Body of a Dancer by Renée D’Aoust

Here’s something I don’t usually say: I majored in theatre. Normally, I opt for the also-true: I studied playwriting. But, really, the first gives a more complete picture. Like all the other playwrights, directors, designers, and stage managers in our program, I took classes in acting, in movement, in voice. I took stage combat where I learned to pretend to fight with a rapier and dagger. I took stage makeup where I learned to give myself realistic-looking wounds and bruises using latex and pancake makeup. I was no good at any of this. Worst of all was anything that involved me moving my still-awkward, recently post-adolescent body across a stage. The problem, according to the acting faculty, was that my brain got in the way.

At one point, I remember worrying myself into near-paralysis trying to remember whether it was natural to walk with arms and legs in opposition (right arm with left leg) or in tandem (right with right). Flummoxed, I wrongly opted for the later and went across the stage like some kind of retarded marionette.

This total incapacity for movement when I think anyone else is watching is my point of entry into Renée D’Aoust’s new book Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press). Unlike me, D’Aoust (pronounced “Dao”), who trained at the elite Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, is competent of mind and body. Her book is a series of essays that chronicles her immersion in New York’s strange world of modern dance.

To call this a memoir is reductive. It is a history of modern dance, a critique of Martha Graham, a rendering of the world of dance both inside and outside the studio. It is a memoir too, of course—D’Aoust’s own journey into and, eventually, out of the physically and emotionally arduous world of Graham’s modern gives the book its larger structure—but it is more than that. D’Aoust is not enough of a prima donna, it seems, to limit herself to the traditional constraints of memoir. Instead, a testament to her generosity as a writer, she spends much of her own memoir in the wings, ceding center stage to often tragic, often beautiful, always frank and fleshy renderings of the lives of the dancers around her.

In an essay called “Daniela Can Fly,” an Argentinian dancer leaps from the fifth floor window of her apartment. Leaps, not jumps. Flies, really, as the title suggests. D’Aoust goes out of her way to clarify that this is not a cry for help, hardly even a suicide attempt. It is an insane extension of the insane rigors of the dance. We see Daniela again later in the book, out of the wheelchair and back in the studio. This isn’t romanticized.

None of the people are romanticized. Ted, the subject of a later essay, “Holy Feet,” left Lutheran ministry in the Midwest to study modern in New York City. D’Aoust takes us with him on his new mission to bring modern to the masses. He could be, D’Aoust says, Lear’s fool, “the wisest one around,” and, like much of the book, Ted is comical in ways that subvert trope. The closest D’Aoust comes to lionizing a dancer is Liz, who, in “Theatrical Release,” succeeds where Daniela has failed. She uses a rope. It is a chilling moment, Greek tragedy to Ted’s Shakespearean comedy. The eulogy for Liz is deftly interwoven with the narrative of D’Aoust’s work alongside her and others in the well-known Kevin Wynn Collection, a professional high point for D’Aoust.

What makes this stylistic range possible is that D’Aoust approaches it all with a clear, steady gaze. Her prose is straightforward, even as it reaches toward lyricism. She avoids the clichés about dance and dancers, often going out of her way to unmake them. The second essay in the book, “Graham Crackers” begins with a line of dancers jumping across a crusted patch of dried blood on the floor.

Spilled blood,” D’Aoust writes, “is a regular occurrence in a Graham class. Since modern dancers dance barefoot, often the skin tears or burns from the pressure of contact with the floor. If there’s blood, Kristi gets the rubbing alcohol and paper towel and wipes the floor. She never uses gloves.”

D’Aoust studied at the Graham Center during the early 90s, “at the beginning of AIDS.” This is in the mix too.

Writing about dance, D’Aoust must render the physical movements with precision and clarity on the page. And she does, as in this moment, from “Theatrical Release”:

I had to drop to my knees at the same moment Stef kicked over my head; if our timing was off, Stef would kick me in the head or, worse, the neck. I waited as long as possible to duck, daring Stef to kick too soon, and Stef smiled, her legs so long, so powerful, she controlled me with her limbs. After I ducked, I reached both arms overhead. Stef pulled hard, while I jumped, from a crouch up into her arms.”

And, from “Island Rose”:

I brought my right leg down, made a quick turn while curving my arms overhead in Fifth position, took a step, and repositioned myself solidly into the same stretched, tilted shape. Every cell of my being reached through and beyond my arms, my legs, the theatre walls. All else was appendage. The center was the whole.”

The writing feels kinesthetic, beginning in D’Aoust’s own physical memory of the movement—in the deep places of the body, the spine and the gut—and expanding out toward the lyrical.

By the end of the book, D’Aoust has left Graham. She has left professional dance altogether, but her rift with Graham feels more pointed. In “Dream of the Minotaur,” she returns years later to see a performance by the Graham Company. She remarks that she is shocked by the ugliness and angularity of it all, by the lack of flight.

Modern now has too much irony, or maybe just cynicism, but it is especially hard to think where so much head-banging and meta-commentary can go but down into the dirt and into more earthbound movement.”

She is longing for ballet, of course, where she began as a dancer, long before New York and the Graham Center. But she is also longing for a version of modern made more in the image of Isadora Duncan than of Graham.

D’Aoust’s prose—and her book—exists between these poles. There is Graham in her language: bodily and plainspoken. There is Duncan in her scope: lyrical and large. A book about modern dance should inhabit this very pull between gravity and flight, between grit and grace. It is the beauty and problem of the form, and D’Aoust stands at the intersection taking the better impulses from both.

For those of us who do well to lurch across the stage, it is a particular pleasure to see all of this through D’Aoust’s eyes, to experience it through her physical memory. It is an exercise in physical and literary grace, an affirmation of the possibility of beauty in an age of irony.

*Full disclosure: Besides being a fantastic writer, D’Aoust is a colleague and a friend.

Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

Oh, right.  I’d stopped reading because it hurt too much.  All the seconds Joan wouldn’t get to spend with her child, and here I am reading about it instead of spending time with my child.  That’s a hard line to tread, but it occurred to me that as mothers (and fathers?), we do it all of the time, and I’m sure Didion’s no exception.

