Email is kinder than feed (Too long to read)
The devastation is not enough. I’m reading AnneBoyer’s series “On Poetry” this month, and it’s soothing. I can’t continuereading it if I want to continue writing these feeds: “Sometimes it’s easy to believe also that the object world is anchorless and unenchanted and that the choice is mfa and new york city and that every against is a for, every contra- will be transmuted into a pro-, then to believe in the abstracted everywhereness of nothing and in the complicated habits of techno-courtiers and the harried morning, the harried noontime, the harried afternoon, the harried evening, the harried midnight.”
She’s right. When I write, I almost always choose the feed—I am a harried techno-courtier with complicated habits and frenetic sleepless mornings. Sometimes when I’m drunk or it’s Sunday afternoon and the light is right and I’ve spent most of the weekend having sex or wandering around the city in the Spring with T, I can believe that the inevitability of my techno-courtier future is fake, that ‘there is refusal and dialectic and our compañeras and possibility and every living, circulating, necessary poem.”
But I don’t really. You can tell. “Montreal professors stare down riot cops.” The bodies of so many murdered students in Kenya. The video of Michael Slager shooting #WalterScott in the back. Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott. 8 times.
One reviewer (rightly, I think) described my first book as
“nightmarish in its vision of contemporary life and the language that life employs. That vision is a useful one, I think—if you play a note then other strings of the same note will resonate—this book hums for me—it seems to tap into a resonant strain of our speech. It’s a very smart book, and I like it a lot. My only caveat in praising it is this: how long do we reproduce the discourse of hatred before we’re just speaking hatefully? Is it possible that by occupying the role of a “citizen, / listening to the radio broadcast, / waiting for embassy news, looking up words” we fool ourselves into adopting “their” discourse as inevitable—what I mean is, how long can we depict ourselves as passive before we accept our passivity as inevitable?”
I don’t know. I wrote that poem in mid-May, 1999, just after NATO bombed the PRC embassy in Belgrade. I was in Harbin, studying the history of “Sino-Soviet relations,” but after the bombing I spent most of my time learning vocabulary relevant to JDAM guided bombs and bombing and accidental bombing. Also words for civilian, industrial plant, barrack, infrastructure, humanitarian crisis, Rambouillet Accords. I’ve forgotten most of these words. Sometime in mid-May the power went out for almost two weeks. Some of my friends were in Beijing, and we were all jealous. One beautiful red-haired boy from Brown University went to the U.S. Embassy and saw the tens of thousands of people gathered there in protest.
There was no embassy in Harbin, not even a consulate. I really wanted to kiss that boy. His girlfriend from Brown arrived in June, with a 35 millimeter camera that she knew how to use, and they traveled around China together for a few months.
Trisha Low is writing about “Being Hated” for Open Space. I keep reading Open Space, hating and feeling hated without, I think, really being hated. I share it on Facebook with one quote, but this is the part that makes me cry:
“Alli reads older poems that feel like a reckoning — heavier with nostalgia, but slippery with a renewed embarrassment. I’m sitting with my head in my hand, a little dizzy because an old lover-turned-ex is in the room, and I’m wondering, does mourning discount the possibility of thinking about a future beyond the reality of our loss?”
Or before that, when she wonders if she’s the only person who doesn’t want to neutralize mourning.
I want to wail. When my partner took another lover, I drove his car around San Diego County, screaming, because I was afraid to really scream anywhere else. We yelled at each other, often loudly, but never as loudly as I screamed in the car.
Now, I work. I edit. I’m devastated by something in the feed and email friends and peers. They email back. We email each other.
Email is kinder than feed. Our sentences are long. We think. We feel.
The feed is at AWP or it’s not at AWP. The feed is having trouble sleeping, and also having trouble waking up. Trouble finishing projects and writing—or else it is writing with an energy that we don’t have. A friend discusses the horrors of the high school cafeteria. A friend posts a Goethe quote to make fun of Goethe:
“If a young couple is at all harmoniously constituted by nature, nothing can be more conductive to a lovely union than the girl's desire to learn and the young man's inclination to teach. The relationship that ensues is as solid as it is pleasant. She sees in him the creator of her intellectual existence, and he in her creation owing its perfection not to nature, chance or a unilateral wish but to a bilateral will. This interaction is so sweet that we must not be surprised if such a meeting of two personalities has generated the most overwhelming passions..."
An acquaintance responds by quoting 28-year-old Jack Kerouac, writing to Neil Cassidy with the revelation that “girls have souls too.”
I remember something said to me during a particularly bad break up and the Goethe quote doesn’t feel so LOL. I close the door and cry efficiently.
Two nights ago: humid, warm air and sirens and people on the street and the sound of a neighbor humming—all soothing, but sometime around 3 am rain and cold and me shutting all the windows after a dream about I don’t know what. Please don’t move to Sweden—no, that was three nights ago. A friend says they woke up early and could not get back to sleep, and that today is going to be awesome, and that their post is fascinating. I comment, “I am writing a long version of this fascinating post right now.”
There’s a story in T’s feed about a woman who read the diaries of her deceased husband and found that he wrote pages and pages about his desire for his ex. In the car, we talk about whether or not we would read someone else’s diaries.
My poem is not passing. It doesn’t have to. I pass, though I don’t have to. I’m a white woman with a middle-management communications job in higher education—this is exactly the kind of job I am supposed to have. Saeed Jones quotes James Baldwin in his 1964 Playboy essay “The Uses of The Blues”: “People talk to me absolutely bathed in a bubble bath of self-congratulation. I mean, I walk into a room and everyone there is terribly proud of himself because I managed to get to the room. It proves to him that he is getting better. It’s funny, but it’s terribly sad.”
I quote this, and then think, “I am an asshole,” and “Should I start writing stories and sending them to playboy?” The summer I lost my job, last summer, I spent a few days looking at Helen Adam’s collages in the Buffalo Archive. The archive was giving away a bunch of magazines, including a stack of Playboy. I took about ten of them. Everyone had massive amounts of pubic hair, it was great—I sat in K’s attic, drinking beer, watching Girls, and reading Playboy.
I used to write more polished versions of these Feed-entries when I was in graduate school. My peers liked them, but they hated the way I’d just throw them a fact or a quote and then move on. Like saying, “That was also the summer I was raped, but I’ve written about that elsewhere.”
I say yes, I would read the diaries of my dead husband. I think of the stories of women who hit or threw things at their lovers / husbands / boyfriends when they were feeling angry and rejected by their lovers / husbands / boyfriends. I think of the stories of people breaking into email accounts and phones. My own clichéd moment of expecting nothing and trying to unfreeze a phone frozen on a message thread not intended for me to read.
The bodies of so many murdered students in Kenya. My lingering pain is so boring I can’t stand it. I did not want to watch the video of Michael Slager shooting #WalterScott in the back. I did not want to watch it. My own lingering pain is boring.
Businessinsider.com says that “The beard trend is over. It’s time to shave. It’s also time to say goodbye to the word ‘lumbersexual.’” Yeah, I linked to that.
I watch Michelle Obama “jam” to “uptown funk.”
I keep making poems because poems are not necessary.
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2087
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