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Letters 1990-1991Jack and CS fell out of touch for a few years but in January of 1990 he sent a copy of a learning booklet he’d written and they enthusiastically resumed their correspondence. January 26, 1990 Dear Jack, I’m still not used to typing “1990” everywhere, are you? I feel I have marched into the true future. 2000 is an even scarier prospect; that’s the year I turn 50, and you, if I remember correctly, will be a wise 75. I’m hyper-aware of chronological age lately, a consequence of turning 40 this year. People tell me I do not look my age. (Yet, I keep thinking.) I sat right down and read your learning booklet. I admire the way you set goals for yourself, and go for them, even when there are hurdles. As for me, poetry has always been my life but now it is truly my life’s work. This is not to say I have been as prolific as I’d wish—there are always dry periods—but since 1986 there have been some amazingly fertile times. I have been persistent and professional about submitting work to the little magazines, and have a growing list of publication credits. . . . . Less lovely news: attempting to break into the Paris Reviews of the world has turned into a difficult, disappointing and time-consuming pursuit. I try these well-known, paying markets now and then and sometimes do get the personal replies that are supposed to make one joyous. But no publishing interest yet. When I read these rags, I wonder what publishing criteria they are using because, in my particular and perhaps jaundiced view, much of what they wind up publishing is a yawn. As I wrote in my Christmas card, I am working for QBank now. I’ve been here for almost four years, working as an administrative assistant in bankcard marketing. Working here has been an education. Because I had only worked in publishing and non-profit, I had never before seen a well-run, well-managed company up close. If Simon and Schuster had been as supportive of their younger contingent as QBank is to theirs, I’d be an editor still. QBankers work hard. You and I don’t know from careers, compared to these guys. We are talking 8 AM to 8 PM, without a lunch break. We are talking about dawn trips to satellite facilities all over the country and beyond. We are also talking numbers—the innumerate need not apply. And it doesn’t get much cushier as you move up the ladder; the hardest working people are the top people. For them, it is literally a 20-hour day sometimes. People who sleep need not apply. It’s less of a time crunch for me, but I do have to put in my share of overtime. At least I get paid for it. I never have before!
I do love our building! I work on the 29th floor, and there is a resplendent view of Manhattan, lots of natural light, and plenty of free food—leftovers from the big-deal breakfast and lunch meetings. Mercifully, there is also a fitness center and just this week I have been trying out the treadmills and the Lifecycles and the weight machines. I have been lifting hand weights for a year now and have never felt stronger. Still, I have written a poem called Adipose Ode, in praise of body fat, and really do wish that the marshmallow look would become fashionable so I can sit down and relax. John and I are still a diehard couple, and still occupying the same roachy flat only now it is a roachy co-op and we are paying through the nose. You wouldn’t recognize the public areas of our building, which are painted fresh and new, with shiny marble lobby tiles and carpeted hallways. And all our new neighbors are beautiful, Lycra-clad people: a soap opera heart-throb, a would be opera singer, and now Amanda McKerrow, a prima ballerina for The American Ballet Theatre. Well, a lot has happened since we saw each other last, including some sad tales involving my elderly mother and a scary car accident (we flipped over three times but John and I were not physically harmed). The first version of my letter described all that, but I have decided not to wax confessional in this first missive after such a long hiatus. Besides, on the whole my life is going well. John is doing well too. He’s more handsome than ever and has lost scads of weight on my diet. He goes to the YMCA two-three times a week to work out. He’s still working for a PR direct mail firm. I have not been in touch with MLB lately, but still think of her, of course. Back in the seventies, she inspired a poem of mine called Off Duty, which will be published in an anthology on the theme of women and work this spring. What else is new? My teeth! I may not have gotten around to an apartment renovation but I have had dental renovation. No more weird Picasso angles; they’re straight and they’re reasonably white and I paid for them myself. Teeth! I never told you but I was always mortified by my strange, Bronx teeth. God gave her strange, cubist choppers. Am I a poet, or what? Anyway, it’s nice to write to you. I miss doing it, and don’t see any reasons why we can’t be pen pals again . . . . May 24, 1990 Dear Jack, Well, I’ve done it again—waited ridiculously long before answering my only pen pal’s letter! I started this letter in April and here it is May 24th. I try to sneak in letter-writing at the office (I am a slave to my Wang when it comes to writing anything) and just haven’t had any sneakable time lately. By now you must be a grandfather; please tell me all about it! Have you been to the upper west side lately? So many of our old eateries and watering holes are gone. O’Neal’s, where we once had lunch at a cozy side-by-side banquette, is long gone. Anita’s Chili Parlor is history, though a place called The Blue Moon is carrying on the Tex-Mex tradition. Miss Grimbles, our cheesecake refuge, is now a bank, Il Cantone a trendy shoe store. It’s getting harder and harder to find dinner, unless you’re craving shoe leather! Speaking of dinner, John and I just got back from Florida where we feasted on many a three-courser. We went to an amusing restaurant in Lake Buena Vista called The Outback, where the Australian theme is carried out to a fare-thee-well and the food is scrumptious. Allow me to elaborate. I had an ornate, multi-colored salad, followed by buttery filet mignon, a stir-fry of gingery veggies and a puffy baked potato, all washed down with a velveteen Cabernet Sauvignon. For dessert, there was airy white chocolate mousse in a dark chocolate shell. Ooooh. (If my description is pornographic, chalk it up to years of weight watching!) The Outback is a favorite of the senior prom set so the meal was especially festive—all these gorgeous, glitzed-up young girls kept making grand entrances in slinky black gowns of a sort that would have gotten me expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School. Perhaps Bob Mackie, dresser (or undresser) of Cher and Co., has branched out into prom wear.
Now I’m back in Reality World and suffering a massive vacation withdrawal. Reading over a copy of my last letter, I see I have bombarded you with tales of my writing life. What you should know is that I rarely talk about this stuff—I don’t even ask John to read my new poems anymore. So when I write to you about poetry, I am writing to my only confidante in these matters. Anyway, this time there’s little to report on the writin’ front. The most interesting thing that happened is that I heard from a Canadian poet, Tom Wayman, with whom I had corresponded ten years ago. He had read “Meditation on a Typo” when it came out in The Little Magazine way back when, and, also way back when, asked to see more “work” poems for an anthology he was putting together. It is finally coming out and he is including three poems of mine from that old batch! The book is being published by Harbour, a Canadian house. A limited achievement, a limited life. Coming to terms with one’s limits, one’s worldly insignificance, one’s wrong turns—surely these are some of the tougher hurdles of adult life. I might have “gone farther” by now but I’m a coward in a lot of ways, I lay low, except when I’m writing. I even confessed to this in a recent cover letter submitting my manuscript to a poetry contest. I got so bored with all the self-promotional dreck one winds up writing in those letters, I switched gears and announced: “Basically, I’m just an ordinary person from an ordinary background who can’t quite explain how poetry came to ignite her. When I was an editor, I was a generous one, but otherwise my virtues are few. Poetry is the only place where I have ever dispensed with vanity or demonstrated courage. It’s my only clean act, and my salvation.” The truth, that. In the meantime, I remain a hard-working, occasionally grumpy secretary bird! . . . . Have you been Twin-Peaking? What weird and wonderful TV! New York Magazine says that the actor who plays the FBI agent makes Wasphood seem spooky. (You make it seem alternately rock-solid certain and devil-may-snare; simple and complicated; nervous and mild.) Here’s a copy of my poem “Carnal Beauty” (don’t say I didn’t warn you!) and a couple of others I thought might speak to you. Before I sign off, let me thank you for your wonderful letter which was so affirming and warm and peace-imparting. July 19, 1990 Dear Jack, See! I can write you a letter even when “the ball isn’t in my court.” The reason? Finally there’s more to write about than boring work stuff. I just finished a stint of Grand Jury duty. Allow me to resurrect an inborn Irish brogue: sure ’twas a grand jury! Every day, for four weeks, I ventured downtown, where the air wafts with the wet ink of a thousand police blotters, entered a busy old building known as 100 Centre Street, and took Seat No. 8 in the No. 3 Grand Jury theater along with 22 other conscripted souls. It was not our job to rule on guilt or innocence but rather to indict, to affirm that (1) a crime has been committed and (2) a probable culprit has been identified. We base our decisions on the testimony of witnesses called by the assistant DAs who usually call in the complainant, the arresting officer, and perhaps a witness; in only four cases did the defendant choose to testify, though that is his right. Our other power was to dismiss a case if, say, there was a paucity of evidence. In four weeks we dismissed only one case—one out of 85! Testaments of misery and mayhem!