UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

Nothing Fatal

A dissertation submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.)

in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences

2006

by

Sarah Beth Perrier

B.A., Ohio University, 1996 M.F.A., George Mason University, 2000

Committee Chair: Dr. Don Bogen

ABSTRACT

Nothing Fatal, a dissertation by Sarah Perrier, consists of two complementary pieces: a book length collection of poems and a scholarly essay. Both pieces are grounded in my interest in Romantic, feminist, and confessional poetic traditions at the start of the twenty- first century.

The epigraph to this collection, “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous,” is the bargain proposed by Frankenstein’s monster when he asks for a mate. Like the monster, the speaker in these poems hopes to strike a deal that will stave off loneliness, or at least be incentive to virtue. And just as the monster’s courting of his mate would surely be unconventional, the poems in Nothing Fatal also approach courtship unconventionally. These poems strive for the satisfaction that all creative work—including love—can provide. In these poems, conventional romantic roles (lover and beloved) bump up against and resist the roles provided for poets and readers by our literary Romantic legacy. The dissonance provided by these two partially compatible paradigms enables the poems in Nothing Fatal to grapple with questions of lyric sincerity.

Introducing the manuscript is “What Do They Teach You in That School, Anyhow?:

Redefining the Confessional Paradigm in Contemporary American Poetry,” an essay that reviews the reception of confessional poetry, and concludes that no balanced critical discussion of it has offered a clear delineation of its constituent parts, its value and role for contemporary writers and readers, or its relationship to other poetic traditions that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, connotative meanings of “confessional poetry,” which have been mostly pejorative, have dwarfed the denotative ones. This unbalanced treatment of confessional writing has had particular consequences for the work of women poets writing in the wake of second-wave feminism, and so I also suggest that our current discussions of a confessional school of poetry should acknowledge how women writers have tried to write around the narrowest conceptions of confessional poetry. Using the poetry of

Lisa Lewis and Lynn Emanuel, I demonstrate two ways that contemporary women writers use, in order to subvert, traditional confessional paradigms.

© Sarah Perrier 2006 All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors and readers at the following journals where some of the poems included in this manuscript first appeared, sometimes in slightly different versions. The Cimarron Review: “Ass,” “Generosity,” “Meeting You: A Definitive Plan,” and “Porch With No Swing”; The Cream City Review: “Patience” and “The Dog, The Yard, The Water, The Problem” (as “The Empathy Kit: How to Be Eight”); The GSU Review: “Notes of First Kisses”; Hotel Amerika: “Aubade: Easy Mistake” and “In the Manner of Folklore” (forthcoming); The Journal: “My Fortress of Solitude”; The Ledge: “How Not to Sleep Around”; Mid-American Review: “Rattle Bones”; Phoebe: “Fresh”; Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing: “Near Misses”; POOL: “Poem in Which I Fail to Appear”; and River Oak Review: “Translation.”

Certain of these poems also appeared in a chapbook, Just One of Those Things (Kent State University Press, 2003). Thank you to Maggie Anderson at the Wick Poetry Center for her attention to my work, and to everyone at KSU Press and the Wick program for the work that they do.

The epigraph to the collection of poems included here is taken from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.

1

What Do They Teach You in That School, Anyhow?: Redefining the Confessional Paradigm in Contemporary American Poetry ...... 3

Meeting You: A Definitive Plan...... 47 Porch With No Swing ...... 48 Poem in Which I Fail to Appear...... 49 In the Manner of Folklore...... 50 The Dog, the Yard, the Water, the Problem...... 51 Flirt...... 52 The Queen of Snakes ...... 53 Rattle Bones...... 54 How Not to Sleep Around ...... 55 Too Darn Hot ...... 56 Aubade: Easy Mistake ...... 57 Generosity...... 58 Listless...... 59 Sexy French Underwear...... 60 My Fortress of Solitude...... 61 Dreadful Sorry...... 62 Lesser Beasts...... 63 Carnivalesque...... 64 Fresh...... 65 On the Principle of Pairing in Nature...... 70 z

A Version of the Ark...... 72 Water Speaks to Our Subconscious Selves ...... 73 Academic Affairs...... 74 Sweet Nothings ...... 75 By the Time this Poem is Over...... 76 Temptation Is No Apple...... 77 Near Misses...... 78 Domestic Bliss...... 79 Welcome...... 80 Texas ...... 81 Translation ...... 82 Notes on First Kisses ...... 83 The Confessional Mode...... 84 Ass...... 85 Personal Poem...... 87 Proper Care and Feeding ...... 88 Augury: Haiku at the Dragon Wok...... 89 The Empty Seat...... 90 Patience...... 91 2

What Is Wanted...... 92 Pitch the Woo...... 94 3

What Do They Teach You in That School, Anyhow?: Redefining the Confessional Paradigm in

Contemporary American Poetry

After more than forty-five years of discussion and examination, confessional poetry, as practiced by a small but influential group of mid-twentieth century American poets, continues to be an ill-defined, contentious, and difficult to evaluate mode of writing within contemporary poetry. Indeed, critical evaluations of confessional writers demonstrate everything from admiration to lukewarm indifference to outright dismissal. These disparate receptions of confessional poetry have prompted some poets to take pains to remind audiences that their poems do not present autobiographical truths about their authors; others poets exploit even the barest possibility of a connection between biographical and poetic versions of truth, and still others refuse to discuss the issue in any manner. Neither readers nor writers seem to know quite what to do with the word “confessional,” let alone how to respond when it is applied to work in which they have a special interest. The history of how the term has been applied is troubled, to say the least. Whereas the term was first used descriptively, over the course of only a few years its ability to describe accurately became compromised; “confessional” became “merely confessional,” and writers working within this tradition were branded not as a matter of genre or aesthetic affiliation, but as a kind of warning—that kind of poem, that kind of poet.

I have in mind three goals for this essay. First, I will present a short historical overview of the term “confessional” as it pertains to American poetry since 1959. Second, I will demonstrate how this history has been especially problematic for women writers working in the last half of the twentieth century. The concurrence of the feminist movement’s second wave with a period of increasing skepticism about the value and merit 4

of seemingly autobiographical material in poetry created unique demands for women poets wishing to honor both the feminist and the literary ideals of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, we can see the emergence of particularly sensitive strategies for dealing with these complex rhetorical demands. In the final pages of this essay, then, I will take on my third goal, a close reading of poems that demonstrate two recent responses to the divergent demands of literary fashion and feminist politics. By looking at the work of Lisa Lewis and Lynn Emanuel—poets whose work is not commonly read as

“confessional,” though their first-person narrative techniques are similar to those of their confessional predecessors—I will demonstrate two distinct approaches for satisfying the demands of both literary and feminist values.

History Lessons: The Rise and Fall of the Confessional School and its Critics

One way to understand the difficulty arising from the term “confessional poetry” is to examine how various critics have defined it, particularly since a comparative approach clearly demonstrates the lack of consistency or consensus about the nature of the thing itself.

In a 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, M.L. Rosenthal applied the term

“confessional” in what is widely recognized as its first appearance in the context of twentieth-century American poetry. Rosenthal later explained the term “came naturally to

[his] mind,” and that he assumed it came naturally to other readers and reviewers as well

(New Poets 25). Yet his use of the term is marked by a reviewer’s preference for wit over specificity. Indeed, all Rosenthal stated about confessional poetry in his initial deployment of the term was that Lowell had used his book’s publication as his “soul’s therapy,” and that poetry demonstrating “the most naked kind of confession” was, to his mind, increasingly 5

popular. He also added “We are now far from the great Romantics who, it is true, spoke directly of their emotions but did not give the game away even to themselves” (“Poetry as

Confession” 71). Rosenthal rightly makes the connection between confessional and

Romantic poetries, though his comparison favors the latter. His use of the word “therapy” further suggests that he sees confessional poetry following the psychoanalytic model for confession (and not other possible models such as religious or legal confession). These two characteristics, then, are the sole identifiers in Rosenthal’s first and most casual description of confessional poetry. In The New Poets, Rosenthal attempted to clarify these points about confession somewhat, but the end result was still troubled by his own resistance to certain poets he grouped with the confessionals and by his growing sense that “confessional” was “a term both helpful and too limited, and very possibly the conception of a confessional school has by now done a certain amount of damage” (25). All the same, Rosenthal’s sense of the limitations of the word did not prevent him from using it with greater critical force in 1967 than he had used it in 1959. His own confession about the slipperiness and difficulty of the term provides an early indication, too, of how “confessional” was already testing its limits as a term for impressionistic description, becoming instead a word used somewhat shamefully and with an awareness of its inappropriateness or shortcomings.

As Rosenthal is one of our first critics of confessional poetry, it is important— though not entirely easy—to see his definition clearly. The New Poets offers relatively little in the way of an explicit definition. Rosenthal does offer, though, three attributes that help identify what he chose to call “New Poetry.” Outlining these three attributes, Rosenthal describes a decisive shift away from Modernist aesthetics. First he sees a mid-century allegiance to Romantic aestheticism, second a growing sense of the individual’s status as a 6

victim, and third a decidedly un-Modernist sensibility regarding the poet’s role in the poem.

Indeed, Rosenthal suggests, “the private life of the poet himself, especially under stress of psychological crisis, becomes a major theme” for the poets he examines in his book (15).

Rosenthal’s discussion of confessional poetry in The New Poets is sizeable, but he includes other writers and movements in the category of New Poetry as well. Thus, readers might conclude that confessional poetry is a subset of the New Poetry, identified by the presence of all three of the attributes outlined above. Not all critics would agree. Marjorie

Perloff, for instance, cites only the third of Rosenthal’s attributes when she offers a definition of confessional poetry. Perloff then goes on to argue that she suspects “the confessional poem as a literary genre has been completely misunderstood” (471) and sets out to outline its conventions and habits anew. Ultimately, Perloff argues that confessional poetry, while it is surely descended from what Meyer Abrams called “the greater Romantic lyric,” may share more in common with realist fiction than with Romantic poetry:

The accuracy of Lowell’s confessional poetry is of interest to the biographer, but for

the critic, the exciting thing is to discern how thoroughly Lowell mythologizes his

private life. He begins with one established convention—the projection of the

romantic lyrical “I”—and fuses the romantic “poetry of experience” with the

metonymic mode perfected by the great realist novelists of the late nineteenth

century. (486-487)

Perloff’s work here doesn’t so much redefine the confessional poem as it suggests new reading tactics that audiences might wish to apply to confessional poetry. Perloff treats confessional poetry as a genre (i.e. an externally applied category) rather than a mode (i.e. a set of conventions and practices employed by the writer). Her suggestions are intriguing, but 7

few critics have chosen to follow up on the possibilities offered by her treatment of confessional poetry.

Take, for instance, the writer and critic A. Alvarez, whose work on confessional poetry emerged in the years between Rosenthal’s and Perloff’s. Alvarez retitles confessional poetry as “Extremist” poetry; he fails, however, to adequately clarify a definition that can apply to all of the poets he presents as Extremists. Instead, we learn that Alvarez’s

Extremist poetry descends, like confessional poetry, from the Romantic tradition; he contends that the “mania, depression, paranoia, and the hallucinations that come in psychosis or are induced by drugs become as urgent and as commonplace [in Extremist work] as Beauty, Truth, Nature and the Soul were to the Romantics” (13). Unlike

Rosenthal’s earliest definition of confession that suggested Lowell and his contemporaries were apt to “give the game away,” Alvarez’s discussion takes pains to clarify that “the genuine artists does not simply project his own nervous system as a pattern for reality” while also allowing that “the basic misunderstanding encouraged by Extremist art is that the artist’s experience on the outer edge of whatever is tolerable is somehow a substitute for creativity”

(15). In other words, the Extremist poet fostered the transparency of persona, the appearance of sincerity, but never allowed himself to “give the game away” and forget the necessity of art’s shaping powers. Yet there is a subtle difference between Alvarez’s point and Rosenthal’s. Rosenthal asserts “The ‘myth’ Lowell creates is that of an America…whose history and present predicament are embodied in those of his own family and epitomized in his own psychological experience” (61). It is Lowell’s status as a member of the patrician

Lowell clan that enables him to mythologize his personal experience into art. For Alvarez, this transformation of personal narratives into quasi-mythological narratives can be 8

accomplished by any “genuine” artist; he sees Extremist art as an inherently democratic form, an avenue for any poet. Conversely, Rosenthal sees confessional poetry’s power,

(particularly in the case of Robert Lowell) as being closely linked to its author’s ability to embody and embed, within the singular figure of the poet, a social or cultural commentary.

