Mistake

A Glittering                                            Sarah Manguso

One mourner says if I can just get through this year as if salvation comes in January.

Slow dance of suicides into the earth:

I see no proof there is anything else. I keep my obituary current, but believe that good times are right around the corner

Una grande scultura posse rotolare giù per una collina senza rompersi, Michelangelo is believed to have said (though he never did): To determine the essential parts of a sculpture, roll it down a hill. The inessential parts will break off.

That hill, graveyard of the inessential, is discovered by the hopeless and mistaken for the world just before they mistake themselves for David's white arms.

They are wrong. But to assume oneself essential is also wrong: a conundrum.

To be neither essential nor inessential—not to exist except as the object of someone's belief, like those good times lying right around the corner—is the only possibility.

Nothing, nobody matters.

And yet the world is full of love . . . 

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". . .even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties, in my definitions, I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me." ~ Lucille Clifton 

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Two Sisters Swim in a Small Locked Box
By Malinda Markham

Sleepers dream of bandaged mouths and bright petals,
a static of bones and inelegant snow.

The night sparrow finally inhaled its own sound. What else
Could have happened? The vessel

was cardboard and twine. They should have strengthened
the moorings, should have cast

their own limbs of matter more promising
than flesh. One sleeper

mistakes a splinter for morning. The other curls
around a small jar of fear.

When the bough revoked its breaking,
the descent became nothing at all.

Two girls stood back to back, entwined.
The initial failure was a rocket-sound of wind. 

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An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.  Niels Bohr 

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Songs of a Girl

by Mary Carolyn Davies

I 

Perhaps, 

God, planting Eden,

Dropped, by mistake, a seed

In Time's neighbor-plot,

That grew to be 

This hour?

II 

You and I picked up Life and looked at it curiously;

We did not know whether to keep it for a plaything or not.

It was beautiful to see, like a red firecracker,

And we knew, too, that it was lighted. 

We dropped it while the fuse was still burning ...

III 

I am going to die too, flower, in a little while--

Do not be so proud.

IV 

The sun is dying

Alone 

On an island

In the bay.

Close your eyes, poppies--

I would not have you see death.

You are so young! 

V 

The sun falls

Like a drop of blood

From some hero.

We,

Who love pain,

Delight in this.

Eye

6. The Critic  (from CHANTS)                 William Dickey

I unscrewed the lip from the mouth, the mouth I discarded.

I unscrewed the lid from the eye, the eye I discarded.

Here is a doll made from pieces. The pieces hate one another.

Here are the doll and I in a posed photograph.

After the photograph was taken, I unscrewed the camera. 

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Self Portrait                   Edward Hirsch

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

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Address to an Absent Lover          Sarah Manguso

The boy speaks in Russian (I understand him neither in the dream nor in real life). He opens his eyes and looks at me, apologizing in English for keeping them closed. When I wake up I think he must have seen me. But when I kiss him he looks surprised, as if he were blind. The night I met you I wrote It is possible I have imagined my entire life. * My great-grandmother's lamp is mine now. It is made of rose quartz -- that is, it is made of poetry. More poetry: A coin you dropped when you took your pants off is still on the floor. Please come back and pick it up. More: The scar on my hand I got cleaning the house for you has outlasted you. In this way you are indelible, but only as long as I have my hand.

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Pantoum Quilted from Agnes Martin's Writings by Carol Moldaw

Composition is an absolute mystery.

To penetrate the night is one thing

(you get light enough and you levitate),

to be penetrated by the night, another.

To penetrate the night is one thing, the mind knows what the eye has not seen;

to be penetrated by the night, another.

Overtaken, we feel a certain devotion.

The mind knows what the eye has not seen.

Perfection, of course, cannot be represented.

Overtaken, we feel a certain devotion.

Think of a shibori-dyed silk organza quilt.

Perfection, of course, cannot be represented

pieced and layered, a little bit off the square.

Think of a shibori-dyed silk organza quilt

but without batting, transparent, floating,

pieced and layered, a little bit off the square,

the layers hand-tied together with horsehair

(but without batting, transparent, floating).

Try to understand, court misunderstanding.

The layers hand-tied together with horsehair,

the grids of the layers overlap like voices.

Try to understand, court misunderstanding.

The seams, like leading, show through.

The grids of the layers overlap like voices.

One thing I've got a good grip on is remorse.

The seams, like leading, show through.

Before it's put on paper, it exists in the mind.

One thing I've got a good grip on is remorse.

Technique a hazard, interruptions a disaster,

before it's put on paper, it exists in the mind.

Rectangles lighten the square's weight.

Technique a hazard, interruptions a disaster,

composition is an absolute mystery.

Rectangles lighten the square's weight.

You get light enough and you levitate.

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With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

-Hafiz

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From "Elegy in X Parts"

Matt Rasmussen

X.

The self-murder mystery
begins like this:

We are more likely
to kill ourselves

than be killed
by someone else.

I am the pistol
saying I will only

say this once.
Do not open

the tiny door
in the back

of your head.
All alone when

all alone, we
are asleep

inside our
murderer. There’s

a metal word
in the chamber

of my mouth
and my eyes

are bored out.
I’m a noose

using the body
against itself.

I see
what’s too awful

to be true—
that house

with one lit window,
my brother’s

punctured skull—
yet is.