—that’s what I listened to every day. An old Greek beaten to the ground for his money (the perps found only cigarettes). A Chinese woman, the proprietor of a bar, roughed up and robbed on 42nd Street. A down-and-out but dignified black woman slashed with a machete, I won’t tell you where, by a boyfriend. Many car thefts, many weapons charges, shoplifting, bail jumping, drunk driving, gay bashing, chain snatching, pickpocketing, harassment—you name it. The funniest case was on day one: from Barney’s did a shrewd operator filch a crocodile bag valued at $3,200. Had it been valued $201 less, it would have been Grand Larceny in the 4th degree rather than the 3rd degree. That irony, along with the preposterous price of the purse, struck as all as mighty droll. Occasionally, my fellow jurors got on my nerves. Most of the cases were cut and dried but we’ve indicted some cases for what I feel were exaggerated and unjust charges. For example, we indicted two guys for attempted armed robbery when never, at any point during the confrontation, did they try to take money or goods. Nor were they armed; their claim to have a weapon was a sham. They harassed someone, yes. Nevertheless, it was clear to me that the crime of attempted armed robbery simply did not happen and I was most distressed by all the other hands shooting up to indict, and in the first degree yet. I have noticed, of late, that I have become more conservative than I once was, a fact that worries me. But next to most of these jurors, I was a regular Joan Baez. What a relief! Occasionally I even found myself siding with a “perpetrator.” I must be an outlaw at heart. Oh, Jack, so many of the criminals are young these days. In the four cases where defendants came to testify, three were only 16 or 17 years old! And boys mature more slowly than girls—these kids looked like babies. You wanted to tuck them into bed not stash them into jail! I read the perfect book to accompany my tour of duty: Tom Wolfe’s BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. Have you gobbled this one yet? The hyperbole, the satire, O tempora, O mores! At first, I berated the book for its cartoonish characters but it soon won me over. The essence of the Big Apple is definitely there. (Essence of Big Apple: bus exhaust, bum piss, police ink and $200 perfume!) But what do you care about our town now that you’re safely retired in sylvan Ridgewood, NJ? Or do you miss the hoopla, grotesqueries, and Essence of B.A.? I will soon be getting a dose of fresher air myself. The cards products division, my steadfast QBank employer, is having an off-site meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and I’ll be going. They use an annual off-site to build enthusiasm for the next year’s strategic goals. It is also a morale-boosting, team-building experience. Eh bien, c’est ca pour maintenant. Hope you’re having a great summer and are going to Ghost Ranch as you love to do. When you get tired of retired freedoms and book authoring, may I suggest a diversion: grand jury duty. August 6, 1990 Dear Jack, Wyoming hath transformèd me! I went white-water rafting, hiked in the Grand Tetons, ate elk—and the days lasted form 5:30 AM to 1 or 2 the next night. And I discovered I am not so cowardly after all. My sister administrative assistants, those who have been through these off-sites before, tend to lament the volume of work that has to be done. Personally, I can’t complain. You do a lot of running around, you collate and distribute mass quantities of stuff, you send and receive faxes (these fax machines are taking over the world), you work the phones, maybe you do some typing, but it beats being in an office! Somewhere between 1 and 3 PM all that stops and you go out and play. On Monday afternoon, we were divided into camera teams with certain themes to photograph around. I named our team “The Not Ready for Prime Time Camera Crew.” One theme was “the bottom line” so you can imagine where our sick minds led us. Yes, four denim backsides were snapped in close-up! For “Executive Decision,” we posed one of our lawyers in front of a sign reading “Ladies” and “Gents,” slung a purse over his shoulder, and posed him with a puzzled, pondering look. For “Innovation,” I was snapped on my knees by a door, using a QBank Preferred Visa as a burglar’s tool. This was all organized by an outside firm called Odysseum which compiled everybody’s work into an amusing slide show for the final evening. The hands-down winner was a photo taken in the hotel bar: four brands of QBank credit cards propped up on four beer pulls to illustrate “service quality.” A merry time was had by all! On Monday night a guest speaker, a new-age sort, gave a rambling talk that centered around fire-walking. I don’t know where they found this guy. Fearless leader Rich is an ex-marine and definitely not into that kind of thing. Then it was a four course dinner followed by a jaunt into Teton Village for some quaffing and dancing at The Mangy Moose. I drank something called a Deep Throat—Kahlua and vodka, served straight up in a salt shaker, with a dollop of whipped cream on top. I suppose the idea is to chug it down in one deep-throated swallow, but I was good and sipped this one microscopic drink all evening, with a chaser of spring water. Despite the day’s frenzy, I managed only four hours sleep that night—and then it was Tuesday. Basically, I walked around comatose all morning but got a second wind in time for our white-water rafting escapade on the Snake River. I have never seen such a pristine river. Much of the float was on calm water flowing through a wooded canyon. We saw osprey and bald eagles on the way. And it was thrilling to negotiate the rapids, to get jostled, to get soaked. Can you believe I was in the same raft as the aforementioned demigod, Rich? He kept razzing me for not getting wet enough. (I had done my research and perched myself in the relatively dry rear; nevertheless, as far as I was concerned, I was wet enough.)
Next day I went on a Teton hike, a long up-and-down trail partly through a burnt-out ghost forest, partly through a lush pine forest, and along two deserted lakes. Afterward our guide was nice enough to give us a driving tour of the Jenny Lake area of Grand Teton National Park. So we have come to Wednesday night, the final night, the night which started with a Perfect Manhattan (your vice and mine), progressed to champagne, segued into Cabernet Sauvignon, moved on to Lone Star, and ended with Cointreau . . . the night of elk eating . . . of make-your-own-ice-cream-sundaes . . . of the Odysseum slide show lunacy . . . of dancing to a live country-western band at the Ranger Bar in Jackson . . . and of actually getting “hit on” by a fine-lookin’, sweet-talkin’ local fellow with whom I passed for young. Let me tell you, I am still toasty from the memory. So now I am home, it’s Monday, and I’m still tired though it’s a happy tired. More importantly, something clicked in me, out there in Wyoming, and I still hear it clicking. And now to your letter. It was uncanny, getting your letter when my own was sealed and ready to go. By the way, I had forgotten that you wrote a column for Presbyterian Survey. I liked that applause-in-church question, and your answer. The only time we applaud in my church is when the choir sings Handel’s Alleluia Chorus on Christmas and Easter. They do such a valiant job, it seems churlish not to, and it’s always the recessional song. I write “my church” but actually the religious fires seem to have flickered out for me. It’s not that the new faith and hope that took root during those intense years following psychoanalysis have left me; they haven’t. It’s just that my critical faculties eventually returned—poor sermons, uptight priests and antediluvian doctrines began to ruin it for me. Nevertheless, I miss my state of grace. For a while, for two years, there were no bad homilies (the kernels of truth rang out), there were only holy priests, and the church’s arch conservatism seemed irrelevant. It was better then. Concerning psychoanalysis, no, I am not still hurting, praise the lord, and in fact I view it as the pivotal event of my adult life. In the end, the turmoil only helped me as a writer, and a person. Most people only feel such things when they go through a painful divorce, or experience warfare, or suffer a grave illness. I walked through the fire too but unlike the divorcee, the soldier or the cancer patient, I came out entirely intact and that makes me fortunate indeed.
September 11, 1990 Dear Jack, . . . . Yes my letters have been totally “up” and frothing lately! 1990 is turning into a very interesting year. Truthfully, I’d been leading much too placid a life. I needed to, after the turmoil of 1980-1987, a period that started with the couch trip and ended with that car crash I mentioned a few letters back. After all that, my motto was Safety First; I took risks only on the written page. Now I feel like Shirley Valentine in Greece: I’m falling in love with the idea of living. Wyoming was a peak experience because during those few days I felt so many things, I was full of vitality. I have not had as many peak experiences as you have, it seems. Ireland was one. I must have told you that I spent the summer of 1973 there, ostensibly studying Irish drama but mostly having a ripping good time. I have never felt freer: I was 22 and on my own and full of hope. John and I met there, so the trip even changed the course of my life. Now fast forward to Bar Harbor, 1985, when I climbed “Reach Mountain” (actually Beech Mountain). My poem makes the mountain sound steeper and wilder than it is, but the experience was no less crucial. And now Wyoming! It sounds like you’ve been living it up yourself these last few years. A four day rafting trip! Wow! I admire your valor. For me, it would take the utmost valor to do such a thing. I love nature but I require a warm, cozy bed and modern plumbing at the end of the trail. I’m taking a week’s vacation the first week of October. John and I will probably go back to Maine for some fresh air and foliage. He’s been reluctant to drive since the car accident and, in fact, did not do so till two months ago when he rented a car for a business excursion to New Jersey. Last Sunday we finally went out together, a little “trial” drive to Nyack for some antiquing. So now we’re ready for the long trip to Maine (the scene of our mishap). I will visit my mother, and inject myself with a dose of Autumn in New England.
