mme bovary and the refuah sh'lemah

A few years ago, I started to slip quietly from our house with no small amount of guilt, leaving my babies behind to go around and write poems and talk to people and listen to them also about poetry and poetics.  If not for the fact that I had been writing something nearly every day since the very day I learned to write as a child, it would have been so embarrassingly pedestrian & cliche.  In fact, I did feel like a silly, post-natal, finding-myself cliche right up until the time that it became obvious (in a flood of my ambivalence) that people really liked my work. 

This, of course, was such an excellently internal Sally Field pop-culture reference with which to amuse myself that I was perfectly healed.  Also with sneaking out before dawn to walk briskly around for miles with our 120-pound dog.  At least I thought I was perfectly healed.  Then I was sitting around, workshopping poems with people under the auspices of the Poetry Project, and the aforementioned Rob Fitterman was going through my poem line-by-line with some glee and then in conclusion said, "And then!  To show off the top of your range!"  I did not hear the rest, sitting there as I was thinking, "I have a range?  Really?"  Then, I thought I was perfectly healed.

I was really productive and engaged between 2004 and 2006 -- a lot of writing; attending a lot of readings; a lot of travel; 7/8 of a manuscript, portions of which were always well-received.  Then the children started to push back a little and I decided that this was all silly, a pedestrian cliche.  I have children.  Only about 627 people in America even read poetry.  Half of that number thinks it should rhyme.  Then there is the whole Billy Collins issue. 

I put all of my work away, far away, up on a high shelf and decided that I would just wait and see, of course, because the next step on the path I am on is residencies and I cannot make time to go away for 2 or 4 weeks to write (how silly!  I am a mother!) until the children are somewhat older.  I took it down and spread it out a couple of months ago and (again to my chagrin) saw a lot of it is really good work.  This tiny piece shows off the top of my range.  Like Mariah Carey, but not so noisy.  I am still waiting on my perfect healing (also like Mariah Carey, but not so noisy).

      

Symbiotic Liberation
Lala Follette

Daffodils languish. The telegram came today in secret.

Patti Hearst will blossom into something like a virgin (stop)
The dehumanization, submission, and serial foolish events were
underestimated (stop)
The loneliness, the rage, the energizing uncertainty are
now awarded a measure of monastic silence, aspirin dissolved
in a persian libation no one knows.
(punto final)

I don't know.

I thought at first this wasn't love. But, cicadas are
pregnant, lamenting morphine, pornography and Larry Hagman. The
name of a dromedary on the shirtwaist of a cigar loads a shimmering
desire into the porous heart of a hippo. Freedom is fingers inside this
hourglass, the bra of a prostitute pollinated with cream mined from a
buttercup's regret.

Instead of gossip, the glotted silence of Frenchmen, carnivorous and
blowing woodsmoke, dissolves into a line, a song, it reeks of the dew
on lilacs -- distinctly minty and without deceit.

Dredged from the valley of a tribe of bubbles -- those devalued spheres
of aerosol, glistening like Lily Langtry in a brothel with an anaconda --
our swan is resuscitated, fleeing, flying. The meadow is open,
the closet is a dance floor, we sail languid and ablaze, swallowing
the whole winter of the sun.

Comments

[Angela]

I love the top, middle and bottom of your range.