It’s hard to think 17 years have gone by since this correspondence! As I said at the time …
Your first letter had me repeating to myself, “She has to be a water sign — or at least have a lot of water influence prominent in her chart.” Now you blithely inform me you’re a Pisces. Ah-ha! Figures! Could that be why you’re so alive in your emotions, as astro-informed friends from my past would insist? (For Aquarian me, meanwhile, aloft in encyclopedic data and logical constructs, staying alert to my own emotions can be a real challenge — especially when retreating into my brainiac self became my way of surviving some pretty intense emotional abuse way back when.) So, in some wonderful ways you help me tap dance into some chambers of my soul. (Molto grazie!) As for the writing skills: do the nuns at dreaded Mother Theodore Guerin get any credit? (Mother … Theodore? And I doubted your age?)
And you wish you look older? Na-na-na-na! Listen to Swami Jnana, kiddo. Do you have any idea how … thoughtful you appear in that photo? It doesn’t get any better than that. Why can’t any of the women I know/have known appreciate being they way they are — which inevitably is much, much lovelier than they presume. (Assignment for future edition, probably when you’re ensconced in that high suite overlooking the Loop and Lake Michigan — I know that view, having been in Jeff MacNally’s eerie in the Chicago Tribune tower a time or two: interview Cindy, Nicky, Cristy, and the rest of the supermodel cult and see if you can find anyone truly satisfied with her looks; bet, deep down, they aren’t.) Ergo: enjoy your current condition while you can. (And may that be for a long, long time!) Most women I know would kill to have the body or the looks of an eighteen-year-old, or so they say. You have the rest of your life to look older. (And may you age gracefully, like Sophia Loren or Joan Collins.) Maybe it’s not really a matter of age, after all, but of self-confidence. Those who are radiant, no matter what, versus those who are wrapped up in their misery. Watcha think?
As for feeling one’s chronological age, you’re an excellent writer: that automatically makes you middle-age. (I know: part of me’s always felt old, too. Maybe it’s just ancient soul.) (My age, by the way, is ninety-two.) But, because you’re an artist, you’re also going to have to find ways of remaining fourteen or fifteen forever. I wouldn’t recommend adult orthodontics as a strategy, although it is an interesting trip and seems to be an good way to open conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have. (And you said something about rambling? Heavens!)
So here I’m looking through some Diane Wakoski volumes for a great insight on adolescence and find instead: “My search for the perfect man, the perfect love, Romance, sexual life, has always been emblematic of my search for something else, you know. In Pretty in Pink, a wonderful character played by an actress who must be thirty but still looks like she’s eighteen, the wise older woman in the film is nostalgically wearing her old high school prom dress and dancing to some golden oldie with the star of the movie (Molly Ringwald) and she says, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could start old and get younger every year?’ I recall my elders always saying that ‘youth is wasted on the young’ … “
I very much enjoyed both the batch of poems you sent along. Do you write as effortlessly as it appears? You have some real knock-‘em-dead connections here: “sometimes she’s a ballerina/hanging by her neck/from the rafters/of some wretched dollhouse//sometimes she’s a little girl/with treasure chest eyes/and a bowl-of-pudding smile” is astonishing. Brava, brava, brava! (Envy, envy, envy!) Ditto: “the sky is pink lemonade.” And the line, “trees singing,” keeps triggering to my ears Isaiah 55:12b, “and all the trees of the countryside clap their hands.”
I, too, prefer direct language — although in my writing, it sometimes seems that by creating a deliberate short-circuit, I’m more able to get down into that painful raw nerve you talk about. I wonder if some of the “trying to hide behind huge words and flowery language” you object to (rightfully so) has more to do with a lack of a real emotional underpinning/experience. A few days before your big package arrived, I received two hardbound prize-winning volumes by those “professional poets” we’ve already defined—and I found myself annoyed. You’re right: there is a lot of hiding going on. And it feels like WORK, both the creation and the reading of it.
Then your latest edition came, and I found myself often laughing aloud with delight, because the pieces were coming from another place in the psyche. (Pieces I checkmarked: “Dead Horse,” “Yes, There Still Are Some Good Ones,” “Sam I Ain’t,” “I read a book about a woman …,” “Sardines,” “The Painkiller,” [hey, is that true about the Walibri???], your centerfold [sick! heh-heh!], your on-going adventures [really fine line: “my feathers are slowly being replaced by rocks … being covered by cold, gray cement”] — and the insights in the paragraph beginning, “i have always been on another planet.”
Please, please, please, send a copy of your chapbook. (What a marvelous title — I can almost taste it. A turnabout on Psalm 34, “O taste and see,” which Denise Levertov uses as a title for a wonderful collection of her own poems — so delicious it opens your eyes.) Watercolor nights, what a vivid linkage, almost a micropoem itself … softness, yet I wonder if night scenes can be done in watercolors: now you make me ask a watercolorist I know.
Was kinda curious about where your neighborhood is — thought maybe it was around Hyde Park, or some other brainy neighborhood. Was surprised to find it on my road atlas as being out toward Mother O’Hare instead. So I asked my boss, who says he’s spent a lot of time in Chi’town (he’s from western Michigan), and he said he thought it was mostly duplexes and bungalows out that way. And then Sunday night I was zoned out in front of the tube, not quite watching some dumb detective story set in Your Fair City, and there they went, ripping onto — you guessed it, your fair street, which may have been filled with some fair number of criminals by then or a fairly high-speed chase. Is life weird or what? Looked like ‘50s ranch houses, mostly. Some trees. Short front yards. Many bathtub Madonnas? (Couldn’t tell.)
I’ve done a lot of travel on maps. Some places I’ve never been I seem to know better than some people do who have actually been there. As Howard McCord has written: “A chest of maps/is a greater legacy/than a case of whisky.//My father left me both.” Another quote: “or what my father said/‘go along the coast as far as/you can without getting killed’/my saint is Hsuan-tsang/who got _ back.”
Well, hope you’re still enjoying that big old Dodge Diplomat (go along as far as you can and then come back). Assume college has started. Took me three-and-a-half years to figure out how they rig the game against you: the moment you walk into a classroom, you’re already a hundred pages behind. (Wright College? I went to Wright State University, then transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington.)
So here’s to a rewarding and eccentric friendship. None of my other editors get long letters like this. Actually, they’re lucky to get cover letters. But then, they rarely reply with more than a marginal scrawl, either. I wish I were having as much fun with the newspaper as you’re having with Indigo, but, hey, we don’t have centerfolds, either.
Good thoughts to you, always.
Your midnight rambler.
Jnana's Red Barn 