wislawa szymborska | drinking wine

Poetry Dispatch No. 125 | November 20, 2006

LOVE POETRY WEEK, Monday, No.2

“I liken love to a great house, a mansion that once you go in, the big door shuts behind you and you have no idea, no premonition where it will all lead to. Chambers, vaults, confounded mazes, ladders, scaffolding, into darkness, out of darkness—anything.” Edna O’Brien from JOHNNY I HARDLY KNEW YOU

DRINKING WINE by Wislawa Szymborska translated by Grazýna Drabik and Sharon Olds

He looked, and gave me beauty,
and I took it as if mine.
Happy, I swallowed a star.

I allowed myself to be
invented in the likeness
of the reflection in his eyes.
I am dancing, dancing
in the flutter of sudden wings.

A table is a table,
wine is wine in a glass
that is just a glass and stands
standing on a table. While
I am imaginary
to the point of no belief,
imaginary
to the point of blood.

I am telling him
what he wants to hear: ants
dying of love under
the constellation of the dandelion.
I swear that a white rose,
sprinkled with wine, sings.

I am laughing, tilting
my head carefully
as if checking an invention.
I am dancing, dancing
in astonished skin, in
an embrace that creates me.

Eve from a rib, Venus from sea-foam,
Minerva from Jove’s head —
all were more real than I.

When he stops looking at me
I search for my reflection
on a wall. And I see only
a nail from which a picture
has been removed.

from Calyx, Special International Issue, 1980

e.e. cummings | 14

Poetry Dispatch No. 124 | November 19, 2006

This is “love-poem” week at the Poetry Dispatch center, a week of Thanksgiving, deep in the woods of a northern Wisconsin peninsula on a mild, slightly overcast Sunday morning in November, amidst the sound of guns going off in the distance (deer season), some longing for snow, for the deeper sense of autumn, for memories of love in all its dimensions…a moment of giving thanks for man’s capacity to choose the right words to say what is in his heart. Norbert Blei

14 by E.E. Cummings

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which I will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh….And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

from 100 SELECTED POEMS

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, and playwright. His body of work encompasses more than 900 poems, several plays and essays, numerous drawings, sketches, and paintings, as well as two novels. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most popular.

Cummings’ publishers and others have sometimes echoed the unconventional orthography in his poetry by writing his name in lower case and without periods. Cummings himself used both the lowercase and capitalized versions, but according to his widow did not, as reported in the preface of one book, have his name legally changed to “e. e. cummings”. He did, however, write to his French translator that he preferred the capitalized version (“may it not be tricksy”). One Cummings scholar believes that on the occasions Cummings signed his name in all-lowercase, the poet may have intended it as a gesture of humility, and not as an indication that it was the preferred orthography for others to use for his name.

E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, to Edward and Rebecca Haswell Clarke Cummings. Cummings’ father was a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard University and later a Unitarian minister. He and his son were close, and Edward was one of Cummings’ most ardent supporters. Raised in a well-educated family, Cummings was writing poetry as early as age ten. His only sibling, a sister, Elizabeth, was born when he was six years old.

From 1911 to 1916, Cummings attended Harvard University, from which he received a B.A. degree in 1915 and a Master’s degree for English and Classical Studies in 1916. While at Harvard, he befriended John Dos Passos and roomed in the freshman dormitory, Thayer (room 306), named after the family of one of his Harvard acquaintances, Scofield Thayer. Several of Cummings’ poems were published in the Harvard Monthly as early as 1912, Cummings himself laboring on the school newspaper alongside fellow Harvard Aesthetes Dos Passos and S. Foster Damon. In 1915, his poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.

From an early age, Cummings studied Greek and Latin. His affinity for each manifests in his later works, such as XAIPE (Greek: “Rejoice!”; a collection of poetry), Anthropos (Greek: “mankind”; the title of one of his plays), and “Puella Mea” (Latin: “My Girl”; the title of his longest poem).