Didion’s fears about being a good mother are ubiquitous, and she bares them.  What mother doesn’t feel inadequate? “I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents.” And if we don’t feel inadequate enough, plenty of people are ready to point out what they see as our faults.  Enter “The Autumn of Didion” by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic (but I found it through Byliner.com, which is like Pandora for CNF and which you should totally check out)  Flanagan seems to know what kind of mother Didion was, and she doesn’t paint a very good picture.  And that’s unfair.  There is every possibility that Didion and Dunne were exceptional parents to their daughter—gasp—while managing to work.  Maybe they weren’t.  But because parents are busy and value their careers does not immediately qualify them for Worst Parent of the Year.

Critiques of Didion’s mothering skills and social anxieties aren’t really here nor there when we’re talking about her work, though.  And a lot of people would agree with Flanagan when she said that Didion’s best works were Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.   I’ve not read her fiction, but The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights both seem to rely on the fact that Didion’s audience already knows her and has some baseline from which to draw in order to get up to speed tone-wise.  Because I think it’s Didion’s tone that her fans love so much. Flanagan says Didion’s the Hunter S. Thompson for women:  “She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair.”

Oh, bullshit.  Didion didn’t give us quiet days and flowers.  Didion gave us subtle malaise and powerful ennui, a palpable pessimism, and we fucking loved it.  We emulated it, we studied it, we lived through those darkened sunglasses.  We learned from it.  And I think Didion’s still teaching us.  Over at The Guardian, Rachel Cusk writes:

 Didion’s strategy, or rather her instinct – the instinctive response to chaos – is to repeat herself. She struggles to revive the form and style of her earlier book, to make it live again; she repeats anecdotes, and often sentences, word for word; she creates repeating prose patterns whose effect, in the end, is to confer the author’s own numbness on the reader. What she cannot do is master her own material: instead of grieving with her, we are watching her grieve. This is a piteous and exposing process, and one which places a moral burden on the reader. And it is here that Didion’s lack of humility comes back to haunt her, for by burdening the reader she is also making herself vulnerable to judgment. Early on, describing a set of photographs of Quintana as a child, she writes: “In a few she is wearing a cashmere turtleneck sweater I brought her from London when we went that May to do promotion for the European release of The Panic in Needle Park.” What passed in The Year of Magical Thinking as the camaraderie of husband and wife becomes, at a stroke, something more disturbing – a kind of parental attention-seeking that again and again drives Didion’s sentences away from their subject and back to herself. “Was I the problem?” she asks. “Was I always the problem?”

She’s right about the language, the repetition, the construction. But Cusk misses the point here.  Didion’s self-aggrandizement is a terrifying part of being a parent—never knowing whether you’ve done enough; or rather, knowing you’ve never done enough.  Blue Nights is about apprehension of an ending, and the fact that Didion can’t stop bringing it back on herself is more about a parent’s guilt than narcissism.

I guess Cusk wasn’t drawn into Didion’s grief, but I certainly found parts of this book startlingly sad.  I didn’t just watch as she grieved, because Joan Didion knows how to write grief.  She offers us so many tiny moments of her unbearable grief—the “sundries” box, are you kidding me?!  “Again, the careful printing.  The printing alone I cannot forget.  The printing alone breaks my heart”—that she avoids being drawn down too deeply.  As in The Year of Magical Thinking, she circles the subject, because it’s too difficult to linger there. She’s not melodramatic, but that’s never been Didion’s thing.  I do love that in this book she comes right out and tells us what it’s about:

When I began writing these pages, I believed their subject to be children…the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us…the ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear.  The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.  As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all…their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death…only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same.  When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

This is not in Didion style, and I think that’s why it feels so vulnerable.  My thesis advisor stressed that we are always evolving as writers:  “Do I really need to start this piece all over?”  “Yes!  You’re a different writer than you were two weeks ago.”  I think Didion’s style is evolving, and that fans of Didion like me (Didionheads? Joan Drones? Slouchers?) can appreciate where her work has come from and what it is now, and still believe we have things to learn from Didion.   Final words:  Quick read, sad, worth it.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

In the review of Something Urgent I Have To Say To You, Daisy Fried fires off a few warning shots in the direction of Herbert Leibowitz (the unsuspecting biographer of Williams).   With gumption, she relishes what the co-founder of Parnassus: Poetry in Review must have missed in the poem, The Last Words of My English Grandmother, saying:

“To misunderstand this is to misunderstand — at least partly — the life.”

 

Now, whether or not I agree with Fried content-wise (and more or less, I do), her tone strikes me as strident.  Her rhetoric, although worthy of our deepest reflection and respect, is not a shut window or a locked door.  Moreover, while I can resonate with the Philadelphia moxie that sizzles off her tongue and that flares from her fingertips, I can also offer this feedback (as she has offered me her own feedback).

Ms. Fried — we all miss things, but for you to rub Mr. Leibowitz face in it by suggesting that he may have missed “the life” he’s trying to approximate on the page — that seems… ahhh… overly aggressive!

My argument has been and will remain that the lives of others are never fully grasped or comprehended.   That’s what makes them (philosophically speaking) OTHER.

We miss.  Ooops!  We lose sight of the maneuvers that Williams makes in his most potent verse (although we try to isolate and analyze them).   We miss, as Mr. Leibowitz has missed, how the husband to Florence Herman, wrote for a variety of reasons, many of which elude all readers and all writers — and this, as Ecclesiastes so aptly portends, is “nothing new under the sun.”

To live this way — to acknowledge the mutual and interpersonal misunderstandings between us — is, “at least partly,” [sic] to stand under the authentic nature of a sacred life…

I guess what seems so irksome to me is the presumption that literature and literary criticism ought to be an elite discipline in which only poets-in-residence from Smith and Bryn Mawr may participate.   On the contrary, Northrop Frye broadens our interpretative horizons when he notes that…

many of those who find it easy to write by an act of conscious will are those who are primarily concerned to say what is most readily acceptable in their cultural surroundings — in other words they are hack writers.   Poets who can  at will produce verse on approved moral, religious or patriotic themes seldom make a deep impression on the history of literature… (Words With Power, p. 52).