Surely Rosenthal’s suggestions here are influenced by New Critical conceptions of universality in poetry, even though he does not frame his argument in exactly these terms.

As later critics have pointed out, the idea of universality often emerges from privilege, and

Rosenthal’s understanding of Lowell’s poetry is almost certainly, if only implicitly, dependent upon such assumptions of status and privilege.

Taken together, the definitions offered by Rosenthal, Perloff, and Alvarez demonstrate a general interest in confessional poetry but also an uncertainty regarding its value and its practices. Additional time to consider confessional poetry did not result in clarification. In 1978, Steven K. Hoffman offered a definition of confessional poetry that, though it calls attention to many of the same poets Rosenthal, Perloff, and Alvarez noted, operates in a fundamentally different manner. For Hoffman:

confessional poetry is a phenomenon that synthesizes the inclination to personalism

and consciousness building of the nineteenth century with the elaborate masking

techniques and objectifications of the twentieth, a phenomenon which, under the

veneer of self-absorption unprecedented even among the Romantics, makes notable

inroads into myth and archetype, as well as social, political, and cultural

historiography characteristic of high modernism. (688)

What seems most striking about Hoffman’s definition is its fundamentally different interpretation of the origins and sources for confessional poetry. Whereas previous critics 9

were most careful to demonstrate the anti-Modernist qualities of confessional poetry,

Hoffman considers confessional poetry as a logical extension of the principles T.S. Eliot laid out in “Tradition and the Individual Talent:”

[R]ecent commentators on [Eliot’s] once unassailable doctrine have determined that

personality does have a place in Eliot’s poetic, if properly objectified and thereby

transformed…if shaped aesthetically by means of the objective correlative. Both

procedures are in fact central to an understanding of the best confessional poetry.

(691-692)

Hoffman’s analysis here is more incisive regarding Eliot than confessional poetry. In the run-down of definitions for confessional poetry, Hoffman’s voice adds to the growing catalog of Romantic, realist, and Extremist, a fourth (contradictory) alternative: Modernist.

Hoffman’s desire to connect confession to Modernism may have many causes—fashion, fancy, or fact—but the result is that his definition presents a challenge to an already poorly defined kind of poetry. Hoffman also expands further than almost any other critic the range of writers to include in the confessional school, going as far back as Delmore Schwartz’s

1938 volume of short stories In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and Theodore Roethke’s book of poems The Lost Son (1948).

Given such confusion, it is easy to see why a polemic definition like the one offered by Charles Molesworth might have a certain appeal. Molesworth identifies confessional poetry with characteristics that include:

the use of a toneless first-person speaker; a relatively dense but discontinuous

imagery; a constant, one might almost say a willed, preoccupation with alienation and

emotional dislocation; an interior life rendered in terms of bizarre figures or ironic 10

parables: these traits can often be traced, in part, to a writer-audience nexus that is

extremely threadbare…a fairly limited but homogeneous audience of readers who

generally accept psychological maladjustment and social impotence as the given, if

not the “norm.” (177)

Molesworth’s concluding focus on the writer-audience nexus opens up possibilities for following Perloff’s example and recognizing confessional poetry by its readers’ habits and practices. His disparaging remarks about confessional poetry, however, make such a study also seem ridiculous. In the end, what Molesworth most clearly provides is a clear example of how the term “confessional” was employed in an increasingly pejorative manner.

Working in this same pejorative critical vein, Joan Aleshire takes on the confessional poem as a seemingly ubiquitous phenomenon that poses a demonstrable threat to the integrity of American poetry. Her essay “Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric” presumes that while writing the confessional poem, “the poet is overwhelmed or intoxicated by the facts of his or her life, lets the facts take over. To say that a poem is confessional is to signal a breakdown in judgment and craft” (16). In Aleshire’s point of view, a successful lyric poem cannot be a confessional poem because confessional poetry’s errors of craft and judgment will cause the poem to fail to live up to the glory of the Western lyric tradition.

Critics who have wished to offer a refutation of an argument like Aleshire’s have often chosen to make their stand on emotional, rather than literary, grounds. For instance, Fred

Moramarco suggests, “A poet’s suicide makes a profound impression on a generation’s sensibilities because poets make public more of their emotional life than others do” (141).

Such a comment draws attention away from craft-oriented critiques. Instead, the critic focuses on the poet as an emotionally and linguistically gifted individual. The figure of the 11

poet as an individual of rare gifts is entrenched in our cultural discourse about poetry. It is,

in fact, a companion and a complement to Aleshire’s configuration of the lyric tradition. Yet

these two arguments effectively manage to cancel one another out, as they work at cross-

purposes. Aleshire cannot argue against the very real emotional content of many

confessional poems, nor can Moramarco deny the not-uncommon formal and stylistic

excesses of confessional poets over the years. Perhaps most problematic is the middle

ground Alvarez attempts to negotiate between the two positions. While Alvarez’s essay

“Beyond All This Fiddle” treats the literature of Extremism in a more or less evenhanded

manner, his treatise on suicide, The Savage God, attempts to place Sylvia Plath’s life and her

work on equal terms, and to treat them as glosses for one another.

Molesworth, Aleshire, Moramarco, and Alvarez all respond sharply—though in

different ways—to the sensational content of many confessional poems. Whether readers

join Aleshire in objecting to the confessional poem’s lack of kairos (which she defines as “the

rules of accurate choice and prudent restraint”) (24-25) or, like Moramarco and Alvarez, we

find ourselves almost unable to resist the allure of voyeuristic temptation offered by poets

such as Plath, it is clear that our reading of confessional poetry is bound to be affected by a

strong partisan divide among critical camps. Thus, it’s not surprising that Robert Phillips

when writing The Confessional Poets (which he claimed was the first book-length examination of confessional poetry) would want to hedge his bets:

While I offer in my opening pages a leisurely and informal definition1 of just what

constitutes a confessional poem, it should be said at the outset that such poetry

1 It is arguable just how “leisurely and informal” Phillips intends his definition to be. It spans almost twenty pages, and concludes with the following summary: 12

rarely conforms to the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary definition of poetry as “The

embodiment in appropriate language of beautiful or high thought.” (xi)

Is Phillips taking pains to excuse himself from the necessity of providing a clear definition by claiming confessional poetry isn’t poetry, strictly speaking? If so, no matter how precise his definition, it will not be likely to suffice. Just as Moramarco and Alvarez attempt to make an end-run around concerns about craft in confessional poems, Phillips attempts an end-run around everyone: the critics of kairos, content, and craft all the same. He certainly pitches a

Before examining the work of individual poets, let us summarize all, or most all, we have discussed as characteristic of the post-modern confessional poetry currently written in America:

It is highly subjective. It is an expression of personality, not an escape from it. It is therapeutic and/or purgative. Its emotional content is personal rather than impersonal. It is most often narrative. It portrays unbalanced, afflicted, or alienated protagonists. It employs irony and understatement for detachment. It uses the self as a poetic symbol around which is woven personal mythology. There are no barriers of subject matter. There are no barriers between the reader and the poet. The poetry is written in the open language of ordinary speech. It is written in open forms. It displays moral courage. It is antiestablishment in content, with alienation a common theme. Personal failure is also a favorite theme, as is mental illness. (16-17)

In these fifteen points, Phillips opens himself up to the accusation of critical lassitude I expect he was trying to avoid by characterizing his definition as “informal.” The pages immediately preceding this list are riddled with hedges, exceptions, and asides, and so his definition, though long and detailed, stops short of clarity. 13

big, inclusive tent under which we can gather the confessional poets, but in the end his tent is too slack to provide much shelter.2

It seems there was something of a looseness in the air. The hedge we see in Phillips

(ca. 1973) is echoed in Hoffman’s 1978 work: “the confessional rubric must be applied loosely enough to embrace Lowell’s realistic and documentary anecdotes, Roethke’s surrealistic sequences, and Berryman’s expressionistic experiments in language” (693).

Hoffman seems to have a firm definition of confessional poetry in mind, but he would prefer that we not apply it too literally. Phillips, on the other hand, doesn’t mind that we apply his definition literally, so long as we understand it may (like Whitman, another poet he connects to confessional writing) contain contradictions and multitudes.

As critics like Hoffman, Phillips, and others advocated a laid-back approach to understanding confessional poetry, it became more and more difficult to describe just what a confessional poem was. Still, by the early 1980s a kind of shared understanding had emerged; this shared understanding fundamentally accepted that confessional poetry is written in the first person, and that it encourages, through narrative and through realistic detail, the impression that the writer is chronicling his or her own experiences, usually of a very private nature, and without the use of an artificial persona. This shared understanding would have also included, however, every hedge, half-truth, or apologetic aside offered in the project of trying to define what made a confessional poem unique. Qualifications multiply

2 In the preface to his study Phillips even laments the practical considerations of book production that precluded him from inviting more writers to take shelter under his big confessional tent. The list of writers he would have liked to discuss at greater length includes Barbara Harr, William Heyen, Randall Jarrell, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, John Logan, Jerome Mazzaro, Adrienne Rich, Delmore Schwartz, and Karl Shapiro. He also explains that he omits Allen Ginsberg “not for reasons of poetics but rather of content” while still sneaking in a sly aside about Howl being a poem “not hewn, but spewn” (xv). 14

and slight variations of emphasis distract us from the fundamental problem: we’ve got a

confessional itch, but we aren’t sure just what we’re scratching at. When one group of critics

suggests that we look to the voyeuristic pleasure that confessional poems can use to tantalize

their audiences, they neither add to nor detract from the work of other critics who

emphasize what has been variously called shame, a kind of “poetic shamelessness,” or, in

Phillips’s phrase, “moral courage” (17).3 In fact, both groups of critics are likely to talk

around the central problem: no one knows just what makes a confessional poem. Are we

clear yet?

My answer would be no, we are still a long way from being clear about confessional

poetry. Furthermore, we are still having problems seeing past the questions confessional

poetry raised forty-five years ago. In 1959, reviewers didn’t know what to make of the

seemingly transparent artifice of confessional poetry. Some dismissed it as artless, much as

they had already dismissed Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1956. Those critics who admired confessional poetry and persevered in studying and writing about it often followed

Rosenthal’s lead and argued that the successful confessional poet transformed personal experience into a universally applicable critique of culture. For these critics, the subjects

Lowell and his contemporaries employed may have been a bit unusual, but the crisis of the private self in an increasingly alienated and alienating culture fit easily into a critical rubric already in place. The desire to locate what was “universal” in confessional poetry most certainly emerges from a lingering New Critical impulse, even though the poems to which

3 The idea of “poetic shamelessness” emerges in David Yezzi’s piece “Confessional Poetry and the Artifice of Honesty,” though Yezzi himself borrows the term from Donald Davie. A discourse of shame surrounded much of the early response to confessional poetry, fueled mostly by readers’ uncertainty over how to respond to the frankness of poets choosing to write about what were considered “private matters.” 15

this rubric was being applied resisted that kind of reading in overt ways. In order to manage this feat of professional reading, most critics who interpreted confessional poetry as cultural critique emphasized the “as if true” posture adopted by confessional poets. This allowed them to praise the poems for their artistry just long enough to move into a justifiable discussion of the poems’ public, universal value.

A second popular critical route leads through the badlands where biographical criticism intersects with faux-psychology and the desire to treat all poetry as specialized language dealing with heightened emotional states.4 Phillips’s work would be one example of this tendency. He explains that “no genuine art is merely autobiographical,” (xvi) yet he also insists that “the emotions [confessional poets] portray are always true to their own feelings” (1). Here we can already see the bind critics got into, wanting to have their art and their authenticity, too. Phillips also declares that he is dedicated to commenting “on the subject of the poets’ work, rather than the form” (xiii) because he believes that each confessional poem has an “ego-centered, though not…ego-centric” origin, and that the goal of confessional poetry is “self-therapy and a certain purgation” (8). Thus Phillips launches himself down the road that leads to a content-based valuation of confessional poetry. Or so it seems. The presumption that confessional poems tell the truth, however, returns us to the artifice/authenticity dichotomy that was central to more traditionally New Critical readings of confessional poetry. Only, this time, we find ourselves taking the long way around, but always, it seems, back to the same familiar questions of artifice and authenticity.