Painting by e.e. cummings | Mt. Chocorua, Oil on canvas, ca. 1938

In his final year at Harvard, Cummings was influenced by avant garde writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He graduated magna cum laude in 1916, delivering a controversial commencement address entitled “The New Art”. This speech gave him his first taste of notoriety, as he managed to give the false impression that the well-liked imagist poet, Amy Lowell, whom he himself admired, was “abnormal”. For this, Cummings was chastised in the newspapers. Ostracized as a result of his intellect, he turned to poetry. In 1920, Cummings’ first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets.

In 1917, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corp, along with his college friend John Dos Passos. The novelty of automotives, and thus ambulances, made driving acceptable to young, well educated men in the US. (World War I saw more well-known writers in medical service than any other war in history because of this. At least 23, including Hemingway, were enlisted in ambulance corps, an interesting and unusual percentage). Due to an administrative mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris. He became enamored with the city, to which he would return throughout his life.

On September 21, 1917, just five months after his belated assignment, he and a friend, William Slater Brown, were arrested on suspicion of espionage (the two openly expressed pacifist views on the war). They were sent to a military detention camp, the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy, where they languished for 3½ months. Cummings’ experiences in the camp were later related in his novel The Enormous Room about which F. Scott Fitzgerald opined, “Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives- ‘The Enormous Room’ by e e cummings….Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality.”

He was released from the detention camp on December 19, 1917, after much intervention from his politically connected father. Cummings returned to the United States on New Year’s Day 1918. Later in 1918, he was drafted into the army. He served in the 73rd Infantry Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.

Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and remained there for two years before returning to New York. During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s he returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, Pablo Picasso. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union and recounted his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico and worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924 to 1927).

In his youth, Cummings attended Cambridge Latin High School. Early stories and poems were published in the Cambridge Review, the school newspaper.

In 1926, Cummings’ father was killed in a car accident. Though severely injured, Cummings’ mother survived. Cummings detailed the accident in the following quote, from Richard S. Kennedy’s biography of Cummings, Dreams in the Mirror:

“… a locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing – dazed but erect – beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her hands (the younger added) kept feeling her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet. These men took my sixty-six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father’s body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.”

His father’s death had a profound impact on Cummings and his work, who entered a new period in his artistic life. Cummings began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He began this new period by paying homage to his father’s memory in the poem “my father moved through dooms of love”.

Born into a Unitarian family, Cummings exhibited transcendental leanings his entire life. As he grew in maturity and age, Cummings moved more towards an “I, Thou” relationship with his God. His journals are replete with references to “le bon Dieu” as well as prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork (such as “Bon Dieu! may I some day do something truly great. amen.”). Cummings “also prayed for strength to be his essential self (‘may I be I is the only prayer–not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong’), and for relief of spirit in times of depression (‘almighty God! I thank thee for my soul; & may I never die spiritually into a mere mind through disease of loneliness’).”

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Cummings was married three times, including a long common-law marriage.

1. Elaine Orr: Cummings’ first marriage, to Elaine Orr, began as a love affair in 1919 while she was married to Scofield Thayer, one of Cummings’ friends from Harvard. The affair produced a daughter, Nancy, born on December 20, 1919. Nancy was Cummings’ only child. After obtaining a divorce from Thayer, Elaine married Cummings on March 19, 1924. However, the marriage ended in divorce less than nine months later, when Elaine left Cummings for a wealthy Irish banker, moved to Ireland and took Nancy with her. Under the terms of the divorce Cummings was granted custody of Nancy for three months each year, but Elaine refused to abide by the agreement. Cummings did not see his daughter again until 1946.

2. Anne Minnerly Barton: Cummings married his second wife Anne Minnerly Barton on May 1, 1929. They separated three years later in 1932. That same year, Anne obtained a Mexican divorce that was not officially recognized in the United States until August 1934.

3. Marion Morehouse (born March 9, 1906, South Bend, Indiana): In 1932, the same year Cummings and Anne separated, he met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. Although it is not clear whether the two were ever legally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings until his death in 1962. Morehouse died May 18, 1969, while living at 4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, New York City, where Cummings had resided since September 8, 1924.

