To begin with I held them in awe. Tell me one time awe turned out well.
The poet with the frank gap between her front teeth was once the seraph Suburban Housewife. Babies, martinis. Her gestures run from folding to stacking to tucking in to combing out snarls to stirring to cutting into little pieces to buttering to dishing out to drying off to fucking to smoothing down his tie before the husband goes out the door until one evening Vietnamese kids running from the cloud gaining on them cower behind her ribs. Cambridge, crowns of sonnets, Lowell smoking and holding forth, pacing miles around the seminar table, ranting them into transcendence, pausing to lay a hand on her head, blessing that became the first poem in Napalm. Yale Series of Younger, ylang-ylang on her pulse points, abortions, Rinpoche, vision quest in Joshua Tree, second book, third, tenure. Fourth, fifth, fame. Her name became shorthand for seducing a straight girl, her Pulitzer’d essays hitchhiked in ten thousand backpacks, on a talk show she unbuttoned to display the rose thorned by double mastectomy stitchery. Cinderblock, she nicknamed Collected Poems of. Through all of this the gap between the poet’s teeth stood by her.
I know a poet who’s ridden for thousands of miles in boxcars and a poet who’s driven everywhere in a black limousine so long it has trouble turning a corner. The boxcars clatter through poem after poem. The limousine idles at the curb just outside.
The poet and I, introduced five minutes before, were naming names, seeking affinities, curating minor coincidences. She mentioned another poet, a generation older, who’d been something of a mentor to her without ever having seemed to particularly like her, and I’d said that was funny, I taught there for a while, she never liked me, either, after which the newly met poet and I traded details of the older poet’s unraveling. How nobody knew what was going on. The older poet’s tone, in conversation and in poems, had always been fey, trance-like, her perfume had cost a fortune and her eyes were very green—they still were, but it wasn’t fun, what was going on in them. The word in her jacket blurbs had been otherworldly, but people understood something had gone really wrong and had stopped saying it. Her original lyric hallucinations seemed like warnings, now.
I remember when I found Siren, I said. I stole it from the bookstore where I was working.
There weren’t that many of them, the poet said. Women whose books were worth stealing.
Schadenfreude had vanished from our attitudes, mine and the poet’s.
She was who I wanted to be, the poet said.
I heard she showed up barefoot for a reading.
We had stripped down to heartsickness.
The poet said:
Once I was at her house for dinner, and she goes, You’ve got to see my little girl. Who was barely one. We’d been drinking and it was really late and I said But she’s asleep right? but she’s insisting, insists I follow her up the stairs and then she opens the door to the baby’s room and hits the light switch and the baby wakes up blinking. Because the light smashed down. We’re in the doorway looking in. And she, she turns to me like okay? And clicks the light off and closes the door and we go back downstairs and she tips more wine into our glasses as if nothing’s wrong. As if there’s no howling.
The poet and I crouched close. We might have been stranded in the taiga, blowing together on a little heap of tinder.
Poets suspect that fiction writers say things about their books like Excellent use of white space, and they’re not wrong.
Academia, it turns out, isn’t a party you can lurk in a corner of, unnoticed. That had been my plan, to receive a paycheck and so-called health benefits while being left alone. I was unaware of academia’s worst sin, lack of collegiality, but I soon found out. Creative Writing Programs operated like remote mountain villages, by ancestor worship, ritual scarification, covert infatuations across clan boundaries. You would have thought my personality would have fended off attraction, incandescently fucked-up as I was, but fucked-uped-ness proved no impediment to sleeping with poets, those first responders of the soul. Still, I was sorry to be the burning building, story after story needing to be searched. Or, first I was sorry, then I was jealous: hideous awkwardness that struck me as needing three hundred pages’ explanation became, in a poem, the kinked hair stuck to a lover’s tongue. I would have liked to have gone into the night as myself and to have come out of it smelling of smoke, cat cradled in my arms, or something, just something alive.
There are poets who want the whole thunderstorm and poets for whom the shine left in an antelope’s hoofprint is enough.