4 This approach was “popular” insofar as many critics pursued it. It was also “popular” because it often appeared to be a less hard-nosed kind of criticism. 16

The urge to verify or authenticate the accuracy of confessional poems initially appears to run against the impulse to locate the universal within them. However, the two different critical approaches lead to the same place. In both instances, critical discussion of confessional poetry limits its concerns to those questions that run from the presence and importance of artifice on the one extreme to the ultimate absence of that artifice on the other. These are worthy concerns, to be sure, and confessional poetry begs readers to ask these kinds of questions. Yet after forty-five years of consideration, these issues may have been done to death. What becomes apparent to me in these conversations about the nature of confessional poetry is that both kinds of readings insist that the only questions audiences might ask of a confessional poem are essentially questions about artifice: What is the purpose of poetic artifice? or How is artifice deployed in this particular instance?5

More recent critical approaches have started to demonstrate, however, the necessity for expanding the range of questions we might ask of work that has been labeled as confessional. For example, Anne Hartman has suggested that confessional poetry may be among the more conservative mid-century poetic movements (conservative both artistically and politically) and that the “confessional” label provided a kind of valorization not readily available to poets such as Allen Ginsberg or Frank O’Hara, whose frankness regarding homosexuality would have precluded their general acceptance by a large reading public.

Hartman establishes an argument that begins by considering artifice and authenticity, but she then places this issue within the larger context of the social and political climate of the 1950s:

5 Readers might alternatively frame these questions as matters of authenticity: What was Anne Sexton really like? or Was Sylvia Plath’s father really a Nazi? The desire to verify the truth of the poem is essentially the same as the desire to analyze the artifice in a poem; both sets of questions are designed to reproduce one or the other side of the artifice/authenticity dichotomy. Each possibility assumes and requires its opposite. 17

I argue…that O’Hara disliked Lowell’s poetic because of its disingenuous claim to

sincerity and self-revelation….I suggest that rather than being “anti-confessional”

both O’Hara and Ginsberg wrote poems that had affinities with the confessional

mode, but which overtly reject the impersonal, solitary form of confession advocated

by Lowell. They used the mode to interpellate a homosexual counter-public, while

exploiting confession’s ability to unsettle normative categories. (41)

Among the most exciting aspects of this kind of work is that it moves beyond the artifice/authenticity dichotomy and challenges readers to look at confessional poetry as a genre instead of a mode, much as Marjorie Perloff’s work tried to do more than thirty-five years ago. Hartman’s last suggestion—that confession (on and off the page) can unsettle received notions about culture, class, gender, sexuality or race—is particularly intriguing after decades-worth of relatively static discussions of confessional poetry. A study like Hartman’s raises questions about how the confessional and the political overlap, and it is this kind of inquiry that informs my own argument about the consequences of reading women’s poetry in the decades after confessional poetry’s rise and long, slow, fall.

Contemporary Confession: An All-Girls School

As I have tried to demonstrate thus far, the definitions of confessional poetry are painfully imprecise. When it is applied to how poems are written, it can be (as M.L.

Rosenthal himself speculated) “both helpful and too limited” to be much use in serious scholarship, and yet “confessional” is a term that has taken a firm hold in our conversations about poetry. When Rosenthal offered his helpful and too limited assessment of 18

confessional poetry, only eight years had passed since the appearance of Robert Lowell’s Life

Studies and W.D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle. These two texts are generally considered to be the first (and best) works of confessional poetry. Now consider this: most of the poets who were originally associated with the confessional school were men. Lowell was the golden child of the confessional school, W.D. Snodgrass and John Berryman its varsity athletes; on occasion Theodore Roethke, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Delmore Schwartz, Randall

Jarrell, S.S. Gardons (an anagram and nom de plume for Snodgrass), Karl Shapiro, or Stanley

Kunitz would be called up from the junior varsity confessional team to run a few plays. Yet for most of these men, the label did not stick. At most, their careers passed through confessional phases, but very few of them were thought of exclusively as confessional poets.

As it stands today our contemporary school of confessional writers seems to be an all-girls institution. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, and Linda McCarriston are all writers whose work has been labeled with the confessional brand name.

Multiple factors contributed to the conversion of the confessional school to an all- girls institution. Most important, though, might be an unexpected historical coincidence.

Just as confessional poetry began to lose its popularity, women were being encouraged to treat private experience as an opportunity for political expression. The unusual concurrence of the rise of second-wave feminism’s emphasis on treating the personal as political and the literary establishment’s intense fascination with confessional poetry between 1959 and 1973 posed a special dilemma for women writers wishing to honor both the feminist and the literary values of their time. In short, doing justice to both was difficult at best, if not nearly impossible. 19

The outcome of this historic concurrence is that poetry by women has become

closely associated with the confessional mode, so much so that in his History of Modern Poetry,

David Perkins addresses both kinds of writing in a single chapter. Even Alicia Ostriker, whose Stealing the Language attempts to point out critical oversights in contemporary discussions of women’s poetry, suggests an especially close relationship between the two.

Ostriker cautions readers, “Insofar as [women’s poetry] attempts timidly to adjust itself to literary standards which exclude the female, it dooms itself to insignificance” (9). Her resistance to timid adjustment fits her larger project of establishing a separate genre of women’s poetry with its own traditions and conventions. As part of her work to establish a separate tradition for women’s poetry, Ostriker argues that in women’s poetry “academic distinctions between the self and what we in the classroom call the ‘persona’ move to vanishing point. When a woman poet today says ‘I’ she is likely to mean herself, as intensely as her imagination and her verbal skills permit” (12). Such an assertion does not, in the case of confessional writing, help to establish a separate women’s tradition. Instead it provides readers with a familiar way of addressing women’s poetry: it can be read the same way the confessional is read. As a result, an argument like Ostriker’s inadvertently manages to stretch all of women’s poetry between the two points that have defined confessional poetry from the start—it is either pure art with gloriously transparent artifice or it is purely artless therapy for a troubled (i.e. female) writer.

As these peculiar intersections of the feminist and the confessional suggest, there is good reason to consider confessional writing from a political perspective. To my mind, the methods and goals of the second wave of feminism should have engaged more fully with the methods and goals of confessional poetry. Chronologically, second-wave feminism and 20

confessional poetry do overlap. Culturally, however, confessional poetry in the 1960s and

1970s was unable to provide a political outlet for feminist discourse precisely because of its status as an already-decadent form of expression. The feminist and literary establishments were calling for women writers to honor two very divergent impulses: the first asked women writers to write their own lives into art, the second insisted that they should do so without the annoying habits of confessional writing (as described by Aleshire, Molesworth, and others). The outcome for women poets who did not back off one side or the other of the feminist/confessional challenge was, by and large, a harsh judgment from the critical establishment.

Take Anne Sexton’s critical reputation as an example of how the literary establishment could deal with unruly women who strove to honor both confessional and feminist values. Both Sexton and her contemporary Sylvia Plath are considered confessional writers, but Sexton confronts her material in a more overtly feminist manner than Plath does. Sexton’s poems such as “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” and “In Celebration of My Uterus” challenge readers to come to terms with representations of the female body that do not fit neatly into familiar categories: goddess, mother, beloved. Plath’s women, also vividly drawn and compelling in their own right, do not conform easily to these categories, either. Yet Plath’s women are also not rebels living outside these categories. Rather they are failed goddesses, mothers, and beloveds. Plath’s work does less than Sexton’s to represent the multitude of experiences possible for individual women. The frequency with which

Plath and Sexton are cast as stylistic foils makes it all the more surprising, then, that readers often reluctant to point out the radical differences in their construction of female characters. 21

Diane Wood Middlebrook’s definition of confessional poetry provides some suggestive complication here as well. Middlebrook claims, “confessional referred to content, not technique” (633). Yet, as I have argued, the bulk of criticism focused on confessional poetry did explicitly discuss technique above content (no matter what Phillips claimed he was doing, his concern with artifice keeps him firmly focused on technique). The discussions of content as modeled by Moramarco, Phillips, or Alvarez seldom looked to the political content of the work, preferring instead to remain safely grounded in the less challenging, more sensational content. Thus the judgment that Sexton is the inferior poet when compared to Plath may well reflect a distaste for her politics that is at least equal to the more readily declared distaste for her poetics. Middlebrook’s definition suggests, then, that content becomes technique for confessional poets; Sexton’s relatively more political content is a technique the literary establishment still resists from a confessional voice.

In spite of all this difficulty with the critics, confessional poetry continues to exert influence on contemporary writers and to provide poetry readers with some of their more memorable initiatory reading experiences. It seems fitting, then, to spend the final pages of this essay examining the ways in which confessional poetry has continued to flourish in the hands of women working after feminism’s second wave. It has done so for two important reasons. First, women writers have adopted writing strategies that presume confessional misreadings; second, women writers have worked to alter the circumstances under which their work is to be read (and misread). Whereas the earliest productions of audience in the confessional poem relied on passive auditors (a model borrowed, in part, from psychoanalytic models of confession), more recently women writers have been participating in a confessional dynamic that configures the audience as complicit rather than passive. By 22

developing an understanding of the audience as a complicit participant in the events conveyed by a particular poem, we can see how women writers have been able to satisfy the seemingly dissonant requirements of feminism and literary criticism during the last decades of the twentieth century.

Rewriting the Confessional Rules: Lisa Lewis and Lynn Emanuel

Two models of how women poets have engaged the seemingly divergent demands of feminist and literary values appear in the work of Lisa Lewis and Lynn Emanuel. Both poets present complex and vigorous models of the shifting relationships between speakers, poets, readers, texts, histories, and the imagination that develop in the course of reading a poem as a piece of confessional writing. Moreover, both poets present provocative first-person female narrators that confound critics who continue to insist that such writing lacks control and risks becoming “merely confessional.” Though neither Lewis nor Emanuel are often read as literary inheritors of the confessional tradition (perhaps because neither poet’s work invites readers to consider the artifice/authenticity dichotomy) examining their work through this lens is useful insofar as it demonstrates how new understandings of the confessional—understandings that highlight its status as a read genre rather than a written mode—can render readings that are sensitive to both the literary conventions of an era and to its political realities as well.

To understand how these writers turn confessional reading and writing conventions askew to suit their own sensibilities, it is useful to examine each individually. Lisa Lewis, author of two collections, presents a series of tenacious, though often wounded, speakers.

Her two books, The Unbeliever and Silent Treatment, are clearly descended from the 23

confessional tradition in their content; Lewis takes on the challenge of bringing once taboo subjects into the forefront of her poetry. She writes about marital and romantic failures, violence, self-hatred, mental illness, and feelings of personal inadequacy using a strong, first- person speaker who is as likely to be audacious as abashed, self-doubting as self-deprecating.

Unlike her confessional predecessors, however, Lewis reminds readers that we have the power to interpret the actions, statements, and events in her poems. Thus, the confessions we encounter in Lewis’s poetry are not the self-soothing, cathartic declarations that

Rosenthal found in Lowell. Rather, Lewis demonstrates that confession is a dynamic and power-driven discourse, requiring two minds equally engaged in a single act. In this respect,

Lewis’s confessional paradigm reminds readers of Foucault’s description of the confessional act:

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the

subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship,

for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who

is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession,

prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive,

console, and reconcile. (61-62)

While Foucault chooses here to highlight the various ways a confessional partner can respond (via judgment, punishment, forgiveness, consolation, etc.), what he elides in this statement is the necessary step of interpretation; before an audience can respond, the audience must process and interpret the nature of a confession. In religious and juridical confessions, the rubrics by which confessions are to be interpreted are codified as law. In literature, however, the subjectivity of both the speaker and the audience is paramount. 24

Lewis’s treatment of the confessional paradigm tends to downplay a sense of speakerly difficulty, emphasizing instead the readers’ difficult task: we will have to interpret the confession for ourselves.