Despite Cummings’ consanguinity with avant-garde styles, much of his work is traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, and he occasionally made use of the blues form and acrostics. Cummings’ poetry often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire.

While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the romantic tradition, Cummings’ work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy of syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.

As well as being influenced by notable modernists including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, Cummings’ early work drew upon the imagist experiments of Amy Lowell. Later, his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and surrealism, which in turn permeated his work. Cummings also liked to incorporate imagery of nature and death into much of his poetry.

While some of his poetry is free verse (with no concern for rhyme or meter), many have a recognizable sonnet structure of 14 lines, with an intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically exuberant style, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols scattered across the page, often making little sense until read aloud, at which point the meaning and emotion become clear. Cummings, who was also a painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to “paint a picture” with some of his poems.

The seeds of Cummings’ unconventional style appear well established, even in his earliest work. At age six he wrote to his father:

FATHER DEAR. BE, YOUR FATHER-GOOD AND GOOD,
HE IS GOOD NOW, IT IS NOT GOOD TO SEE IT RAIN,
FATHER DEAR IS, IT, DEAR, NO FATHER DEAR,
LOVE, YOU DEAR,
ESTLIN.

Following his novel The Enormous Room, Cummings’ first published work was a collection of poems entitled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This work was the public’s first encounter with his characteristic eccentric use of grammar and punctuation.

Some of Cummings’ most famous poems do not involve much, if any, odd typography or punctuation, but still carry his unmistakable style. For example, the aptly titled “anyone lived in a pretty how town” begins:

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

“why must itself up every of a park” begins as follows:

why must itself up every of a park
anus stick some quote statue unquote to
prove that a hero equals any jerk
who was afraid to dare to answer “no”?

Readers sometimes experience a jarring, incomprehensible effect with Cummings’ work, as the poems do not act in accordance with the conventional combinatorial rules that generate typical English sentences. (For example “Why must itself…” or “they sowed their isn’t […]”). His readings of Stein in the early part of the century probably served as a springboard to this aspect of his artistic development (in the same way that Robert Walser’s work acted as a springboard for Franz Kafka). In some respects, Cummings’ work is more stylistically continuous with Stein’s than with any other poet or writer.

In addition, a number of Cummings’ poems feature, in part or in whole, intentional misspellings, and several incorporate phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects. Cummings also made use of inventive formations of compound words, as in “in Just-“, which features words such as “mud-luscious”, “puddle-wonderful”, and “eddieandbill.” This poem is more commonly known as Chansom Innocent. It has many references comparing the “balloonman” to Pan (mythology), the mythical creature that is half-goat and half-man.

Many of Cummings’ poems are satirical and address social issues (see “why must itself up every of a park”, above), but have an equal or even stronger bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex and the season of rebirth (see “anyone lived in a pretty how town” in its entirety). Cummings’ talent extended to children’s books, novels, and painting. A notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic strip Krazy Kat. Examples of Cummings’ unorthodox typographical style can be seen in his poem “the sky was candy luminous…”.

During his lifetime, Cummings published four plays: HIM (1927), Anthropos: or, the Future of Art (1930), Tom: A Ballet (1935), and Santa Claus: A Morality (1946).

