, Dear Bleader,

If April is the cruelest month why are we so sad in winter? If April looks at our sadness and shoves flowers in our faces, shouldn’t that mean we perk up a bit when abandoned to the cold? Forget “At least it’s not raining,” here comes “At least it’s not April.” “At least there are no flowers.” I never saw the best minds of my generation though I felt around for them. Some were destroyed by madness starved hysterical but most, if not quite mudders, could at least keep the tops of their boots above the water.

I used to work all day and some of the night, reading and writing. At some point I noticed as a side note that I was a bit miserable. Counsel was to work many fewer hours. That took long enough, struggling to do that, coming to believe it was better for the work to be at it less anyway. I’d been hiding in there, hard work though it had been. Now I’m out part of the time and part of that time am awfully oppressed by time.

It seems I’m not much in the mood for most things but maybe it is more that I can’t forgive anything for its part in the disappointment, the general wanting for more. Wanting terribly without knowing what you are wanting leads to some interesting investigations, not least a stint with a ukulele. It was orange and I loved it until I started to be mowed down a little lower each practice that got no better, finally I put it up on a shelf like canning for someone else’s winter.

I talk to the departed. If you had stayed, you might have learned, as I have, to shout at the shadow of your marauding paint-splattered mother, and you, sunshine, you might have said to the big-bad dad of speaking, “Hey, you do not do. Not anymore, black shoe.”

They didn’t want to eat the plums in the fridge which someone else was saving as a possible way to shake off the terrible compromises of the night and face the blank, hungry day. They did not want to eat them. They left them behind.

Is that what I have travelled gladly beyond? That is what I have travelled gladly beyond, and at this point will eat any unguarded plums anywhere, without apology. With the desperate hand of betrayal hoping to leave behind, in the plum dish, a little of my excess bitterness for all the plums that by now have been purloined, most often by the fates, from me, and my imaginary better life, from which I lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, and barely daring to breathe or ach du.

I took the plums but couldn’t eat them. I’ve still got them. They have become that thing absurd, the dream deferred, now raisins. In the sun I still have some faith, even when through a closed window it can be a warm feeling almost as nice as drugs used to be. Did you read the piece by Donald Hall in the New Yorker this week? It is an essay on looking out the window, old, and between pages on birds and snow he reports on his life with a phrase for each decade, his thirties bad, his forties forgotten because he was drunk, fifties a good total change of life. Each brings so many questions none of which he there answers. We’re in the middle of so many adventures. Life, I’ve long said, is a decent book with a terrible pacing problem.

I love my office but it is not a well-insulated room and sitting thinking and typing gets to be cold work lately. 

Well bleads, that is as far as I got before. Now I’ll just add that I do have some actual things to tell you and that if the sun hits me just right I will be back to tell you them soon. Oh and if you feel like coming out, I’m reading this Sunday at 6pm at Le Poisson Rouge.

I know it is a cold, hard season and many places, including my own, have gone without the benefit of snow. But look to your decades, eat your raisons, post your posts. Try not to be drunk through your entire forties unlike Donald Hall. No but seriously, it’s hard, all these slow motion changes and lightening flash results. Everything will be all right. At least it’s not April.

Love,

Jennifer

 

Christopher Hitchens RIP [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,
I've told you guys before about how Christopher Hitchens borrowed a mite too liberally from my book Doubt: A History, though he cited a lot he definitely did not give credit when it was most painfully due. (I made all that plain in an otherwise extremely positive review of the book and we had some electronic chat about it and suffice to say the man liked my work and just hadn't quite realized how much was indeed mine, i.e. original research and ideas). I'd mostly forgiven him by then and I'd forgiven him entirely upon hearing his diagnoses. I had disagreed with much of his politics too -- I'm not much of a nun hunter and I think taking time out to bash the Clintons exhaustively in a world as corrupt as our is a little jambon-fisted (clumsey in a european way) -- but as he got sicker I thought more of the Hitchens of Letter to a Young Contrarian. And of course his God is Not Great is a hilarious and eye-prying romp through religion's manifold attempts to sway the genuinely curious Hitch, and how they all fail spectacularly. If you haven't read it you really should. 
An editor over at the Ottowa Citizen asked me to write up an atheist's take on CH's godless predicament now that the end was likely soon. Thought I'd share it with you.
Hope you're enjoying the warmish cold. Big hugs. Don't give up. Shout "courage" to strangers. Or give up and shout nothing. But don't kill yourself. I shall return to encourage you again. 
Love,
Jennifer