From the very first, Lewis introduces the parallel difficulties of speaking and interpreting in her poems. “Night Ride,” the first poem in Lewis’s first collection The

Unbeliever, begins by lulling the audience into reading at a comfortable distance from the actions and events of the poem. Lewis uses the second-person voice in the present tense, which creates the impression that the “you” the speaker is speaking about is really the “you- that-is-me,” a stand-in for the first person. Her success in convincing readers that the first and second persons are interchangeable makes the poem read like a confession. Lewis begins with Lowellian detail: “You’re driving / A Cadillac, skim milk with sweet butter seats and a cassette deck / Turned up wide-ass open. What if you decide to follow the bus you saw the boys climb on?” (21-23). The inclusion of such specific, idiosyncratic detail and the

“what if” question (which seems to be a random musing or a brief distraction) creates the illusion that the speaker has intimate knowledge of the you’s situation. Thus the reader begins to settle into the idea that the you being addressed in the poem is not the reader, but rather, a stand-in for the speaker. By appearing to give the speaker in the poem such central importance, the poet utilizes the conventions and expectations that have developed in association with the confessional mode. Yet Lewis’s recasting of this central role as a second-person address, rather than a first-person account, also works to ward off any critics prepared to accuse a strong first-person speaker of lacking craft or control. It also emphasizes the ways in which the experiences of the speaker and the audience must run parallel to one another in a confessional discourse. 25

In line 67, however, Lewis radically rearranges the you’s relationship to the speaker.

Suddenly, the two are clearly separate entities: “You glance over as a car pulls beside you;

I’m inside, and you / Don’t know me, but you recognize the look on my face and speed up, with a new story, this one / About you” (67-69). Any sense of a stable, reliable role—for either the reader or this speaker in this poem—is now gone. The poet puts the reader into the poem not only as a character in the poem, but as a character with no control—we drive the Cadillac, we speed away, like it or not. We are incapable of action independent from the text; we can only react to or interpret what Lewis has created. Our last reaction here seems particularly crucial—we leave with a new story to tell. By giving such a specific role to the audience, even if it is an entirely fictitious one that each reader plays only for a few lines in this poem, Lewis prepares us for what our job will be throughout the rest of the collection.

Not only will she call on us to witness events (as she says in the last line of “Night Ride,”

“you have to see”) but we are also expected to give voice to those new stories.

If we accept this new role, our position as a passive, listening confessor is undermined by our new participatory role in the poem. Foucault argues that the power structure of confession precludes it from being a bottom-up discourse initiated by the speaker; the speaking subject of the confession must always submit to the obligatory “act of speech” that is ordered by the interpreting listener (62). Yet Lewis’s poetry requires that readers move through several roles—shifting from passive audience, to interpretive listener, to future confessing subject—all within the space of a single poem.

By establishing the importance of our role as witnesses to the stories that we are told in The Unbeliever, Lewis makes it clear from the first that the burden of knowing and seeing, 26

not the cathartic release of an offered confession, is her central concern. Her work opens avenues of interpretation that share Michel Foucault’s understanding of the power relationship of the confession—it is the listener who holds the power, and it is the listener who will, ultimately, interpret and judge. The value of the confession for the person who speaks it is relatively insignificant, as those speakers already know the stories they have to tell. Thus, in “Night Ride” Lewis constructs a confessional paradigm in which the audience takes center stage, not the poet.

By according so much importance to the act of interpretation in her work, Lisa

Lewis manages to manipulate the conventions of the confessional mode, as described by

Foucault. The conventional disclosures of a confessional poem are still offered, yet the person who listens, the reader in this case, is just as much of a construction of the poet as the speaker is. To further emphasize this overt construction and reconfiguration of both ends of the confessional dialectic Lewis creates speakers who are alternately participants and witnesses. By describing similar events or people, Lewis prompts the audience to identify an unnamed “she” with a character who speaks in the first person elsewhere. For instance,

“Trains,” presents a first-person speaker who is clearly a teacher. In fact, the speaker describes herself as “a lousy teacher,” and proclaims hers a “dubious ‘profession’” (Unbeliever

8, lines 5, 11). In “Revisions,” however, Lewis presents another classroom scene:

But she will notice the paper roughened,

A word revised, a phrase, and think

He was probably right the first time. . .

. . .He is so right, 27

She thinks, to get rid of words, if only

Because they can be changed, and lost— (Unbeliever 33, lines 5-7, 10-12)

By shifting in and out of the first- and third- person perspectives, Lewis plays the game both ways; readers must struggle to identify who the speaking subject is within a given poem, and yet Lewis never wavers. She is always certain who offers each lyric confession. Thus we can see that even as she challenges some of the conventions of confessional writing, Lisa Lewis is still intent on honoring the lyric “I” within each poem. Each of these poems remains squarely aligned with the conventions of confessional poetry in that each one presents individually complete pictures of one individual mind. Though the shifting pronouns can make it difficult to pin down who the speaker is at first, the poems do not attempt to adopt polyvocalic strategies. The disjunction and divide that arises here arises between and among multiple poems.

A more difficult example of this same technique can be found in the poems “The

Visitor” (from The Unbeliever) and “Bogart” (from Silent Treatment). Each of these poems recounts the same narrative: a woman takes a sleeping pill, goes to bed, and wakes up to find someone has entered her room and has raped her. In each poem, the woman remains equivocal about the issue of rape: she was expecting someone else; she knew the man who attacked her; her roommate (who invited the attacker in) accused her of overreacting; the pill she had taken before going to bed had left her feeling disoriented. In “The Visitor”

Lewis writes:

She’s learned his name, and where he lives,

. . .she caught him stumbling 28

Drunk through cornstalks folding around him

Like bad weather; nude from the waist down, nothing

But ugly, he sobbed I’m lost. She believed him.

That night she was sure she’d just forget him.

Still her shame wavers, the flame of a candle.

She wonders what to call what happened. (lines 57, 61-67)

In describing the character’s reaction to the rape, the speaker in this poem must tell a good part of the whole story in order to create the requisite willing suspension of disbelief in the audience. Even with the complete narrative laid out, the audience feels compelled to ask how this could ever happen. The character’s difficulty with learning to interpret the events

(“She wonders what to call what happened”) mirrors our own.

In “Bogart” the story is retold, first-person. Here, the speaker’s equivocal reactions to the rape are clearly the result of the difficulty she has in interpreting the events:

I don’t care to claim the legal term,

Four letters no one knows how to define.

But that night I shouted it, he didn’t

Decline. . . (lines 16-19)

…

Does that sound like rape? The catch is 29

This: I thought he might be someone else.

Someone I’d invited. (lines 32-34)

…

Sometimes people don’t think it’s rape.

Sometimes they don’t think it’s suicide.

Maybe it’s better to repeat every story

From start to finish in full detail. (lines 160-163)

By constantly returning to the way in which the crime is viewed by a variety of audiences, including the victim, Lewis reinforces the idea that it is not the confession itself that is crucial, but the interpretation of that confession. Even when the speaker suggests

“Maybe it’s better to repeat every story / From start to finish in full detail” it is the completeness of the story that is critical, because only when the whole story is out will a valid interpretation be possible. The speaker in “Bogart” goes on to say:

Unlike Bogart, I’m not dead yet. But, like

Bogart, I give you permission to say

What you will. I’ve described how he

Answered my accusation. I figure I named it

Right. You’ll see it another way, maybe,

According to how you’ve lived life. (lines 173-178) 30

In ending the poem on this reminder of the power of interpretation, Lewis yet again inverts the conventional structure of poetic confession as described initially by Rosenthal.

Instead of creating a speaker who might “give the game away,” Lewis reminds the audience that the burden of living with this knowledge is now theirs. In “Bogart” and “The Visitor,” then, Lisa Lewis creates a microcosm of highly personal female experience based in confessional traditions. Her work is controversial, intimate, and violent. It also, like confessional poetry, invites readers to consider its use or lack of artifice. Yet, more significantly, this pair of poems asks readers to consider the public and political ramifications of interpretation. As such, it invites its readers to read outside the artifice/authenticity dichotomy.

By thematizing this interpretive power (as it exists only at the receiving end of

Foucault’s confessional power relationship) Lewis effectively demonstrates that the stories in her poems are not necessarily easy to tell, but more importantly, they are also difficult to know. Confessional poetry has always brought that kind of difficult knowledge to the foreground. By combining the conventions of confessional poetry with an awareness of discourse dynamics, readers can choose to see Lisa Lewis’s work as poetry that that tells true stories about women’s lives without sacrificing those stories to easy interpretations that might reinforce a simplistic idea that women are victims or otherwise marginal figures. In short, Lewis has found a way to employ confessional practices and to also subvert easy readings of her work that would make these poems simple demonstrations of a tired interpretive question. Lewis successfully writes herself into a confessional tradition, yet her 31

work invites readings that work outside the single-issue interpretations of the artifice/authenticity dichotomy.

In every respect, Lynn Emanuel’s poetry is as invested in (and subversive towards) the conventions of the confessional poem as Lisa Lewis’s work is. Emanuel herself, speaking at the 2000 Associated Writing Programs annual conference, characterized her understanding of the relationship her poems establish between the poet and audience. She said, “I found the perfect metaphor for my relationship with the reader: Phone sex.” While the comment was surely more of an ice-breaker or a warm-up joke than a serious critique of her own work, the metaphor is still apt, particularly in examining her treatment of the elements of audience construction and interpretive authority.

Like phone sex, Emanuel’s poetry demands an active dialogue between the speaker

(operator) and the reader (caller). Like a caller to a phone sex line, a reader of Lynn

Emanuel’s work must not only listen carefully to each detail she provides, but moreover, must actively participate in the imagined scenarios that Emanuel, a consummate operator, creates. Yet Emanuel complicates the relationship between the speaker/confessing subject and the reader/confessor by usurping the power of judgment and interpretation. Time and again, Emanuel bullies and beguiles her readers into realizing that whatever judgments they may form about the speaker in her poems, these judgments are somewhat beside the point.

In fact, Emanuel’s poems, while they certainly do offer opportunities enough to consider the power dynamic at work in a confession, do so at the risk of dismantling the efficacy of that dynamic, at least as it is described in Foucault. For Foucault, a confession’s truth “is not guaranteed by the lofty authority of the magistery, nor by the tradition it 32

transmits, but by the bond, the basic intimacy in discourse, between the one who speaks and what he is speaking about” (62). The same is clearly true for Emanuel, yet the “intimacy in discourse” that Foucault assumes exists between the speaker and the content of the confession is characterized in Emanuel’s work by duplicity, doubt, and dysfunction. In order for Emanuel to successfully achieve her seemingly anti-confessional effects, however, she must operate in ways that explicitly remind readers of the conventions of the confessional genre.

Emanuel’s three books Hotel Fiesta (1984), The Dig (1992), and Then, Suddenly—

(1999) interweave first-, second-, and third-person poems in order to create an imagined world in which a speaker’s shameful secrets are not confessed in a therapeutic purgation so much as they are talked about by other characters. When Emanuel’s speakers do offer first- person confessions they are seldom as direct as many more traditionally constructed confessional poems might be. Furthermore, the shameful secret these speakers have is always the same: Lynn Collins Emanuel is a mask-wearing faker and phony. Surely such highly-focused confession would wear thin, particularly if we believe, as Robert Lowell did, that the key element in writing a confessional poem is having something to confess in the first place (Phillips 27). For poets to “confess” to their artifice seems to be a sure way to shut down critical discussion, especially when that discussion has focused for so long on questions pertaining to the presence of artifice in confessional poetry.

And yet Emanuel manages to charm her readers into following along with her seemingly half-true confessions by employing a combination of scintillating detail and a hefty 33

dose of metapoetic gestures. “The Poet in the Garret in America,” the closing poem in Hotel

Fiesta, offers the following lines as one early example:

…America, I want to transcend you.

Like this cardinal in the sycamore I love

My own beautiful sensibility and have come here

To be issued an invitation as exact and stunning

As Eve’s was in her green, frail, and sacramental

World. Under all my winsome diction, you and I

Are standing toe to toe, the diurnal, the divine.

America, I am still hopeful and a woman of my time. (lines 13-20)

In these lines Emanuel offers her readers a glimpse of the self-mocking tone and sensibility

that would go on to become the trademark device of her second collection, The Dig. Here,

Emanuel allows a self-aggrandizing confessing voice to speak freely. Its “beautiful sensibility” and “winsome diction” are stacked side-by-each with the speaker’s ability to see herself in everything from the cardinal to Eve. Though Emanuel’s voice is more overtly sexual in its teasing in other poems, here the poet offers just a hint of the transgressive female (the one, of course, in need of confession) in the figure of Eve. That the two dissimilar figures of Eve and the cardinal are composite components of “a woman of my time” invites myriad questions, yet Emanuel leaves these questions unanswered at the conclusion of Hotel Fiesta. Instead, she offers “The Poet in the Garret in America” as a poem that seems to deny readers the opportunity to see a fallen woman confess as she 34

should. Moreover, the poem also prevents a reader from passing judgment as a listening

confessor by offering what might be thought of as the confession of misdirection; by the

poem’s conclusion, readers are uncertain what the speaker might be guilty of.