Of course, none of this repartee is meant to claim intellectual superiority over anybody, or to refer to Daisy Fried as a hack.   Far from it.  By the same token, self-deprecation and humility are not always the shortest routes to a moral high ground.  Nor are they automatic conduits to a stimulating cultural exchange.   And I wanted to make peace and not feel the burden of upholding this MFA program for exercising poor syntax.

The point is, whatever our cognitive, emotional and familial resources, lovers of poetry ought to feel welcomed to the party.   We ought to feel as if the splendor of the tradition outshines those who make it into the latest Billy Collins anthology and reflects off the wrench which has been thrown again and again into lecture halls mechanizations.  Let me emphasize  the combined celestial and corporeal banquet that we — the Herbert Leibowitz’s, the Daisy Fried’s and the Scott K-P’s — join in progress.   The reason for the feast is not simply that some may discern nuances in taste and texture, but that we’re starving!  Starving for news!

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something

that concerns you
and concerns many men.  Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, a late poem by Williams, delivers all the goods, hits all the right notes and casts all the shadows necessary for us to realize that lives will be missed, missed entirely…   Moreover, if we’re fortunate enough to have an audience for our life-product (our poems, our short fiction, our creative non-fiction, etc.), the famous words of Dana Gioia in Can Poetry Matter? require a follow up.   Gioia wrote,

A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.

I say, Amen!

And yet, a little “tact” [sic] goes a long way.   There’s a finesse to misunderstanding a poet, a poet’s biographer, a astute columnist, a reckless barking blogger — and I hope we never stop practicing.

Peace–

(I feel sort of like Inigo when he’s trying to explain to Wesley what’s going on after they wake him up from being almost-dead. “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”)

So there’s this young female writer who had posted a couple of pieces on Thought Catalog about losing her virginity and spending a day as an escort in London.* She had her own blog under the pseudonym Marie Calloway, which she has since taken down, but many of her posts were about sexual encounters with men she contacted through the internet, and a few times she posted naked pictures of herself. She read and admired some writing by an older man in New York, who is apparently in or on the fringes of one of the cool kids’ clubs of writers in the city. (As a non-resident of New York, an unpublished writer and a decidedly uncool kid, let’s just say I’d never heard of the guy in question.) She made contact with him, and suggested they meet up and have sex while she was in the city. They met and did have sex, despite his admission that he had a girlfriend but that he was “bored,” and the fact that she was traveling with another man who’d paid for her trip and who she was also sleeping with. (She says the other man, Patrick, was supportive of her plan to sleep with the writer, and that he was happy with how he was portrayed in the account/story.) She took some photos on her phone, and wrote a detailed account of the whole liaison for her blog, using the real names of everyone in question, publishing the photos she took (including one of her face with the writer’s semen supposedly all over it), and essentially giving a play-by-play of all their conversations. Oh, and also play-by-plays of all the fucking.

So people started to notice it, and her blog exploded with hits, and then (this is where I get fuzzy) for some reason she took the post down. Not sure what that was prompted by. But then, a couple of days later, lo and behold: nearly the exact same account, in its entirety, was published on Muumu House as fiction, with one main change: the male writer in question’s name was changed to Adrien Brody, at the suggestion of Tao Lin. Ms. Calloway had communicated with him previously and sent him her writing, so she sent him her 15,000 word piece and he agreed to publish it, advising that she change the man’s name to that of a celebrity.*

So then, by some magic, everyone was supposed to treat the story as fiction, even though most people were aware that it had been published online as nonfiction, and even though the “story” uses actual quotes from the man’s writing that anyone could plug into Google and find out his name in approximately fourteen seconds. (Which I did.) So the internet exploded.

First, Emily Gould wrote a response to the original nonfiction blog post, in which she says that she couldn’t tell if Calloway understood what amazing things she was doing in the piece, and that she wanted to “locate her story in a tradition because for years I didn’t understand that my own writing was part of a tradition.” Gould then updates her own post after the piece is republished as fiction, and makes it clear that she’s absolutely unsympathetic to the fact that the male writer’s privacy may have been violated by making it so obvious who he is, and so she says: “But mostly you feel bad for women, who are in this and cannot escape and especially can’t escape themselves. At least they can describe their situation and I guess that’s what part of what I like, when people do that.” *

 The New York Observer did a piece, sharing some juicy gossip about how after publishing her story, Tao Lin invited Marie Calloway to accompany him to Paris but later rescinded the offer. Gawker weighed in, suggesting that the whole thing was ridiculous and that it wasn’t productive or necessary to take one woman’s account of sex and try to force meaning upon it:

I suspect (though I am no psychiatrist, or expert person of any sort) that people flock to sex stories for roughly the same reason that people watch pornography: because people like sex. There is nothing inherently noble, or brave, or feminist about relentlessly focusing on one’s own sex life to the exclusion of other topics. We all like sex. Most of us like reading about sex. But it does no favors to young female writers to convince them that they are courageous voices in the wilderness for dedicating their talents to writing stories that are received as lurid, not literary. (Hamilton Nolan for Gawker)

 Roxane Gay wrote a piece for HTMLGIANT, raising some questions about the ethics around disseminating such intimate details when Marie Calloway and “Adrien Brody” weren’t the only ones involved—his girlfriend stumbled across and read the very graphic account of them having sex, and had to deal with the fallout from everyone knowing that “Adrien Brody” was really her boyfriend. Kate Zambreno argued pretty vehemently that the story does have literary merit, that Calloway was aware of all the choices she was making in the piece, and that culturally we’re so dismissive of girls and young women’s experiences that everyone wasn’t taking the piece seriously simply because it involved a young female writing frankly about sex.* Zoe Zolbrod said “I was completely drawn into the story. It nakedly addresses so many issues I’m perennially interested in and currently writing about or around: Gender, youth, age difference, sexuality, power, honesty, attraction, ethics, transaction, responsibility.” Here is Tao Lin’s response to someone insulting Calloway and the story, in which Tao Lin defends the story and also Marie Calloway herself, and he does so by calling the person stupid, but he also asserts that the story has “relatively little sex and, I feel, no ‘shock value.’” (Which I disagree with, but that’s fine.)

