For the record
Rejections from Wash U and Minnesota today. Entirely expected.
While it would have been nice to go to a hotshot school — and work on getting Philip to move to Minneapolis and be my gay boyfriend in the same city for a change — Missouri would have been terrible, and terribly close to my trailer-dwelling extended family. So, nothing gained and nothing lost, really.
Because it is bitter and because it is my heart
Yes indeed, Nick Flynn acted like a cutesy, pretentious douchebag for the majority of his reading and the audience just lapped it right up (note to self: being cutesy with an audience will earn you a lot of time, a lot social currency, but you are a WAITRESS, you know this already) and the themes of Samsara/enlightenment emerged and reemerged in his work, at which I could quietly snicker: my mentor does it better so nyah nyah nyah. The final piece in the –tragically short, 30 minute — reading was a longish freewheeling poem populated with a bunch of found lines from like, Bruce Springsteen and Walt Whitman? And name-dropped Britney Spears? And ended in some strange sort of confession, a memory of skipping class in grade school, climbing a huge rock and lighting matches which he dropped over the edge, into drifts of dead leaves. Small flash fires. A girl his age wandered up and begged him for her own match, which he traded for a glimpse of her genitals. He told this story in somber guilty overtones (MEA CULPA! MEA CULPA!)
And I thought: lech.
Then I shoved all my tumultuous feelings in a dark closet in the back of my brain and shouldered the door closed, to maintain at least the illusion of cleanly composure in his presence. Presented him with his memoir and his first book of poems, Here I brought you these! all bouncy sweetness. He sized me up. Yes, you. “What was your name again?”
“Uh. Ahem. Farren?”
“Right. Right. Of course! Spelled F-E-R–?”
“F-a-r-r-e-n.”
“Right! Right! Yes. And how are the poems going?”
“Well, wonderful, actually. A couple of publications this winter. I got into Alabama and Purdue, although I’m waiting to hear from–”
He looked up. “Would that be…Tuscaloosa?”
It was my turn. “mmm hmm. Of course!”
“Wow. Well that program is just–Wow! And I LOVE Joel.”
“Me too. And Robin and Peter Streckfus. I’m just really excited about the entire faculty.”
“Yeah! Joel is just–amazing. Wow.”
His inscriptions are saccharine and bordering on fawning: “To Farren — ALL BRIGHTNESS! Nick Flynn Feb ‘09″ Et cetera.
Amazing! He didn’t even remember me! Incredible! All the wasted rage, all the teeth grinding, all the spun wheels and all the plowing into new poems, eyes narrowed in his (clueless, idiot) direction. So much angst wasted on someone who forgot me probably the minute I exited his line of vision.
STORY OF MY LIFE!
Goodbye, Nick Flynn, and thanks.
From “Robin Hood’s Barn”
You bad birds,
but God shall not punish you, you
shall be with us in heaven, though less
conscious of your happiness, perhaps, than we.
Hell is a not quite satisfactory heaven, probably,
but you are the fruit and jewels
of my arrangement: O be with me!
Forget stand-offishness, exact
bookkeeping of harsh terms! The banal
sun is about to creep across heaven on its
daily turn: don’t let it find us arguing
or worse, alone, each
having turned his back to the other,
alone in the wonderful solitude
of the new day. To be there
is not to know it, its outline
creeps up on you, and then it has fallen over you
like bedclothes of fog.
John Ashbery
I am just loving the crap out of these Yale Open Course lectures Meg sent me. I’ve been watching the two-part lecture on Wise Blood tonight–part of an entirely broadcasted course on the American Novel since 1945– in between large chunks of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and well, it’s just been pretty great. Yep.
Tomorrow: Franny and Zooey! Lolita! SIGH!
from “Lithuanian Dance Band”
I write you to air these few thoughts feelings you are
most likely driving around the city in your little car
breathing in the exquisite air of the city and the exhaust fumes
dust and other
which make it up only hold on awhile there will be time
for other decisions but now I want to concentrate on this
image of you secure and projected how I imagine you
because you are this way where are you you are in my thoughts
Something in me was damaged I don’t know how or by what
today is suddenly broad and a whole new era of uncertainties is
ending
like World War I or the twenties it keeps ending this is the
beginning
of music afterward and refreshments all kinds of simple
delicacies
That toast the heart and create a rival ambiance of cordiality
to the formal one we are keeping up in our hearts the same
What with the skyscrapers and dirigibles and balloons in the sky
seems pretty crowded
and a nice place to live at least I think so do you
and the songs strike up there are chorales everywhere so pretty
it’s lovely
and everywhere the truth rushes in to fill the gaps left by
its sudden demise so that a fairly accurate record of its activity
is possible
If there were sex in friendship this would be the place to have it
right here on this floor
with bells ringing and loud music pealing
Perhaps another day one will want to review all this
for today it looks compressed like lines packed together
in one of those pictures you reflect with a polished tube
I feel it in the lean reaches of the weather and the wind
that sweeps articulately down these drab streets
bringing everything to a high gloss
Yet we are alone too that’s sad isn’t it
yet you are meant to be alone at least part of the time
You must be in order to work and yet it always seems so
unnatural
as though seeing people were intrinsic to life which it just
might be
and then somehow the loneliness is more real and more
human
You know not just the scarecrow but the whole landscape
and the crows peacefully pecking where the harrow has passed
John Ashbery
Farm III
Small waves strike
the dark stones. The wife reads
the letter. There is nothing irreversible:
points to the last sibilants
of invading beef and calico.
Pretty soon oil has
taken up the place of
the dark around you. It was all
as told, but anyway it never came out just right:
a fraction here, a lisp where it didn’t matter.
It has to be presented
through a final gap: pear trees and flowers
an ultimate resinous wall
basking in the temperate climate
of your identity. Sullen fecundity
to be watched over.
John Ashbery
A little piece one of my Middle Schoolers turned in this week:
He loved her—no, an understatement. He needed her by his side…always. They did everything together—everything. It pained him when they were apart, like he was missing the right side of his body. Their times were happy together. Like when they beat level 22 together—he couldn’t have done it without her. Their love was a passion unlike any other. He planned to spend the rest of his life with her. They’d grow old and die with each other, him whispering as he faded that she didn’t look a day older than the day they met.
His name was Matt, he was a loyal man with everything to gain and nothing to lose. And her? Her name was Yuffie. What better name for a Gameboy Advanced?
I mean, how goddamned adorable IS that?
from Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror
A look of glass stops you
and you walk on, shaken: was I the perceived?
Did they notice me, this time, as I am,
Or is it postponed again?
John Ashbery
