The Secret Life of This Life Now #26
26th in a series of 31 brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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Another Thursday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. Let those remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, sit in that box. I’m here to finish what I started, to tell a story that may resonate for some of you reading this. That being said…
You can get both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!
This is post #26 in the series. We go through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet, and chat a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.
We are up to the fifth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The fifth poem in this section is “The Old Meaning/Moaning Dichotomy.” Here are the first two and a half stanzas of this poem in eight quatrains.
On bad days I seek a theoretical basis
for my actions, a point of origin, a strategy,
a thread to pull me through,
family tree, concentric circles,dates of birth and death, lists. Because
meaning is not so much in things
as in the story the thing implies,
like melody implies harmony,a setting that makes the pattern perceptible,
lets the tune make sense.
“Meaning/Moaning” (as I affectionately call it for short) was written prior to 1995, and was published in spring 2006 in the now-defunct roger, a journal edited by undergraduates at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island.
The genesis for the title, if not the poem overall, was an article in The New York Times magazine of February 9, 1986, about the so-called Yale Critics—Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. Titled “The Tyranny of the Yale Critics,” the article included the opening sentence of Harold Bloom’s essay “The Breaking of Form,” which was included in Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), an influential volume that included essays by Bloom, De Man, Hartman, Miller, and Jacques Derrida. It reads
The word meaning goes back to a root that signifies “opinion” or “intention,” and is closely related to the word moaning.
I loved that idea—of the ineffable and inescapable connection between body and mind, feeling and thought, emotion and intellect. Now, mind you, I read that article in that issue of the Times magazine in 1986—I may still have it somewhere in my file cabinet. What’s more, I was a total theory head in college (1979–83), and I know I read Deconstruction and Criticism from cover to cover at some point, although that might not have been until the mid 90s. So this idea was in my noggin for a long time.
So it feels inevitable that at some point I would write a poem about those mind/body, thought/feeling, emotion/intellect dichotomies, and allude to the Bloom quote in the title.
But enough about that for now. Last time, I left you hanging just as I was about to hit on the man who would become my husband, whom I spied from across a crowded room at a journal launch party at The New School in March of 2000. Just as the boyfriend in San Juan was planning to leave his tropical island for my Manhattan island. And just as I was letting the dog-walking photographer from Mexico—with a heart as big as Mexico City—slip through my fingers.
As you may remember, I walked up to poets Mark Bibbins and Ravi Shankar and said—suggestively, I will admit; seductively, some would argue—“Hi, guys. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
The precocious poet, J, would later describe that moment by saying he had not worn his contacts that night, nor was he wearing his glasses at the moment, and so when he looked up at me (I’m an inch taller), my face alone was clearly visible against the background of the out-of-focus room. I remember it as everything else fading away in the glow of his expectant smile. “Hi,” he said, not totally without his own hint of seduction.
In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, neither of us could restrain ourselves from referring to that moment as love at first sight. We knew from that first glance—at once improbable and inevitable—that we were destined for each other.
We were glued to each other for the next couple of hours, talking—well, he mostly talked and I mostly listened, raptly—sitting through the reading (during which he seemed to have some insult-comic-of-poetry barb to hurl at every reader, quietly leaning over to vituperate in my ear), and dancing afterwards to the DJ’s tunes. Given that it was 2000 at an MFA program in NYC—with a lot of gay people—the music was probably some mix of Third Eye Blind, REM, Madonna, B-52s, Pet Shop Boys, Clash, Britney, Whitney, and Cher. In any event, suddenly he was gone. When he came back a moment later, he was wearing his pea coat and thrusting a business card at me, the back of the card face up so I could see that he had written his number on it, and then he was across the room and out the door.
When I got home—the incredible rent stabilized apartment that the social worker boyfriend had snagged for us in the prewar building off Columbus Circle—I wrote, by hand, in my composition notebook journal, “I met this cute poet tonight at the LIT party at The New School. He’s in the MFA program at NYU. He was kind of sassy, but I liked it.”
And…that’s a good place to leave it for today. As many of you know, there’s more. Quite a bit more. À la prochaine.
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We have to talk about Deconstruction sometime. It was the hallmark of my college education!