I keep thinking of new poems I could add to WHY GOD IS A WOMAN--about all the ways the world would be different if gender roles were reversed. One of my friends emailed and suggested I should draw a Boberto doll--the male version of a Barbie doll that I wrote about in the book, but I don't think the drawing would pass the Facebook censors.
I love Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "One Art." It's hard not to keep going in this vein with something like:
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to be. None of these will bring disaster
I lost a man with such good looks! My last, or
next-to-last, of three lovers who just left.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two skinny fellas, lovely ones. And, fat,
some men I owned, some as wide as a continent.
I miss them, yes, but it wasn’t a disaster.
The last stanza, so lovely, so true and painful--I would never want to mess with: "Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture/I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident/ the art of losing's not too hard to master/though it may look like (write it!) like disaster."
If only we poets didn't have to write a narrative essay for the Ohio Arts Council grants! I really pause when I try to answer these questions about my work.
I have read that Smart's Jeoffry is the most famous cat in literature, more famous than the Cheshire cat perhaps. When I think of cats, I think how they consider me, as much as vice versa. As if perhaps I don't live up to their standards. In drawing the comic, I was thinking of how people become so much like their cats and dogs after a time.
In his book, State of the Art, David Lehman writes that "Dover Beach" is the most parodied poem of all time. My favorite poem to parody is "Annabel Lee," perhaps because it was the first poem I fell in love with. When I was a girl, my father used to say that Edgar Allan Poe had once wandered in the woods behind our house. He called them the Usher Woods. Of course, I believed him.
In The State of the Art, David Lehman writes: "Whitman recalls the moment when, as a boy alone on the shore of Long Island, he heard two mockingbirds sing, and then one stopped singing and the other missed his mate and sang elegiac songs to her, and suddenly Whitman understood his purpose in life, "what I am for."
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
Note: I've been reading David Lehman's The State of the Art. This poem was discussed in the chapter titled 2013 with the subtitle, "It was his poetry that kept him going." It begins with the sentence: "Shelley's 'Defense of Poetry' (1821) culminates in an assertion of poetry as a source not only of knowledge but of power.
I've been thinking about that. Poetry, a source of power.