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February 29, 2008

When He Was Lonely, He Thought of Death

I really wish I were in Tucson today, not just because it's beautiful and warm--it's supposed to be 80 degrees, mostly sunny, with 0% chance of precipitation--but because tonight the University of Arizona Poetry Center has arranged a memorial tribute for my dear friend and mentor Jon Anderson.

Jon died last October, and when I got news of his death, I wanted to write a blog entry, but I was just too busy. So now, while there's an appropriate moment, I want to say something about why this man was dear to me.

I met Jon in the fall of 1982, when I enrolled in his intermediate poetry class as a sophomore. I took the class because a friend told me I had to study with Jon--he was the best poet and the best teacher on the faculty. That is as may be; I feel lucky to have worked with almost all my teachers, who were, by and large, extremely talented and generous people.

But there was indeed something special about Jon. For one thing, he was so goofy and disorganized. I admit I found him alarming at times--he was a mess in many ways, not just disorganized but slovenly. Our class met once a week-- Tuesdays, I think--at 3:30 in the afternoon; Jon would show up and tell us, as if we couldn't see for ourselves, that he had just gotten out bed. (Back in the early 80s, people wore surgical scrubs as pjs a lot--not fancy ones, just the mint green kind. They worked well for that. Jon would show up to class in a pair of ratty 501s and a scrub top.) But one thing he said that first semester truly raised my eyebrows, and I will remember it my entire life.

At that time, Arizona's two senators were Barry Goldwater, a conservative born in Phoenix, and Dennis DeConcini, a liberal born in Tucson, which is how things used to break down: Phoenix was more conservative; Tucson more liberal. (Neither of Arizona's current senators, McCain or Kyl, were born in Arizona. This makes people like me parents--and me, frankly, even though I don't even live in Arizona right now--a bit skeptical of them.) Anyway, DeConcini is who matters in all this.

One Friday night Jon's young son Bodhi (short for Bodhisattva) had a friend stay over. In the middle of the night, the neighbors had some kind of domestic disturbance that required calling the cops. These two little boys--ten or so--thought it was great that the cops were around because it gave them a chance to be bad in front of authority figures who couldn't do a thing to them, and their way of being bad was to stand in the yard and chant, over and over,

Dennis DeConcini
had a 50 foot weenie;
he showed it to the woman next door.
She thought it was a snake,
and hit it with a rake,
and now it's only five foot four.

Jon told us all this! I was an 18-year-old Mormon, sitting in my seat, going, "Who the hell are these people?" But it's been almost 26 years since I heard that rhyme and I've never forgotten it; unless I get Alzheimer's, I'm pretty sure I never will.

I took five or six other classes with him throughout my undergrad and MFA coursework. I went to see him after my mission and he did something extremely generous and important: He read the poems I gave him and said, "Oh god, these really are good. I was worried that I was remembering your work as better than it really was because I like you. But these really are good. So here's the thing: You need to start calling yourself a poet. Don't say, 'I write poetry;' say, 'I'm a poet.' Because you are a poet." It was things like that that made me loyal and devoted to him, and willing to show up at his office hours--which some semesters he would have on Fridays at 6:30 p.m., to discourage anyone from showing up; but ever dutiful when it came to school work, I'd go anyway.

This is not to say he was always enthusiastic about my work; he said he got tired of reading all my poems about my mission, or "White Mormon Girl Visits Land of Inscrutables," as he put it. Once when I wrote another poem on just that topic and submitted it in workshop, he waited until everyone had commented on the poem, then glared at me across the table--he was seated at the head, I was at the foot--and said, "I despise this poem." That pretty much ended discussion.

After I graduated, I knew better than to ask him to keep in touch, so I'd just send him cryptic postcards (back in the day before email) every so often, because even if he would make no gesture to remain in my life, I wanted to feel that he was, somehow, still a part of my life. I quit that after too long, particularly when he told me that the postcards worried him--I felt sort of guilty for making him worry when his own life was so out of control (and it was).

In a forms class I had with him as an undergrad, he gave us the assignment to write our own epitaph, and he even provided a model: his own, which he said he wanted to be

Here lies Jon
All gone

I fairly copied that, writing

Here lies Holly
By Golly

But I don't want to end with that. I want to end with my favorite poem by him, the one that's probably best known and most often anthologized. I realize I'm violating copyright here, but I'll try to mitigate that by telling everyone to go buy one of his books.

The Secret of Poetry

When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.

I supposed this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning

Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.

When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.

I suppose this error will go on & on.
Mornings I kiss my wife's cold lips,

Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.

I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.

I'd like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty

Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

Read a follow-up on the Poetry Center's Tribute to Jon here.

Posted by holly at 8:07 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2005

A Curmudgeon I Like

The other day I was discussing memorizing things with a friend who noted that I have an exceptionally good memory. This is a gift that has served me well throughout my life: it helped me become "scripture chase champion" (meaning that I could identify a passage of scripture based on one or two key words, then recite it verbatim, more swiftly and more accurately than anyone--what an accomplishment!) when I was in high school; it helped me memorize the discussions in Chinese as a missionary; it helped me get through a bachelor's degree with really great grades and a minimum of studying.

Some things are especially easy to memorize--certain poems or songs, for instances. One of the easiest poems to memorize is This Be the Verse, a bitterly funny poem in iambic tetrameter with simple diction and a straightforward ABAB rhyme scheme. TBtV is one of my favorite poems ever, and my very favorite poem by Philip Larkin, a curmudgeonly British poet whose attention to the intracacies of rhyme and form contrast nicely with a very earthy vocabulary and a sensibility keenly aware of loss. (As Robert Hass writes in Meditation at Lagunitas, "All the new thinking is about loss./ In this it resembles all the old thinking.")