Let me say a few words about the accident, not to burden you but because, in its own way, it too was a peak experience. John lost control of the car as he was trying to pass an RV. Probably he just hit too high a speed for the puny subcompact to handle—an old-model Chevy Nova, not exactly a high performance vehicle. The car began to waver and before we knew it, we were tumbling off the road at warp speed. It was intense in there. I continue to be amazed at my response. I remained calm, incredibly calm. As we were going off the road, I pressed my hands to my face and eyes to protect them, and just rode out the experience. I remember taking a mental inventory, split second by split second: still alive, yep, still okay, not hurt yet, ouch was that my elbow, still that wasn’t so bad, I’m alive, alive, and so on. Since my eyes were shut, mostly I remember the noise—the thundering, crashing sound of grinding metal. Poor John was making a good deal of noise himself. And then suddenly the car stopped hurtling and I looked up to a view of pine trees and weedy earth.
. . . . So you have been studying childhood lately, my favorite topic. To my mind, one of the best writers on the subject these days is Alice Miller, author of THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD and FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. She is a free-thinking shrink and a salient critic of the Freudian legacy which, she would argue, finds fault with children in order to spare parents and keep them idealized in the adult mind. She holds, as I do, that we are born innocent and then become victims of “poisonous pedagogy”—noxious child-rearing practices that shame us and strip us of our natural vitality. Going back a few missives, thank you for your appreciative words regarding the poems. I’m proud of my craft. Also, I have come to accept life as it has been handed to me, and that acceptance permeates the work. I feel this is true even with “Early Lessons,” a series on my childhood. Even when I describe a harsh experience, an acceptance, even an affirmation, underpins the writing, yet I do not compromise or prettify anything. Still, I am fascinated by the idea of writing without affirmation as well. A poet named Sharon Olds inspires and titillates me. She writes about beastly experiences of her childhood with a raw, unrelenting urgency. Like me, she also writes about the body, the flesh, and she is far braver on the subject, sometimes getting so detailed about lines of tartar on the teeth and booze-stained tongues and I wot not what, it makes the reader squirm. In some ways, we are polar opposites, she and I. I love to write in form and use rhyme, for example, and she is mistress of the prose poem and the run-on. She is woman wailing and I am woman singing. Still, I feel a deep affinity for her work. I imagine you are hunkering down now to meet your book deadline, not to mention your weekly workshop readings. Funny, but I remain uninterested in workshops though they are very popular among poets. For me, the process of writing is mine, all mine! I don’t want anyone else’s finger swirling in my creative juices. But you, you love input so here is some from me. Be passionate in your writing. Don’t hold back. Also: experiment with style. I think you latched on to a certain style a long time ago and have been reluctant to try anything new. If there’s a phrase going around (like “kinder, gentler”), avoid using it. That’s too easy. And don’t work to make your paragraphs march ahead like good little soldiers; think of them as liquid things, sluicing happily along. I know what you’re thinking. It’s a good thing she’s no longer an editor, with weird commentary like that! CS told JP that in a previous year she had sent her poem “Keeping the Third Commandment” to the periodical The Christian Century and that she never received the courtesy of a reply. He wrote the editor an audacious letter asking him to do him “a personal favor and wipe a stain from the reputation of your magazine” by reconsidering the poem. JP convinced CS to retitle the poem “At Work on the Sabbath,” because the Catholic and Reformed traditions number this commandment (“Remember the Lord’s Day, to keep it holy”) differently. The Century accepted the poem, as well as several others over the years.
Dear Jack, Your letter to The Christian Century knocked my socks off! What an approach! My ever-so-proper cover letters pale by comparison. I have actually written “I would be honored if you would consider ….” Maybe I will now adopt the Jack approach: Dear Editor, would you do a favor for one of your own raggedy editorial army and rescue these poems from the slush pile? …. Would you stop being oxymoronic and give my work a chance? .… Would you please notice that my stuff is as good or better than Cowlick’s or Peterprick’s or the rest of the dreck you’ve been publishing? ‘Sblood! I’ll bludgeon them into publishing me! As for The Christian Century, whatever happens, happens. A poetry credit there would not impress the literary snoberati—I would simply like to make some contribution to the Christian press and believe their readers would appreciate a poem like that one. Later in life I suspect to be doing much more writing in a religious vein but now, like the early John Donne, I am in my profane period. At least a growing number of secular editors have responded to my work. I have about thirty credits now. I have also completed at least two manuscripts’-worth of publishable poetry and am more pleased with my writing than I ever thought I’d be. January 28, 1991 Dear Jack, . . . . Hey, it worked! You did it for me! As I write these words, I lift a glass of Diet Coke and toast you most exuberantly, huzzah! Sometimes I think it amazing that I try for publication at all. The waiting game bores me, the self-promotion bores me, the ultimate bring-down certainly bores me. For it is a bringdown, to find that something you’ve stitched together so carefully, something that expresses so exactly some piece of your inner being, as poems do, seems to fall on deaf ears or come before blind eyes. Only once in all these years have I gotten reader mail for a poem—and that was “Meditation on a Typo” back in 1980. And, as with the Century, even the editors tend to remain silent. . . . One of the things I loved most about being an editor was getting to know my authors. It is a philosophy that does not hold sway at these little magazines. Still, I do make every effort to get published; that is part of the business of being a poet. The other part I have shirked: i.e., meeting people, joining workshops, giving readings. In high school and college, you could not get me off a stage, I loved being in plays, being in front of people, getting applause. . . . I no longer need or seek applause or prestige or honorifics. It may be a mature stance, but it complicates one’s ambition to perform in public. I want to, but only if I can find a way to really commune with the audience, to get something going that is more than mere performing, that has the sting of sacrament. It’s a tall order, and I’m more than a bit afraid of it. On another topic, I agree with you totally on the subject of “defiant pluralism.” Did you see that article about journalistic no-no’s in the Times on Sunday? It seems reporters have to self-censor constantly lest they use a word or phrase that might “offend.” New York Magazine just did an article about the “thought police” too. It seems university professors are now fair game for every know-it-all sophomore with a chip on her shoulder; some of the best liberal teachers are canceling their signature courses because it’s impossible to teach them without raising the ire of some splinter group. And that ire is fiery. The teachers are picketed, harassed and condemned in school papers. This is the fascism of the left, the article says. I agree. . . . . I’m all for using inclusive language, but I’m a lot less hypervigilant these days. Like you, I’ve grown weary of the antagonism. Speaking of antagonism, here we are at war and it’s so painful and compelling a situation I scarcely know what to say. You were around for W.W. II, but this is the first war I have been “in” on from the start. I was pretty young when Vietnam got going, and that crept up on us. With Desert Storm, we have a true declared war. I had the TV on when the first reports of our bombardments came through. Fear shot through me, and kept shooting through me for days. I had stomachaches, headaches—the whole spectrum of war-torn angst and weltschmerz. (Isn’t German perfect for some things?) . . . . After a year of self-abuse I have quit the fitness center at work. I decided I really don’t like communing with machinery and I don’t like the kind of aerobics classes taught there—fast, repetitive robotic movements done to unrelenting music. The classes were so fast, my heart rate would go through the roof. Now I simply work out at home, at my own pace, to a collection of dance-based videos. You should see Jane Fonda in her latest. She wears a distracting black lace unitard and her new boob job is obvious. What a thing to do, and in your 50’s yet! Even Jane Fonda hates her natural body, it seems. That’s another reason why I quit the gym. Female masochism and self-hatred are so obvious there. For example, women with perfectly nice bodies hide in shame behind giant T-shirts. And I keep overhearing things like “That teacher is great! I was so sore after her class!” I’m agin’ that philosophy. Fitness shouldn’t hurt, it shouldn’t be penitential—but women are always doing penance and why?