Ana Mendieta, Untitled from Silueta Series, Mexico, 1973-77
I am falling in love with a person. Isn’t falling in love one of the weirdest feelings you’ve ever had? I can’t say that it is pure joy. I mean we say FALLING in love for a reason. And, as you get older, falling is no joke. Forty-two-year-olds fall down and can break their body. But love falling is so much riskier! We really should call it plummeting in love. We really should call it into-an-empty-swimming-pool-diving in love. It feels like my realities are at stake. My sense of self. The view of my life from this angle — forty-two-year-old white mother poet lady.
In Alice Notley’s Waltzing Matilda the narrator reads a friend’s poems, contends with the ambivalences of marriage, tends to sick children, gets hammered, makes an ass of herself, worries about making an ass of herself, reads the news, frets about money. Good god, am I describing my life or a book of poems? This book was published in 1981. I was published in 1976.
In Alice Notley’s Waltzing Matilda the narrator reads a friend’s poems, contends with the ambivalences of marriage, tends to sick children, gets hammered, makes an ass of herself, worries about making an ass of herself, reads the news, frets about money. Good god, am I describing my life or a book of poems? This book was published in 1981. I was published in 1976.
Unless otherwise noted, all works: untitled, 2018, oil on canvas
My six-year-old daughter, Georgia, and I arrived in San Francisco for a vacation last Wednesday night. I told her we were going to go to SFMOMA to look at the Etel Adnan paintings the next day and that we should go to City Lights before that, so we could get one of Adnan’s books. Maybe we would want to read it while we looked at her paintings.
When we got to the show, Georgia thought the paintings were boring and picked out her favorite one. When we got to the show, I thought the show was small and picked out my favorite one.
Have you ever heard Aram Saroyan read his poem “Biography”?[1] It is a poem in which he recites every year from his birth to the current year in his usual steady, calm cadence. I’m a bit fascinated with this poem; I seem to bring it up often. It really can’t be beat. It’s a pure poem. I heard him read it in 2007 (I think) at Poet’s House in New York. There are a hundred things to say about the poem, how the simplicity of it belies the fact that it describes something huge, i.e.
I’d like for the boundary between what is funny and what is poetry to be torn down or at least be outfitted with a glory hole. I feel there is one (a boundary, geez!). I feel it when I read a funny poem in a terribly lit, modular classroom and am met with unblinking eyes (and no laughs). Or when I read on an elevated stage at a fancy literary festival and hear only the groan of a chair (and no laughs). Maybe it’s because you’re not funny? Get a life. What I’m getting at is there is a set of expectations that surrounds poems and poetry. There is the expectation that the person in front of us is smart(er than us), that poetry is depressing, or worse, poignant, that it is a puzzle and so needs focus lest you miss a vital piece, that it requires silence to be shared.
I have one [PG] fantasy of reading poems in comedy clubs and telling jokes at poetry readings. Why waste a fantasy on it? Why ruin a good comedy night for those unsuspecting patrons? I don’t know. I don’t want to answer those questions. They’re rather aggressive, if you ask me. Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s okay. I’d rather explore what that might do, in my mind, to read funny poems, funny poems that are often also quite sad, on stage, against a brick wall, beneath a blinding Klieg or two, alone. The set up sounds like a firing squad.
How Many Poets Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?