The Secret Life of This Life Now #29
29th in a series of 31 brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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Another Monday, another semi-weekly edition of Secret Life. I started this series to sell off the remaining 90 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. Now I simply want to finish what I started 28 essays ago—telling a story of love and loss that some of you may find intriguing. 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 #29 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 eighth poem in the final section of the book, “This Life Now.” The eighth poem in this section is “Confession.” In keeping with recent Secret Life practice, here is the poem in full.
Confession
Sometimes, when people are hungry,
I still want to eat; when they are naked I want to dress.Sometimes, even though people are homeless,
I prefer to sleep in my own bed,and when there’s a war, I certainly don’t want to fight.
Sometimes, knowing there is suffering,even the worst kind of oppression all over the world,
I don’t want to bear witnessor speak out or be counted or make amends. Sometimes
when you are gentle I want it rough and when you’re hereI wish you were gone; sometimes I want him back
and it has nothing to do with the hungry,the naked, the homeless; sometimes it has nothing to do—
nothing whatsoever to do with you.
Another poem about the now ex-husband. But also about Tony, who is the “him” of the penultimate couplet. I wrote this in Marie Howe’s workshop in September 2003, my first semester in the MFA program at NYU. A couple of months before The New York Times published my letter in defense of same-sex marriage, the letter where I said, “I want my partner to get my Social Security check when I die,” which was true. But clearly, even three years into the relationship, there were flaws in the weave.
I was somewhat surprised that my ex never asked me about the sentiments behind this poem. Then, in the summer of 2018, I was a last-minute stand in for another poet at the legendary Monday night poetry series at KGB Bar on E. 4th Street, the series started by Star Black and David Lehman in 1997, and in 2018 co-curated by my ex-husband. Walking towards the F Train after the reading, he said to me, “That reading sounded very angry,” or words to that effect. I answered with a vague, “Oh, did it?” or something like that, but the fact is, I had very consciously poured anger into that performance that evening, and I remember doing it most vividly when reading “Confession.” By that time, there were a lot of flaws in the weave.
Speaking of weaving, in these last few installments of Secret Life, we’re sort of weaving together two sections of one timeline. The timeline described in the poems, which is childhood to 2005 or so; and the timeline of that life which is described in the book itself as “this life now,” from about 2000 to the time the book was finally published—or some version of it, at least—in 2014.
I ran through some elements of this condensed bio in an earlier Secret Life, but in a vein both more whimsical and more wistful. Here I just want to bang out the facts—and more about me than about us. The precocious poet and I meet, date, commit, and get married between 2000 and 2004. I get my MFA in poetry at NYU in 2005. When I resume my long-deferred PhD in classics at the CUNY Grad Center in the fall of 2005, I begin adjuncting at Brooklyn College, which I continue doing continually, including summers, through 2011. I defend my dissertation—Mensura Incognita: Queer Kinship and Camp Aesthetics in Juvenal’s Ninth Satire—in August 2010.
We almost split up that summer, but we win by a nose and, in fact, I recall 2010 to 2013 as a truly lovely stretch in our marriage. I interview for classics jobs at national academic conferences (the American Philological Association, later rechristened the Society for Classical Studies, primarily because nobody knew what “philological” meant by then, which made marketing the organization to younger students and scholars difficult), but fail to get any second interviews. I think it’s a combination of the Great Recession, ageism, and a syndrome I call What-The-Fuck-Is-He-Talking-About (with reference to my dissertation that was too cutting edge for most search committees’ comfort).
In October of 2010, my ex, whose six years of grad school funding had ended that spring, received a fateful phone call on which he was veritably begged to start working immediately as interim writing center director at a local community college. A new hire had not worked out, the writing center was in the lurch, and they knew my ex from his years as a fellow in the school’s writing across the curriculum program (part of his grad school funding). He had had other plans (we’ll save the details of that for the memoir), but those plans did not come with a salary, so he opted for the writing center job—which contributed mightily to the blissful sense of forward motion in our relationship at this time, after a perilous brink.
At the same time, I land a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC, for the 2011–2012 academic year. The facts that (1) I lived in student housing and (2) did not drive in a city that was about as pedestrian unfriendly as you could get and (3) did not seem to know how to cultivate or nurture meaningful relationships with colleagues—All of those things made for a difficult nine months. But I loved the job. I loved teaching. I taught Latin 101; an upper level undergraduate class in Plato’s Symposium; Introduction to Classical Mythology; and a graduate seminar in research skills that was required for all students entering the MFA or PhD program in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (which was chaired by a Paul Allen Miller, one of the pivotal mid-career classics scholars of that era, and the guy who gave me the job).
When the spring semester ended in May 2012, my ex drove down to take me home, and the road trip from Columbia to New York—which included my first-ever breakfast at a Waffle House—may have been the best, most loving, most memorable 48-72 hours of our entire relationship. We loved each other so much that weekend.
That summer of 2012, I teach in the Summer Latin Institute, a ten-week beyond-the-intensive team-taught program offered jointly by Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center, the program in which I first studied Latin in 1982, and to which it was always my dream to return as faculty. There was a toxic fellow faculty member with whom I could not restrain myself from tussling, and so, on balance, it turned out to be a pretty awful experience—but it was an awful experience that fulfilled a cherished dream, so I was grateful for it, and remain so to this day.
During Hurricane Sandy, we hole up in our apartment—Bed-Stuy is high ground, and is not affected by flooding or power outages—and I proofread and copyedit my ex’s dissertation on molested boys in the postwar gay novel. It’s another very close, very loving, very sweet time that encourages my belief that maybe we will get through this—whatever “this” is, exactly—after all.
In the fall of 2012, I resume teaching at Brooklyn College, now as an adjunct assistant professor. I’m also teaching the noncredit basic Latin class at the CUNY Grad Center, designed for graduate students in the humanities who need to pass a Latin proficiency exam as part of their degree requirements. Meanwhile, my ex gets a full-time, tenure-track position as an assistant professor of English at the same community college where he has been directing the writing center while finishing his dissertation. We did it! Yes, I say WE—WE DID IT. From the moment I met my ex, I had a sense that my job was to love him, nurture him, and support him while he went from MFA to PhD to full-time academic job. And now he had it. I some respects, I felt that my job was done.
That’s a nice note on which to end this, the longest Secret Life I have written so far, by far. In Thursday’s installment, you will learn about how This Life Now hooked up with its publisher in 2013 and made its debut in 2014.
À la prochaine.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fire-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.
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