poets Jane has introduced me to, Bridget McCarragher and Penelope Tan, are arguing passionately. I presume they’re debating the finer points of the sestina or the questionable merits of Ezra Pound, until I overhear Penelope, her high-pitched voice rising above the din: “Kylie shouldn’t have been sent home before G-Lance! His tango was a fucking travesty!” Bridget McCarragher shakes her head vigorously and smacks her forehead in distress over the latest elimination on Celebrity Dance-Off.
We haven’t moved from this spot since we arrived an hour ago. The strum and thump of loud flamenco music fills the air, making everybody look somewhat sexier to me than they are.
“You guys,” someone yells. “I’m transferring to the Business School! I just found out that poetry’s dead!”
Jane and I met during our senior year of college, in Madison. I was majoring in drawing and painting, working on a graphic novel about two star-crossed bird-watchers, called We’ll Always Have Parrots . I thought that a creative writing class might broaden my skill base: this way, after graduation I could work in a restaurant or a bar. Most of us in the Art Department accepted our fates with weary resolve, undercut by constant neurotic fretting. We drank a lot of beer and cultivated superior attitudes about having to work retail jobs at the mall to pay the rent on our crappy off-campus apartments. There was also a plasma center off State Street that paid thirty dollars per donation and gave out cookies, and which sometimes looked like one of the wine and cheese receptions they held for fine arts students on Friday afternoons.
By the time senior year rolled around I was pretty sure I was just about finished with all of that. But I had no idea where I would go next. In addition to my book about bird-watchers, I had also devoted an enormous amount of time to a series of drawings of imaginary animal crossbreeds (hippophant, skunkey, flamenguin). I felt like I was pursuing my dream and wasting my time simultaneously. There weren’t that many jobs for people who could draw a really majestic polar beagle. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my life. And I had the vague sense that I ought to have already figured it out.
I was in the middle of drawing the snout on a dolphig when Jane walked in on the first day of class, silver rings and earrings sparkling, her curly hair bursting out of its ponytail holder like loose springs. Twelve of us sat at a big square table—an arrangement, I would soon learn, well suited to the process of ritually immolating one another’s work. Jane came in late and slid into the last available chair.
We started with Owen Schiff, straight spined and shiny eyed and wearing all camouflage, including, I noticed, his socks. He told us that he was writing a series of Shakespearean sonnets devoted to his passionate love of military history. He recited his poem, “Iraq: My Brains,” and seemed happy to interpret the stunned silence that followed as approval. Then Jane read hers, “The Universe Is a Vacuum Cleaner.” Her voice was clear and deep and unaffected, and when she was done, when her tongue had loosed the final, debauched k in “suck,” she looked across the table and smiled at me, a great beaming grin. I stared back at her, startled, smitten. It was love at first sight, and also sort of like looking in the mirror on a really, really good day. I saw that Jane was just like me but better, an observation she would later, with a laugh, firmly deny.
Jane had managed to sidestep the unearned cynicism the rest of us were afflicted with. Her poems were about the search for meaning in a sparkling kitchen sink, the persistence of mildew, dust bunnies, and stubborn love; she cleaned big suburban houses to pay her rent. She wasn’t afraid of latex gloves or of rhyming “dust” and “lust,” “clog of hair” and “fog of despair.” She seemed to have found the intersection between her life and her
We haven’t moved from this spot since we arrived an hour ago. The strum and thump of loud flamenco music fills the air, making everybody look somewhat sexier to me than they are.
“You guys,” someone yells. “I’m transferring to the Business School! I just found out that poetry’s dead!”
Jane and I met during our senior year of college, in Madison. I was majoring in drawing and painting, working on a graphic novel about two star-crossed bird-watchers, called We’ll Always Have Parrots . I thought that a creative writing class might broaden my skill base: this way, after graduation I could work in a restaurant or a bar. Most of us in the Art Department accepted our fates with weary resolve, undercut by constant neurotic fretting. We drank a lot of beer and cultivated superior attitudes about having to work retail jobs at the mall to pay the rent on our crappy off-campus apartments. There was also a plasma center off State Street that paid thirty dollars per donation and gave out cookies, and which sometimes looked like one of the wine and cheese receptions they held for fine arts students on Friday afternoons.
By the time senior year rolled around I was pretty sure I was just about finished with all of that. But I had no idea where I would go next. In addition to my book about bird-watchers, I had also devoted an enormous amount of time to a series of drawings of imaginary animal crossbreeds (hippophant, skunkey, flamenguin). I felt like I was pursuing my dream and wasting my time simultaneously. There weren’t that many jobs for people who could draw a really majestic polar beagle. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my life. And I had the vague sense that I ought to have already figured it out.
I was in the middle of drawing the snout on a dolphig when Jane walked in on the first day of class, silver rings and earrings sparkling, her curly hair bursting out of its ponytail holder like loose springs. Twelve of us sat at a big square table—an arrangement, I would soon learn, well suited to the process of ritually immolating one another’s work. Jane came in late and slid into the last available chair.
We started with Owen Schiff, straight spined and shiny eyed and wearing all camouflage, including, I noticed, his socks. He told us that he was writing a series of Shakespearean sonnets devoted to his passionate love of military history. He recited his poem, “Iraq: My Brains,” and seemed happy to interpret the stunned silence that followed as approval. Then Jane read hers, “The Universe Is a Vacuum Cleaner.” Her voice was clear and deep and unaffected, and when she was done, when her tongue had loosed the final, debauched k in “suck,” she looked across the table and smiled at me, a great beaming grin. I stared back at her, startled, smitten. It was love at first sight, and also sort of like looking in the mirror on a really, really good day. I saw that Jane was just like me but better, an observation she would later, with a laugh, firmly deny.
Jane had managed to sidestep the unearned cynicism the rest of us were afflicted with. Her poems were about the search for meaning in a sparkling kitchen sink, the persistence of mildew, dust bunnies, and stubborn love; she cleaned big suburban houses to pay her rent. She wasn’t afraid of latex gloves or of rhyming “dust” and “lust,” “clog of hair” and “fog of despair.” She seemed to have found the intersection between her life and her
Similar Books