• * HIM, a three-act play, was first produced in 1928 by the Provincetown Players in New York City. The production was directed by James Light. The play’s main characters are “Him”, a playwright, and “Me”, his girlfriend. Cummings said of the unorthodox play:
• “Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff—relax, stop wondering what it is all ‘about’—like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this play isn’t ‘about,’ it simply is. . . . Don’t try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON’T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU.”
• * Anthropos, or the Future of Art is a short, one-act play that Cummings contributed to the anthology Whither, Whither or After Sex, What? A Symposium to End Symposiums. The play consists of dialogue between Man, the main character, and three “infrahumans”, or inferior beings. The word anthropos is the Greek word for “man”, in the sense of “mankind”.
• * Tom, A Ballet is a ballet based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The ballet is detailed in a “synopsis” as well as descriptions of four “episodes”, which were published by Cummings in 1935. It has never been performed. More information about the play as well as an illustration can be found at this webpage from the E. E. Cummings Society.
• * Santa Claus: A Morality was probably Cummings’ most successful play. It is an allegorical Christmas fantasy presented in one act of five scenes. The play was inspired by his daughter Nancy, with whom he was reunited in 1946. It was first published in the Harvard College magazine the Wake. The play’s main characters are Santa Claus, his family (Woman and Child), Death, and Mob. At the outset of the play, Santa Claus’s family has disintegrated due to their lust for knowledge (Science). After a series of events, however, Santa Claus’s faith in love and his rejection of the materialism and disappointment he associates with Science are reaffirmed, and he is reunited with Woman and Child.

In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1952 and 1953 were later collected as i: six nonlectures.

Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire.

He died on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 in North Conway, New Hampshire of a stroke. His cremated remains are buried in Lot 748 Althaea Path, in Section 6, Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory, Boston, MA. In 1969, his third wife, Marion Morehouse Cummings, died and was buried in a contiguous plot: Lot 748, Althaea Path, Section 6.

During his lifetime, E. E. Cummings received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including:

• * Dial Award (1925)
• * Guggenheim Fellowship (1933)
• * Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry (1944)
• * Harriet Monroe Prize from Poetry magazine (1950)
• * Fellowship of American Academy of Poets (1950)
• * Guggenheim Fellowship (1951)
• * Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard (1952–1953)
• * Special citation from the National Book Award Committee for his Poems, 1923-1954 (1957)
• * Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1958)
• * Boston Arts Festival Award (1957)
• * Two-year Ford Foundation grant of $15,000 (1959)

Bibliography

• * The Enormous Room (1922), a memoir
• * Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
• * & (1925) (self-published)
• * XLI Poems (1925)
• * is 5 (1926)
• * HIM (1927) (a play)
• * ViVa (1931)
• * Eimi (1933)
• * No Thanks (1935)
• * Collected Poems (1960)
• * 50 Poems (1940)
• * 1 × 1 (1944)
• * Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems (1950)
• * Poems, 1923-1954 (1954)
• * 95 Poems (1958)
• * 73 Poems (1963) (posthumous)
• * Fairy Tales (1965) (posthumous)

A number of books have been written about E. E. Cummings, notably:

• * Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings, by Richard S. Kennedy
• * E. E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Norman Friedman
• * E. E. Cummings: The Art of his Poetry, by Norman Friedman
• * E. E. Cummings: A Bibliography, by George James
• * “A Concordance to the Complete Poems of E.E.Cummings”, by Katharine McBride

john haines | a winter light & if the owl calls again

Poetry Dispatch No. 123 | November 17, 2006

2 by John Haines

“Even more than politics, poetry is local. For John Haines, his poetry has had an ongoing attachment to Alaska, his experience of the land as well as the stories of its people. Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1924, and for several years an art student on the East Coast, it was after becoming a homesteader in Alaska that Haines in 1966 published his first book of poems, Winter News, followed by his second collection The Stone Harp in 1971 (both issued by Wesleyan University Press). This was the start of an impressive body of work, including News from the Glacier: Selected Poems 1960-1980 (Wesleyan, 1982), New Poems: 1980-1988 (Story Line Press, 1990) and The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems (Graywolf, 1996). His books of prose include Living Off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place (University of Michigan Press, 1981) and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (Graywolf, 1989)

But poetry does not remain local. Indeed, what characterizes Haines’s poetry is its ability to make that leap from the personal to the mythic, to celebrate and explore that which is essential in human experience. Haines’s poetry is also often marked by a ferocious economy of language that finds its power through the resonance of image, of its connection with the natural and cultural world, regardless of whether the poem involves a military cemetery in Eagle, Alaska, or a 16th century engraving by Albrecht Dürer…” Norbert Blei

A Winter Light by John Haines

We still go about our lives
in shadow, pouring the white cup full
with a hand half in darkness.