There’s probably fifty-seven other responses to this whole thing, so good luck trying to be productive today if you get sucked into them.  So you’re pretty much up to speed, except for one thing.

The Rumpus posted an interview with Marie Calloway on December 29. Stephen Elliott did the interview, and makes it clear that he’s very sympathetic to her as a writer, that he enjoyed the story, and makes a point of saying that since the account was “published as fiction it seems only fair to treat it as such.”

And then he adds this at the end of the Q&A:

Postscript: While the story Adrien Brody is supposed to be based on a real experience Adrien Brody was published as fiction. I think it’s only fair to read it as such and to withhold judgements from the participants as you would with any work of fiction.

Wait, what? Seriously?

Not only am I confused as to why he’s so adamantly defending both the writer and the “story,” but I sort of thought it was my job as a reader to evaluate fiction and make judgments, good or bad, about the actions and motivations of the characters. But in this case, since everyone fucking knows that it really happened, it’s more complicated than that, and Elliot seems to be ignoring that, as if it’s insulting to artists everywhere that we won’t talk about the piece as if it were fiction. Calloway chose to share it with the world as nonfiction, and changing the guy’s name to a Hollywood actor doesn’t mean it’s a piece of fiction. (Note: Since I never read the original, nonfiction blog post, and it was taken down a while ago, I’m not an authority on what exactly changed between version 1 and version 2. Generally people seem to agree it was very little, mostly identifying details about the man. Although, as I said, even with the “fictional” edited version, I found out his name in less time than it takes to type “The quick brown fox” sentence. So only some identifying details were taken out.)

Does this whole mess raise some interesting questions? Yes, absolutely. Does the reaction to the piece prompt some thinking about fiction versus nonfiction, gender roles, cultural expectations, power dynamics in the older man/younger woman scenario we see everywhere (and I’ll admit I’m fascinated by it, too, and I generally love work that explores it, like Disgrace). My problem isn’t with those conversations. My problem is that the actual piece of writing which prompted all this doesn’t examine those issues in any meaningful way. Any number of things are referenced in the piece– feminism, Marxism, gender roles, pornography, narcissism, and more– but nothing in that piece opened up anything about the world for me, or made me think in any meaningful way about any of the subjects she mentions.

Instead, it reads like what I believe it is: a confessional piece by a young woman who is early in her writing career, who makes a lot of mechanical and grammatical errors, who is interested in writing about sex and probably compelled to write about it by the events in her past she alludes to. She seems to read a lot and take writing seriously, but the writing is rough. It just is, and that’s fine, because she’ll get better. But right now, there are many edits to be made, not to mention she has a tendency to drop in huge bombs alluding to information about her past and then never return to them. Reading the piece felt sordid, because I was basically just waiting to see if they’d fuck, and then they did, in detail. Could the writer have been trying to achieve that effect, to make the experience of reading the story like watching a porn? Yeah. But there wasn’t anything else going on– the story wasn’t doing any work, in my opinion. And while I hoped that reading her answers to the interviewers’ questions would prove that she was intentional and crazy smart and hard core feminist and trying to say something about the world, and she might be all of those things, but her answers struck me as immature and cringe-worthy. It feels condescending to talk this way about her, probably because it is, but I should try not to disrespect her. She’s a fellow aspiring artist, after all. My point is that I didn’t get much out of the “story” that was published. I think Tao Lin wanted to publish it because he’s Tao Lin, and he tries very hard to be provocative. I think Marie Calloway, pseudonymous writer from Portland, should keep writing, and if she wants or needs to, keep writing about sex. I know I’ll probably keep writing about the things I’ve been writing about, despite lots of eye-rolling, so if sexuality is what she wants to write about, she should, and the more she writes and matures, the better it’ll be. That’s all I can hope for in my writing.

P.S. The asterisk denotes things that piss me off, which I’d be happy to elaborate on, except that this post is already obnoxiously long. So you should probably just share what you think in the comments section, and if it’s related, maybe I’ll explain myself.

“Glimpses of Underthings” is about a teenage girl, Agnes, who tells boys that her name means “an angel of God.” She studies her father’s hands and infidelities and steals his girlfriend’s underwear. She twirls around a world where boys aren’t men, so she calls them by their full names. Agnes flirts with secrets and wears them where the eye can’t see.

“If You Must Know,” the first story in the collection, begins with this line: “These are the early cicadas, four years ahead of schedule, chirping, shrilling, blistering through their skins.” There are so many lines I want to pull out from the page and feed to you because they’re so rich with word candy.

While some could consider So There! to be “Chick Lit,” stories for and about women, the dark truths within this book transcend age and gender. They drip with sex and yearning.  Reid’s prose has an ethereal quality, capturing the magical idealism of adolescence while quietly breaking your heart with the harsh realities that hurl a budding youth back down to earth. They remind you how painful it is to grow up, how disappointment can leave a scar.

Nicole Louise Reid is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at George Mason University. She teaches at the University of Southern Indiana and serves as the director of the RopeWalk Reading Series. She is also the editor of RopeWalk Press and is the fiction editor of the Southern Indiana Review.

So There! is available from Stephen F. Austin State University Press and her website nicolelouisereid.com.

I’ve seen variations on this themes on everything from astrological horoscopes to bumper-stickers to political buttons (see end of post) to a manual on Zen Buddhism (This is your brain on Buddha!)

And yes, as prevention programs go, this one beats Nancy Reagan’s “Just So No!” hands-down.

Metaphors, 1.

Moralizing Slogan, 0.