—for having eaten, and having enjoyed what we’ve eaten. And we’re always at war with our natural lushness and curves. I have read and read and read about this issue! Some theories are political: as we get “bigger” and more successful in the male world, women are expected to get “smaller” in form, as a punishment perhaps, or because the workplace requires us to desex ourselves. Some theories are psychological: we punish ourselves for our hunger because hunger itself is equated with some terrible action or loss—with “sucking our mothers dry” or with horrible greed. Some theories are societal: thin is in and that’s that. All these things come into play and the result can be a living hell for women. I’ll probably never be free of body-obsessing, and I’ll never like the way I look. Some days all I can think of is liposuction! It’s a kind of idolatry, the Baal of the perfect body, and I’m sick to death of it! I must remember the wisdom of my own poem, “Adipose Ode,” with its echoes of my beloved Hopkins: “… feed your body well/ and maybe your soul will increase along with it/ and the world be charged with an adipose grandeur,/ a contentedness, a magnanimity, a benevolent queen-size swell.” How can I be so wise and so stupid at the same time? You write you might actually get involved with a friend’s film project. If the contract goes through, will you be on screen? If so, perhaps you could don natty tweeds and sport that ponytail I keep envisioning you in, now that you are retired and no longer need to wear the hairshirt of conservatism. I’m serious, I really am, stop laughing. February 4, 1991 Dear Jack, . . . . I’ve been wondering how I might tap into the well of your letter when approaching poetry editors. Experience has taught me to tread carefully when writing to them. When I first starting submitting, I sometimes began my letters with “Greetings from the slush pile.” I intended it as a humorous attention getter and an ice breaker, and hoped it expressed some empathy with the reader’s lot. Well! One editor scolded me for assuming she regarded her submissions as mere slush! Editors, especially young ones, can be quite earnest about their calling. I decided not to risk offending by sounding flip. How writers agonize over these things! Meanwhile, it is questionable whether one needs to send a cover letter at all. Some poetry editors don’t care to receive them; letters only add to the bulk on their shelves and the poems are supposed to speak for themselves anyway. O the po life ain’t no good life but it’s my life. March 13, 1991 Dear Jack, Congrats on your penultimate chapter. Pretty soon you’ll be writing “The End.” What a triumphant occasion that must be! Completing a poetry manuscript—which is really a matter of shuffling and reshuffling short pieces so that they somehow cohere—will never yield the same sense of divine relief and closure. I was truly amazed at how quickly the Century printed my poem. Immediate gratification! I got a nice letter from the editor, along with a check for $20, which he proffered apologetically. He needn’t have. It’s the most I’ve ever gotten for a poem. The same week I got another check for $15 from Sing Heavenly Muse . A grand total $35: I am flush! I have been offered that new position here at Mondo Mammon, and will probably be seated in my new spot within the week. It will demand more of me and I am glad for the change. I spent a recent weekend reading one of our senior poets, the right-souled Hayden Carruth, whose work had somehow escaped me until recently. I thought I’d share some with you. Aren’t they wonderful? Isn’t poetry the best? I don’t understand why poets are so obscure these days, and poetry so unread. The very succinctness of poetry makes it ideal for this busy epoch. Intelligent people in their prime are out there working long hours, and then they go home to the demands of family. They don’t have time for tomes, but anyone can find a few minutes for a poem, and when the poem is a good one it transports you, even as it grounds you. I am evangelical on this issue! At your suggestion I read Jill Ker Conway’s THE ROAD FROM COORAIN. It was wonderful. I won’t ever forget the descriptions of the Australian terrain, and the drought, and the sheep-shearing. I also read THE DARK ROMANCE OF DIAN FOSSEY, a bio of the gorilla researcher—a fascinating story and a pretty good read. She sure did go bushy in the end, torturing a poacher and bedeviling a student, but she’d been through hell, including being kept in a cage and gang-raped during an era of political troubles, it seems. And her love life was a mess. The gorillas must have adored her though! When she’d return after a long period away, they’d whoop it up and give her a royal welcome. They touched her, and allowed their young to be dandled on her knee. For two nights, all I could think of before falling off to sleep was the inhospitable but magical mountain in Rwanda, and the mind of the gorilla. March 29, 1991 Dear Jack, I’m installed at my new desk, right in front of a corner arrangement of ceiling-to-floor windows with a view of midtown and uptown Manhattan. I could reach out and touch the 59th Street bridge! And from this height (the 30th floor), the East River looks downright refreshing! Apologies to Coleridge: “In grubby Queens did corporate kings a massive house of toil decree, where East the reeking river ran ….” Your nervous reaction to capital P Poetry amazes me, sort of. If you distrust your ability to absorb and interpret it, then no wonder the great mass of mortals shuns it. Were those Carruth poems so difficult? And here I thought they were models of simplicity and clarity! And they deal with genuine human experience—with deep sorrow, hard labor, nuclear terror, the “finishing off of the animals,” sacramental sex. I thought you’d respond to these poems easily and immediately—and yet I also know the people’s response to poetry is highly personal. Either you love a poet’s work or you don’t bother. Even I don’t like most poetry when you come right down to it. If a poem’s subject matter isn’t clear, if its diction or grammar is confusing, if its logic is muddled, if it lacks momentum, closure, emotional depth—then it’s simply a mediocre work, as far as I’m concerned. And I feel scornful toward most of the poetry I encounter, both in long-published books and especially in the current magazines. I don’t understand why such dull writing is chosen; obviously my idea of dull and the editors’ are quite different. My work is really quite different from that of my contemporaries—especially insofar as I write in many different forms and with may different voices. Valued today is VOICE—a poet is said to have found her VOICE—and indeed it must be so, because book after book after book, there it is, that same bloody VOICE. I shouldn’t be snide because some poets I admire—e.g. Sharon Olds and Linda Pastan—do fit this category. But, personally, I would get bored, writing with the same diction time after time, year after year. I strive for RANGE myself. Some nice acceptances of late: my poem “Wild Women of Borneo” will be published in an anthology called CATHOLIC GIRLS, which Penguin Plume is bringing out next year. And I also had a witty poem (“The Beauty in the Bun”) taken by a magazine called Thema. Thema publishes issues with preposterous-sounding themes like “Nothing ever happened to him but weather” or “A tattered hat, abandoned.” My poem will be in an issue about “Art from the canvas freed.” That one appealed to me, for some reason! Here’s a peek at those poems. Have just read a book about radical nuns: NO TURNING BACK. These were the nuns who signed that NY Times ad proclaiming “a plurality of views in the Catholic church concerning abortion”—the two holdouts who refused to recant. In the end, they were not forced to leave their order but they chose to leave on their own steam. It’s a great story, skillfully told by Jane O’Reilly, a story not only about battling the Vatican but about all the changes in the church over the last 30 years. Their story moved me; I even wrote a poem about them, “The Outside World: Words for a Radical Nun,” in uneven rhymed couplets, a form I have used a few times and one which I may have invented. (Probably not.) . . . . Am I writing you too many letters? I hope not! Remember when I didn’t write enough of them? Our correspondence has become an essential part of my life. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you to tell these things to. You are enriching my life, both by listening to me and communicating with me. God, letters! They’re a dying art. Thank goodness there are a few of us scribes left in the world. And thank goodness for the computer for making it so effortless! April 18, 1991 Dear Jack, Last time I winged you some ego matter and today I feel I have no ego left! Feelin’ like a low old failure, feelin’ useless, feelin’ frumpy. Need haircut, need makeover, need to stop catching colds. This last one I’ve had for eight days. I probably look like Lisa Loopner, that dork Gilda Radner used to play: all rosy philtrim and tilted spectacles and tissue flakes stuck to my sweater. Probably there’s an orange toe pad affixed to me somewhere as well. I dig my new job. It gets frantic sometimes, but it’s far more involving and interesting than what I just came out of. A very high-profile spot as well. I appreciate R as a boss. My previous boss had somewhat old-fashioned ways. He was the type who expects his secretary to dial the phone for him and bring him food and take care of his family’s endless medical insurance forms (a task I loathed). I adapted to him—I’m pliable these days, a real Gumby—but still I feel as if a heavy weight has been lifted from my shoulders. April 22: I’m a lot better looking today! Am basically cured of my cold and wearing a tres chic chemise I bought Saturday at Bolton’s, a clothing discounter. Also bought a casual silk blouse with a perky print of sea creatures on an aqua base; it’s for Sanibel Island where John and I are definitely going on May 14th. We’re staying at a primo resort, the Sonesta Sanibel Harbour. The first thing I am going to do when I get there is don that blouse, find an alfresco bar, and have a piña colada. I CAN’T WAIT. Need another prayer from you, though, as John once again takes the rented wheel. Thank you for your good words regarding “Wild Women of Borneo.” That was one of the first to come tumbling out when I finally “broke through” in 1986. One night at a co-op party a neighbor and I discovered we’d gone to the same elementary school. She had been a few years behind me, and she asked me if I’d been “one of those bad girls with the teased hair.” Of course I hadn’t been, I was a studious geek, but the memory of those girls came flooding back and the poem came flooding out. By the way, you will soon be seeing my name in The Century again, at the bottom of a poem I once showed you. They chose an upbeat, unstuffy poem when they might have opted for a more pious piece; I am proud of them! But they are not at all stuffy are they? Those articles by James Wall regarding Desert Storm are downright radical. The 60’s have not died. Perhaps I ought to write an essay on this VOICE business—if only to work out for myself my own views vs. that of the teaching establishment. Now bear with me for a moment. What if the whole idea of a “voice” you “find” is too limiting? Walt Whitman, for example—now there was a poet who dug into himself and unleashed a most original poetic voice—energetic, celebratory, incantatory, swingy in style yet Biblical in proportion. And yet, when you pick up Walt Whitman, don’t you soon grow weary of that self-important stance, those sonorous cadences? I do! He’s a Johnny One Note, a one trick pony. He was driven by a desire to embrace and incorporate all of human experience—yet he fixed on one mode of writing and recapitulated it ad nauseam. Poets are doing the same thing today, and teachers and editors are encouraging it. Understand that I’m not saying it isn’t a valid method, only that it can