There was one poem of his that killed me. In the poem a woman was cheating on her husband with the poet. She and the poet slept together in her bed, in her house; in the poem, it couldn’t be helped, what they felt for each other. Other obsessions of mine at the time were Cat Stevens singing “Wild World” and JFK-assassination conspiracy theories, and while I didn’t give those up, I understood the poem had induced a more worthwhile greed. Throw your shoe, hit a writer, my students said about the little Iowa town. The poet had a new book and it wasn’t long before he came for a reading. Winter, the windshield snowing over in the time I spent twisting the key, reciting my dad’s old incantation when yanking the cords of lawnmowers or fishing-boat outboards, Comeon comeon comeon, invoking the tender futility that had been my dad’s apology to recalcitrant machinery for his baffled, conciliatory manner of dealing with it, an apology my gender should have rendered extraneous, but I was his daughter and his Comeons issued from my mouth in the frigid space capsule of the partially buried Bug and his emotions rose in my heart and milled around uncertainly, and I was ashamed that he, my father, was in some sense here for this freezing inkling, these minutes of trying to start the freezing car that would carry me to—right there, it felt shameful to recognize what I had of course known all along, that what I wanted was to fuck the poet, to become aware of that before my father with the weird sincerity he had directed at inanimate objects had completely vacated my heart, but then, luckily, or I thought “luckily,” my father, the particular adorable shade of my father conjured by a good dose of futility in relation to a dead-seeming machine, trailed off in the dodgy transit through streets vacated by the power outtage to Prairie Lights. I eked the VW into the last available niche and climbed out to find the world had come much closer than ever before, and was, in a sense, meeting my gaze with its own gaze, crowding in toward me, rushing, urgent, but soft, too, coming in the softest touches I was capable of perceiving, and I was rising through them to the black from which they issued, it seemed to me I could easily have vanished then and there, that with another breath I could, if I gave the purest, most absolute consent, align myself with the force willing me to disappear into it. In its rawness it was the coldest, quietest wildness I have ever come close to, but what is the it of its rawness? I’m not, now, in a position to lecture that girl with the snow falling toward her. Something writers envy poets for is the way, pausing at the mike between poems, they get to do a little soft-shoe, explain allusions, flash their charming real selves. In the poem I wanted to hear, the woman he’s just slept with is standing in the doorway watching the poet go, and you know he has to go, and you know it’s killing them. Suddenly she kisses the doorframe. I walked in just in time. That poem, he prefaced by saying Everybody who’s had an affair raise your hand. In his loft in Salt Lake City he had a brass bed and the Indian motorcycle he rode into the desert, moonlit nights. He was easy-going, elusive, suicidal. I didn’t get the chance to know him well. There was only what he was willing to let me see, which—I understand now—was wisely calibrated to what I was willing to see. It wasn’t serious is the sentence that offers itself when I wonder about what happened between me and him, and it’s true, it was only serious beforehand, it was only, for two minutes in an empty parking lot, a matter of life or death.
A red-haired Truth is beauty, beauty truth acolyte so prone to quoting the letters that an hour of talking to the poet held the exasperation you’d experience talking to the actual Keats—resurrected, hauled through time, affronted by the speed of everything’s unfolding, by the dominion of brutality. The poet even went in for a pale, vested, high-collared look. On the page this anachronistic courtliness continued, lines ruled by meter and wistfulness. One day a young woman showed me a note he had written. You fucking cunt, it began.