And yet, before we, in the creative arts, run up the score, I’d like to consider a book on the brain that has been acclaimed by neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neuro-imaging researchers and even by such egg-heads as the editor of Poetry Magazine, Christian Wiman.   The book is published by Yale University Press and is written by Johns Hopkins mega-star in the above fields, Iain McGilchrist.  It’s entitled, “The Master and His Emissary,” which is odd, considering it has nothing to do with the despicable institution of slavery, nor with any messengers who might have made special deliveries.  Nothing literal like that at all.

On the contrary, the subtitle saves the day (not to mention the marketing department’s ass):   “The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World.”  And it is here — in that criss-crossing, apple-saucing of the two hemisphere’s of your primary internal organ, your grey matter, that the rubber meets the road… that the kettle becomes black… that the chicken (coming first) traverses the road, lays the egg (coming second), which gets fried in the skillet, next to the kettle on the adjacent back-burner…   The point is, once the author clears his throat, everyone who has ever set a coffee mug down upon a literary journal of any reputation should stand and salute.  Or bow and genuflect.   McGilchrist is brilliant, as the mere progression of chapters in the table of contents can testify:

PART ONE:    THE DIVIDED BRAIN

Chapter 1 Asymmetry and the Brain

Chapter 2 What do the Two Hemispheres ‘Do’?

Chapter 3 Language, Truth and Music

Chapter 4 The Nature of the Two Worlds

Chapter 5 The Primacy of the Right Hemisphere

Chapter 6 The Triumph of the Left Hemisphere
PART TWO:  HOW THE BRAIN HAS SHAPED OUR WORLD

Chapter 7 Imitation and the Evolution of Culture

Chapter 8 The Ancient World

Chapter 9 The Renaissance and the Reformation

Chapter 10 The Enlightenment

Chapter 11 Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution

Chapter 12 The Modern and the Post-Modern Worlds

Conclusion:  The Master Betrayed

***

Now, to cut to the chase, I will summarize what I recall of McGilchrist argument in brief:  Cultures in the west have biassed the left hemisphere of the brain, which emphasizes a pseudo-map-making of the world, or whatever it is that we experience through experience.  Subsequently, based upon this map, which is a reduction of the Real World, we calculate, legislate, evaluate the reprobate and so on.   The results have not been good.  Enough said.

Enough.  Except that there actually is more to say on the subject.   And the gist of McGilchrist’s scientific and historical analysis leads him and the reader to believe that, in fact, human beings were originally intended to allow the right hemisphere of the brain to dominate.  That is, when we experienced the world once upon a time, as REAL WORLD, without reducing it to functions and to functional language, we had music and poetry and art…  For heavens sake, take a gander at the cave walls in Lascaux, France!  Go to any kindergarden class with a box of crayons and a harmonica!   I’m probably preaching to the choir, or to the Masters of Fine Arts students…

But the amazing thing is that McGilchrist is not.   He’s not saying that the left brain bias is evil and the right brain is good.  He’s saying that the two hemispheres have evolved to work in tandem, with the right side commanding the left, setting the agenda more in the direction of beauty and truth and not so much basic career-building technique.

Of course, it should be no secret why I loved working through all the neuro-imaging gizmo-jazz to get to the poetry.   And when I finally did arrive at chapters 8 through 12, my mind reeled with the possibilities:

“The breakthrough in Romantic thinking to the essential connectedness of things enabled them to see that those who are in awe of any great object — whether it be God, or the vastness, beauty and complexity of nature — do not set themselves apart from it; they feel something that is Other, certainly, but also something of which they partake.”

Awesome, eh?

Now I know why macro-economics didn’t come naturally to me.

McGilchrist [let Dr. Jonathan Johnson take notice] absolutely loves Wordsworth.  He writes on Book I of The Prelude:

“I believe that what Wordsworth is actually doing here is talkinga bout the relationship between the two hemispheres.  Narrowly focussed attention is the province of the left hemisphere, and an increase in stress, fear and excitement actually inhibits the spread of neuronal recruitment in a manner that favors this very closely targeted kind of attention within the left hemisphere.  Yet while the left hemisphere is pre-occupied with its quarry… the right hemisphere is actually freed, its vigilance also in a state of enhancement, to see the scene afresh, once more authentic, not overlaid by familiarity…”

Ah, familiarity.  In shopping for groceries, familiarity helps.  In deciding who remains on the Christmas list, familiarity’s the grandest of left-brain skills to deploy…  But, in writing and in reading poetry, fiction or even creative non-fiction, familiarity is death!  I spit on you!

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t confess how utterly impressed I am with McGilchrist’s take on theology and linguistics as the two disciplines bang into one another in the night.  You may be surprised:  this scientist is a devout critic of the institutional church, who still holds out hope. On the Reformation he claims:

“The problem… lay not in statues, the icons, and the rituals themselves, but in the way they were understood.  They had lost their transparency as metaphors, which are always incarnate and therefore must be left to act on us intuitively — neither just material or just immaterial, but bridges between the realms.”

Bingo!   This is your brain… and this is your brain on metaphor.  Who needs drugs!

Peace–

Stephen King has written a new novel (released on Nov. 8, 2011), depicting events leading up to and beyond “11/22/63″…  In fact, this is the title of the 849 page tome of fiction, in which the protagonist, Jake Epping, travels back in time to 11:58 a.m., September 9, 1958, and accepts the mission of preventing the assassination.  The 35-year-old school teacher therefore has a good five years to move to Texas, get close to Lee Harvey Oswald and otherwise unravel layer upon layer of  elusive history.

What he discovers, of course, is that history’s not like a tangled string of Christmas lights.  It doesn’t even resemble an onion.

History, it seems, has been wrapped and rewrapped, inserted and re-inserted, into and out of the autonomous individual’s psyche — an individual who is embedded in peculiar communities from which we, upon “pain” of non-existence, may never detach ourselves.   There is no such thing as objective history.  Here’s the quote from the main character, favored by a New York Times Critic:

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. . . . A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

Poetic, eh?   Or maybe a hybrid of Soren Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death and Rogers & Hammerstein’s The Music Man (King’s novel even goes the extra mile and includes a librarian-love-interest)…

At any rate, I’m thinking you can either read this epic, suspense-filled revision of history — something I plan to do over the holiday season.  Or, you and I may delve into the John Hodgen poem, “Teachers,” from his collection, Heaven & Earth Holding Company.