Part II on Bliss and the Mind's Eye [more for those who like this sort of thing, by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

Okay I thought I was done but I need to do a little more. Essay Part One.

 Allow me to put two more bits of notion into our meditation on the rule of bliss and its opposite, the swing-and-the-miss (and solitude, and its opposing number too) (which for me, right now, is you).

Note the first is the excerpt from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal commonly, wonderfully offered in tandem with Will’s poem. Read it like you have been staring hungry too long a tin of grav lox missing its key, and then entered the theater to deliver it as a monolog to the ghost of Stanislavski:

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up— But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road . . .  some rested their heads on stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here & there a little knot & a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity & unity & life of that one busy highway... —Rain came on, we were wet. 

April 15, 1802

I wandered lonely as a cloud, indeed.

 Note the second is that William wrote, and it has been oft repeated, that the two best lines of his poem were written by his wife, Mary, these being, “They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude.”

 Well the winner is whosoever’s work is long remembered and in this case the palm goes to all three. Also I don’t mind noting that while Will is a good man to go publically gloating about the wonders of his spouse’s mind, he was to himself a little too unkind, as the best line of the poem is the first one, the one that no who hears it, or perhaps speaks it aloud, ever quite forgets: I wandered lonely as a cloud.

The second best lines are indeed the ones Will called out as best, his wife’s apt description of something usually hidden and damn difficult to describe: that there is an inward eye, that things flash upon it, that solitude can be tasty and what is most tasty about it is the opportunity for day dreaming wherein spiced heights of passion and tangential sour lows of gross revenge play out a thousand times. That is the bliss of solitude when nothing, even so divine as love, is suffered gladly to intrude.

 The third best lines of the poem are “Ten thousand saw I at a glance,/ Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” I’m kidding of course with this beauty-pageant ranking, but the other lines that describe the wind tickling the lake into a million flickers of lightnesses and darks, then without dropping a stitch switches to tickling the flowers into a million flickers of yellow, lilting in brightness and weakness and power.

To continue, the forth best lines of the event are Dorothy’s: “some rested their heads on stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them.”

I could have stopped the quote at “laughed” which as the moment awakens into full-on magic, as in fairy tales when candles stand up and sing or when the color comes on in the Wizard of Oz, because here the flowers are Pinocchioed into humanity, when the daffodils, giggle themselves from that to they, but I was loath to lose Dot’s repetition about the wind and the lake and the blooms. What was so transfixing to them all, Will, Mary, and Dot, was the oneness of the water and the petals in their response to the wind. It created a scene of simplicity, and unity, and life, and that is the wind we all long to get caught up in.

Our own little heads are heads among ten thousand and when we too are too weary to dance, we rest noggins on rocks and are still parts of the program. The wind blows. Each tiny patch of water responds with a new reflection of the sky or matte introspection. On the shore, each leaf responds, each alone, each uncertain and certain, all in concert. Our hearts respond, each an only, each uncertain and certain, all in concert, and something lifts that often keeps us drastically darkened and lonely, somehow nature and art lift that murky curtain, and we join again the light fantastic.

Such togetherness abounds and is as thick and sweet as candied meat, but what about Crusoe, truly alone, perched on a little dead volcano, watching things of unquenchable beauty, like roving, giant, test-tubes of glass arising from hot pits in the magma, with boiling water spouting out of them like screaming kettles abandoned on their stove. Actually, let’s return to the text for a listen:

The beaches were all lava, variegated,
black red, and white, and gray;
the marbled colors made a fine display.
And I had waterspouts. Oh,
half a dozen at a time, far out,
they’d come and go, advancing and retreating,
their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches
of scuffed-up white.
Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,
sacerdotal beings of glass...I watched
the water spiral up in them like smoke.
Beautiful, yes, but not much company.

