The Secret Life of This Life Now #19
19th in a series of brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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If I can coerce 100 or so people to order a copy of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, the book will be blissfully out of print. This essay is a self-serving ploy to pique your curiosity so you will snag one for yourself.
To sweeten the pot, I am offering you both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fireside-sale price of $10.00, including shipping within the US. Click here to order yours now!
This is post #19 in this series. We’re going through the book poem by poem, reading a snippet, and chatting a bit about the world of the poem or the world of the poet at the time he wrote the poem.
Still in the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of the book. The next poem in this section—19th in the book overall—is “Investiture.” Below is a snippet from the first half of this 16-line poem.
When I turn the next corner,
Batman casts a shadow over moonlit Gotham,
and climbing down the stairs
to the cool sand beneath the boardwalk,
I am Orpheus descending,
down on my knees before you can say blow me.A poem about Greek mythology and sex under the boardwalk in Brighton Beach—Now that’s eclectic, don’t you think?
Investiture is a medieval term that referred to the ceremony in which a priest or other religious official first donned the vestments (garments) of their new office—literalizing the more modern idea of “clothes make the man.”
In classical philology, the term “poetic investiture” refers to the process whereby the Muses—as the mythological sources of poetry—invest a poet with their poetic powers. Later in this poem, there is a moment of the speaker’s poetic investiture that is much more parental-advisory–worthy than the scene from Hesiod’s Theogony on which it is modeled, where the Muses on Mt. Helicon invest Hesiod with his poetic powers by bopping him over the head with a laurel branch. But if you want to read that salacious passage, you gonna have to buy the book.
I gotta run to therapy now, so this edition of Secret Life is sharply curtailed. As they used to say during commercial breaks on The Love Boat, “more love to come.”
À la prochaine.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.
Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.
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I have to say that I really am enjoying this and it was nice to think about investiture this morning