Emanuel’s three books work like a triptych. In the first panel, Hotel Fiesta, she begins

to draw the world of a disintegrating family (a familiar topic to readers of confessional

poems). The Dig, the second panel in the triptych, introduces a new factor to deal with, a

second self who offers critique and commentary about the speaker who has started to tell us

that she is, in fact, Lynn Collins Emanuel. The stories that come through in The Dig are

reminiscent of the ones from Hotel Fiesta, but they are clearly more involved with the speaker’s own choices as an adult, and how she chooses to present herself to the world.

With the entrance of the second self, the relationship between the poet’s self and the speaker of the poem is no longer a direct, unmediated relationship. The second self, of course, thinks of Lynn Collins Emanuel in a much different way than the Lynn character who speaks in the unitalicized voice. These conflicting opinions over the nature of a single woman—Lynn Emanuel—encourage a dialogue between poems and between the poem and the reader. For example, in “Riddle” the speaker speaks cryptically of a particular craving:

All one summer my hunger lunged for this

or that green calabash whose name was as hollow

as the sound of wooden tackle blown knocking

at a mast, or as round as the throat of a well 35

down which I tossed my wishes to hear them throb

a message: artichoke, artichoke. (lines 9-14)

The cryptic nature of the utterance here, further underscored by the title of the poem, creates a situation in which the reader is explicitly not permitted into the inner-life or mind of the poem’s speaker (which is, in fact, about as unconfessional as you can get). The next poem, “Who Is She Kidding,” restores the reader to a place of central importance within the discourses contained in The Dig. In this poem the italicized second self asks, point blank:

Who is she kidding? Who is she,

anyway, talking as though she knew

when, I can tell you, honey, she never

even saw an artichoke until she was

eighteen and went to Italy and got laid

for the first time on the beach outside

Talamone, and even then

that girl didn’t know how to spell

artichoke until she was twenty-three. (lines 1-9)

The second self’s assessment of the speaker in “Riddle” is clear. What demands more careful consideration, however, is the way in which Emanuel, by presenting these dialogues within the text itself, also presents a model for the reader to follow. We are invited to be skeptical, like the speaker in “Who Is She Kidding.” Notice, it is the unconfessional voice 36

that we are to mistrust. The voice that speaks directly to us is responsible for confessing those things that the more hermetic voice refuses to disclose. In constructing this dialogue on the page, Emanuel provides readers with an ally in the text, someone to follow, to trust.

She also provides readers with an opportunity to play the judgmental confessor listening to the stories the poems tell.

Having this ally becomes more problematic by the end of The Dig. As the book ends, the Lynn character has died, described the afterlife, and started a slow process of rebirth, “She is standing here thinking she cannot bear the way this foot—/ my foot— wants to step out of the earth. I don’t care. I am using her/ to leave the grave. And so we go on” (“The Dig,” lines 14-16). The Lynn character, of whom we have become conspicuously suspicious, is now allying herself with the second self of the text, our former ally. This newly created alliance is what makes the entire third panel of Emanuel’s triptych possible. Then, Suddenly— presents the complex dismantling of everything the speakers in the first two text/panels have created—hometowns, sweethearts, families, readers, and selves alike.

This incessant revelation of the artifice in Emanuel’s texts (as it is achieved through her creating and dismantling every element in them) works to restore balance—a sense of kairos, to borrow the term from Aleshire—to the confessional paradigm because it enables readers to see the woman behind the curtain, the poet, in such a way that we understand her poems as a new kind of confession. The confessions Emanuel offers are not defined by their relationship with their subject matter in Foucault’s sense, nor in the more 37

sensationalized sense of the taboo; instead Emanuel’s confessions are defined by their relationship to the reader and to the art and craft of writing poetry.

Emanuel is playing with the very foundation of confessional poetry—its insistence on a real-seeming confessing voice. This experienced, human voice is presumed by most discussions that belabor the artifice/authenticity dichotomy; its absence is the mark of a

“failed” confession. In trying to describe the qualities of this voice Louise Glück outlines its conventions, claming:

Substantial contributions to our collective inheritance were made by poets whose

poems seemed blazingly personal, as though the poets had performed autopsies on

their own living tissue. The presence of the speaker in these poems was

overwhelming; the poems read as testaments, as records of the life. Art was

redefined, all its ingenuities washed away. (35)

Lynn Emanuel’s poems, however, seem to stand as a contrary example to Glück’s statements. Emanuel’s speakers are certainly present in her poems, and they are certainly presenting records of a life (and, I might add, a death and a rebirth). By the last panel of

Emanuel’s triptych, however, those speakers have come to speak as poets (as Lynn

Emanuels!). The trouble is we have learned not to trust them because the first two books modeled that distrust for us in the ways that the various poems spoke to—or perhaps talked back to—one another. Consider, for instance, how Emanuel closes her poem “Homage to

Sharon Stone” by asserting “My name is Lynn Emanuel. I am the writer / trying to unwrite the world that is all around her” (lines 71-72) before revising the writer’s task in the very next poem, “Ode to Voice.” In “Ode to Voice” Emanuel claims the writer’s voice in order 38

to assert “I’m the plot;” in spite of the simplicity and directness of her statement, Emanuel casts it into doubt by turning it over and over again. She continues:

And here I sit staring out.

There is a locust tree and twenty chapters

in which

the locust, shaggy and flirtatious,

shuddering in the wind like a huge sea

anemone in the currents of the sea

stares back at me. Perhaps that’s not

the whole story. Perhaps there is no story,

there’s just a narrator, a voice perched,

like a finch on a leaf, between the end

and the beginning (lines 21-31) 39

Emanuel moves the poet’s role from being a partial, incomplete representative of plot (“not

/ the whole story”) to being “just a narrator, a voice.” In this shift, subtle as it is, Emanuel manipulates the conventions of confessional poetry’s expectations of authentic-seeming confession. Indeed, though both the story and the voice Emanuel posits as apt descriptions of the self in the poem have a ring of truth to them, other poems in Then, Suddenly— make clear that this speaker is nothing so passive as a plot to be described, or even as bounded as a narrator who does little more than recount events.

On the contrary, Emanuel is the master of every part of her confession. She controls not only its content, but also the terms on which it is to be received. “Dressing the

Parts” offers readers a perfectly plain example of just how little room we are allowed to interpret things for ourselves. Emanuel begins:

So, here we are,

I am a kind of diction

I can walk around in

clothed in the six-inch heels

of arrogation and scurrility.

And what are you

40

wearing? Is it those boxer

things again? I hope it is

those boxer things

and nothing else (lines 1-10)

Here we see a speaker who is in such control she knows her audience down to its underwear. And, should a reader feel tempted to argue with Emanuel’s insistence on our appearance, apparel, or behavior, the only thing to do is to keep reading:

Like you, my pig,

I’m your truffle and

for you

reading is eating.

Is too. (lines 23-27)

Of course it is line 27, “Is too,” that creates the sharpest insistence yet on how inflexible our roles are. Whereas Lisa Lewis allowed readers to wander in a morass of difficult interpretation, Emanuel prefers to place us squarely within a role we are to play to perfection. Such precision, one could argue, is necessary, given Emanuel’s penchant for allowing her own speakers to contradict one another. There simply isn’t room for the 41

reader’s own take on things. The contradictory tone of “Is too” makes clear that Emanuel’s

speaker will not tolerate any interpretive insubordination from her readers.

As for Glück’s assessment, that in the process of writing confessionally poets

redefined art and washed away all of its ingenuities, again Emanuel seems like an interesting

counterpoint. Glück suggests elsewhere that the legacy of poetry since the Romantics is a

growing “tradition of sincerity.” This tradition, she says, has resulted in a new view of the

poet; no longer a meditative mind-in-process, “the poet is less and less the artisan who

makes, out of an occasion tossed him, something of interest. The poet less and less

resembles the debating team: lithe, adept, of many minds” (38). The implication here is that

the poet more and more resembles a projection of his or her own pathological, monolithic

emotional state. Yet the poems from Then, Suddenly— work to show just how ingenious a contemporary poet can be, even when the speaker is the overwhelming presence in the poem. The poems in Then, Suddenly— bring all the artifice poets usually try to keep hidden in their poems out onto the wide-open space of the page. Poem by poem, Emanuel teases out the conventions of the persona, speaker, poet, and the self she calls Lynn. She cycles and recycles through moves that question the straight-forward authoritative rhetoric of so much confessional poetry, and then she questions the questions, too. The result of this constant inquiry is a balanced, if unstable, revision of the poet-reader relationship as it exists in her poems.

The relationship between poets and their readers is never simple. Some readers have declared the poet dead, and some poets have—at times—returned the favor by allowing no space for the reader to exist comfortably within a poem. The territorial give-and-take 42

between poets and readers over the past half-century has left us somewhat wary of one another. Confessional poetry has been an especially contentious territory because of its amorphous nature, its dramatic tendencies, and its appearance to focus so intensely on only the poets’ perspective. Yet, as my examination of Lisa Lewis and Lynn Emanuel demonstrates, the power dynamics implicit in the confessional paradigm are far more fluid than such narrow, speaker-centric readings of their work would suggest.

By focusing our attention outside the artifice/authenticity dichotomy, and through the open application of confessional reading practices, readers can invite far more intellectually and emotionally satisfying encounters with the confessional impulse in contemporary American poetry. Confessional reading demands nothing less than full engagement from both poet and reader, and it also allows for both parties to approach the confession with the same wariness and apprehension that decades-worth of living with a

Modernist sensibility has made second nature to us all. Lynn Emanuel and Lisa Lewis offer readers interested in applying confessional reading tactics the opportunity to understand their work as a nexus of Romantic, Modernist, and feminist poetics, filtered through their dynamic, uniquely drawn first-person speakers. Readers ready to take up this challenge will find that what they teach you in this school is nothing short of how to read a poem on its own terms. Best of all, such reading strategies can also help readers to understand contemporary American poetry like the contemporary lyric “I” itself—a blend of complementary traditions and impulses, rather than a discordant and disjunctive compilation of unrelated and disinterested fragments shored up by nothing at all. 43

Works Cited

Aleshire, Joan. “Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric.” (1988) After Confession: Poetry as

Autobiography. Ed. Kate Sontag and David Graham. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2001.

Alvarez, A. Beyond All This Fiddle: Essays 1955-1967. New York: Random, 1967.

Emanuel, Lynn. The Dig and Hotel Fiesta. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.

---. Then, Suddenly--. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1999.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley.

New York: Vintage-Random, 1978.

Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994.

Hartman, Anne. “Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg.” Journal

of Modern Literature. 28.4. (2005): 40-56. Project Muse. University of Cincinnati

Libraries, Cincinnati, OH. 3 Feb. 2006. .

Hoffman, Steven K. “Impersonal Personalism: The Making of a Confessional Poetic.” ELH.

45.4. (1978): 687-709. Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. University of Cincinnati

Libraries, Cincinnati, OH. 3 Feb. 2006.

.

Lewis, Lisa. Silent Treatment. New York: Penguin, 1998.

---. The Unbeliever. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994.

Moramarco, Fred. “‘Burned-up Intensity’: The Suicidal Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Mosaic: A

Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 15.1. (1982): 141-151. Academic

Search Premier. EBSCOhost. University of Cincinnati Libraries, Cincinnati, OH. 3 Feb.

2006. . 44

Middlebrook, Diane Wood. “What Was Confessional Poetry?” The Columbia History of

American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Columbia UP: 1993. 1 March 2006.

.

Molesworth, Charles. “‘With Your Own Face On’: The Origins and Consequences of

Confessional Poetry.” Twentieth Century Literature. 22.2 (1976): 163-178. Academic

Search Premier. EBSCOhost. University of Cincinnati Libraries, Cincinnati, OH. 3 Feb.

2006. .

Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Boston:

Beacon, 1986.

Perkins, David. History of Modern Poetry. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976.