The first time we met, the poet threw her arms wide and waited. Almost nobody persists in such a gesture if the summonee stays put, but the poet was known for her unwillingness ever to back down, and even if that unwillingness struck me as wrongly deployed against my hanging-back, which I would have imagined, from her work, she’d be sensitive to, alert as her poems are to multiple shadings of transgression and coercion, still her flung-wide welcome, sustained, cast my immobility, more and more, as gracelessness, and if there’s one thing I can’t bear facing it’s that glaring deficit, my gracelessness, next thing I knew she was stream-of-consciousnessing hotly into my ear: You won’t break will you?—the solstice, fortuitous!—it’s been men men men men men here, I mean I love men—feel your teensy shoulderblades!—I told everyone oh, no I’ve never even met her—teensy—really I stayed out of it, I was away while she was hired, said not a word, the men did something good for once!—the disillusionment of finding out zero sisterhood had been involved, she hadn’t fought for me after all, should have hit me like a ton of bricks, but didn’t. Somehow, I could never figure out how, she had a way of making her obliviousness entrancing. Charismatic, as if what you’d secretly always longed for in your dealings with others was not, as you’d believed, clear-eyed comprehension of who you really were, but just this anxious, self-serving puzzling-out of what use you could be, to her. An editor at the magazine, having red-pencilled the word, explained The magazine frowns on the use of “oblivious.” Frowns. This was on the phone. In phone conversations I was always ending up with my hands full, emotionally. The littlest things were always causing me to have to stop to try to damp down emotion, and because I was busy minding that billboard-sized magazine frown, what I said back had the note I most loathed in my own repertoire, a chastened feminine obligingness ineptly masking acid dissent: Oh. Pause. Why? The editor: It can mean “unaware of,” or it can mean “indifferent to,” either of which is more exact than “oblivious,” and they’re different, and the writer ought to know which it is, and without knowing what I was going to say I said But what if the writer doesn’t know, if the not-knowing, not being sure, is more interesting than exactness, then isn’t “oblivious” the word? but oblivious didn’t get back into that story, though it can stay here, in this scene where I probably should have been able to tell whether what the poet was was unaware of or indifferent to, because I was right there. I mean, I was in her arms.
Keats was in the wrong century, otherwise we would have Fanny. You fucking cunt.
In Washington DC for a conference I sat in the hotel’s rooftop bar with other writers. I was wearing a sleeveless little black dress and had kicked my heels off and was rubbing my stockinged feet against each other, ssssst sssssst ssssst, till I told myself in my mother’s voice Cut it out, that’s annoying. The bar overlooked the White House, whose pillars were theatrically uplit. The white-neon lonesomeness of those pillars was opposed by the misted-over modesty of the surrounding low-lying cityscape. Diffused light glowed brighter and blurred out as the fog came in and it took me a while to comprehend that while its crawl seemed uniform in depth the fog was gaining and buildings were disappearing. Boas of gray furred the uplights below the pillars, diffusing their blaze to a weak pallor. Only upper stories were left and even the high air we were breathing began to smell of river. I told the poet sitting near me that it seemed like our view ought to have been outlawed on the grounds that it would be excellent for snipers. The poet had been musing and should have been left alone, but that was the sort of mistake I could get away with then. He was among the last of the Beats, old, cowboy-lean, glamorous, with a black eye-patch half-hidden by a boyish hank of hair. The eye-patch took me in. He turned from me back to the stray lights filtering through the crawl of fog and said If that was the world, I would walk out into it.
And, see, he knew I was never going to know what he meant. He black-eyepatched me for good.
The poet was troubled, she told me, by my disputatious attitude toward male colleagues. In particular, she told me, I needed to learn to like F. Her tone startled me—a little grenade of savagery. The poet lived in the same faculty-housing complex I did, and, without intending to, we often ended up walking home together after events, and at the sidewalk leading to her door, we would pause, and the pause nearly always occasioned a reprimand along these lines. The first time this happened, I laughed—the quick, disbelieving hiccup of being jarred from one’s presumed immunity to attack. Time after time, despite the suffering asperity of her manner as she broached the question of my disliking F, I made things worse with that laugh. Often, defensively—and defensiveness was a mistake—I objected that I worked hard at collegiality with F. Things I failed to say: You’re a famous feminist!, What are you doing!, You know why I don’t like F! and if I had told her how compulsive and intrusive this conversation seemed to me, what might have changed, would anything have changed?, but as it was I grew, in a minor way, harder of heart, achieving the ultimate rudeness, through bearing with her as-I-saw-it craziness, of dismissing the person we are with as inconsequential, figuring these attempts at correction were her way of saying goodnight. This night, though, well before the usual moment at her door, she lost her temper, and I did, too, all my stored-up incredulity emptied into the shout You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, and the longer we stood there, sliced at by mercurial March rain, the worse this was going to get, her vitality made it impossible to think of her as frail but she was asthmatic and we still had three-quarters of a cold dark mile to go. Without waiting for a lull in her rant I walked away. Only after five or six steps did I grasp what I had been seeing: she was shaking. The terribleness of that flickered at me but failed to claim my attention. I was thinking in slashes, in obliterations, Crazy and I should neverof stood still for this and Why, why, why are we even talking about asshole F, the rain really coming down, my glasses fogging. I took them off and walked blind. She was seventy-five, she was shouting, farther and farther behind, Elizabeth! April was the month of her death. When I read them now her poems are—but my relation to her poems can’t be called reading, it’s just me trying to scrabble back to that night and re-write it, by which I mean re-live, willing myself to turn around and go back and try, to at least try, and while you’re at it, fool, take an umbrella to hold over her head.