Paring potatoes, our heads
vent over a dream—
glazed window through which
the long, yellow sundown looks.

By candle or firelight
your face still holds
a mystery that once
filled caves with the color
of unforgettable beasts.

from TWENTY POEMS, Unicorn Press, 1973

If the Owl Calls Again by John Haines

at dusk
from the island in the river,
and it’s not too cold,

I’ll wait for the moon
to rise,
then take wing and glide
to meet him.

We will not speak,
but hooded against the frost
soar above
the alder flats, searching
with tawny eyes.

And then we’ll sit
in the shadowy spruce
and pick the bones
of careless mice,

while the long moon drifts
toward Asia
and the river mutters
in its icy bed.

And when the morning climbs
the limbs
we’ll part without a sound, fulfilled, floating
homeward as
the cold world awakens.

ronald baatz | three more poems

Poetry Dispatch No. 122 | November 13, 2006

3 More by Ronald Baatz

ALWAYS

here is a poem
I wrote for you
last year and

which I never
got around to
giving you

I hope it still
has some life
left to it although

I don’t
see why
it shouldn’t since
I try my best

to construct these
things with such
care that they

should last many years
without coming to
any reasonable ruin

just as a potter might
form a bowl
from clay or a

sculptor might chip
away at a hefty
block of marble

knowing their sweaty
toil will bring forth
objects possessing

the qualities necessary
to leap through
the ages

with a truth
otherwise
always known

THE SAME ORANGE

the same orange
has been on the
table for over

a week now
and every so often
i’ll notice it there

and i am tempted
to it eat but
the idea of it

being gone for
some reason does
not sit with me too

well
so it continues to
remain there

day after day
as though it were
an astray

and naturally I
know that some
day soon this

orange is going to
start going bad
and it’ll end up

simply being thrown
out and I’ll never
know what it would’ve

been like to eat
and i’ll have to
forgive myself this

I’M TELLING YOU

please let me get
up from this bed
I have an early

day tomorrow and
I must get home
to sleep

and stop trying to pin
me down I know just
how much stronger you

are than I am
and stop trying to put
my penis back in you

can’t you see how limp
and exhausted it is
and it has been informed

of my need to rise at
dawn so it is just as
anxious as I am to be

out the door and down
the road so please
stop sitting on me with your

godforsaken heavy ass
which probably doesn’t have to
get up until noon

from WORMWOOD REVIEW, #137, 1995

peter fissel | night swans

Poetry Dispatch No. 121 | November 10, 2006

In my continued pursuit of “everyday poetry, everywhere,” I submit the following Poetry Dispatch for today, sent to me by Wisconsin poet (and avid birder) Susan Peterson, with her notation :

“ Prose-poetry from the Wisconsin WSO Birder’s Hotline??? Usually we (birders) just post good sightings, maybe habitat, etc. But once in a while comes something like this………almost poetry.” Norbert Blei

Night Swans by Peter Fissel

It happens almost every year around this time – I’ll be outside after dark
for some reason (walking home from the bus stop, just looking at the moon
& stars, or, like last night, finishing the raking by the light of the
streetlamp on my block.) I’ll hear something that at first sounds like a
conversation down the street, but then resolves into a higher-pitched
register. And then it gets a little closer, and I hear that unmistakable
“flying monkeys” sound, and I frantically search the sky until I see the
ghostly shapes of a flock of Tundra Swans way up, lit from below by the
city lights, heading south or east (like these were.) It always gives me
a bittersweet feeling – I’m elated, but it means WINTER is coming in force.

