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 14
You feel like you have one foot in the air. Not quite waiting for the other shoe to drop, but close. When you wait for the other shoe, there’s already a shoe on the ground— Something great is about to get shat on— This job, this apartment, this boyfriend, they’re all perfect, so what’s the catch? You’re going to get fired, they’re going to raise the rent, he’s going to turn out to be a lying sonofabitch. That’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. But you— You’re in a different jam. More like a hamster wheel. When you’re running in place, you always have one foot in the air (cf. the pioneering chronophotography of animal locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge). Part of the brownstone fantasy (do you need to explain about the brownstone fantasy somewhere? Stay tuned, you guess) was a mental picture of you sitting in an antique arm chair, sinking into the plush upholstery, sipping coffee in a high ceilinged room with lots of rich dark wood, tall windows with lush plants in macrame hangers. Like the cover of Carole King’s Tapestry, or your brother and sister-in-law’s parlor on Midwood Street in 1970, the house where your own dream was born amid framed Peter Max posters and art books and shelves full of record albums— The Concert for Bangladesh, The Divine Miss M— and the scent of dried eucalyptus on a table in the foyer just inside the stoop. That’s both feet on the ground— That’s off the hamster wheel— But you, despite everything you’ve got, all you’ve accomplished— You’re still running in place, for now.
Wow. I’m listening to The Divine Miss M right now, as I write this post, because I just added that line to the poem, and I had to research it on Spotify. It’s so amazing. Imagine me—as I imagine myself—listening to this at eleven years old, which is how old I was when The Divine Miss M debuted (“dropped,” as we would say now) in 1972. It is so amazing. I know I said that already. But I have to say it again. The scope of it. From the 1929 song “Am I Blue” to the 1969 “Superstar” written by Bonnie Bramlett and Leon Russell (which I know primarily from the 1971 recording by the Carpenters). And of course, “(You Got to Have) Friends,” Midler’s breakout 1973 hit.
Imagine how it would have affected me then. I mean it—Please, imagine it. Because I’m not sure I can even imagine it, let along describe it. But I know I turned out to be who I turned out to be; and I cannot help but believe, whether I remember every minute detail or not, that who I am was born largely in Kathy and Henry Broder’s brownstone at 133 Midwood Street in Brooklyn, NY, in those years when we gathered there for holiday meals, and sat shiva there for my father in July 1972, and where I marveled at my infant nephew in 1976, in the backyard with the stockade fence, where I rendezvoused with my family after watching Operation Sail, the procession of tall ships in Jamaica Bay, in the shadow of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, with my childhood best friend Timothy Yee, in celebration of The Bicentennial.
Not sure where I’m going with this, especially as I am drunk and stoned—two things I did not get very much during my marital life, but which I get quite a bit in my post-marital life.
Okay, let’s stay on topic.
☞☞☞Here comes the…both craft and autobiographical stuff?☞☞☞
So here’s what’s interesting to me about this poem.
I first drafted it on October 14, 2020, as part of my “First Thing in the Morning” poem-a-day writing project. Back then it was one and done; I never returned to it. This past spring, I was scheduled to read at Gerald Wagoner’s “Cormorants” reading series in Gowanus, and I decided I would read some of my “First Thing in the Morning” poems. It felt dicey to me, because most of them touched on the deterioration of my marriage, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to share about that in public (as opposed to, say, at an Al-Anon meeting). But I put on my big boy pants and chose ten of these poems to revise and read that day. The thing is, I revised them as prose poems. The reason I did this is that, as I set out to revise, I could not hear any music in these poems, nor could I infuse them with music, the way Stephen Sondheim might turn the 1955 Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night into the Broadway musical A Little Night Music. My music was gone.
You can find one of the resulting prose poems here, where I started sharing the prose versions in my New Poems series here on Substack. But then something happened—My verse chops started to return! Remember those episodes of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, where Elizabeth Montgomery twitched her nose and nothing happened, or Barbara Eden crossed her arms and nodded, and nothing happened? (I loved those episodes, by the way, the way I loved superhero origin stories: Doc Bruce Banner, pelted by gamma rays, turns into The Hulk.) That’s how I had felt for many years.
But at services for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, just three weeks ago, I had a thought about how I wanted to hold my ex-husband’s hand, and I pulled my phone out and entered the following into my Notes app:
It could be summed up in five words: I liked holding his hand.
Oh my! It was like Samantha twitched her nose and Darrin stopped being a frog and turned back into a man! I will share the resulting poem in a future New Poems post, but let me give you just a taste of what I tasted as I turned that on-the-fly note into a draft poem—
As the cantor intoned the first prayer tonight, my mind/body reached for your hand, I wanted to take your hand, hold your hand— which is not to say I still loved you; rather, it meant you were a craving, a kind of habit, something I wanted even though it was bad for me, something I did even though it hurt me.
So I twitched my nose, so to speak, and the version you see at the top of this post is the result. This is major. I believe it is a sign that I am healing from the “dis-ease” I suffered in my marriage.
☞☞☞Here comes…some more craft stuff?☞☞☞
Above I guess I touch on how a poet might move between verse and prose and back again. I don’t think I can really articulate here all I think and feel about this issue. So I will just say that, for me, when poetry is at its most incantatory—which is the mode that makes me come most alive as a poet—it is in verse. When I switch to prose, the poem can be just as meaningful to me, but it no longer feels like an incantation. (For whatever reasons, my several poems that involve the recounting of dreams fall into this category.) My best prose poems for sure have a profound intensity of their own—but it’s an intensity different than that of verse. And it’s not just a matter of line breaks. In fact, it is not even primarily a matter of line breaks. For me, it is always about music.
Whether I lineate from scratch, or lineate after I already have a prose draft, ha'ikar—that’s Hebrew for “the main thing” (cf. this popular Hebrew song)—is music. I’ve been using the word “music” a lot in recent posts. I feel somewhat…fraudulent?…using this term: What—after all—the fuck do I know about music? And yet…. I think I may know quite a bit about music, after all. I’ve been singing my whole life. I thought I might include here a list of recording artists with whose recordings I sing along on an almost daily basis—but any list would not be fair, because I just keep connecting with new vocalists, male, female, nonbinary—pop, rock, hip hop. Etc. Suffice it to say I am always singing, even—perhaps especially—in the street, the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, out loud. Shameless (although I do wonder now many people think I’m crazy—which I may well be).
So “craft stuff” is supposed to be “news you can use,” and I don’t know if I have achieved that here. So let me say this: Do you sing? Do you sing along with any artists on the radio, or on the streaming? Take that sensibility into your poetry. Try to imagine singing your poem. Try to imagine your poem as a song. What kind of song is it? Pop? Rock? Hip-hop? Opera? Jazz? Saloon? Try lineating it that way. What do I mean by that? Fuck if I know. Just do it. See what happens.
For me, an important moment in my induction into the world of song was hearing Billie Holiday sing “Easy Living” on this album. I mean, the whole thing is amazing, but for some reason, “Easy Living” stood out for me. That, and the very last song on the album, “Big Stuff,” by written by Leonard Bernstein for the Jerome Robbins dance, Fancy Free. I was just blown away. Well, and, while we’re at it, I hear a similar music in the prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Or at least, I did when I was 18 years old. And that’s all you need.
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