Perloff, Marjorie G. “Realism and the Confessional Mode of Robert Lowell.” Contemporary

Literature. 11.4. (1970): 470-487. Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. University of

Cincinnati Libraries, Cincinnati, OH. 3 Feb. 2006.

.

Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973.

Rosenthal, M.L. The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II. London:

Oxford UP, 1967.

---. “Poetry as Confession.” Critics on Robert Lowell. Readings in Literary Criticism 17. Ed.

Jonathan Price. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1972. 70-75.

Yezzi, David. “Confessional Poetry and the Artifice of Honesty: The Marriage of English Poet

Ted Hughes to American Poet Sylvia Plath” New Criterion. 16.10 (1998): 14-21.

Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. U of Cincinnati Libraries. 24 Jan 2006

.

45

Nothing Fatal 46

Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

47

Meeting You: A Definitive Plan

I will not buy two goldfish and name them both Elizabeth Taylor because there is no telling them apart. I will not decide they are both Scorpios simply because I am, and because I think they are mysterious for their distracted way of pouting around their bowl, turning the curves smoother each time. Their wet world will not tip like a steaming teapot into a cup. No cat will lap up its tragic good fortune. You will not sell me two new fish at a dollar apiece plus ten more for a new bowl to replace the one gravity got and you will not miscalculate the sales tax and I will not not get my change back. Chances are, you will not even work at Bud’s Sea and Sky Shop. So in case that’s you shopping the family planning aisle out of wedlock, don’t let our white-haired family pharmacist with the spooky, wall-eyed stare catch me smirking as he assures the woman (who I pray is not your girlfriend) all the merchandise is “fresh.” And since you probably aren’t her supportive older brother checking the date on every box of every brand don’t think to think about some grand plan passing you by. Tonight I am as simple as the world’s last love poem: I pay for multivitamins, I shoplift a pack of Freshen-Up. I leave the door swinging behind me, right in front of you.

48

Porch With No Swing —after Edward Hopper’s Summer Evening

Her clothes are more bare than the light and I am sure the young man is glad. Late, on a porch with no swing, his request seems more daring.

Her clothes are more bare than the light. Her red-headed frown squares out her jaw. Curtains hang inside the door; she still hasn’t caught his drift.

Her clothes are more bare than the light. Only I think he’s wearing her shoes. Heavy curtains do not catch in the breezeless summer air.

Her clothes are more bare than the light. Her red-headed frown squares out her jaw. Curtains hang inside the door; he still hasn’t caught her drift.

49

Poem in Which I Fail to Appear

I’m not in there, or if I am you cannot see me. I’m hidden behind the cowboy whose swagger suggests he’s all hat, no cattle. The boozy banker in the brown pin stripe has taken my chair and the server has swept away all trace of the glass I sipped my whiskey from. Look for me pinned beneath the bar-chord callused hands of some young thing or in the single stray hair knotted through his rough, shadowed attitude—a two-day beard and the unlit cigarette he blames for his stagy smokers’ growl. Ask him where he found me, or try to remember yourself where you lost the last lover you found—under your thumb, behind your back, back together again with the cook who kept the kitchen hotly ticking. Send a waitress to check under the stall doors in the Ladies’, keep one eye on the lonely curb-parked cabbie who closed his book and winked when you jumped at the flash of his for-hire sign.

Catch him if you can. Look for me on his last dog-eared page. Then you’ll see what happened and when. He did what I said; I slipped away while he read, and now I am gone, baby, gone.

50

In the Manner of Folklore

Take a milkweed tea twice yearly to prevent the onset of anything you’re better off without, though more often is best for rickets, weedy gardens, or children. Stroke a cat’s fur backwards and see if sparks rise in the shape of lost loved ones. Fleas cannot be helped, though some claim their bites add heat when love begins to cool and can urge the cows to breed, come spring. Don’t be cruel with the potatoes you bury beside the raspberry bramble, even if the neighbor’s dog is sure to dig them up. Don’t curse your cure or those warts will grow back twice the size and black to boot. Unmarried women, as a point of etiquette, please don’t snuff a stranger’s candle, or handle an axe blade, even in gloves.

Carry your wits in whatever basket you have, and if a man asks tell him you have been hunting for simples. An itch will tell you what you have found.

51

The Dog, the Yard, the Water, the Problem

Imagine that you and your dog are in the front yard. The dog must be wet, and possibly has soap still sudsing his fur because you’re eight and, even though I’m telling you how to do this, you’re going to get part of it wrong. Good. Very good.

Feel the sharp small slap of the dog’s wet tail against your thigh. Accidentally spill half the bucket of water you’re carrying on yourself. Miss the dog entirely with the other half of the water. Now wait briefly, as if you are trying to figure out what to do next.

You are trying to be helpful—and that’s good—but now you must stop helping for a moment. Your dog is shaking himself off. His head and body seem to twist in opposite directions at the same time. Now your dog is tossing himself in the grass, sending loose blades into the air. His tail and paws fly upwards like a seizure. You would like to try this, I know. You have watched your parents practice this at night in their bed. Go ahead, you’re eight and you are eager to grow up. Notice how damp the lawn is.

Remember to make soft snuffling sounds. Wait for your mother. (Think how she must be about a million years old in dog years.) Wait for her to bang the door open by throwing her hip against the latch while kicking the sticking spot loose. She never spills a drop of her drink. Get up from the grass and tell her you are sorry. Actually be sorry at this point. As sorry as you were last night, awakened by strange sounds then slapped for being a snoop. Consider this the growing list of your own shortcomings. 52

Flirt

My moves move quickly, like jokes at cocktail parties, like ice off the face of a glacier.

Tonight I will wow you with imperfect haikus, the dropped syllables filled in by long, meaningful stares or with a flutter of sleeve and eyelash, the semaphore the body flashes. My blush and hitched, nervous breath telegraph my feelings in dots and dashes. Words melt in the watered-down gin and love might just run smoother for it. All over the room little lines, knocked out one too many times, fall down punch-drunk and well past clever. Watch out! One well-placed hand and you’ll feel the sting in my smile all the way down to your thighs. Come on… why don’t we get outta here.

53

The Queen of Snakes

She must have slithered straight from the root of a cypress tree. No turner could work his lathe to cut her jeans’ finely fringed cuffs. She rises from the cracks and the mud at the bus stop like the Queen of Snakes rising from a black knot of reptile hide. She never watches her step. The snakes climb higher, wrapping their fat bodies around the slim joint of her ankle so tightly they could snap it with a careless twitch. They twist their bodies into a wriggling braid, they slide over one another, knowing only the pleasure of skin touching skin. She feels nothing for her minion, yet he dreams of his hands drawing up slipknots of her hair. She takes a slow drag of clove smoke, wet winter turns a little more exotic for a block in either direction. Then a flick of ash. Open mouthed, he breathes in her scent and taste, his tongue stabbed clean through with a silver stud.

54

Rattle Bones

In the lab the mad doctors stitch up the seams that will never heal into scars. Their monster, they know, will be all jigsaw puzzle and skin graft but they love the craziness of their quilt. Each night a different one sleeps on the slab tucked beside the cold mass of their genius.

Come morning, they pull on their lab coats—worn mostly for looks and for warmth—knowing there is work to be done. Today’s question: where will they put the soul? On this debate the sides seem evenly split: half heart, half brain. A few rogues jokingly point lower.

Wrapped in their white coats and gloves, they frown over their progress. One thinks the monster looks a little like him. He blushes with pride when his boss praises the careful way he has chosen each toe; he had hoped his attention to detail would not go unnoticed.

Flexing the left foot again, he checks the tension rising in the line of the Achilles’ tendon, the loft of the sculpted arch, all along dreaming he will be the one to whisper into their lovely monster’s ear and rattle those three delicate bones for the first time. Speak, he will say, tell them you’re alive.

55

How Not to Sleep Around

Cats call out their crazy love and the amphitheater alley bellows back their lunatic heat. The creekbed cuts corners and its shale banks sag like furniture. Familiar sheets twist against your own unmixed sweat. In the other world, lovers carry on and someone clutches you like a handbag in a bad part of town. Someone hollers keep it down! and summer settles in while you name its every sound, name the heat that swells in cycles and waves you on toward that one last thing you’re waiting to feel: either cooler nights and quiet sleep, or a hotter way to cool your heels.

56

Too Darn Hot

I’m down to just two secrets, and one is a lie I tell to keep the other company. Like a silver dollar, you appear and disappear with ease. I can make you hot beneath the palm of my hand, or tuck you into some small pocket of the night’s star-striped suit for a good night’s quiet sleep. Before we move on, let us notice the darkness, sleek and clear, though only in one direction. It isn’t safe to breathe or move when the air itself is as thick and brutal as a dime-a-dozen thug, itching to swat one of us with the spit-polished buckle of the moon, belted low on the night’s shadowy frame. This is when the wooing happens, if we go ahead and woo. After that, there’s no telling what I mean when I say I want to hold you like a cardshark with a rotten hand. This late, why sort the doubletalk from the innuendo? They’re both lyrical. Suppose I poured you a whiskey, straight from a bottle cast in glass so green, even money sickened with envy. Let’s say I drank the deloveliest wine. With a piano, we could Cole Porter ourselves into a too-darn-hot spot, only I don’t like you enough even to hum. The least movement is only a turn-on for the spotlight above the door. I’m bored and would prefer something a little more upright, a little more grand. So this is the plan: I’ll yawn. Yawn. And thank you, thank you. The show is over. Good night.

57

Aubade: Easy Mistake

No wonder the sun rose and soaked my bed in watery light better suited to laundry than to love. No wonder dawn dragged itself up into a full gray sky. I strip the sheets and the washer swishes its hips at the first touch of a button. The coffee maker drips too slowly to enjoy such a rushing ruckus but the manufacture of some fast hot heat is not a mystery to everything in the kitchen: the tea kettle fairly squeals each time the microwave completes its calisthenics routine.

Beauty and strength—both are lost on the wobbly fan that totters all night long like a drunken chanteuse, more the idea-of-cool than cool itself. Easy, I suppose, to mistake its cheap squeak for morning birds coming on two dim hours before the forty-watt sun at last laid bare the forsythia without its yellow, the world its wonder.

58

Generosity

The generous would be wise to keep both hands always in sight and yet the old man leans across his pyramid-stacked bananas to hand the man who looks so much like that no-good kid of his the only thing his vendor’s heart can get its hands on—a pear.

A gesture. In a makeshift shopfront, crates full of sour fruit, oranges and limes—stacked beneath the sweeter scents of apple and berry— serve as a fragrant reminder of our every vice. Sinking misaligned teeth into the set curve of the pear’s hip the younger man waits for the vendor to turn his back. And so the generous will learn the story of temptation the hard way again. The young man’s calculation looks just like gratitude.

59

Listless

Let the lioness lie, sleepy, in the shade of one bare tree and dream of small puddles, so the drought may seem less long. And a dream, too, for the baboon, who doesn’t see the lion slip her tongue in one dry loop across her teeth. A flight of featherless wings, wasps and bats like nightmares diving from rooftops to the open spaces below, streaks the sunset with a thousand reasons to panic at the sky’s unlined lanes of traffic. Every set of wings strong-arms the evening into pairs of hungers, pairs of thirsts. Closer, one hand draws, in solitude, to the one body it knows best. The moon is inconvenient, it reeks like a stale tooth—the root’s gone rotten, there’s nothing to be done. All that heavenly ether only helps the ache burn brighter. Now here, a candle, here a window, a warped wood door that won’t close true. A wick that smolders, a book unread, and that breath— almost a word—when the hungry world at last lies quiet.

60

Sexy French Underwear

French underwear is sexy, so I put on my sous-vêtements for you each morning, slipping first one leg and then the other

into the half-sad openings whose tattered, elasticized lace has been machine washed once too often to still pass

as lingerie. But at least I try, I tell myself—though I keep quieter than Victoria’s Secret about the time I went bust

in a twice-worn bustier. Does all this French pay off? When I feed the cat do you purr, imagining canary feathers

tickling the backs of my thighs? Or when I drive my car (God, yes, the Citroën!) do you go wild around all my curves?

I can hum La Marseillaise as we come, we can cry for liberté and all the rest of it, but the sirens wail in a strange key, and, quel dommage, every ribbon, every accent comes out wrong: I say merci, though I must mean something like pity. You say de rien as if your kindness simply is a little piece of nothing. We wear and wear each other down this way, a negligee, the slip or the savor of a foreign tongue. The thinnest of understandings flutters between us. I’m a dark roast, a thick soup, I’m French like nobody’s business except my own. Who knows if you love me for les bras, for my brain, for my softassnow?