rein you in as a writer. This voice thing may be a very American thing, I’m thinking—your voice as your trademark or your brand. At least one critic (poet Donald Hall) complains that poets today are writing in the same voice, the workshop voice, all producing the same “McPoem.” Hah! That’s one thing I can’t be accused of, anyway! (Along with success, renown, etc.) I did not deliberately set out to buck the system. When I finally became able to write with some fluency, my goal for each poem was to find the form/tone/voice that would best embody the subject at hand. That seemed right; I really didn’t think about it much. At any rate, “finding my voice” is not how I would describe what happened to me in 1986. I can only describe it in analytic terms as being granted access to the unconscious. I had always been confident of my ability to manipulate words, but had seldom been able to tap into that mysterious realm where inspiration comes from. What a sea change! I also came out of my crisis with a much stronger sense of identity and a personal philosophy of life—things I had not known were missing but which turned out to be essential to me as a writer. It can still be difficult to get a poem going, but once I have my topic, and my first line or two, the rest is just a matter of going with the flow. It is not a laborious process for me, it’s fluent and it’s fleet, and more like exploratory play than work. (Of course, as a prose writer you’d probably be horrified at how much time one spends on a few lines; nevertheless, from what I’ve read, I have a much easier time of it than most.) I am really happy when I’m writing. Except for sweet vacations and the surcease I find in my husband’s arms, it’s the only time I am happy. I am running at the Wang and had better say bye. May 9, 1991 Dear Jack, A gray day, a gray skyline, a gray busy bridge. Today the East River looks exactly like glossy oil, like one great big spill. Light—atmospheric light—takes on great importance when you work in a crystal corner high above the city. You find that your mood is as changeable as weather. This week alone we have had two bright days of eternal visibility, and one day of enveloping fog, and now this odd, dirty-cotton day. You can practically smell it. Alas, within a few months R and I will be moving to the executive floor, 29. It will still be lofty and it will be more plush—but it is unlikely that my own desk will be this well situated. I will miss the view, and the greater privacy, of my current digs. What’s the inside scoop on the sexuality report the Presbyterians are presenting? Their doing the study at all seems courageous and right-minded to me. How unloving and smug the protestors seem! Right here in the office yesterday, I overheard a secretary loudly condemning the document for violating “family values.” She is not a Presbyterian, but she and her husband fancy themselves preachers. I managed to keep my mouth shut though she was making little sense and spouting inaccuracies. Religion seems out of place in a regular business office. Going public with your beliefs only leads to divisiveness in a situation where cooperation is vital. Sometimes I just hate religion. Every sect is contaminated with hypocrites, fanatics, boors, sheep, bigots and “church ladies.” They ought to get together and form their own church and leave the rest of us alone. They can call themselves the United Patriarchal Church of the Hellions, Ursines, Christocrats and Kerygmatics: UPCHUCK. Not much news. I’ve been preparing for my trip next week; in other words, shopping till I’m dropping. I actually spent $106 on a bathing suit! (It does nice things for my figure, which is at least a $106 job.) Glad to hear you feel healthy and are so involved in things. Your involvements tilt me to envy, for they sound so much more rewarding than my own involvements. Health must be a touchy subject after a certain age. I know I’m dreading the impending creakiness and the even worse potentials. So far, of course, I’ve been incredibly fortunate. The worse thing that has befallen me is shingles, which I had in the summer of 1988. Shingles is a combination of deep muscle pain—agony!—and a rash like jungle rot. Anyone who has had chicken pox is a potential shingles victim; the viruses lie dormant until one day they decide to wake up and cause havoc. Just sent out another bunch of poetry submissions. One went to a magazine called Vowel Movement. Can you imagine? Some periodicals do choose preposterous names. Would you submit the emanations of your soul to a magazine called Lip Service? Or how about Paper Radio, And, Fag Rag, Feh!, Spider Eyes, Hard Row to Hoe, Off Our Backs, Onthebus, Egorag, Virgin Meat, Hurricane Alice, Smegma, or The Redneck Review of Literature? All guaranteed genuine publishers of poetry! Then there are all the special anthologies which advertise their needs in Poets and Writers Magazine. Some of them seem worthy—anthologies about the environment, or fathers, or the Hispanic experience in America, say. Others are faintly amusing. Mention the Unmentionables is calling for poems about women’s undergarments! “Sky and outer space poems needed,” reads another ad. And then there are all the homosexual-oriented solicitations, e.g., “gay siblings,” “Italian-American lesbians,” and John’s favorite, “Lesbians and their cats.” The light has changed. The day is a yellower cotton and the river is beery. May 22, 1991 Dear Jack, On Sanibel Island, John and I got mellow and learned how to relax. We are experts at lazing around at night after busy days at work, but on vacation we tend to engage in frenetic activity and entertainment-seeking. This time we resolved to veg out! So we lounged around lizard-fashion on poolside chaises and bobbed in Jacuzzis and sat on our 8th floor lanai gazing at Floridian skies while sipping rum-and-cokes. Those skies! One crystal-clear night lightning kept flashing behind a spray of distant clouds and it looked like Armageddon. We also saw plenty of buttery sunshine, red-orange sunsets, forked lightning, a morning rainbow, and even a funnel cloud. One afternoon, late, I saw extending from a cloud a shape like the hand of God, fingers and all. Then it elongated into a long, thin, snaking cone. I said to John, “If that thing was swirling around, I’d be concerned.” But I guess I should have been concerned anyway for that cloud made it onto the news, along with a tornado watch. The weatherman announced it had almost become a “water spout”—a liquid tornado.
It wouldn’t be a vacation without a couple of untoward events to pepper one’s memory. Landing in Fort Myers, the jet was virtually on the ground when suddenly it went up again. Let me tell you, it is unsettling to have your stomach tuned to descent during an ascent! For five minutes we heard nothing from the cockpit, so I just kept squeezing John’s hand, wondering what the devil was going on. Then the pilot announced he had encountered “wind shear” and took the “prudent” way out by going up again. Should we have believed him? Maybe he or his co-pilot overshot the runway and were just covering their butts! I am a bit of a white knuckler when it comes to flying. Not phobic—nothing can keep me from traveling—and I actually love the above-the-clouds bit. But taking off and landing give me the willies and I sit there incanting silent Paternosters and Glory Be’s while sucking on my Celtic cross. I know, I know, this is probably just religious as superstition, but I say whatever gets you through the night—or the flight. Second untoward event involves a zoo attraction. The guidebook copy sounded nice enough—fauna and flora on display—but when we got there it turned out to be a prison for animals, revoltingly smelly and overcrowded and terrifying in an atavistic way. Disgusting, really. We beat a hasty retreat. But there is something about the whole affair that haunts me. It was like encountering evil in what otherwise was a Garden of Eden. I think I feel a poem coming on. I loved your letter about the Brobdignagian brown trout! What an experience! You really ought to expand that into an essay. I do wish I could expand my experience, and my imaginings, into a novel, but fiction does not come naturally to me. My motivation for doing so would be venal, anyway. Poetry is written out of pure love for the form, but a novel has the potential of making one rich. I would like to be rich, you know. I would like a home in each of the three M’s: Maine, Maui and Manhattan. I would like to travel to Europe, Australia, the Amazon, the Galapagos, and the South Seas. I would settle, however, for three weeks in Hawaii and one more room in my apartment! June 4, 1991 Dear Jack, Once again I sit here at work fascinated by the weather! High dark clouds bordered by a brightness below, a brightness that briefly illumined just a few Manhattan spires, have now lowered so that all is misty gray. Chilly it make me feel, and dreamy. . . . . You are quite lucky: all your family happenings seem full of love, whether it’s a night at one of Tom’s plays or a visit with Norman the Supergrandchild. He sounds adorable. Do you know that some shrinks refer to his stage of life as a “fall into language”? They mean that learning to speak can be a fall from grace—for now a child is expected to communicate his needs instead of having them “mindread” by mother. They say there is a lost little tyke in all of us who still longs to be understood utterly, without having to make an effort. Who knows? June 27, 1991 Dear Jack, You have been so supportive of my work: supportive as in bulwark, bastion, flying buttress! I love having you root for me. You’re my claque! Hope those Sharon Olds poems went over okay with you. I passed them along with some trepidation, thinking that you might find her work offensively raw. I wonder, am I projecting daddy qualities on you or just my own stubborn, nice-girl sensibilities? Her work is totally “undefended,” don’t you think? It’s true to lived experience, flesh-and-blood stuff. Yet there is a keen intelligence there too. You said, quite astutely, that my “Sociable Ode” was juicy and sly; Sharon’s poems are always juicy, never sly. I saw City Slickers on Sunday; what a flick! So that’s Ghost Ranch? I had imagined something pinker. In the movie, it was quintessential cowboy country, all crag and creek and scrub. Well, this is some strange job I’m in. Things were hectic at first but now I have a lot of down time. R has been traveling, or attending back to-back meetings, leaving me alone to carry on. That means many phone calls to field, some from disgruntled cardmembers, and the usual administrative tasks—keeping his Protean calendar under grips, doing mass distributions, that type of thing. Pretty low gear, really. I try to fill in the gaps by writing but lately my Muse has