If You Read Anything Today, Read This

If you read anything today, read this. The Farrar, Struus, and Giroux blog Work in Progress has published poet and author Sarah Manguso's "How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers." Young or not, all writers who are trying to achieve some sort of success (however you measure it, and this articles suggests a way to measure it) should consider these highly practical, very specific pieces of advice. This is not another "Read as much as can" kind of advice. This is how to make your life's work your life and still be able to eat.

Includes such gems as:

-Be relentless. All over the world, people are working harder than you. Don’t go to events; go to the receptions after the events. If possible, skip the receptions and go to the afterparties, where you can have a real conversation with someone.


-Run and do calisthenics instead of paying for a gym membership.

-Stay healthy; sickness is a waste of time and money.

-Avoid all messy and needy people including family; they threaten your work. You may believe your messy life supplies material, but it in fact distracts you from understanding that material. . .

-Don’t give favors to people or institutions that lack authority or consequence. Publishing or showing work where no one will see it or giving a reading where no one will hear it is a favor. Learn graciously to decline. The world will catch on that you are a valuable commodity.

-When you find great work, help it along; expect nothing in return. Bringing great work to the world is your job, whether you or someone else created it.

Women Who Write

Here's a conversation between poets Sarah Manguso (SM) and Rachel Zucker (RZ) about the roles of woman, mother, and poet, and how they intertwine, and how writers who are also mothers relate to women writers who are not mothers.

Like most women I have very conflicted feelings about these topics, so I've cut and pasted some of the many points made by these two poets that were most pertinent to my interests. Like SM, I blanch at being thought of as a woman writer, at having my writing classified because of the capacity of my body to bear children (an egg-box, these two women call it at one point).

But truthfully, my identity as a woman at all is not particularly strong; more of my persona poems are from male speakers' points of view than  females', partly because I was trained in analytical fields and spent a lot of time with men-heavy populations, but also because I was told much of my adolescence about how undesirable I was as a female, while concurrently being trained that the defining trait of womanhood was desirability to men. Sigh. I've left behind the population determined to teach me this, but have not fully escaped that kind of thinking....Also, I suffered from infertility before having my 2 sons, and once again fell into the egg-box mindset, questioning my basic womanhood, even still now that I have 2 sons, and despite the fact that intellectually I don't believe a woman or womanhood should be defined by reproduction and/or attractiveness. But somewhere deep in my psyche those ugly notions persist.

On the other hand, like RZ, my life is so completely suffused with my role as a mother, due to the sheer amount of exhausting time it takes to fulfill that role as well as because of the brand-new feelings that motherhood awoke in me (both positive and negative), that I cannot extricate my role of mother from my role of writer any more than I can separate any part of my life from my mother-ness (and I can't). I don't have many of the same feelings as RZ concerning writers who aren't mothers though....

Anyway, these women are far more eloquent than I am, and cover far more ground. Below are the points I was most interested in, but if this topic is dear to you, read the entire conversation here. I've inserted ***** to indicate that sections do not follow or respond to the previous section quote.

*****

SM: A man can become a husband and father and still be a writer first in the public imagination, but it seems a woman must choose. In the public imagination, it seems that if a woman is to be perceived as a writer first, she must stay sexually available to men, even if that availability is only hypothetical. The public doesn’t believe (yet?) that women are as complex as men, so perceptions of women aren’t as nuanced.

One symptom of this problem is that people seem unable to talk about women’s writing without talking about their bodies. I periodically start to log the adjectives used in the New York Times Book Review for a comparative analysis, but after the first day, it’s just too depressing and obvious. Books by women are “gorgeous,” and books by men are “brilliant.”

*****

Rachel Zucker: Perhaps Ozick is right that “It’s rough thinking to confuse vast cultural and intellectual movements with the capacity to bear children.” Or perhaps she’s wrong. I’m wondering not just about “the capacity to bear children” but also about my (and others’) experiences birthing and mothering.

And this isn’t just about pregnancy. What about the reality of caring for infants or older children? The physical realities of childbearing and childrearing change my ideas about feminism. I may resent being limited to my gender, and yet I feel that to some extent these archetypes are inescapable because they are true.

*****
Sarah Manguso: The problem with sustaining the dichotomy between mothers and nonmothers, of course, is that in doing so we weaken all women against the reigning culture of men.

*****
RZ: I wondered, after reading your memoir, whether, when you were in the hospital, you felt there was a dichotomy in the world: sick and not sick. And now, do you feel there are two types of people: those who have faced death or a serious illness and those who have always taken their health for granted?

SM: Well, yes, in a way. I believe the essential dichotomy is between those governed by the childish ego and those whose egos have been eradicated—through suffering or motherhood or whatever.

RZ: It is possible that the things I’ve learned from being a mother are things I could have learned in other ways—by running a marathon, by caring for a sick parent or partner or friend, by having pets, by taking antidepressants, by being in therapy, by studying nonviolent communication.

The fact that I could have learned these things in other ways does not mean that I would have otherwise learned them.

SM: I guess that’s what we can’t know about ourselves, given that we live in four dimensions and can’t backtrack.

****

RZ: As you say, there are degrees of participation in being a mother. Unfortunately I don’t know many (any?) mothers who feel at peace with the degree of participation they’ve chosen. This seems, unfortunately, an ineluctable part of being a modern mother.

*****
RZ: Making art sometimes feels highly indulgent and narcissistic. So does having children. At the same time, making art and having children sometimes seem to me like the only valuable things to do.