I often gave way to self-pity.
“Do I deserve this? I suppose I must.
I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there
a moment when I actually chose this?
I don’t remember, but there could have been.”
What’s wrong about self-pity anyway?

Whenever I read this I’m like, "What the what?" I’m a nut for this kind of question and answer, the commitment to the notion that I know this world is of my making, clue one was that it is so perfectly tailored to unnerve me. She tells us it is our fault, this mess we’re in, but that it is okay to cry about it.

We are all back from somewhere, each a Doberman among Chihuahuas, but we are also on our way elsewhere to birdland, when we will look back on sharing dogness and a scene together, Will, Dot, and Mary, will seem something only the impossibly young could do, and what might never again be done.

Then we’ll know that we have passed the lake-afire-with-light part of life and are into a new one this time full of laughing fellows and full on sunny yellow where every glint of golden shimmer is perfectly opposed by one mustard and dimmer. As in the past it is the next ancient world I am trying to get through to, to which I am trying to get through. As I’ve told you before, I may play with a noun or a verb but prepositions must get all their tits in the right bra cups if I am going to proceed.

And I mean to. So, yes, there is Crusoe remembering Will and Mary and Dorothy’s memory, but not quite remembering their communal memory to the finish, leaving him diminished by three lines and the crucial, I repeat, crucial information that the bliss of blank is Solitude, where one has time enough to start seeing picture shows, unasked for but awaited, running unabated upon the inner screen of mind, “that inward eye.” Crusoe remembers the Wordsworths, and later remembers himself remembering, and is then remembered by Bishop, who is remembered by me, who is remembered by you, all of us wandering lonely as a cloud, building up to a bit of a storm. 

Which is where I’ll leave you. Get home safe now. DKY and ISRTEYA.*

Love,

Jennifer

*Don’t Kill Yourself. I Shall Return To Encourage You Again.

On Bliss and the Mind's Eye [an autumnal bramble by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darlink Bleaders,

I come to speak of daffodils not to bury bulbs of them. Here as we enter the entry to winter I thought I'd hinder the mundane with a bit of verse rapture about how hard it is to do without and how often we already have what we can't quite remember. Let's start again.

For many of us, when someone asks, “What would you bring with you to read if you were stuck on an island deserted of relief, for upwards of decades, lost as a tribeless chief?”, the answer is, “What do you mean ‘if’?

In Elizabeth Bishop’s sublime poem "Crusoe in England" every stone and stanza is a brilliant primer on the primal and the primary, what it is to be human from pram to prime to prim, and back to pram again.

Today I’m thinking of Crusoe’s confession that among the agonies of that wee island of his captivity, beyond rank loneliness and raw despair, beyond rage like a volcano-in-violence and sorrow like the cold, hardened magma the morning after, looking like the very shit of your life solidified, as unkempt as your bedroom, some parts glassy perfection and frozen, others chaos and regret, yes beyond all that, sat the anguish of a forgotten fact and nothing to consult to bring the neuronic nightmare of searching to a climaxed close, an answered ending, a fattened act in the sated sweet repose of Now I Know.

You should go read the whole poem but if you’re already too drunk or not yet drunk enough, read this chunk from the trunk:

There was one kind of berry, a dark red.
I tried it, one by one, and hours apart.
Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;
and so I made home-brew. I'd drink
the awful fizzy, stinging stuff
that went straight to my head
and play my home-made flute
(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)
and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.
Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all?
I felt a deep affection for
the smallest of my island industries.
No, not exactly, since the smallest was
a miserable philosophy.

Because I didn't know enough.
Why didn't I know enough of something?
Greek drama or astronomy? The books
I'd read were full of blanks;
the poems--well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
"They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss..."the bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
when I got back was look it up.