been out to lunch. As for the cardmembers, the other day I spoke to a raging individual who claimed some customer service rep called him a “hard-on”! (I would have used a seven-letter word beginning with “ass.”) I do attend R’s staff meetings with his six direct reports. They discuss financial models and strategic planning with great gusto; officers at Mondo Mammon thrive on some weird thrills. Did I ever mention that when I came to temp here in 1986, this division was doing the sponsorship work for Hands Across America? QBank was one of two corporate sponsors, along with Coca-Cola. Things were really exciting and lively around here then! On the big day itself, I went down to Battery Park to join the QBank contingent in the center ring of the media circus. By that time, I had accepted a permanent position. July 3, 1991 Dear Jack, O Bulwark, O Flying Buttress, . . . . I like your image of the Serpent; is that your own idea—the Serpent as first poet? If so, may I use it someday? As for “The Reptile’s Creed,” I first encountered the phrase in a book about the mind, in a section devoted to the so-called “reptilian” brain, the part of the brain that is ontologically most primitive. I wrote that poem already. It is a parody/inversion of the Nicene Creed and begins “I believe in one Mouth, the eater almighty, breaker of vessel and bone, and of all flesh rendable and unrendable.” I hope the poems in the series will have some of the power of Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets.” I want to explore despair, rage, greed, the curse of our “sweating selves,” along with a radiant acceptance of the human mystery, that we are angel and animal in one. Now, I’ll never be as lusty as Sharon Olds, I’ll always (like you, it seems) be a little bit at war with physicality. Most people are, even today. Yet I think it vital that we humans get friendlier with our animal nature, otherwise we will blow each other up and destroy nature. I stumbled on a brand-new biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins last Saturday at Endicott Booksellers, written by one Robert Bernard Martin who also wrote a bio of Tennyson. I swooped down on it like a windhover! Here it all is—the story of his undergraduate years at Oxford, his conversion to the Roman Church, his experience as a Jesuit, his eccentricities, his scruples, his passionate nature. I have always thought of Hopkins’s life as being monastic and walled-in, but he did a lot of traveling in his youth, when he was something of a prankster and jokester, and he crossed paths with famous poets like the Rossettis and Swinburne. I once wrote a paper on Hopkins for a course at The New School, which I titled “The Sensuous Jesuit.” After reading this bio, I still think there is no better title. I loved the chapter on his novitiate. As my nun poem might tell you, I am fascinated by accounts of fledgling priests and nuns, by their ardor, their discipline. Hopkins occupied a small cell in a grid of cells in a huge, drafty room. Nothing much in the cell except bed, table and chamber pot. The first hurdle of his novitiate was a 30-day retreat during which speaking and letter-writing were forbidden. It broke many a young man down. They were given shabby, ill-fitting hand-me-down garments to wear, and allowed one bath per month—at which they were made to use “modesty powder” which made the bath water murky lest they become smitten by their own smelly forms. I know his poems so well it’s like they’re part of my DNA, my genes; if I had a baby, his first words would probably be “Mama, you are thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.” When I was coming out of my whatever-it-was in the mid-80’s, I memorized “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Part the First, and kept repeating it to myself whenever I went out walking. Do you know that one? It was his first mature poem, and his quirkiest and most difficult. Part the Second—which describes the actual shipwreck—doesn’t do much for me. But Part the First is all about a dark night of the soul, and the saving power of Christ, and it is a gorgeous, explosive and sacred piece of writing. I loved hearing about how you deliver a sermon. I imagine the effect may be similar to that of the pastor of Blessed Sacrament on West 72nd Street, Father O’Connor, who is the only priest I can listen to at that parish! He just speaks to us, without bombast or posturing, and yet, like yours, his sermons are carefully pre-planned. Sometimes he tells us about people he’s met in his pastoral rounds—the sick, the dying, the yearning—and that always draws us in. He shares his shortcomings with us as well. Do you do that? There may be a plainness to his delivery, yet there is mystery. Poor Hopkins sometimes went overboard in his sermonizing, as in everything, and once threw his fellow seminarians into peals of uncontrollable, jeering hysteria by describing the Sea of Galilee as “shaped something...like a man’s left ear; the Jordan enters at the top of the upper rim, it runs out at the end of the lobe...” and then he continued, as Martin tells it, “his geographical journey around the ear, the hair, the brow, the cheek,” etc. Pretty gruesome! Later, during a stint at a chi-chi parish, he preached to a congregation of proper ladies, comparing the Church “to a cow full of milk, with seven teats, the sacraments, through which grace flowed.” My man Hopkins: God’s fool. Lord, you get around—Maryland, Ohio, New Mexico—you are positively peripatetic. Truthfully, I can envision Tibet better than I can envision Ohio! July 22, 1991 Dear Jack, Read nothing into my short-term silence. Things have been busy here at the office, leaving me little time for personal scribbling. Also, I’ve been revising my Grand Jury poem at the suggestion of an editor who liked it but found it too wordy. So I’ve been brain-straining the poem and think I finally have it right. The ending gave me special misery! It was just too pat. Everything you have written about Sharon Olds I have read with keen interest and glee. She’s done more than anyone I can think of to make the art of poetry electric and alive. Yes, she gets under one’s “hide”! I can’t believe you read “The Pope’s Penis” aloud to your kids! Good thing they’re of age. Actually, that one seems silly to me, though I myself used a similar image when I referred in a poem to “the irritable bowels of the popes.” Shows you where my head is at. I like hot weather, generally, but this is ridiculous. I’m writing this on the Monday after the weekend from hell. I did not leave my apartment; I’d peep behind the shades, note the dreadful chartreuse sky, and settle deeper into the couch. John went out for simple victuals—Chinese food, pizza—otherwise we would have dined on Microwave popcorn and soda, our only provisions. I read two magazines and one ballet biography, watched two movies (My Life as a Dog and The Baghdad Cafe), took two naps, and drank numerous beverages tall and cold. Here is my recipe for an updated screwdriver: The Shavian Screw I also invented this recipe: Puerto Rican Iced Tea Did you watch the drama about Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz Friday night? I loved it though it was a sanitized version of their story. It was fun to hear Georgia announce her purchase of Ghost Ranch. How come she ultimately sold it to the Presbyterians? You’ve noted that 17,000 heads are rolling at Citicorp. True, banking in general is in a bad way, due to the recession, bad mortgages, bad Third World loans, and other ineffable things. It just so happens, however, that the Card Products division is the only profitable business in the Citicorp firmament at this time. We are literally earning all the bucks for the bank. Our growth has slowed, though—we are not hiring new people and we are slashing expenses. Instead of a communal jaunt to Wyoming, this year we are whooping it up at a Queens beer garden! Basically, though, we Mastercard and Visa usurers remain secure. I have no news, absolutely none, and my brain is sweat-sodden. Can you live without a letter for a while? I promise if I have anything worth saying I will post you one forthwith. August 1, 1991 Dear Jack, John and I recently had a “madcap Manhattan weekend” (see Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo for a wry reading of this phrase!), double-dating with a colleague of his and his wife who were apartment sitting in NYC. We rendezvoused at an amusing Mexican place called Jose Sent Me on West 55th Street. The idea is, you ring the bell, incant the name of the restaurant, and then they buzz you in. You walk up some spooky stairs—it really does seem like a speakeasy—and then you find the eatery, a 3-room casual space with great chow and beatifying frozen margaritas. We downed a few and had a great time. Afterwards, we walked uptown in the rain and parked ourselves at an Irish bar. We got together again on Sunday for a pleasant brunch, followed by an amble in Riverside Park and an hour or two at The Sports Bar. You’d love The Sports Bar. It’s a huge, dark, cavernous space with plenty of tables and even some bleachers. There are huge projection televisions, along with a line of smaller screens above the bar. Different baseball games were playing, and golf. Guess who was sitting at a neighboring table. Reggie Jackson! . . . . John and I don’t do enough socializing; we’ve found it hard to make non-business friends. Some folks have old college buddies, but since John and I were commuter students we never had the opportunity to make those kinds of friends. At S&S, I did make a few overtures, but they were spurned. S&S was not exactly Amityville; neither is NYC. Only a solitary sort like myself could have written “Sociable Ode,” you know. That evening seemed so remarkable to me, whereas for most people it would be just another night out. I have always been more of an observer of life than a participant in it. It’s a useful stance for a writer; it’s a stupid stance for a human being. Most of my poetry news is mucho bleak, with no acceptances of late and all my contest hopes dashed. (I’d entered my ms. in four contests, the reward in each case being publication and a small cash prize.) So frustrating. The other night I had a grating dream in which I was kept from reading my Grand Jury poem aloud to an audience; the group leader stole my time by being a motormouth. In the dream I started banging the table and yelling at him; I woke up banging on the bed! However, that Canadian work anthology was finally published, with three of my poems in it, and my complimentary copy arrived. It’s a substantial and good-looking volume, and it cheers me up to be in it. The title turned out to be PAPERWORK. Tom Wayman wrote an excellent introduction in which he laments the taboo against the topic of work in contemporary