Rejected! #2
Like Breathing — Rejected by Ascent on February 9, 1995
Welcome to the second edition of Rejected! These are poems rejected by journals, in chronological order by response date from earliest to most recent—the diametrical opposite of my series Pub Crawl, which features poems published in journals in the same kind of chronological order. As with my other series, there are personal notes and craft notes. Roll your eyes as much as you like—that’s what Rejected! is all about!
Like Breathing
The fear of death
Shitting
Sleeping
Getting fucked
Mother love?
Trying time and again (failure)
Wishing it were otherwise
Anger/Resentment
Dirty laundry
HungerRejection History
AGNI Review 01/20/95
Ascent 02/09/95
Beloit Poetry 02/23/95
The Bridge 04/03/95
Gettysburg Review 05/17/95
Diagram 12/29/05
roger 02/15/06
Shampoo 03/18/06
Coconut 04/24/06
Rattle 12/01/22
Current publication status: Not published in a journal, anthology, or book
Notes
There oughta be a word for when a writer loves his own work more than most other people do. I love this poem. The list form was a daring choice for me at the time. As a fledgling poet (albeit a long-in-the-tooth fledgling), I leaned heavily on story and music as my poetic “temperaments” (in the sense described by Gregory Orr in his classic craft essay “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” This poem, by contrast, makes me think of the kind of poetry I was exposed to in Ms. Malta’s sixth grade English class, where we used the anthology Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle…and Other Modern Verse (first edition Scott Foresman, 1966), edited by Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders, and Hugh Smith.
Oh, now I remember—The reason “Like Breathing” makes me think of Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle is that it was in that anthology, in Ms. Malta’s sixth grade English class, that I read what I remember as the first poem that ever really moved me, the way Simon and Garfunkel or The Beatles moved me: Dorothy Parker’s “Résumé.”
Résumé Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp; Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.
I suspect I gravitated to “Résumé” as an eleven-year-old boy because it was dark and transgressive, funny and deadly serious, all at the same time. I think that’s how I felt about life. I mean, there’s a reason why
🤷🏻♂️ is my most frequently used emoji.
Yes, I was an accident. 🤷🏻♂️ Yes, my mother considered aborting me. 🤷🏻♂️ Yes, my mother told me she considered aborting me. 🤷🏻♂️ Yes, my mother had uterine cancer and a hysterectomy when I was a year old. 🤷🏻♂️ Yes, my father had a heart attack when I was two. 🤷🏻♂️ Yes, my oldest brother, 15 years older than me, was at constant war with my mother (usually over a car or a girl), and once held her over the sill of an open kitchen window. 🤷🏻♂️ Not to be outdone, she once hurled a nightstand drawer across her bedroom at him. 🤷🏻♂️ Yes, when I was about three, that selfsame brother babysat for me and my eight-year-old brother when my parents where at a shindig at the American Legion Post on Sea Breeze Avenue (my dad was part of the leadership), and my brother and his girlfriend, and his best friend and his girlfriend, presumably got drunk, and definitely tied my eight-year-old brother and me into chairs with rope and threw eggs at us. 🤷🏻♂️ When we were finally untied, dripping in egg yoke and egg white, my eight-year-old brother was so enraged that he thrust his fist through a window, and my 18-year-old brother had to call an ambulance to come stanch the bleeding and bandage his hand. 🤷🏻♂️ Freddie, my developmentally disabled brother—between my other two brothers in birth order—had cerebral palsy and what they used to call cretinism—abnormal mental and physical development resulting from a deficiency of thyroid hormone in the womb. 🤷🏻♂️ Before I was born, Freddie was “placed”—that is, institutionalized—at Willowbrook State School for the Mentally Retarded on Staten Island. 🤷🏻♂️ Robert Kennedy called it a snake pit, and Jacob Javits called it a hellhole. 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️ We visited Freddie at Willowbrook every Sunday from my infancy. As a small child, I would accompany my mom, dad, and brothers to retrieve Freddie from his ward, a large room with high ceilings and metal beds that looked about what you would expect from a former military hospital, with young men, palsied, misshapen, drooling, wailing, chained to radiators, smearing their feces on walls. 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️
Okay, enough. I had no idea I would write that paragraph when I sat down to draft this post. I had no idea the extent to which “Like Breathing” was connected to that itty bitty excerpt of my life story. I certainly wasn’t thinking about those things when I wrote the poem. I was thinking of Dorothy Parker’s “Résumé,” and I wanted to emulate it. And I conceived the notion of writing a list of things that that seemed “as natural as breathing.” I guess “breathing” suggests life, the idea that all the things listed in the poem are part of life. There’s an element of Mikhail Bakhtin’s “bodily grotesque” in “Like Breathing,” but I wrote this years before I knew anything about Bakhtin, the carnivalesque, the Lord of Misrule, and all that jazz. But I seemed already to know it in my bones. And I think I am realizing—tonight, lately, when I read a poem in The New Yorker—that my own vision is quite dark, and that’s okay. That’s who and what I am. I know not everyone can relate. But I also know a lot of people can.
If you liked this post, please consider clicking the ❤️ below. I welcome your comments, too, on the poem itself, or any aspect of this post, or anything you would like to share about the writing or reading of poetry.
I keep thinking of the harrowing paragraph written at the start of the post. I keep seeing it translated into its own “list”; I also keep seeing it as a prose poem — a block of text with very little breathing space that will have the impact of a fist — but a raised fist!