The island smelled of goat and guano.

Now what I want to say to you, dearest darling bleaders is about what she, he,

An Able E, An A Belly, Hannibal Lee, A Napoli [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

How's the ol clacker clangin? I've been writing, for some time now, soundalikes to some of my favorite poems. They're all in my new manuscript (third book if I can figure out what to do with it) called Who Said. A few weeks ago I posted one that leapt from Blake's Tiger, called Spider.

Here I'd like to tempt you with a little ditty switch hitting for a guy who wrote on both a raven and a writing desk, to wit, a take in translation of An Ab Ole. Why won't you just write Annabel Lee? Mischievous fingers! Ahem, pardon my multiple personalities. Also for your orbal entertainment, looka these skulls. In a town like this instead of the Muss Nat Hist you can just take the kiddies to a bone shop. Used to be such a thing as a rag and bone shop, which was much messier than this (or thee). Tant pis. (I include here a rhyme both for those who know how to pronounce it and those who don't). So much the worse.

Anywho, here's the poem, I publish it here out of love for you. You. How the little word sings. The title reminds us of Plath but that aint who I'm plundering.

Lady Look-Alike Lazarized

It was many, many years ago
in this house, with this tree
that a woman lived, whom I don’t know
in a photo you can see. She baked bread
and ate with two fat men
and her picture looks much like me.

I was a child and she was a child
then neither again would be
she in nineteen-thirteen
me near two-zero, one-three.
And we loved with a love that was more
than a love, at the heads of our centuries.
Let me see less than she’ll see
because I know more than she
and, even from here, it near-blinded me.

And with virtue and reason, long ago,
In this picture that looks like me,
A bug blew out of a cough one night,
chilling the woman who looks like me;
So her muscled kinsman came
and took her away from our tree
to bake no more bread for fat men
and escape the brutality.
Yes, a wind blew out of a cloud
one night chilling and killing
who looks like me.

Microbes, heartache, and wars
do not give way to reason nor pause
at the soaring wrought-iron gate
of Brooklyn, nor at the doors of state.
She was here and some time later died,
well before I arrived here or anywhere.

But our love, she for fat men, I for my
small and tall friends, is stronger by far
than the love of those younger or richer
than we, and who could be wiser than we?
And neither the redbreasts in heaven above,
Nor the dolphins down under the sea,
Can ever quite sever my sight from the sight
Of the woman who looks like me.

For the moon rarely beams without bringing
dark dreams to the woman who looks like me;
And the stars never rise but I feel my tight eyes
on a dark dream that looks like me; And so,
all nighttime, I lie down by the side of my
searching self and my self that hides. With a
photo from nineteen-hundred, one and three,
of a woman who looks a lot like me.

Did you like it? I hope so. The sky is so grey it is rubbing itself pink where it touches the trees. Kisses. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to attempt your diversion again and exhort you to take courage! We are going down the long slide, but we'll all go down together. Especially if we each stow each other's verbs in the arches of our shoes or in the gap at the center of our bras. goddago c u nextime.

Love,

Jennifer

Book Review Post - Deborah Landau's The Last Usable Hour [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

I've been a sporatic spartan latterly, postwise, as I've elsewhere noted, I've got a lot of burners going at the moment and have been working hard to get something done for months and months now, interspersed with my usual state-hopping for secularism, and the raising of dem cute children of mine and now also, a puppy. I just try to keep the kitchen sort of clean and let the rest of it go to hades most of the time. Still, that doesn't leave time for hogging the blogosphere. But now I've handed something in, and am hoping will feel more free to return to our small electronic chats. 

Right now I'd like to offer you this book review which I wrote for no reason but the inclination to meet today's inclement weather with a storm of human artistry.

So what I want to tell you about is the terrificly smart, witty, and slightly terrifying new book of poetry by Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour. On the cover the silhouette of a chair swings in the open air on a rope looking as if it has hung itself, but also clearly a reference to the Platonic forms. It is a trick she pulls on us to great effect a few times in the book: she seems to say she is giving up but it turns out to be a metaphysical swerve. No, I’m not hanging myself, but I am also not in that chair. 