When I was twenty-four, in Santa Fe, I was a little in love with my best friend, a fragile-seeming poet of Chinese descent who lived alone on a mesa three hours’ drive north and who, liking solitude and having almost no money, had little reason ever to come to the city. For the dangerous slump of its adobe walls, the sheets of corrugated tin threatening to sail from its roof, and antique electrical wiring, the house she lived in should have been condemned; her rent was fifty dollars a month. Its narrow windows had the original glass, showing oval bubbles of the glassblower’s breath—exhaled in 1874, the poet liked to say, touching the tip of her tongue to the pane. When I spent the night, we slept chastely in her bed. Apart from the bed, her possessions made a Rilkean inventory, as in Maybe we’re here only to say typewriter, table, chair, cup, bowl, fork, spoon, knife, things that in themselves never dreamed of existing so intently. I used to tease that if I ever pulled open a kitchen drawer to find two forks, I would know she was in love. Once we were under the quilt she would tell me to look up and I would say What? and she would say Keep looking and I would say It’s not a spider is it? because it wasn’t impossible that she would have come to love a spider if one lived there, and she would take my hand and straighten my pointer finger and point it, saying softly: Bang. There it was there for the seeing, the bullet hole in the rough smoke-dimmed plaster. She was not a holder or toucher, and I was enchanted by her seizing my finger, willing to pretend I had no idea what was up there, though on each of the half dozen nights I spent under her raggedy quilt, which smelled inexplicably of dry grass, she pointed it out, and it seemed unlikely that she’d have forgotten, but maybe it was a playlet about what sex would have been like between us, first the having-no-idea-what-comes-next, then the Oh, then the pretense of complete forgetting. In that comfortless three-room warren her migraines disappeared, and the insomnia that had been her life’s torment. Mice ate the corners of her books, she went without wood for the woodstove in order to pay for typewriter ribbons, she wrote page after page and her lines were getting so long, she said, she had to turn the paper sideways before feeding it into the platen. I got it into my head that she ought to meet another poet, older, more famous, a big, rangy, feral, several-affairs-at-once spellbinder who was also precarious beyond belief, though because he was six foot three and a world-class dissembler, he struck me as being vulnerable when, and only when, it suited him—manipulatively vulnerable. In short: anyone could have seen that for the two of them to meet could only bring disaster. In the restaurant, while the older, more famous poet and I waited for her, and though I tried to talk him out of ordering wine, he began drinking, and he drank through the first and into the second hour of her failing to show up, and then he was done. He was like that, he could be suddenly, absolutely done. Standing up, he said Why are you doing this? I said There she is and she was coming through the crowd toward us and every head turned to watch her. She had not tried, she was above trying, she wanted nothing from anyone. When she sat down at our table, I told them each other’s names, and they said their first sentences to each other—shy, fraught. The older poet poured wine into the glass that had been waiting for her, and she drank, and they talked, and when they left off talking, she bent her head so that her hair fell forward, not slippingly, like mine might have done, but all at once, black claps of hair, and then she was quiet. They both were. She appeared to be exerting prodigious effort to stay in her chair. To hold supremely still. And my sense was that she was honoring the advent of life-altering emotion. And that I was at least there to see it happen. To see her fall. But I minded it, too—minded the inevitability of their devouring each other’s attention. Each other’s lives, maybe. She was wearing a long-gone boyfriend’s pajama bottoms and the huge, smoke-scented, crudely knitted, black sweater she said she needed to wear while writing, a talismanic garment I’d never seen her wear out of the house before, whose unravelling cuffs could be pulled down over her hands when she could no longer feel her hands, but they were out now, her hands, white-knuckled around the stem of a wineglass. Apart from the wineglass stem there was no other touching, and as it became clearer and clearer that the two of them were not into each other, my relief grew, and gratitude to the poet for having deflected his interest by her strange, stalwart immobility. Only later did she explain. Overnight, fleas had infested her house, and they’d come along—as soon as she sat down at the table, inside the black sweater, fleas started jumping. It was very distracting, she said, being bitten while you are trying to talk. Bitten all over, and all I wanted to do was scratch, and I knew if I scratched just once, I wouldn’t be able to stop.