Who cares, if I can’t trust you not to read me wrong.

61

My Fortress of Solitude

I want to wear him like the snap-brim hat that keeps Clark Kent’s sleek blue-streaked hairdo greased into pomade’s most perfect expression of strength and hold. I want so much control the disguise leaves crowds of anxious bystanders blown away by my hidden life, the impossibility of such a singular double nature. I want to be seen here, overlooked over there in my work clothes, somehow too daily for even this, the dailiest of planets. Let me wear him down until he’s become my most comfortable shoes, my best hat and threadbare coat, the house in which I alone can live and in which I can live a little less alone. He’ll hold me close until we can fly further south into those Antarctic climes where even predators cannot take the harsh winter wind that blows survival away and solitude shelters us naturally in its crystalline architecture. We’ll poke around in exotic furs and layers of socks, warming each other against the chill that comes through the walls, even in summer. I’ll leave Paris and all of Italy to lovers who need good light or heat to find each other beautiful. Give me instead the cold of everything below zero so that tongues freeze and stick to the wounds they lick and my doubts aren’t kryptonite, don’t weaken him, won’t kill me a little at a time.

62

Dreadful Sorry

Don’t drag that dreadful sorry daughter up from the earth like a precious mineral. Let her hover in place with her skirts blooming around her like calico jellyfish dandling their tentacles across the skin of her thighs. I’ve been mixed up— I took caves for snowy mountaintops, fathers bereft for faithless beaux whose courting can’t be trusted. And that girl? Her, I never knew at all, except by name. In deep enough to float, to bob and roll past every line we’re thrown, Clementine and I are well past saving. We sing a song whose tune no one knows, whose love and grief are ours alone.

63

Lesser Beasts

Bare-handed, I snapped all the necks on a six-snouted pig named Lucius and beat back Lycoris, the bringer of dull evenings. Now come, lesser beasts, imps and sprites, swarms of you like gnats in the yard. Here’s a saucer of vinegar to lap, a small bowl of cloves to fatten up on before I pluck you from your own burpy stupor. The staccato gallops of the night-mares’ hooves will slur and thicken in the strip of honey I’ve spread on the windowsill; their hollow bones will keep until I sift them from the black ants’ trails. I’ll blow their dust back to the distant north, shine their saddles like trophies to hang from my jacket buttons. Beware my open hand, beware my wicked tongue—it cleans my teeth like a plague cleans a field. It’s the gristle that causes the glint, gorgeous prey. Now watch me pry your ribs apart, tune your spine, tongue your last note in no key at all.

64

Carnivalesque

Bargains were struck. Firemen dressed as clowns, Jaycees’ Wives made snow cones, and the Chamber of Commerce sold raffle tickets. Andrea Nelson wore perfume and stole a hanky from her father’s drawer.

We were learning Brad Higgins kissed with one eye open and Jeff Meyers wouldn’t kiss a girl until she touched his cock. In the lost and found, a thin gold band—the confirmation ring Julia Jennings gave some boy. Mothers wept. Fathers blinked. The brass band clanged away.

Then the ferris wheel came down and the fun house folded up—it turned out to be a trailer home painted, gutted, and rewired. The whole town buzzed and blared. Blame had to be misplaced: Some sentences began “My daughter...” Some began “Those carnies.”

65

Fresh

When Kevin Miller’s mother called me fresh before swaying up her driveway I didn’t know her New Jersey twang was from New Jersey or that when she called me fresh she meant to make me sorrier than her son was for the game he started with kisses. I ran after him until his wrist was fast in my grip and his belly was flat in the dirt. The soft pop of his skin beneath my teeth is still as fresh as the sting in my mouth where I stretched it sore at the corners.

His mother stopped in her tracks when I spat the missing bit of his dirty cotton shirt at her heels and she spat back with fresh. Suppose his response had been that sharp. Suppose my kneecaps hadn’t cracked two of his twiggy ribs and left him forgetting how to handle his next breath. Suppose he had been heels-dug-in stubborn and refused to run. The messages our bodies send us and deliver us from—quick as currents running to ground—snap and arc under the force of our telling (the synapse filters flash and the story is recast): If he hadn’t run away, he could have won. And now if the knot of his scar could untie itself and slip back into skin, it would only be one more thing he left behind when I watched his mother load half

66

a houseful of her, her wisdom and her furniture, onto a truck and head back to New Jersey.

•

Before he began, the dentist shook his thumb over his right shoulder, asked me if I “wanted one like that.” Kevin Miller was long gone, and my trophy—my chipped incisor—was filed smooth. By summer, I learned to throw out a hip and carry a comb.

I hung out at the corner of Rollerskate and Ten Speed with a pack of cigarettes I knew how to light but couldn’t yet smoke. On the corner we played “Truth” and let the good lies slide until Nicole

Ryan dared Steve Swisher to a game, then fired off a pack of lies. Had she, or would she ever? Yeah.

With a boy? Yeah. With Brian Wilburne? We were gonna but he just had his braces tightened.

With a girl? No way, Steve. You’re the only queer I know. And none of us said a word.

Then Megan, who knew about sins of omission, heard her mother call, and Ruth, who always played by the rules, said it was hers.

Then Ben and Adam Morgan rode off without a word. Nicole spat out her gum, said Let’s don’t tell, right? We don’t ever tell. When he asked me if I wanted one like that, I wondered if the dentist meant the girl or her thousand dollar smile. 67

Did I really have to choose? Could I tell him anything without a word like complicit?

•

We still don’t tell. None of us would ever say a word about how Nicole was easier than a boy, or mention how she let us kiss her, so long as we kept our eyes open and did what she told us to do:

No. The boy puts his hands here. The trouble with secrets is keeping them quiet enough. Is choosing who to tell each story to. Nicole never told anyone who didn’t already know and I never told anyone at all. I lied to Allen

Wexler through my straightened teeth, said it just came natural, because maybe it did for someone. In the woods, behind the traffic rails at the dead-ends of streets; in basements and bedrooms and borrowed cars; in the alley behind the drugstore and under the bleachers at away games, the difference between postulate and theorem was made manifest on a familiar scale, without a reminder that failures have always been part of the proof. The exclusive properties of either saving myself or giving it out on the cheap seemed less exclusive the night Rob McKerney kicked me out

68

of his car for not wanting to go all the way. He had said we would just practice, but Rob didn’t want to practice like Nicole and I had.

I hadn’t considered not believing him when he said we wouldn’t do it in his car. Whichever way, the story is the same.

•

I can only allow for so much discretion and if my stories seem to hedge their bets, it’s a habit I’ve picked up with experience:

John Ackerman pulled my hand to his crotch during an assembly. What if I had pulled away instead of trying to imitate what I told Rob McKerney I wouldn’t do? Then John Ackerman wouldn’t have held his books low as he left the auditorium and I wouldn’t have wondered what John Ackerman’s mother said when she found those jeans in the wash. Then I wouldn’t have said yes when Theresa Vincente asked That’s it? That’s all it is? She expected stories of hands under my shirt and voices dropping to soft guttural gasps. Not the simple synchronous looks away. Not quiet disavowals and throat-clearings without even, simply, a thank you. The whole truth is invariably only part of the story—the skin over the flesh and bone of experience. I have let what comes first hand come first. Everything else resists translation into narrative—the story doesn’t end. There is no moment I can point to, say This is when things changed. Kevin Miller, 69

I’d still pin you down in the dirt, if only to tell your mother to take back the time she called me fresh; if only to ask Nicole Ryan if what happened happened only to me. If only to say none of this happened only to my body.

70

On the Principle of Pairing in Nature

Don’t look in the obvious places.

Friends with good intentions will tell you to employ simple principles of logic: If you want to hunt big game, they will say, you must find it where it lives. Want a lion? Get thee to the dark continent of love where prides of doctors and lawyers run free through happy hours, night clubs, and upscale retail centers. If you point out that you could be a gazelle, and that would be bad, they will repeat their advice, as if it’s you who didn’t get the point. These friends are probably still single.

But maybe you are looking for the arty type. Order pizza, they say. The musician willing to starve for his art delivers. The painter delivers. The sculptor, performance artist, struggling first novelist, aspiring actor/director, documentary filmmaker, and songwriter all deliver. Call. Wait. He will come to you fresh, hot and in thirty minutes or less. He will come guaranteed.

If you are too hungry to wait that long, go to the drive-thru. Look at the speaker and be sure to speak directly to it. There is a chance you will hear a promise of love so rich you’ll devour it, want more. You’ll want to drive through again and again, circling the parking lot just to hear the voice promise he’ll “bewitch you in a moment.”

Take classes at the community center, they say. Even the ones that don’t interest you. Yogacize. Learn to look in every crowd for someone dressed like your soul mate. Always look alert and receptive. Dress like someone else’s soul mate. Most of all, don’t look like you’re looking. But don’t look and—poof!—you disappear. 71

z

72

A Version of the Ark

So what if God doesn’t play dice with the universe? There’s always roulette or bingo—or hell, for that matter, there could be nickel slots warming up for the Big Winner to come and take the money and run away to some tropical island a little less cloudy than heaven. Or perhaps to some place a bit dimmer, where the blinding ether doesn’t boil all vision to a white-hot glare. Let the rule that the house always wins come apart until every last loser in the joint can leave feeling lucky in love and clever at cards. Blow the casino doors down and let them leave, marching off two by two to weather the storm in the swan-shaped boats that used to bump along the flume in the Laugh-in-the-Dark.

As they sail, they s’amuser with a little covert clutch and rub; they fail to notice that the waters do not rise. It’s about time these tame and timid creatures finally pushed their luck. Nothing’s fatal. Everything’s wild and nothing beats a pair.

73

Water Speaks to Our Subconscious Selves

The power was out, so the t.v. wouldn’t work and the garage door was stuck shut. Everyone stayed in. No moths’ wings opened or closed in the darkness above the front door. Tip: Drink half a glass of water before bed. Remembering your dreams is as easy as drinking the other half when you wake up.

I couldn’t tell if anyone ever stepped out on anyone else. All along, when other parents were running around, I figured mine were busy doing something different. I mean, I guessed they must have been. I went to bed early. A whole lake froze and its shale cliffs eroded.

Trouble was they never said how big a glass. And by morning, you’d think they’d have come back on, the lights. I was so thirsty my voice cracked for good. I still can’t remember if they were in color, what I looked like, or if I could fly.

74

Academic Affairs

Why don’t you love me, and we can hit the road together, cruise the lecture circuit and tell other single people

about the work it takes to make it work. Together, we’ll talk talk talk about the necessity of long-term

memory and the value of the grudge. Your flipchart of my body parceled out like a butcher’s map

shows the exact locations of too much and too little with tiny stuck-on arrows, their sharp points as fine

as my revenge: reading poems instead of lectures, each one a reminder of other men I left for doing less.

Afterward, alone again, come up beside me, nuzzle my ear and quote Foucault: Tomorrow, sex will be good again.

Now add But tonight you’re on your own. This is how itinerant scholars of loss communicate: quote, footnote.

Our end notes and marginalia are full of longing for the pet projects we can’t let go, yours on fixing up my life, mine

a love poem I’ve been working on for years. It reads, I can take it if you can; I can take it if you can.

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Sweet Nothings

You’re my little blossom, Buttercup. My sweet butter pat to spread across the sheets’ unwholesome slice of goodness. Let’s not let the literalists make love harder by asking that we must mean so precisely what we say. Indulge my weakness for the rotten rhetoric that covers up the scratched tracks you stalk, Tiger. See how I pounce on the chance to indulge my sweet tooth for words, my sticky need to keep you safely in some half-baked, sugared state.

Let me call you Sweetheart to keep you only as close as the shopkeepers who call me Honey. Baby, you know our business has been more than good. I won’t burn with a figurative flame unless your sweetness melts in a word. Sugar, dissolve in my mouth or crumble and let me call you my Cookie, my Muffin, my Ruin.