literature. He cites two recently literary collections, geared to college courses, that purported to examine “how we live”—and the whole world of work, one-third of our lives, was missing! Wayman is doing his part to rectify things. August 26-28, 1991 Dear Jack, I hope your next letter tells me all about your latest trip to the southwest. In the meantime, let me gush. I have seen how the other half lives. John’s boss gave a party last Saturday at his estate in Saugerties, on the Hudson. My jaw is still hanging open. The great expanse of green you first see when driving into the complex reminds you of a golf course, or a regal English park. He employs two groundskeepers. We made a great effort to park without upsetting any flower beds, then were greeted by our tanned, white-clad host, an Italian gentleman in his sixties, and his wife, a good-looking blonde, who escorted us to the party tent—my first “tent” party. West of the main house, near a groundskeeper’s cottage, there is a steep set of stairs leading down to a lovely pool, as large and pretty as any hotel pool, where there is even a pool house for changing clothes and taking showers. Beyond the pool is another expanse of lawn and trees and a paved path down to a private dock on the Hudson. Amazing! As was the house itself—Mediterranean in style, with a walled garden-cum-fountain and an interesting “horseshoe” layout of rooms on two floors. . . . . Too much for me, though! I don’t need to be that well-off! Anyway, the party gave John and me the excuse we needed to go away for the weekend like normal people. We left early on Friday and drove up to Kingston where we’d booked two nights at a utilitarian Ramada. We had an atmospheric dinner at a place called the Skytop and then watched Home Alone on the hotel TV. Saturday morning we went to Woodstock, the tie-die capital of the east, Saturday afternoon and evening we partied, and Sunday we visited New Paltz, where there is an enclave of old stone houses built by Huguenots, and Cold Spring, a prosperous Hudson town with good antique shops, none of them air-conditioned. Well, except for this faux-riche weekend, the summer has been its usual yawn. Still, I’m content during the summer, happy just walking around the city, dining al fresco, etc. August is traditionally our busiest month at the office, when we put together our “plan” for the following year, mapping out new projects, reevaluating old ones, then crunching, crushing, crashing the numbers. High stress all around, especially for my boss who is fast turning into a Type A personality. This gentle man was recently observed screaming at a copying clerk and kicking a cabinet! These are the weeks that send you reeling into every weekend. This fall I am hoping to take a course at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, a workshop led by a well-known senior poet who often writes in form, just like me. I sent her a letter and a few sample poems, as required, and now I am waiting to hear. If all goes well, I’ll join the class in mid-October. I have no idea how these things work or who tends to sign up, I just hope I’m not in a class of 25 year olds. I also hope my application is not rejected; that would be the last straw. I recently drank down a new biography of Anne Sexton, the “confessional” poet who committed suicide in 1974. I was very taken by her work when I was younger. No one was being as honest as Anne back then; there would be no Sharon Olds (and no Catherine Shaw) without Anne’s influence. She was the first to write about the raw things. Very troubled she was too—in and out of mental hospitals, always on medications, always in shrinkage. She even had “fugue” states when she would be disassociated from reality. So it is amazing that she wrote as much as she did, and became a public poet who gave sell-out readings and taught college workshops. She was stunning, too—tall, glamorous, with great bones. She modeled at one time. So many poets tend to disappoint one in person, but not Anne. She had a powerful presence and a rich actressy voice. And she led a sad, fragmented life, full of drama-queen scenarios. Her husband and two daughters catered to her completely. One daughter was even sexually abused by her, a fact so horrible it almost ruins the poetry for me. Anyway, Anne was not a great poet, and sometimes not even a good one. She could be long-winded, tone deaf, overly slangy; her images were sometimes odd (e.g., “my heart is a kitten of butter”); her religious efforts seem theologically idiotic. Still, I like her stuff better than critically “impeccable” work of the constipated and obscure kind. I have taken a vacation from writing myself, which means I’ve confined myself to revising, but now I am getting ready for the next surge. I have been looking over copies of some old letters, particularly the frightening ones I wrote to my shrink. It is nauseating to remember that time, but if I am to tackle the darker work, I must get reacquainted with my darker self. September 5, 1991 Dear Jack, R is in his office cooking up a presentation which will probably keep me chained to the Wang for two days straight—so let me grab some writin’ time while I may. Speaking of Wang, we are now phasing out the word processing system which I know so well. Next week I’ll be training on Microsoft Word-for-Windows. Judging from what I’ve observed over a co-worker’s shoulder, the program is more versatile and more fun to use. But the changeover is making me nervous. I know Wang so well! And all my poetry is on my office Wang system; I’ll have to re-key everything. One definite advantage of Microsoft Word is the sheer beauty of the final document. Expect my future letters to look absolutely gorgeous! So you’re deserting the Eastern Seaboard! Santa Fe has a fantastic reputation; I have a sense that it is architecturally and culturally advanced, with a good climate and atmospheric Christmastides. Congratulations on making the decision. I have another debt to acknowledge. Your tip about ELF panned out nicely; they just accepted four poems, three for Winter 1991 and one for Spring 1992. “Warts and All” is among them, as is “The Marginal Way.” I’ll be tramping The Marginal Way again soon. John and I are off to Ogunquit on September 14th, after which we intend to wend our way down to coastal Massachusetts. I’ll be home in time for my birthday, which you know damn well is my 41st. I was half your age when you were 50 but now I am catching up! I still look youngish, probably because I don’t smoke and have always shunned the sun. Getting older per se isn’t bothering me; getting older without success is the problem. I’d like to publish a book of poetry before I look like a hag in my jacket photo! . . . . How exciting to be descended from those New Paltz pioneers! My ancestors go back two generations to some hovel near the railroad tracks in the Bronx. Speaking of the Bronx, John and I took a detour when we were driving back from our faux-riche weekend and had a look at our old neighborhoods. I was pleased to see that many stores were still there, and that the neighborhoods looked well kept. What was once a better deal for the Irish and the Italians is now a better deal for the Puerto Ricans and the Cubans. The woman who bought our one-family house has transformed it, adding nice awnings and turning the twin garages into rented apartments. I get nostalgic about the Bronx sometimes, and always pay close attention when a TV news program features Bronx footage. September 12, 1991 Dear Jack,
On a happier note—we made a nice purchase in Ogunquit, a pricey new gold ring for me, fashioned by a Maine craftsperson. It is a swirl of 14K, a ring that puts one in mind of S-curves or Atlantic waves, and it will serve as my wedding band. We never did get around to wedding rings, you know! So that’s my birthday present, and it’s a dandy. Got your birthday card yesterday! You used to send me sexier cards. So you found a lot to respect in IRON JOHN? After reading some articles about Robert Bly’s tribal male encounters, I was beginning to think of them as retribution on us females for the women’s movement! Of course, even women are convening in sweat huts these days. I don’t know ... I tend to agree with Margaret Mead that we ought to be looking forward, finding new forms and new ways of being, rather than falling back on the possibly false comforts of ancient agrarian rituals, whether sweat huts or wicca or animism or any of those new age practices. (Though I do like some new age music, which can be haunting in a Celtic-twilight kind of way.) Just got word I’ll be featured in another anthology, THE LITERATURE OF WORK, coming out around Xmas from the University of Phoenix Press. My work poems which languished unloved for a decade are suddenly popular! Ooh, some birthday flowers were just delivered to me from John. He’s getting romantic in our old age. October 16, 1991 Dear Jack, I was also glued to the Clarence Thomas hearings, surely a low point in our history. Like you, I believe that Anita Hill was telling the truth; she had nothing to gain by making the allegations, and he had everything to gain by denying them. Grow up, America! . . . .I have been reading Robert Bly too, not IRON JOHN, but a book of criticism in which he laments the bad state of modern and contemporary poetry. Starting in 1917, he writes, poets in America started to lose touch with the unconscious, the mysterious, and instead wrote bloodless poems about “the things of this world” and middle class values. Like some other strong voices, he also complains about the “workshop” poem. Some say that dreary writing habits take root in these workshops. Personally, I don’t think the problem is the workshop; it is simply that in any given time, few poets are truly gifted. You can’t teach inspiration, you can’t teach genius. About all you can teach is how to self-edit and avoid the howlers. I’ll have more to say about all this soon, for I start that workshop tomorrow night. The prospect of reading my stuff out lout to a class gives me the willies! I am getting over the same killer cold you are getting over. In the past, I’ve gone for three years without catching a cold; this year, so far I’ve had three! I hate them, I just hate them. Now that I’m feeling better, I hope to console myself this weekend with some leaf-peeping and some hot mulled cider, for which I purchased spices at L. L. Bean. Then, on Friday October 25th, we see Ann-Margret at Radio City. Laugh if you must, but I always adored Ann-Margret and John presented me with tickets for my birthday. At 13, I was an Ann-Margret wanna-be, who tried to fit herself into frilly Bye Birdie blouses and who even performed renditions of Bye Bye Birdie with her girlfriends. We bored the neighborhood parents to death! I’m certain that we looked