The wintry, quaintly goatee’d countenance of the poet who’d gone to Japan before anyone, five lean and barefoot Zen-monastery years had left him knowing the ropes, and they were in his poems, the ropes, things-as-they-are poems of falling snow and the breasts of women and highways and hawks riding thermals, catnip to women was what my colleague said he’d been, irresistible, haven’t you read Dharma Bums, that’s him, you know, who does that sex thing, said my punk Woolf-scholar colleague, that thing where a woman takes him inside her while he sits cross-legged without moving and he’s rock hard and it lasts for hours, I’ve always wanted to try it, she said, and I said, Now? She had one of those quicksilver temperaments, herself—good for Woolf scholarship, inclined to impatience in civilian conversations. I said He’s old. She said In years maybe. I was sort of into her and willing to play along. As opposed to soul, you mean? Because haggard. Old. Old. Old! Is how he seems soul-wise. She said she was talking about dick age. For proof she pointed out the Chronicle’s reporting some wisecrack of his mother’s about his having left his fifth wife and taken up with what the paper called a younger woman who was now installed in the cabin he’d hand-hewn from ponderosa pines he’d felled himself on his land in the Sierras, property whose hot spring featured in the poem he liked to open his readings with, a poem in which he and his then wife and their little boy waded in naked and the son’s penis perks up and the poet ruefully celebrates the little erection for embodying the beauty of the world as he has known it, the world his son will walk out into, and the Woolf scholar wondered if that had been her who’d gotten into the paper as the woman he’d left his fifth wife for if she’d have been called a younger woman and then she said the way things were going she was never going to get to sit on the poet’s dick for hours. He had asthma and after everything he’d been through his Roshi was refusing to deem him a Zen master. I had grown up with a father who went around smoldering and I recognized the force field radiating from the poet so the refusal to deem him a Master seemed fair enough to me but I kept my mouth shut because I had to work with the guy, and who did I have to talk to, anyway, except a punk Woolf scholar who all that year mourned missing the chance to sit on his dick, maybe meaning it, maybe not? In faculty meetings, she and I, the only women, would sit at a corner of the table, and with her hand hidden from view, she would gaze meaningfully across the room at the otherwise-absorbed poet while the hand in her lap made an eloquent jacking-off motion whose prowess and mockery were witnessed only by me. And I wish I could write that that was fun, or that it was subversive, or that the mischief of it bonded us, but all it did, really, was worry me, because she was sort of compulsive about it and because it began to seem like a worse and worse thing to be secretly doing, and it was strange to find this brilliant exquisitely sensitive person obsessively enacting a sexual taunt directed at a poet she claimed, in every other context, to revere, and didn’t it diminish him somehow, in his unawareness, to be mocked with furtive prowess, under the table we all sat around, and why, really, why was I sitting there with my craven mouth shut, thinking Stop. I would contract my peripheral vision until my focus was narrowly directed at the place where he sat. The poise of his motionlessness was perfect. Strange, too. I tried to describe it to myself by thinking of him as being distinctly outlined. If you looked away from him, the next person you focused on appeared to be leaking from themselves. Sitters oozing out not-really-here-ness, just as I was always doing. Not-really-meaning-it-ness showed in face after face after face till you got to his. Old words wanted to be used in his case. The jawbone below the glaze of stubble was as suddenly beautiful as if I’d been hit over the head with it. The set of the shoulders in the artful Japanese denim shirt told of authority with an ax, and it was reassuring to think that if you got stranded out in the wilderness with him the blade would ring through kindling and the spark nestled in tinder would answer to his breath and you could warm yourself at the blaze he had made—some despair arose due to this, my quasi-confrontation