(no subject)
Sometimes I like to do a ridiculous dance of creepy, wherein I write poems about people and then present them to the very people they're about under false pretenses. Of course, this year has given me ample opportunity to do that. I'll give you an example. One day I was driving through the ciy, and I got to the Upper West Side then thought, "Suzanne lives here. I wonder if she walks these very streets." so of course I went home and wrote this poem:
This whole city smells like you tonight.
That man on the corner with the briefcase is you,
and the weird-eyed shaggy one, and the baby in the carriage
and its mother (nanny?)
That pile of trash is you: mysterious, elusive,
pointing beyond itself.
(Where is the other shoe?)
This city might as well be your body; it’s simple:
you live in this city, you live in your body.
I brush suggestively along the graffittied wall.
I kiss the asphalt.
Today in our non-conference she read part of it out loud, and I got that little frisson of something being so wrong and yet so right. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't be trying to steer my so-called education in the direction of something more solid than guilty pleasures and self-indulgence, but for now I am just bingeing.
Also, in non-conference she suggested that I keep reading more Auden and Jarrell essays, and in particular that I should talk to people about them. Who am I supposed to talk to, Suzanne? No one else I know is reading them. I guess I could try to bully someone into reading them. She also seemed to vaguely suggest I should write a paper about CP Cavafy and Elizabeth Bishop, but who knows when that would happen. Well, we'll see.
This whole city smells like you tonight.
That man on the corner with the briefcase is you,
and the weird-eyed shaggy one, and the baby in the carriage
and its mother (nanny?)
That pile of trash is you: mysterious, elusive,
pointing beyond itself.
(Where is the other shoe?)
This city might as well be your body; it’s simple:
you live in this city, you live in your body.
I brush suggestively along the graffittied wall.
I kiss the asphalt.
Today in our non-conference she read part of it out loud, and I got that little frisson of something being so wrong and yet so right. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't be trying to steer my so-called education in the direction of something more solid than guilty pleasures and self-indulgence, but for now I am just bingeing.
Also, in non-conference she suggested that I keep reading more Auden and Jarrell essays, and in particular that I should talk to people about them. Who am I supposed to talk to, Suzanne? No one else I know is reading them. I guess I could try to bully someone into reading them. She also seemed to vaguely suggest I should write a paper about CP Cavafy and Elizabeth Bishop, but who knows when that would happen. Well, we'll see.