Yes, of course, you’ve caught me.   This is a false choice, a rhetorical device to help us consider the differences between fiction (in this case, novel-writing) and poetry (in this case, a prose poem).   We may peruse both and enjoy the craft of each according to their own snippet of time.   A novel obviously grabs for a larger chunk of chronos than does the often-episodic verse.  But, with an eye toward the self-consciousness of the individual, my preference orbits lines like these:

When Miss Sokoloski, our first-year French teacher, leaned over her desk to get out
our quizzes from the lower-right hand drawer, we all leaned with her, even the girls, to see
that softness and shadow under the scoop neck of her Jackie Kennedy two-piece suit…

You see, rather than putting us in contact with the major movers and shakers of society — which is the  prerogative of Stephen King — the writer of this poem  offers an adolescent memory sampler.  The speaker’s teacher, you see, has tried to emulate the first lady before she became Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.   Moreover, the action of the students — leaning to see “that softness and shadow” — conjures up that hormonal place where all of us have yet to be tested.   Remember that?

I have no doubt that King, in his chosen genre, can summon similar moves, tapping into our experience as he goes, and that the movie rights to the story will reflect that.   And yet, what happens when the reader of the novel gets tripped up in terms of his time-travel, let alone Jack Epping’s venture to Dallas, Texas?

That is, although we may find ourselves entertained and intrigued with the prospect of changing history, that spectacle may easily morph into what William Wordsworth called “a state of almost savage torpor” — or into what Neil Postman has said more recently:   a state of “amusing ourselves to death…”   The poem, by contrast, will not deliver on the escapist urge.  Instead it seems enmeshed in the very historical moment, which simulates the historicity of the moment in which we exist, reading the text.

I hope there’s no misunderstanding.  By pitting Stephen King alongside John Hodgen I’m not trying to start a petty squabble about which literary form taps into the truth of the human condition better or best.  Rather, I’m pointing out that the financial pay-off of writing a work of fiction like King’s says something about what North Americans value.  Not begrudging any famous author his portfolio, an economic comparison with a poet and a poem, who writes just as well, sets up this bold claim:   we would rather write and read something that helps us avoid being stuck in history!

In this regard, you see, even a novelist like  Walker Percy can lament the condition of his own genre when he writes:  “Everyone remembers exactly where he (she) was and what he (she) was doing when Kennedy was shot–how places and things and people and even green leaves seemed to be endowed with a special vividness, a memorable weight.  But what the novelist is interested in is the in-between times, the quality of ordinary Wednesday afternoons, which ought to be the best of times, but are, often as not, times when places, people, things, green leaves seem to be strangely diminished and devalued” (Novel-Writing in An Apocalyptic Time).

Hodgen, I think, understands this when he writes about his teenage peers wanting Miss Sokoloski to marry the English teacher, Mr. Burke.   However:  ”…when…”

Mr. Burke, Junior English, who looked like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird and wore
the same suit three times a week, slumped in his seat and would not speak when the PA
announced JFK had been killed, he taught his best lesson, that we all lived somewhere
between what was right and what was wrong, that beauty lives right in the middle,
that teachers felt the same thing we all felt too, they just kept it inside like a test in a drawer…

***

It’s strange to think that over ten years have passed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and perhaps that’s a generational marker that will usurp the Kennedy assassination in cultural lore-supremacy.   What won’t be overtaken, however, is the torrential mud-flow of time.  Encased in the stuff like the pedestrians of Pompeii, we do well to write novels and screenplays like Stephen King and his proteges.   The effect of their work will undoubtedly help us transcend the muck and mire… for a while.   Eventually, however, it’s a poem (by John Hodgen and others) which motivates us to re-enter the fray, to engage in dialogue about consciousness and to avoid compounding each tragic happening with the perpetual ‘what if…’

Peace–

See? Pretty book.

Our local library recently had a book sale, and I went on the last day, when you could get a bag full for $3.  So my family and I went down and brought our own big bag and we loaded up with 25 books.  The first one I read was Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard.  It’s a short thing, just 75 pages, and I was interested because I found it in the fiction section of the book sale, and I’d not read anything but nonfiction by Dillard, but it turns out this book’s nonfiction.  It’s a lovely little first edition with the pages that are uneven at the edges, and they are thick.  I love it.  My kids already wrote in it, but that’s really neither here nor there.   I love how on Dillard’s website she explains what genre her books are (this one’s a nonfiction narrative).   It’s great because we’re always having to label our writing, and she’s sort of funny and matter-of-fact about it.   I first read Annie Dillard a few years ago, when I was on my first memoir kick.  I read An American Childhood, or at least I read part of it.  I didn’t make it through.  This was before I’d studied writing at all, but even then I knew her sentences were gorgeous, bubbling over with beauty even, but for whatever reason the book didn’t hold my interest.  In graduate school I read an essay called “Total Eclipse,” which then led me to read a beautiful and lyrical book Dillard wrote in 1999, called For the Time Being.  It was a masterful threading of a few different narratives, historical, philosophical, scientific, and ecological, and after reading it, it immediately went on my thesis list, so that I could study it more.

Part of what makes reading Annie Dillard so interesting is that she goes on all these adventures, and we get to go with her. It’s through her own curiousity and endeavoring to put pieces together that we get to see any of this.   I have to say, I fell in love with this little book.  It looks like the picture here, and the pages feel nice in my fingers, thick and firm, but softened at the edges where the longer pages get rubbed.  I love the Spokane Public Library stamped on it, and the pocket for the library card.  And how could I not fall in love with these first sentences: 

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.  I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.  I wake in a god.  I wake in arms holding my quilt, holding me as best they can inside my quilt.  Someone is kissing me—already.  I wake, I cry “Oh,” I rise from the pillow.  Why should I open my eyes?  I open my eyes. The god lifts from the water.  His head fills the bay.  He is Puget Sound, the Pacific; his breast rises from pastures; his fingers are firs; islands slide wet down his shoulders.  Islands slip blue from his shoulders and glide over the water,  the empty, lighted water like a stage. 