Consider, for intance, Larkin's poem "Sad Steps." It begins with the line, "Groping back to bed after a piss," an occasion that provides the speaker with a view of a brilliant moon. The poem becomes a meditation on the fact that the moon's "wide stare"

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again
But is for other undiminished somewhere.

Larkin doesn't seem like a particularly nice person but he wrote wonderful poetry, even if he is known as the poet of dirty words. If you aren't familiar with his work, check it out.

Posted by holly at 9:28 AM | Comments (2)

September 15, 2005

Venus Pandemos

In 1987, when I was finishing up my bachelor's degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona (at that point I was still primarily a poet), a beloved teacher and friend loaned me a copy of Little Star, Mark Halliday's first book. I loved it. It was one of my major influences. The title poem is about wondering who sang lead on some 1950s pop song. Halliday acknowledges that the poem

is not the first time I've tried to
get a rock-&-roll song into a poem and it won't be
the last; it is my need to call out
This counts too!

After reading Halliday, I began writing all kinds of poems with rock & roll songs in them, or inspired by rock & roll songs; I wrote a poem about the video to Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" and I wrote a bunch of poems about death by hanging inspired largely by "Gallows Pole" by Zeppelin and I wrote a poem called "1812 Overture" but despite the reference to Tchaikovsky the poem is really about how much I love the song "Close to Me" by the Cure, how sad I always was when the song ended, how it was over far too quickly.

Because I was poor, I never bought Little Star; I just returned my teacher's copy after reading it once, then got a copy from the library and kept it until I finished my master's degree four years later. And then it went out of print and I didn't think much about it, aside from the poem "Why the HG is Holy," which is one of my all-time favorite poems.

But a few months ago, I mentioned to Tom how much I loved that book, and as he had a copy, he loaned it to me. And I got to reread a few of the poems I had rather forgotten about, including the longest poem (seven pages) in the collection, which is called "Venus Pandemos."

When I first read that poem, I thought it was funny, mostly because I didn't have much personal reference for what it was talking about. I was an incredibly naive Mormon virgin who had little experience with dating and had never been in love, and though at that point I quit riding the bus to campus because I found enduring the catcalls and whistles I got while I waited at the bus stop on a busy street too upsetting, I still laughed at this poem, thought he was saying something clever. In fact, I once read much of it aloud to one of my friends who ran the women's center before she stopped me, almost heaving with distress. The poem begins

What am I going to do with my desire
for women?

To be more specific, what am I going to do
with my interest in women's bodies?

and continues its exploration of this

energy--
I am a little excited just to describe it--
the quick expert evaluation of
face
breasts
ass
and then the instant summary judgment:
"I crave her"
"I'd take her"
"Maybe if I was a little drunk and she threw herself on me"
or, more often:
"Forget it, honey."

Then he spends a stanza discussing breasts, and another discussing ass, and then wonders "if any intelligent feminists will ever read this poem." Then we get a section with a fairly explicit discussion of sex. He says it's not about conquest; rather,

it's
to do something about
her beauty.

To do something about her beauty!

Is it a defining quality of beauty
that it won't leave us alone?

He also states that

of course what I'm talking about
has nothing to do with rape. (Nothing?)
So I'm left to rely on my technique of
covert ogling-in-passing--
I eat them with my eyes.
--Is it like eating? It's a job of
disposing of them, one by one:

All right, I see that body,
I have seen it.

--Which means, that body is taken care of now,
that body is disarmed, normalized,
brought under control, it is forgivable now:
I have disposed of it through ritual,
the ritual of snapshot glancing, and now
its power is dead.
ah. So is it, then, a kind of murder fantasy?

And ultimately, he acknowledges,

Yes. I guess that's what I'm saying.
--But it's your fault, baby,
for being so GOD DAMN BEAUTIFUL.

As for why he is writing this, it's because

every day
I think about strange women, for quick seconds,
in ways I consider dehumanizing.
Should I be ashamed?
I suspect my sexual fantasies are
among the tamest (most repressed?) anywhere;
and I can claim that my relations with the women I know
are relatively
nonsexist . . .

and he goes on for another page and a half before writing

In 1973 and '74 I worked in a feminist theatre group;
my awareness of the women's anger reached the point where
it seemed a crime for men to whistle at women on the street.
Now I'm not going to say it isn't.
But I'm admitting to an enduring energy in me that says
an attractive woman is not simply one more comrade on earth,
nor is she just another nice thing about life;

an ATTRACTIVE WOMAN is a PROBLEM.

And that's the real end of the poem, despite one final throwaway stanza.

Now, I'm not trying to dismiss Halliday or his work. I still admire a lot of the poems in Little Star and I was very inspired by his most recent book, Jab. I like how straight-forward and energetic his voice is. But when I reread "Venus Pandemon" for the first time in a long time a few months ago, I didn't react to it the way I did at 23. Eighteen years after first reading it, after enduring several incidences of sexual violence, after hearing a boyfriend say to me, "Look, I'm sorry I date-raped you" (which isn't really all that comforting), after being sexually demeaned by men who claimed simultaneously to care about my welfare and to be feminists, I don't find that poem funny any more. And I feel entitled to assert that a man who finds an attractive woman a PROBLEM, is something of a PROBLEM himself.

And as I listened to that panel on male Mormon feminists, I thought about the fact that any discussion of feminism needed to include a discussion of this issue.

Posted by holly at 7:14 AM | Comments (3)