The chair was always empty. Plato imagined the ideal form could exist without its purpose, the human weight. Imagine perfection assless. Hilarious. Precarious.

I speculate that Landau’s poems frighten me so delightfully because she tells secrets, real ones, like being in a hanker for someone not synonymous with the husband, for romance, for instance. The book all happens at night, in a sleepless trance dropping in and out of depths of field. The poems apologize, for their insomnia and their intuitional intrusion like a sleepwalking blond beauty knocking on your door and apologizing for coming right in as she pushes past you and through your house to the yard and dissertates about the stars out there, some of which you have to admit you had not noticed before.

I have always been riveted by expressions of giving up and since I rarely give up I suppose I am most engrossed by people saying they are giving up, but then not actually giving up. Landau gives up beautifully a number of times, like an evening of dance made up entirely of interpretations of the end of Swan Lake. One hypnotic poem, or series part (each page stands alone but is not titled, though four titled sections comprise the whole), starts “In the middle of my wood, I found myself in a dark life.” and after flipping around Dante’s famous line of despair, it tells us of a mood that happens in a comfortable space, made hazy with gin and wine and night, coddled but a bit blank, candle lit, “are you sick” she asks herself without a question mark, “are you all done flirting,/ have you lost your appetites” and then the kind of open speech that makes me love a poet, the final line, “no longer a girl but slinking around nonetheless.” Don’t I know it.

I’m going to give you the next poem (or page-long stanza) in the collection in its entirety.

He keeps me waiting

and I start hysteria a little bit.

I start hysteria against everyone’s advice.

I go into the street to drink air.

I’ve never been so thirsty in my life.

Another mouth, some fresh-minted lips.

See, I can feel blue on half a bottle of jewels.

Sleep then wake then this then that day

and another night back on the bed

lying in an eros dumb and slackjawed.

The sound of hustling advances and retreats

as if someone were shuffling money

or unbuttoning a blouse.

Can you put that taffeta away now, please?

Please put it away.

I love the funny inner language of “I start hysteria,” love how she pulls us out into the street with her and her tentative madness, love “on half a bottle of jewels.” After all, we are all taking something, but what? I like how Frank O’Hara’s “I do this than that” gets so literal here it rubs out the details.

But then my favorite part is the end, where she converts all this potential energy into something kinetic, the whole of life’s rhythms, breathing in and out, day and night, even the back and forth of sex, and of love (the “hustling advances and retreats”), and condenses them all down to sound, to a susurration, a rustling, “as if someone shuffling money/ or unbuttoning a blouse” which is one seriously sexy version of the candy-wrapper theater problem, to which image Landau gracefully switches and then says to life and its crinkle of repetition, “Please, put it away.” Pretty brilliant. It’s a terribly sad little stunner, but it is funny, too, and keeps our misery company.

Well, I haven’t said nearly what there is to say, but I’ll say one last thing which is to note the pleasure of a poet who can tell me that in the city, some days in the summer, “even the little girls reek.”

Here's a link to The Last Usable Hour on amazon. 

Read your poetry and don't kill yourself, and I shall return to encourage you again. You may also feel free to encourage me as my doing so does not always presuppose that I am myself sufficienty courageous to meet the day. Coffee helps, and rum too, but only so much.

Love, 

Jennifer

 ps Portrait of a Windy Day

 

 

 

ee [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Does everyone know this ee cummings poem?

It will rock yer glockenspiel, so read it. 

       XXX

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand; 
but--though an host of overjoyed 
noncoms(first knocking on the head 
him)do through icy waters roll 
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed 
anent this muddy toiletbowl, 
while kindred intellects evoke 
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag 
upon what God unto him gave) 
responds,without getting annoyed 
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers 
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride) 
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion	 
voices and boots were much the worse, 
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease 
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified	 
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

 

Well there you have it. ee said a thing or two, dint he?

love,

Jennifer