Because They Can
Well, my sweet JunieBird has flown back to Wisconsin. We checked The
Weather Underground before she left and at that time it was 15 below zero (wind
chill -30), but it's supposed to warm up to a balmy 10 degrees by the time she
gets there and gets on the shuttle. I've been bitching about the unusual
cold spells we've been enduring (both their length and temperature), but I
suppose I can count my blessings that my state doesn't border Canada.
I'm pretty seriously backed up on my litmag reading. There's at least one
APR and a couple of journals that sit on my To Read pile.
Also a new copy of Poetry that came yesterday, which includes work by Louise Glück
and (gasp) Jorie Graham. I think I've read a couple of times about
Louise's decision to put the umlaut back in her name. People tell me that
she pronounced her name something like "glick", which isn't of course anything
like what it would sound like in German. I know, because I used to make a
habit of asking attractive German girls at Hanover Messe to help me with
umlaut'ed vowels. Invariably, they would put their fingers on my cheeks
and tell me to purse my lips. Then, they would show my how it
was done, drawing out the sound, pursing their own lips, and generally looking
kissable. But, I digress. Ms. Graham can't be bothered to conform to
Poetry Format Standards, of course, so her poem is the only one I've ever
seen in Poetry that is sideways on the page, like those spreadsheets in
the middle of Word documents that cause your printer to switch to landscape
mode. It even folds out to be its own eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of
paper. I'm surprised it doesn't possess scratch-and-sniff properties.
It's called "Full Fathom" and it sort of goes on and on, as Jorie is wont to do
since about around The End of Beauty, and starts out as an extension of
the title: "& sea swell, hiss of incomprehensible flat: distance :
blue long-fingered ocean and its / nothing else: nothing
in the above visible except / water: water and //
..." Oh, you know that kind of stuff. Hardly the power and
understated elegance of "To a Friend Going Blind", but my friend Claudia assures
me that there is much to appreciate in Later Jorie, so what do I know? Ms.
Glück's contributions are the usual
reminiscences that one approaches like an episode of Twilight Zone, narratives
that start out perfectly normal but with that eerie background music that makes
you just know that something's going to happen and it isn't going to be
good for someone, but it's OK because it's really deep and shouldn't be confused
with the other expansive narrative that dominates today's journals, to wit:
"On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry, / the boys making up games
requiring them to tear off the girl's clothes / and the girls cooperating,
because they had new bodies since / last summer
/ and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones / leaping off the high rocks −
bodies crowding the water." When I read this kind of thing, it occurs to
me that most poets lead lives that generate the fewest number of interesting
moments, as opposed to hit men, for example, or professional wrestlers. Or
the carneys that guess your weight or the UPS driver. Or world-class
downhill skiers or really successful sushi chefs. Or certainly those
fiction writers who claim on the back of their book to have been lumberjacks and
short-order cooks and bull-riders and oil-fire putter-outers. Or drill
sergeants or bond traders or even the people who walk the dogs of 5th Avenue
clients. And yet who writes poignant vignettes in 42 lines about their first
love that first summer? Well, poets of course. And why? Well,
for the same reason that some pharmaceutical company increased the price of my
sole prescription medicine 23% last month. Because they can.
There's more to Poetry and I really really promise to tell you about it
tomorrow, but I always say that.