from Yeats at Work by Curtis Bradford, this untitled quatrain from late in Yeats’ life:
The friends that have it I do wrong
When ever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.
Crashing headlong into the deadline for the 1st packet of my 4th semester, when all this writing and reading is supposed to gel into a manuscript, I’m deep into reading and thinking about the purpose of revision. What are we doing when we revise, as opposed to all the endless fine-tuning of word choice or meter or line breaks? What role does revision play in how we live in language and strive to express that?
What is revising when it is part of writing, not part of editing?
I’ll be doing a lot of reading, and talking with other writers, about these questions, and trying to make sense of the various answers by writing about them. Stay tuned.
Having just read an amazing poem by Jane Mead about Hedda Nussbaum and Lisa (do we still in good conscious use the last name of the man who beat her to death??), I’ve been thinking on them all morning. These are very rough notes toward something, although nothing like the firm calm grasp of an actual poem. But every start is a start, and everything that is grows from having been willing to start.
Hedda and Lisa
I understand, Hedda, I do,
I do, what happened to you, how
the shame bound tighter than
the pain, how you could no more
have saved yourself than Lisa. No more
have saved Lisa than yourself.
Lisa was yourself.
But I’ve been that child, too, and you,
goddamn you, were an adult and really-
really?-there was no single time when you
could have run, could have called 911,
could have locked out me out, made me
wander the halls crying until someone could
no longer refuse to see me?
Let’s talk about how traps work.
Let’s talk, let’s call Oprah, let’s weep
about how a coyote in a trap
will chew off her own leg.
But who sets the trap?
Nevermind, we’ve talked that to death.
Whose hands bear the animal’s blood?
We all know we all do and also
how we’ve made popular the wearing
of red gloves to make fashionable what is true.
But who made the trap, whose job
is forging, polishing, packaging,
boxing, driving, opening, pricing,
placing just so on a shelf?
The whole world betrayed you, Hedda,
and Lisa – hell, you weren’t even real
enough to own the expectation of a right
and the wrong done to you was barely
a crime at all. Manslaughter? As if
a six year old girl were a man, as if
one could slam a child into a wall
and say I did not mean to kill.
But still.
A coyote who would leave her leg in a trap
would not leave her cub trapped there.
She would stay, fight, face the hunter
and his club, his gun.
Or so I need to believe. Better
that you stayed, Hedda, when you could not
get her free than that you were too crippled
to run. But could you have crawled,
dragging shattered legs across the ground,
your cub in your teeth, across broken glass
and burning ground?
In the Disney movie, you would have.
In the Lifetime movie, too. In the starring-
Angelina-Jolie film you would have twirled
and blasted Joel with blazing guns; in the
sisterhood version, a tribe of Amazons
would have rescued you.
But in the real world, the easiest plot
was for the hunter’s clan
to club you. Hedda, battered
by one man and then the whole world
felt justified in beating you while Lisa
just went on being dead.
Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz
by William Notter
She had a truck, red hair,
and freckled knees and took me all the way
to Memphis after work for barbecue.
We moaned and grunted over plates of ribs
and sweet iced tea, even in a room of strangers,
gnawing the hickory char, the slow
smoked meat peeling off the bones,
and finally the bones. We slurped
grease and dry-rub spice from our fingers,
then finished with blackberry cobbler
that stained her lips and tongue.
All the trees were throwing fireworks
of blossom, the air was thick
with pollen and the brand-new smell of leaves.
We drove back roads in the watermelon dusk,
then tangled around each other, delirious
as honeybees working wisteria.
I could blame it all on cinnamon hair,
or the sap rising, the overflow of spring,
but it was those ribs that started everything.
“Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz” by William Notter, from Holding Everything Down. © Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.
The Language Issue
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
translated by Paul Muldoon
I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant
in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,
then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river
only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.
The Song of the Homesick Armenian Girl
no author or translator issued, traditional in Armenian culture
I was a quince-bush growing on a rock.
A rocky cliff that rose above the dell.
They have uprooted and transplanted me
Unto a stranger’s orchard, there to dwell
And in this orchard they have watered me
With sugar water, that full sweetly flows
O brothers, fear me back to my soil.
And water me with water of the snows!
Gertrude Stein—how we’ve been told you are obtuse, impossible, all but meaningless, when in fact you are loving, inventive, playful, sexual, flirtatious, silly. Why has it been easier for the world to imagine Gertrude as a stern remote genius than as a woman of brilliant mind and wit passionately in love with another woman?
Wonder why indeed.
There is a wonderful (though out of print) collection of Stein’s love notes to Alice, edited by Kay Turner: Baby Precious Always Shines, You can find used copies easily enough. The notes are handwritten, so some words aren’t entirely clear and are marked with brackets and best guesses. Here’s one from the collection:
Dear dainty delicious darling, dear
sweet selected [enemifier?] of my soul
dear beloved baby dear everything
to me when this you see you will
have slept long and will be warm
and completely [loudly?] loved by
me dear wifey, [your?] baby
—yb
from Larry Levis The Gazer Within:
Gazing within, and trying to assess what all this represents, I find I’ve been speaking, all along, about nature, about the attempt of the imagination to inhabit nature and by that act preserve itself for as long as it possibly can against “the pressure of reality.” And by “nature” I mean any wilderness, inner or outer. The moment of writing is not an escape, however: it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.
from Jordan’s Things I Do in the Dark, 1977
[…]
and even the stars and even the snow and even
the rain
do not amount to much
unless these things submit to some disturbance
some derangement such
as when I yield myself/belonging
to your unmistaken
body
I’m back at Drew for my 4th residency. Well, I’ve been back since last Monday, but have been having the experience more and blogging about it less. It’s so deep but also so familiar, now, to be here, to know where everything is, to know the faculty (mainly, always someone new, in this case Jane Mead), to know how to match the poem I want to discuss to the poet leading the workshop, and to know what to NEVER touch in the dining hall.
Information is coming fast and furious, as always, and I’ll post more of it after I get home and the intensity fades a bit. Today, a Sunday, we had a lecture/panel scheduled from 3:30 to 4:30 about language, art, and politics in the life and work of June Jordan. 4:30 passed. 5pm passed, and we were creeping up on 5:30 when the conversation had to end because one of the three panelists had to go. I was with a group of people who chose to stay an extra hour because talking about Jordan’s work was too good to give up. I am SO in paradise here.
I’m heading into my 4th semester, which means I have to produce a manuscript of at least 48 pages of well-crafted, fully alive, breathing fighting kicking screaming singing loving wanting speaking crying poetry. No explication, remediation, hesitation or too-easy-affirmation allowed. Wow. Luckily, my mentor is Anne Marie Macari, who gives astounding support and won’t let anything slide past. The semester pretty much starts when I head home on Friday, so look out world. For something. I’ll be in my office writing, so don’t be looking out for me.
This Frenzy 