I mean, damn.  Annie Dillard can make me sigh with happiness at the end of a sentence.  Seriously, it makes me happy to read that passage, and since I got this book I’ve read those first passages dozens of times.  That vision of the Sound as a god, with islands slipping off his shoulders—it’s really sensory for me—smooth, wet, green, blue, salty, windy, serene. 

After a dozen or so pages of richness and  beauty, though, I sort of wanted a cup of coffee.  Dillard warned me though, that there wasn’t going to be much of a narrative thread:  “Nothing is going to happen in this book.  There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.”   I’m OK with nothing happening though, hell, I adored Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (because, like Dillard, there was so much subtext, buried so deep beneath the gorgeousness of every sentence).  At times, though, like I said, it got a little “oh, pretty shiny words,” even for me, and I was always relieved when she moved back into something less philosophical from time to time.  I came across this article by Bill Bawer, a writer and critic, which made me laugh.  “As a rule, however, her images  are notable  more for their audacity than for their effectiveness, failing either to produce a clear picture in the mind’s eye or to make a coherent point. Not infrequently, they cross the border into unintelligibility.”  And  “While such prose may quite sincerely be intended to convey a sense of wonder and immanence, it generally reads as if its chief purpose is to let us all know, beyond any possible doubt, how sensitive its author is to the glorious mysteries around her; at times one even has the impression that Dillard is less genuinely taken by the world around her than by her own endless capacity to respond effusively to it.” 

Ha!  And isn’t that creative nonfiction in a nutshell?  We’re all taken with our own ability to respond to the world around us, I guess.  Still, Bawer has a point.  I feel this way about Thoreau.  He responds ever so effusively, doesn’t he?  But for me, Dillard’s still great and still interesting, and I’m willing to hang on through the rich pecan pie of her words, because I know she’s going to show me something (ice cream?).  One of the main things that keeps Dillard’s work grounded for me, not just lovely rumination, is that she has such a fascination with things.  “One thing the reader must note about Dillard is that she pays unflagging attention to all sorts of zoological and botanical goings-on.”   Yes.  Her curiosity leads, in this book and in For the Time Being, at least, to a questioning of god, and what reality is, and the horrors of humanity. 

                I meant this to be a mini-review, and I’ve gone on a bit, but if you’re a Dillard fan, you should definitely read this.  And if you’re not a Dillard fan, this is a short book, and it will give you a taste of her style and her content, too, as much as can be understood.  Dillard published Holy the Firm in 1977, and For the Time Being in 1999.  I think she had the same idea and even the same subjects in both books, but I think in FtTB she really connects the more airy and philosophical with historical threads in a more narrative way, by which I mean there are storylines that continue, merge and diverge, overlap, and ask a lot of questions, most of which are never answered.  I may never know what she means, really, but Dillard’s nothing if not sigh-worthy.

look at their faces. the whole damn story's written right there on the freaking cover.

quick: name for me the hero of tikki tikki tembo.  you can’t, can you?  because it’s sort of a trick question.  in more ways than one.  at the center of this conundrum is the matter of how we define “hero”—and also the true heart of this story, which has nothing to do with arlene mosel’s purported purpose for telling us this tale in the first place.  what, you thought this was an ancient folktale passed down through generations about why the chinese don’t give their first-born sons crazy-long names anymore?  because that’s what the book jacket told you?  don’t be ridiculous.

this book is much closer to being yet another example of americans importing, appropriating, and abusing a product of the humble chinese people for their own profiteering ends.  yeah, in case you missed that part, the “author” of this book is some old white lady, who made up an absurd name for her character that sounds nothing like any kind of chinese word, let alone a name—oh, and she sold a million copies of her book.  and a special bonus, we get a depiction of the chinese as monsters who would let a child die rather than forsake the honor due to one’s elders.  which totally falls in line with my understanding of the chinese (i.e., they are dragon-worshipping weirdos).  but back on point…

everybody knows the name of the idiot who fell down the well: tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi pip peri pembo.  he is the title character, but not the hero.  you could be forgiven for thinking so, however.  i had forgotten until recently re-reading this book that tikki tikki tembo, etc. had actually helped save his little brother, who fell in the well first (long before tikkilicious did).  it happens in like the first five pages of the book.  but i’m guessing i’m not the only one who forgot that.  or the only one who forgot the name of the brother, who i’m sure everyone remembers as being the one who saves tikkitard when he falls down the well.

but the little brother whose name you don’t recall (it’s chang) isn’t the hero, either.  because he’s not the one who actually saves tikkitor tikkitee tikkity tikkitoo.  nor does his “most honorable one” mother.  the real hero of the book is the dude with the ladder.  and the reason you don’t remember his name?  yeah, that’s cuz it’s fucking “old dude with the ladder.”  oh, excuse me—where is my deference… it’s “old man with the ladder.”  which is a pretty great interpretation of the millenia-old chinese tradition of filial respect for your elders.  but that’s not what we’re supposed to take away from all this.  we’re supposed to be learning why the chinese don’t use long names anymore.

and yet, nobody who reads this remembers chang’s name.  the old man with the ladder has no name.  and tikkitron’s name (which supposedly means “the most wonderful thing in the whole wide world”), despite all it’s nonsense syllables is the one that readers have absolutely no trouble recalling, even years after reading the book, and undoubtedly can recite at a fairly rapid clip. tikkitikkitembonosarembocharibariruchipipperipembo.  i said that like 8 times aloud in the time in took me to type it.  and “chang” is the name i couldn’t remember to save my life.  and the “moral” of this story is what?  that it’s a terrible idea to give your kid a long name?  riiiiight.

