New Poems is a series of poems written or revised in the past five years. For me, that qualifies as “new.” Poems in this series have not been published in journals or even submitted to journals. It’s unclear where they stand on the continuum from first draft to finished. All I can attest is that they exist as files on a computer.
Diary of a Doorknob / October 10 You and he have already had your coffee and bagels with cream cheese and his hand-crafted gravlax, and you completed the Sunday Times crossword. Louise Glück won her Nobel Prize this week. All the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens went back into lockdown because they did not wear masks or practice social distancing. You’re gloomy today because sometimes doing the puzzle with him makes you more sad than happy, and this was one of those days. He sits at the head of the table while you prepare breakfast by yourself. He explains to you that πr2 is the area of a circle. He mocks Bob Dylan’s receipt of a Nobel Prize for literature. He mocks Yoko Ono for something or other. He refuses to fill in crossword entries that you are quite sure of. You know you are being petty about all of this. As your 12-Step literature says, Our thinking becomes distorted by trying to force solutions, and we become irritable and unreasonable without knowing it. You try to let go, maybe even let God, but it’s a slow process, easier said than done. You dreamt last night that he asked you for a divorce. It was a strange dream, and somehow wonderful. He was in love with somebody else, or maybe you were—It doesn’t really matter which.
Notes
First, a note about the series title. You may have received an earlier version of this post in an email, with the series title “Days of 2020” followed by a date. That was a nod to Constantine Cavafy, who wrote a number of poems entitled “Days of” plus a year. They were generally poems about a homoerotic male object. There’s a bit of irony, perhaps, in the fact that these are mostly “out of love” poems. In any case, I decided that “Days of 2020” was kind of boring and generic for these poems, so I’ve changed the series title to the more provocative and evocative “Diary of a Doorknob.”
A note about the second person address. I came to poetry late—at about the age of 30. My earliest poems were poems of direct address to a male object of erotic desire. That conceit became very central to my conception of myself as a poet. It was not exclusive by any means, but it was fundamental. For a time, I wrote poems of direct address to the man who became my husband. Then, for complex reasons that I will not go into here, I lost that voice. I could no longer address my husband as an object of erotic desire, nor could I address any other man as an object of erotic desire. At the same time, I felt that I had lost myself, my sense of self, my sense of my own autonomous existence. I thought that writing poems addressed to myself might help me recover myself, rediscover myself, reconnect with myself. I think it helped. In any event, the marriage has now left, and has to a great extent taken that particular problem along with it, both for my writing and for my life writ large. But the trace of that experience, those years in the wilderness of self-abnegation, lives on in these poems.
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I also had a daily writing practice in 2020, something I decided to do well before the pandemic. I just finished, three days ago, going through that material--it was a lot; I only missed two or weeks worth of days--deciding what to discard and what to revise into a working first draft. In revising, I set myself some constraints. First, I worked on the poems in strict, monthly chronological order. In other words, I did not start on May 2020 until I finished with April. I did, though, sometimes skip around within a month in order to make a poem. So whatever I wrote on April 5th might be combined with what I wrote on April 17th--and sometimes one poem comes from three or even four of my daily entries. Second, if the revision process made it clear that I needed more content, I allowed myself to go as far back into the past as I wanted, but not into the future. This way I did not introduce into the poem something that did not happen until after the original piece was written. The next step, though I am going to wait a little bit since I have other projects to work on, will be to see which of these first working drafts I can move on to the next stage. Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be my next book.