ridiculous, especially gawky, dorky me. If I worked my way out of gawkiness and dorkiness, some of the credit has to go to A-M for her sexy, vivacious, Titian-haired role-modeling. O the po life seems so boring compared with singing and dancing on the silver screen! Got a lotta livin’ to do, October 28, 1991 Dear Jack, My new teacher’s philosophy is different from that of Robery Bly. Her method is to point out what is good about what we write, to foster a non-hostile, creative ambiance. Do you know how I reacted to this? I nearly wept, I was so relieved. I have the sense that one could bloom under her kind tutelage. She is maternal, and also a little offbeat. . . . . At our first session, she read aloud some of the poems we sent her. From my batch she chose “Wild Women of Borneo.” She read it beautifully; I was thrilled! . . . . Already I trust the other poets, a diverse group who range in age from, say, 25 to 70. Several people have that mesmerizing quality writers can have: lively eyes, good voices, a look of wisdom, humor, intelligence. Our first assignment was to write “ghazals,” an Arabic form from the middle ages. . . . . I had no idea you were an opera fan. One of my favorite movies is The Magic Flute, directed by Ingmar Bergman, but otherwise I am ignorant about opera. About Ann-Margret I am more cognizant! She was great the other night; I’d never heard her use so much voice. And the show was spectacular. One number featured a laser show, another motorcycles with bright headlights everywhere. There were quiet moments, frisky moments, Rockette moments. (Is there a more potent symbol of American optimism than the Rockettes?) Our favorite segment celebrated the 1950’s—a giant jukebox, giant 45’s, exuberant rock music. It ended with A-M and Company recreating some of the choreography from Bye Bye Birdie; she brought the house down. My only disappointment was that I could not see her face very well, given the magnitude of the theater. I’m just everyday people, you know. I like spectacle, I like glitz, I like Disney World. I revel in my normality now, I don’t stake my identify on being “special” or “supra-talented” anymore. What makes me happy is what makes anybody happy: good food, good drink, sensuality, uncomplicated leisure. Writing well also makes me happy, but no happier, I am sure, than the pleasure derived from crocheting a fine sweater or devising a recipe or solving some car repair problem. To conceive of oneself as “loftier” than other people is a blueprint for depression and despair. Thus spake Herr Philosopher Catherine Kantshaw November 8, 1991 Dear Jack, . . . . Last night was my fourth workshop. Each session has had its own aura, somehow. Last week seemed talky and tense, but last night there was magic in the room. I am trying to respond with care to everything that comes before me. We exchange poems at the end of class, and then take them home for careful reading and commentary. If one of those poems reminds me of a poem I know and love—then I photocopy the poem and pass it along. It is wonderful, getting a glimpse of other people’s experience. For example, one woman, a scientist, lived for a time in frigid northern Canada and is writing about it. A darlin’ bearded man, a teacher from Scarsdale, writes about the agon of fatherhood in carefully crafted poetry. And then there is a Peck’s Bad Boy-type who is training to be a shrink and who, in predictable passive-aggressive fashion, never fulfills an assignment but does just the opposite of whatever has been asked for! . . . . QBank continues its journey to the dogs. All the newspapers and business magazines are lamenting our losses and casting aspersions on our Chairman, John Reed, who also achieved notoriety recently for having an affair with the flight attendant on the corporate jet. His wife is suing for divorce. November 21, 1991 Dear Jack, Get ready for a dull letter, I guess, ‘cause these days my life is basically sleep/eat/work, in that order! Am gearing myself up for another workshop tonight. . . . When I read my stuff aloud at the workshop, my voice has a choked quality. I am nervous, I can’t free up the old vocal chords. Do you know what I think the problem is? Though I may be confident in my poetry’s integrity and worth, I have absolutely no confidence that anyone else on God’s earth will appreciate it. It’s a matter of trust. And I’m afraid that, in my analysis, I got a big red Incomplete in trust! Trust was amputated from my soul a long, long time ago. Have you read this wild-and-woolly book by Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE? I have been plowing through it. The stuffy scholars hate Camille for toppling their sacred cows; the feminists hate her for debunking the old goddess cultures and for her argument that only the male of the species could have led us to advanced civilization. . . . One of her favorite words is “chthonic,” pronounced “thonic,” which she uses to describe all that is messy in nature, the muck and the suck and the gore, and which she sets up in opposition to the “Appolonian,” all that is clean and logical and goal-oriented. It’s a quirky book, and sometimes a funny one; she is always adding facetious one-liners. Tough-going, though, especially if you aren’t familiar with the texts she explicates. I read the first few chapters, which deal with ancient cultures up to Spenser’s England, and then I fast-forwarded to the final chapter on Emily Dickinson. The good gray arbiters of literary taste have kept Emily’s most disturbing (read “chthonic”) poems out of the anthologies—the more kooky, kinky stuff. Camille quotes such poems at length. Anyone who has a mental picture of Emily Dickinson as some shy spinster writing tame little verses is in for a chthonic boom! And that’s my own one-liner.
December 6, 1991 Dear Jack, Your recent letters are so full of interesting things, not to mention direct questions to me, I hardly know where to start! Perhaps with Mary Gordon’s book, which I dearly want to read. I remember the essay she wrote for the NYT Book Review, the one about the Irish taboo against self-revelation. I thought it sagacious, though I wonder whether that is an Irish trait, per se. Aren’t most “traditional” families like this? Is your father an alcoholic child molester who dresses up in women’s lingerie? Well, just look the other way and don’t tell the neighbors! It is a tribute to our ever more enlightened culture that such attitudes are changing. This is another reason why Sharon Olds is so interesting to me; she tells the truth about her family, she makes those skeletons in the closet dance! I admire that. Whenever I write an angry poem about my family, I quiver in fear about the prospect of its publication. There was a time, of course, when I would not have dared to write such a poem at all. I liked your list of questions; my shrink never even asked me those questions. (About all she ever registered interest in was how much money I made.) May I answer some, even though I realize you weren’t asking for this? To which of your parents did you feel closest and why? What can you remember about your first sexual feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex? Who were the three most important role models when you were an adolescent? What did you hate most about school as a child? Whom have you hated enough to want to kill? Which of these four loves do you consider the most important: love of neighbor, love of the beauty of the world, love of religious ritual, friendship? Which are the most important to human welfare, rights or obligations? What recurring dreams do you have? What was your favorite book or movie as a child? Against which race or religious group are you most likely to feel some prejudice? Are you more comfortable around rich people or poor people? Recently, I enjoyed reading Peter Mayle’s A YEAR IN PROVENCE. What a scrumptious life is the Provencal life: wine and food, food and wine, forever and ever amen. An even better book on a similar topic (settling into rural life in a European country) is O COME YE BACK TO IRELAND by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. This young married couple left their urbane middle-class comforts to live under thatch in Donegal. It’s quite a story! (Niall was an editor at Avon Books when I was temping there that time.) I cut my workshop class last night. I was so hopeful about that workshop and now I dread going. Truth is, I’m a walking grump lately. I’m at odds with God and Man. May this season of downtrodden disheartening dismay pass quickly! December 23, 1991 Dear Jack, Got your “please forgive me” letter dated 14 December, which made me wonder if perhaps 14 December was the Presbyterian Yom Kippur. I had taken no offense about anything you’d written; indeed, I was happy to hear that you had used an image of mine in a public discussion, even though the metaphor took on a new meaning there. So go in peace; absolvam te, and pardon my bad Latin. Have been under the weather in an amorphous, non-specific way. Scratchy in the throat, humid in the post-nasal regions, fatigued, but with no all-out miserable cold or flu befalling me, or giving me an excuse to stay in bed for a few days. I just keep on truckin’, in low gear. But I get a break soon. I will go to work tomorrow, Christmas Eve, and then be off till New Year’s. John and I will have Christmas dinner at Tavern on the Green. Otherwise, we will just hang out, and work out! I bought one of those platform steps and a couple of step aerobics tapes. I learned two new things in 1991: step aerobics and this new Word software I keep raving about. Your commitment to continued learning is right-minded! THE LITERATURE OF WORK was just published by the University of Phoenix Press, with two of my poems included. It is one of the most beautiful books I have ever laid eyes on—full-cloth binding, headbands fore and aft, colored endpapers, exciting jacket art—and the quality of the poems, stories and essays inside is top-drawer. I will send you a copy. I have run out of news and I am busily trying to wind things up at work so let me say Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and a blessed Presbyterian Yom Kippur. ——Back to Contents—— |
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Bankcards recently moved into a brand new office tower in Long Island City, which sounds remote but is just a five minute subway ride to Queens from midtown. Perhaps you heard about our grand opening gala—Koch and Dinkins were here, yes sir, and QBank gave a crazy party with international food areas and diversions such as people on stilts, mimes, musicians, caricaturists and so on. The New Yorker wrote a little scrip about it in their Talk of the Town column; they made is sound like a surreal event attended by neurasthenics, which I suppose it was.