with him, whoever he was, and I balked, I wanted to get a hold on things, the hold I usually had, I was acquainted with my despairs and thought I knew them all, but this one, anarchic and indifferent but feeling mostly old, old, old, old, old, insanely old and wily and inarticulate, insouciantly potent, prodigal, unasked-for, fleet was my thought, as fleet as if it came from way far back, was nothing I’d ever felt before, and by this onslaught I was dragged from my known self, that fortress, dragged out a ragdoll fool—and right then, with a fractional turn of his head, he caught me staring, and by some quirk of timing we gave each other these real little smiles, his lacking his trademark fearful symmetry, deeper in one corner than the other, droll, intimate, yes that was it, it was intimate!, and mine, mine was steady and freakishly tender, a smile that gave away the whole shebang, ending when I tuned into the voice of the Woolf scholar. She had leaned close to my shoulder and was saying something truculent and funny, which I heard and immediately forgot, because who wants ironic knowingness when life can do this, write something beautiful in a heartbeat?
The canaries have been singing like mad for a hundred years now, and we’re all still down in the mines.
The poet with beautiful dreads talked gorgeously, offensively, with jouissance, with nerve, fantastically, somberly, ironically, self-deconstructingly, jumbledly, first lines of neverwrittendown poems flying by, images gleaming and sucked under, neverwrittendown last lines like wasp stings, like dying falls, talked headlong, righteously, bruisingly, talked as if she had been told she was to have her throat cut in the morning and had one night to get all the words out, with despairing ferocity, improvisationally but with guileful set pieces inserted here and there, rants whose theatricality would have worked before an audience of four hundred, meaning that, because it was only the poet and me, three hundred and ninety-nine people were missing.
If poets and fiction writers attend a party, they’ll segregate themselves, each cluster as comradely and comfortable as Victorian men settling down for cigars and serious talk, now that the pernicious listeners have been banished.
Beginning about a year ago, the Irish poet began interrupting conversations about quite other things in order to narrate some incident or other from her childhood, except interrupting is wrong, she was such a beguiling and authoritative talker that when she began it was not as if others’ interests had been forsaken but as if the entire table’s submerged obsession had at last asserted itself and we were all finally on the right track. At program dinners she told of the illiterate cook who had fed and cosseted her in the kitchen of the residence allotted to her ambassador father; her mother’s having been talked out of an abortion by a charming doctor while pregnant with her, the poet; her father’s admiration for the American delegates who in post-Versailles negotiations advocated for giving tractors to desperate German farmers. What is a childhood, and why was she parceling it out now to tablesful of listeners, when she had always held forth about everyone except herself? She was a sluice-style talker, mischievous, formidable, a compulsive pourer-out of others’ secrets, but these were the only self-disclosing stories I had known the poet to tell, though I’m not sure how much exactly one discloses about oneself if that self is, in the stories, a child. Her mother telling her “My dear, I’ve had more affairs than you’ve had hot suppers.” The stories were anti-mysterious, barely a sentence or two. Seldom more. Her glee was lovely, and her imitation of voices long gone. And you might have been charmed, but you probably wouldn’t have thought the stories themselves remarkable. Nothing was unfolded, no truth driven home. Things-as-they-once-were glinted from the dark, that was all. After this year of changed stories, the poet suddenly died.
A poet who never uses italics said of her: Of everyone I know, she was the least likely to die.
Sometimes I think we are all in the dark, we keep ourselves in the dark and other forces keep us in the dark, and the poets, at least, are digging.
Tell me what you’d give for a little light.
Elizabeth Tallent teaches creative writing at Stanford University. Her latest book is Scratched, a memoir.
