Month: May 2003

Questions:

What’s the difference between a ‘dramaturg’ and a ‘drama queen’?

Is our ‘hard wiring’ just wrong?

How to hold death in mind at all times non-morbidly?

I never had someone terribly close to me commit suicide. I knew and liked both Ramez and Dan, but we were not really intimate. And though their choices saddened me, I could somehow understand their torments and their motivations.

My only really sad and uncanny close-friend death experience is this:

When I was twelve, I had a best friend, Caitlin, whose mother was a junkie. Caitlin and I were in the same alternative school. She was willowy and Welsh-looking, with beautiful totally golden wavy hair. I think she was one of my first loves. We would walk around holding hands, we took LSD together, we would sit on each other’s beds drinking lapsang souchong and earl grey all day reading and talking about what we had read. We both read and wrote poetry. Men were wild for her. She had this incredible nymphy body with long limbs and perfectly round not big not small breasts. She gave off the aura of being highly experienced. I think in fact she was. We became punks together. Later she abandoned me quite suddenly when she met a man, a hardline Marxist, who eventually became her husband. I never understood that abandonment, particularly the suddenness of it (as I suppose I never understand *any* abandonments).

In our alternative school was another knockout nymphet, Leila, who had long red hair and am oddly pointy nose. She, at fourteen, had a body like Ava Gardner — totally 40s pinup (she even wore a vintage a-line leopard-print “car coat”). And she *sucked her thumb*; you can imagine what this did to the 30ish Marin County men who pursued, and often got, her. Leila and I had actually known each other for many years. Our mothers were friends, and we all used to go Sufi dancing together at the Sausalito art center where my mother took metal sculpture classes.

The two gorgeous girls were rivals, on and off, for the attentions of a variety of men. It was a neverending soap opera; existing as I did, between them, I was privy to both of their lamentations and rages over their respective nemeses.

I lost touch with both of them.

Sometime in the early 80s, Caitlin had a brain aneurysm that put her in a coma for some time. She came out of it, but her speech was slurred, her vision was impaired, and she had to walk with a cane. I tried to contact her a couple of times but she never returned my attempts at communication.

I had lost touch with Leila around the same time, but I heard, after I had been in Japan for several years, that Leila had died of a brain tumor.

Then, after a Google search I did last winter, I learned that Caitlin had died of complications resulting from her aneurysm, perhaps a couple of years ago.

Farewell to all that youth, that loveliness, that sex, those passions and convictions.

I don’t think that I have truly “processed” the fact of their deaths. They remain to me now as “figures in the narrative.”

Anyway.

Anyone who has V. Imp. may have noticed that it is dedicated to Leila and Caitlin.

so… gather… ye rosebuds… while… ye may…

Not sure why Ann, Gary’s ex, thought Dan was “dangerous” for coming on to her. I hope she didn’t think she was special. Dan came on to everyone — me, my beautiful friends Claire and Stacey. His approach was — and in this my testimony differs from Gary’s — to be quite abject. He was the kind of man who seemed like he wanted to put his head in your lap and gaze up at you lugubriously. (This creeped me out. I didn’t learn to love abjection in a man until I met Gary.) And he liked innuendos. I remember he came by one day when I was working at David Highsmith’s bookstore and for some reason we were tallking about children — maybe even little girls. He looked at me meaningfully and said “they’re so wet.” Now, how was I supposed to construe that?

It’s quite true that I reviewed Monologue x 3 for Poetry Flash. I’m sure I have a copy somewhere. What Gary doesn’t mention is the dramatic irony of this — what if it had been Monologue x 4 and Gary had had the role he wanted in it? How would *this* story be now? What, for example, if I had given him a bad review? The mind boggles, stumbles, reels, freaks out. Do you believe in fate?

I remember arguing with Dan a couple of times. He could be very persistently argumentative.

First thing to remember is that Mercury is retrograde. Communication will be haywire until the end of May, ’tis said.

We can look at Mercury retrograde as an opportunity for introspection and reflection-before-speaking, also as a catalyst for outbursts of truthtelling. We can also allow it to play havoc with our lives. Just remember, back up your data, and be ready to deal with the fallout of countless misunderstandings.

Now, to Nick’s comment that women bloggers write more about sex than poetry or poetics. I’m not bristling at this comment, but I think it’s funny, sort of that old “animalization” of women vs. the “cerebralization” of men. I don’t always have a problem with this kind of essentialism ; sometimes it suits my arguments — but in the case of womyn bloggers, I simply don’t think it’s accurate. If I think back on the topics I have posted on, I can think of very few instances where I explicitly wrote about sex. I posted one funny fake sex fantasy. I wrote about my memories of a hippie girlhood and specula. I may have sexualized my cats a little in a poem about them, i.e. “One of my first sexual experiences was with a kitten.” But in the main, although I have written on “feminized” topics like adornment, ornament, long hair, etc., I think I have written more about war, pain, and despair, and the tiny lovely absurd or hilarious experiences that permit me to move through war, pain, and despair. I have also written about poetry and poetics, though not as much as when I first started, mainly because I have no time. I have about eleven minutes to write this before I must leave the house to go to Hunter to find out the almost certainly negative results of a tuberculosis test I was compelled by the Dept. of Health to take because one of my students had TB.

Of course I think that language oozes sex no matter what the topic, but that’s perhaps my own bias, as in a bias-cut satin gown that barely hides the pubic mound of a cabaret singer…

I certainly have no problem writing about sex, a fact to which Swoon, not to mention all of my other books, attests. You’d think, actually, that ‘d be writing about sex much more on this blog than I actually do.

So… sex… you want it? You KNOW you want it…

mmmmmmmm

The mussels and their lips, the greeny membranes,

the flat apricot clams.

Moistly fluttering up to the explosion of oh!!! feathers falling in twitchy heavings on my purple stockings, sweet with crotch musk aching in blossoms.

His lips that licking my folded claspings send up through the nerves puffs of melody from my painted mouth.

Oily nipple, thrill of entry. Contacting tongues to activate the hearts, dual dumbeks (sp?) in the craving room.

etc. etc. I mean I could go on and on like this. But I’m getting turned on and I have to go to work. (work vs. eros. Quel drag!)

p.s. James said something about “mere mental masturbation”, not in reference to Swoon exactly, but agreeing with something Gary had written there. You know, what’s the big issue with masturbation? Thinking back to Jism Jim. Don’t understand.

Anyway, whenever I hear the word “mere” I reach for my vibrator. How I do love the trivial!

And whenever I hear yet another convolution of “whenever I hear the word …. I reach for my ….” I want to screaaaaaaaammmm!

“Under clothes/ the vaginal cave/ as if that’s some sort of/ big deal…”