but even that is surface level bullshit.  let’s look at the story itself.  am i supposed to believe that after all the trouble the first near drowning in the well caused, they somehow didn’t work out a hand signal for this shit?  just in case this happened, i don’t know, a completely foreseeable second time?  because children are stupid little monkeys.  and so are the chinese if i’m to believe this insane book.  they didn’t even put one of those folding child gates around the well’s opening.  i could understand it if these were girls we were talking about.  because, if i remember correctly, the chinese totally just shoot a newborn in the head if it’s a girl.  but these are highly valuable boys.  and yet nothing is done to prevent their dumb asses from falling into the well.

and when they do!  the mother doesn’t lift a finger to help them?  either time one of her boys falls in?  she keeps doing the wash in the water of the “roaring” river that looks about as still as a fish tank?  and when tikkimaster falls in, why doesn’t the little kid just say his “brother” dropped into the drink?  and at the end of the story, while tikkibird is recovering and his mother & brother are bedside caring for him, where is the real hero, the old man with the ladder?  outside the house, looking in a window.  those ungrateful bastards don’t even invite him in for so much as a cold cup of shitty tea made with well water that probably tastes like dirty little boys now.

have you ever heard a chinese person talk about about this “classic” book?  me neither.  and i ask chinese people about it every single time i see them.  mostly they just stare at me blankly in return.  or say something to their friend in mandarin and giggle effusively.  but i have a good idea what they’re really thinking, after the hilarity of the moment fades.  they’re plotting their revenge in response to how we’ve disrespected a nation that is certainly our elder.  they’re thinking about the day when their homeland calls to collect on all those u.s. treasury bonds they bought and they own all our asses.  they’re thinking toodle-oo, motherfuckers!  which is all a long way of saying: if this book is the childhood foundation on which so many of us base our understanding of chinese names, and thus culture, it should come as no surprise that the chinese are trying to kill american kids with lead-paint toys.  we’ve got it coming.

If This World Falls Apart, Lou Lipsitz

For all the banter and bluster of the avant-garde crowd, plain speaking can be a virtue for a poet. The literary merits of the language of everyday life—let’s call it dinner table diction—haven’t been exhausted and won’t be anytime soon. Winner of the 2010 Lynx House Prize, Lou Liptsitz’s If This World Falls Apart is a fine reminder of this.

The poems are sometimes striking in their simplicity—some seem to start out almost as simple accounts of events—but they quickly become much more, as Lipsitz’ work often does what good work should—it conveys experience, puts you there, with each piece revealing something close to truth. And Lipsitz does so while dabbling in some pretty serious—and personal—subject matter: lost love, regret, family scandals, and he somehow avoids lapsing into the great sin of solipsism. That’s a difficult dance, and something to be commended.

The first two stanzas of “Fishing with My Son on Lake Champlain” are a good example of this:

He’s a big guy now, not the boy
who sat with me so many hours
in the sun-flooded rowboat thirty years ago
when, despite my ignorance,
I did my best to act like a fisherman
and show him how.

So much has fallen apart,
the tangled gear rusted with neglect;
so much unsaid, fought over,
yet we can still do this together:
sit near in the way men do;
focus on tackle, bait, lures, lake, winds
and, of course, the elusive fish
we mean to tempt from their murky world.

I see his boyish joy again,
sense the depths that lurk beneath our boat.
Lucky, a northern pike strikes our lure.
We’ve never seen one before.
Jon brings him in and I hold him firmly
below the head and work the hook out
so we can throw him back.
He’s long, fierce looking and beautiful:
square jaw, small sharp teeth,
faint purple markings on his belly.

A visitor from the other world.
Will he heal as in the stories?
Or say, “Get serious. I’m supposed to be eaten.”

The long line of days stretches across the water.
We flick the rod and the reel lets out the line:
almost invisible, knotted here and there,
settling quietly downward. Time’s
flickering cocoon.

A participant in the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement made famous by Robert Bly, Lipsitz’ work places special emphasis on the experience (and transformative power) of emotion. As I know almost nothing about the movement itself, I won’t weigh in on its merits, but whatever Lipsitz is doing, it works.

That’s not to say the book is perfect, however. It has its faults. The first half is stronger than the second half, which includes too many poems about poems. This may be a personal prejudice, but I think such subject matter inherently limits the audience to poets, and even as a poet, I’m usually unmoved by such poems. And there were one or two rare occasions where I wanted to excise a poem; specifically, “Have a ____Day,” which seemed more like an exercise than a poem.

Here’s that poem; feel free to lambast me in the comments section if you disagree:

Have a ____Day

Have a nice day. Have a memorable day.
Have (however unlikely) a life-changing day.
Have a day of soaking rain and lightning.
Have a confused day thinking about fate.

Have a day of wholes.
Have a day of poorly marked,
unrecognizable wholes you
cannot fathom.
Have a ferocious day, a bleak
unbearable day. Have a
riotously unproductive day;
a grim jaw-clenched, Clint Eastwood vengeful
law enforcement day.
Have a day of raging, hair-yanking
jealousy and meanness. Have a day
of almost grasping
how whole you are; a finely tuned,
empty day.

Have a nice day of walking and circling;
a day of stalking and hunting,
of planting strange seeds and wandering in the woods.
Have a day of endearing nonsense,
of hopelessly combing your hair,
a day of yielding, of swallowing
hard, breathing more deeply,
a day of fondness for beetles
and macabre spectacles, or irreverence
about anything you want, of just
sitting and wondering.
Have a day of wondering if it’s
going to help, or if it just doesn’t matter;
a day of dark winds
and torrents flowing though the valley,
of diving into cool water
and gasping for breath,
a day of sudden hunger for communion.

Have a day where the crusts you each
were given are lost and you stumble
with your fellows
searching endlessly together.

In aggregate, however, this book is impressive. Lipsitz has done something difficult—he’s written a personal book that remains honest, and he’s done it in plain speech, and that’s important, as there’s a lot of truth waiting to be found in such language. At his best, Lipsitz reminds one of William Stafford and Bly (especially Bly’s Silence in the Snowy Fields), and by the time the reader finishes this book, they’re better for it.

If This World Falls Apart

Lynx House Press

$15.95 paperback (9780899241210)
Published: 2011
80 Pages, 6 x 8.5 in.
Purchase here: distributor