joan jobe smith | 3 poems

Poetry Dispatch No. 120 | November 9, 2006

3 poems today by Joan Jobe Smith. Enjoy. Norbert Blei

AT THE DEBBIE REYNOLDS HOLLYWOOD HOTEL by Joan Jobe Smith

In high school some of the girls I knew carried photos of Debbie Reynolds in their wallets and wanted to be gym teachers when they grew up because that’s what Debbie’d said in Photoplay she’d wanted to be till she won the Miss Burbank beauty contest and got rich and famous instead but when those girls in high school I knew grew up they all got married and had daughters they named Debbie although Debbie Reynolds real name was Mary Frances and those Debbie Daughters had daughters they named Jennifer or Jessica, and today, here in Las Vegas, Nevada, I sit in the Bogie Bar of the Debbie Reynolds Hollywood Hotel where giant photos of dead movie stars hang on the walls, Bogie, Audrey, Joan Crawford, John Garfleld and Wayne, Bill Holden, Cary Grant, Coop, Marilyn Monroe, and more, and I watch the girls, maybe some of the same ones I knew in high school, now much-older women, standing in line to buy tickets to see the Debbie Reynolds Show their hair perfectly coiffed, grey or dyed red or brown or black, wearing sequins or leather or sweats, Nikes or Doc Martens or 4-inch stiletto high heels, holding hands with their first, second, or third husband, some of the girls having had a Liz in their lives too who took away their First Love, some having gone through bankruptcy, forever unsinkable just like Debbie Reynolds, those girls smoking or laughing or staring straight ahead, thinking how soon they’ll be close to Debbie Reynolds as she sings and dances on stage, a stage like the one they placed her upon in their wallets a hundred decades ago, while all the dead movie stars smile down on them, kindly, beautiful gods, forgiving the girls for not liking them best, those Debbie Mothers, here at the Debbie Reynolds Hollywood Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, finally content, after all these years, not to be her.

THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW by Joan Jobe Smith

After my father died and I had to drop out of college for the second time to go back to being a go-go girl, my mother came to live with me to take care of my kids although she didn’t approve one bit of what I did for a living, said I was just goofing off and having a good time even though I told her I wasn’t, and so ashamed was she of me she lied to my grandmothers, told them I was a dancer on the Carol Burnett Show and that’s why I worked nights, wore mini skirts, false hair and eyelashes, but my mother told the truth about me to her sister Vera, a divorceé like me, and when Vera came to visit, the two of them came to see me at the Playgal Club and Spike the manager gave them a front row table and a free pitcher of beer and potato chips and there they sat, wearing white gloves and Jackie Kennedy pillbox hats, Kleenexes from their purses for napkins on their laps as they watched us go-go girls dance, sling pitchers, kegs, tanks of beer to the drunken aerospace execs, construction workers, surfers, Nam-bound marines, watched us empty ashtrays, dance, wash glasses, dance, sweep up broken glass after some pool hustlers got into a fight, and dance and the next day at noon as I sat in the kitchen, nibbling my bowl of Rice Krispies, a somnolent zombie and achy from working till 3 a.m., I heard my mother outside yelling at the trashmen not to make so much noise banging trashcans, they might wake up her daughter who worked nights and her daughter worked .DAMNED HARD to earn a living! It was the finest tribute my mother ever gave me and now, years later, finally I can appreciate it, now that I’m all rested up.

both poems from WORMWOOD REVIEW #142, 1996

PICKING THE LOCK ON THE DOOR TO PARADISE by Joan Jobe Smith

You probably won’t believe this but I
am in San Francisco on the corner of
Lombard and Van Ness on the seventh
floor of a hotel overlooking the
Golden Gate Bridge teaching a tall
dark handsome poet to dance the fox
trot to Frank Sinatra’s “Our Love Is
Here to Stay” and he won’t do a thing
I say, won’t let me lead, won’t watch
my feet, won’t agree I’m a better dancer
because I was a go-go dancer for seven
years, he says he could dance the fox
trot if he wanted to, afterall he can
boogaloo to the Doors’ “L.A. Woman”
but he doesn’t want to dance the fox
trot and when I laugh, he doesn’t, he
sits down next to the window, sips beer
and peers out at the Bridge and I don’t
give a damn if he ever learns to dance
the fox trot, the waltz, cha-cha, or
the Charleston, because he is a tall
dark and handsome poet, we are in San
Francisco peering out at the Golden Gate
Bridge that is disappearing into a
sunset fog, and our love is here to stay.