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By the Time this Poem is Over

some readers will wish the genre of the love poem were more popular because someone will hurt someone else in line eight. The reader’s eyes will have giddyupped across two little lies and a big, juicy whopper there’s no hope of catching. The tides will have shifted and displaced the sand that marks their margins; we will move closer to the second ice age when that sand will grind canyon lips down into deepest bedrock. A bed will stop rocking beneath two lovers who neither love nor need each other (the poem will end with their starting up again). When it’s over, it’s over or it’s not, but tell that to the painter who claimed he finished painting the same way he finished making love. I guess having sweat through some fabrics he changed the canvas as a housewife might change the sheets after her lover leaves. (What a racket those two made!) By the time this poem is over, that quilt will be awash in sweat and dander, shadows steeped in a swelter so sultry one of us will feel like lighting up— didn’t their love make you think of words like smolder? By now it is almost time for us to leave each other, but first let me ask you, what’s your name, my love? You look like someone I used to write about.

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Temptation Is No Apple

Lead us not into the adult bookstore because those sorts of things often can be delivered to us at home, after all, and the children have friends whose parents would rather not see us—the chaperone for every fourth grade field trip—waiting in line for an issue of Bitch Kitty.

No apple pulls me against my will into sinking an eyetooth into it, but Lord, there is a hand-polished gleam in every sin I’ve ever gone in for. I know difficult resistance and prudence and how far we can go beyond them if the mail carrier likes our taste in literature and says so. So lead us not into inviting him in when he slips the circulars and bills through our mail slot. Lead us not into a steaming shower with the water slowly turning cold because the mail carrier accepted our invitation to something hot for the holidays. Lead us not into mistaking seduction for affection or delivery—I mean, deliverance.

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Near Misses

Forget about the fat angel and his sack of arrows; tipped up on one chubby foot, he always seems to be falling. Flipped up on edge, the pool rafts bask in the sun and the concrete sweats beads of water. Everyone’s schedule is just a bit off-kilter, ripped up by holidays and interruptions. By Monday morning the glad, grabbing lovers who ached for flesh the day before will have zipped up and down the elaborately turning paths of the public gardens so thoroughly every witness will know the pair is tripped up by each other’s still being there. There is an intimate stink like the magnolia’s woozy rot, those tacky flowers, so open-lipped. Up early, out of habit, they don’t kiss. One yawns, one shakes or scratches. The fat angel takes his aim. Breakfast gets whipped up.

It’s a hit! The Perrier bottle’s green curve goes to pieces, its insides begin to love the floor. The tile is slick. Someone’s slipped up.

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Domestic Bliss

I’ll tell you what it’s like, my married friend says. It’s always dark where he’s from. She lives in an unknown country: the walls rise slick and lemony from bright tile floors, and the tabletops taste like vitamin C. In her kitchen, the knife blades break their teeth on her fear. She won’t look. Once, she dared me to curse the dark mirror in her bathroom. She promised to save my soul with a flick of a switch. Now it comes to this: parts of chickens in her garbage can, loads of dark clothes to scrub. She tells me about the bathroom scale, about the kitchen sink. She’s afraid the shower curtain might snap into a wall of fire. Even now, she hears its dangerous flapping down the hall. Stand right there, she says, and cuts the lights. Where he’s from, all the stairs point down.

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Welcome

to the city built on location, one perfect spot at a time. Here’s the best first kiss, and over there, the last goodbye, beside the stairs where you can stop a stranger and whisper kiss me, because you can see yourself being kissed just there, and impulsively. We make up our own public monuments: lovers pose, almost frozen, on every bench. Those who don’t, stand on-line at a kiosk for memories they’re too young to own, flip through boxes of matte, gray photographs to find every detail they long for, down to the day of the week and the weather. They fatten fantasy with a hint of intent, though some get impatient waiting for some invisible hand to move them closer to what they plan to love. Won’t you move faster—come over here and take my hand in front of the broken sign for RTIFICIAL LIMBS—

I’ve written your part in according to plan. We’ll kiss, by the next line you’ll love me. Three later, I’ll leave.

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Texas

It didn’t much matter anymore if he was a bullfighter, a cattle roper, or a rodeo clown. You wanted to feel callused hands, watch them run smooth along the fence rails. His palms would almost shine, daring the wood to splinter.

In Clear Spring there’s nothing but a field full of trucks and the Clear Spring Saloon, but you were still singing about the Terlingua—not thinking of Waylon or Willie, but mainly, of the boys. I told you to buckle up.

But Sweet God how you saw them! Rowdy, cocksure, and lovely in their swaggers. You’d kiss them hard just to prove their lips could bruise. In Seguin someone asked us what two girls from way up North were doing in Texas. You said you were down here looking for the whole enchilada.

Rodeo isn’t the same thing as The Rodeo and neither of us knew that leaving Chicago. Not cows, cattle, they told us. Half way out of Austin we stopped counting tumbleweeds and cows. When I asked for directions to The Rodeo at a gas station in Luckenbach they told me It’s in February.

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Translation —a lament for Emperor Wu of the Han and his concubine

Suppose it was her meatloaf he loved and that they had made plans to buy her a color t.v. as soon as they could. Suppose he loved her unreasonably, with the feverish intensity of a sailor who’s been out to sea too long. That in their kisses this woman could hold her hand around the thick knot of his braid and he could finally be brave enough to whisper something into her ear that might never be whispered back. Suppose in his grief he could be angry and smoke cigarettes in an American diner. Set the table with a cup of black coffee, and a newspaper open to the crossword puzzle and let him cry it on out. The waitress in a pink, frilled uniform has hands he can’t remember. Such rough palms have never touched the great man until now. She had to be the one to ask: does he know what he wants? He wants clocks not to run clockwise, and not at the slow secondhand’s pace.

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Notes on First Kisses

Allen Wexler thought he was the first, and I let him strut that fact for days. The only myth of first kisses is that there is only one. The first kiss on the lips, the first one with tongues. The first with feeling

(it’s probably fear). How can you believe a word I say, once you know where my mouth has been? Josh Elias asked first. Kenny Hudgins should have brushed his teeth better. Can you believe a word I say, until you know what else my mouth can do? Shut up and kiss me, fool.

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The Confessional Mode

I may have a part for you in my documentary.

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Ass

Sure, my ex tells me, you can say “ass” with anything. For emphasis especially.

Like the word is the white blouse my mother said went with everything. The black patent leather shoes that dress up any outfit, but don’t really reflect up. It just doesn’t seem like a compliment to say a woman has a “fun ass sense of humor.” The conversation is going nowhere, but thank God it’s midsummer so I can play like I swallowed a gnat because it’s believable and I’d rather let my ex

(we’re still friendly) feel sorry for me about that. Let him think I flinched over some bug he couldn’t even see, so he can slap my back squarely and try to hand me my drink again, the ice cubes squeaking against the curve of the tumbler as they melt into the already wet air. So the dog won’t listen he’d cheer at me if he figured out the tiny fly was a fake and I’d hear him out, so he wouldn’t have to feel the daily impotence of people who make their livings watching people cry. Let him think what he likes.

What he likes is the woman in his office who always wears a black bra and has a tattoo

(a teddy bear on the inside of her wrist! It’s no bigger than a dime! he gushed).

I think the bug trick might be working. My ex just says those candles never work, do they? and rattles the loose ice in his glass. Citronella burns through the neighborhood. The dog returns

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to its post, a mat of plastic grass near the door, and snouts around suspiciously. Animal possessiveness

(we’re still friendly) uncocks its ears, braces for this evening’s mosquitoed assault.

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Personal Poem

Be my material! Seeking solution to invention problem. Me: young poet (red/br) well-versed, strong interest in voice. Some cross-genre tendencies. You: scary uncle meets muse. You: literate, but ill-tempered. You: Fickle. You have some major hangups. You is not me. You breaks my heart. I goes on from there.

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Proper Care and Feeding

I eat twice a day. Feed me a line, I’ll follow the shimmer and glitz of your lure. Let’s switch.

Now you play the wolf, stare me down until my flesh comes right off the bone with just one yellow flicker of your eyes. Try now to imagine me as a circling fin; I’m hungry again— you’d best not struggle so. I’m streamlined, I focus. I know you so well your body has scars

I have yet to cause. Don’t expect us to be less than wary of ourselves. We bite back, we fight. Howl and screech shriek out from dim places not dark enough to hide the timid fools we eat.

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Augury: Haiku at the Dragon Wok

A hint of almond or lemon gone stale; the taste of the folded moon.

The plastic wrapper crackles with Earthly Delights. One must always choose.

Break it and let crumbs rain down on jade palaces captured in red ink or tell me, sweet thing, you don’t believe in desserts. See where that gets you.

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The Empty Seat —after Nighthawks

Because I wished her sadness were less well-dressed or that her date seemed a little less indifferent,

I left while she read a sugar packet or matchbook and he smoked, though I’d like to point out there wasn’t an ashtray in sight. He’s a cad, it’s clear. She deserves better. In a dress like that she deserves a driver to whisk her from soirée to soirée, to hold her coat and stole. Let me choose from all of Europe’s oldest bridges the one she’ll look best on, strolling with me as we dare the rain to fall on anyone as happy as we are. Across the empty Atlantic of my unfilled glass, the waters ebb and nip. The cad can’t imagine her crossing Pont Neuf in Spring or the Rialto in red Italian sandals.

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Patience

At last, the sound of metal rolled flat by open places, and then the press of the whistle muscling through brambles. The sound of darkness hunting itself in the backyard like a streak of pure weight. On the other side of the tracks someone fiddles with a radio. Someone taps one fingernail on the steering wheel or stands in a doorway, ready to wish in case a caboose comes by. Suppose just once there weren’t coal cars but loads of cut diamonds blaring their fire straight down the main line between this world and the next. Or better still, a passenger train to bring the one face you’ve been waiting for, with its slightly rumpled brow and delicate wrists. That skin that asks to be touched because inch by inch it is becoming an expanse. Now say hello or I have always loved this weather or I have always loved you.

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What Is Wanted

He’s the meanest man I’ve ever seen: declared dangerous and wanted by the FBI. I love him a little,

mostly for not living on my street. His sketch snarls at the jittery girl two ahead of me in line. He’s ready

to take on anyone who thinks he’s tough. Buster, I could tell him, you don’t know from tough.

Take a look: it’s ten past five and the line is long (the clerk’s dinner will be cold again). And the bride with her romantic sense of stamps that take licking is stuck here too, her face fixed in place, inelegant and faintly ill as she double counts two hundred ivory laid invitations, each one graced with a satin bow and bride-licked stamp. The jittery girl is nonplussed by such nostalgia: her acrylic, airbrushed fingernails tap, tap, tap out stupid bitch and her snowboots squeak in agreement. Bad ideas end up here. The signs say nothing fragile or stuffed with razor blades, no packages soaked in butane or sent without a correct return address— as if anyone ever wants to come back here. The cops drive through slowly in the afternoons, are never seen after dark.

Fuckitscold shudders the last man in, and the bride and I and the jittery girl all throw him a look that says, Manners, young man, in glares as glassy as the door bumping shut behind him. Perhaps he loves someone, has a note that says so like the bride (though not the clerk whose wife hasn’t bothered to keep a meal warm in fifteen years). Or else he’s lonely, he’s bored enough to wonder if he could still get a money order on demand or else a box with a little key to call his own, a reason

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to leave his house each day—to check his rented slot for the note no one knows how to write or where to send. Next, please.

The line shuffles forward and I move closer to my mean-eyed love, the stranger last seen shooting up the swollen heart of a bank vault in Texas. He’s the one who got away—at least according to the sign. Tell it to the law, pal, says the jittery girl’s indifference. No, I say. Tell me. Explain your hands, dull enough to pull a trigger, to etch each letter of a lover’s name into a fistful of fingernails, engraved like the bride’s every last invitation. I only want what can be had: a letter and a photograph sent from far away. A simple meal and then a clean, outrageous escape.

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Pitch the Woo

Let’s lose it, baby; let’s forget the fever, the flowers, the dinner and dancing and all the jazzy lines we throw out for waiters so they know they can slap that check down anywhere they please. Give me your heart on a platter. And look, your lovely, loose fist opens to show off—like magic—mine. It’s smaller than you thought, and lumpy as unwashed socks.

Let’s send romance out for groceries and a tank of gas. Let’s guzzle sweet tea or warm beer straight from a dented can. Don’t promise a thing until you can look and see space, not stars. Unstitch every last sequin from the dress it’s been hitched to. Touch my thigh, say skin is skin, the heart a muscle. Say your words are nothing but words; I know you are ready to bore me right through. Now try me. I want to try you, too.