WordWacky

I am about to have my first traditional publication credit: two poems in an anthology. I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t pretty jazzed about it, but the subject matter of the book — if only because it’s my first publication — is a little embarrassing.

The book is called Women. Period. Wanna guess what it’s about?

Why is it that our “time of the month” is taboo? In some cultures, menstruating women are banished from their marital beds during Aunt Flo’s visit.

In our culture we come up with cute names to talk about menstruation, mimic it in television commercials with something that looks like it could clean windows, and charge exorbitant prices for pressed cotton wrapped in something called Dry-Weave — to keep it away from us.

And yes, even though I see right through all these euphemisms and whitewashes, I am still embarrassed that I wrote two poems — one of which I even count among my best — about the subject. Worse yet, they’re not hiding away in a document on my now dead computer. They’re out there, in the world. In a book.

So it is with a familiar mix of pride and shame, and shame of my own shame — metashame? — that I announce this publication. Truly it’s a gift that I get to put something in my artist’s resume. Certainly it’s an honor to be chosen. And someday it will be a funny story.

For now, it’s mine. And damn it, I’m proud of it.

by Anne Carson

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book marks, without an ember of doubt, the first time I’ve ever felt burned by my lack of education in the classics. I approached this book ready to feel cowed and lost, so I was enthralled when that was not the case.

I understand Geryon intimately, for I, too am a red creature.

From a forgotten notebook of mine:

“On my steady diet of nicotine and coffee, my thoughts grind (like bad teeth) into points. I am a sharp-shaped thing. A needle, an arrow, I cut. I can touch rage: rage that was the only sprig of life on the barren potato farm; rage tucked into the left work boot for the dark walk home from the plant; rage channeled into the line of a razor’s making, at first invisible, then blessed red. We all know the color of rage. Red will unmake me.”

Geryon’s red is a different hue, as has my own ripened with age. Passion. Shame. Love. The interior exposed and vulnerable. Heat. Longing. Did you know longing was red? Do you know how close you are to knowing that?

Like the terrestrial crust of the earth
which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul
is a miracle of mutual pressures.

Fuck Herakles. That bitch and his arrogance, never seeing the deep red interior of his jailbait trick. Winning is blindness. Winning is empty. Winning is lonely, even with a joint in one hand and a cock in the other. It is through losing that we learn to make bread in the volcano’s eye. It is through returning that we get wings.

Anne Carson, thank you for making a hero of the vanquished, for turning a flat story over and finding the life growing beneath it.

Geryon stood upright
within the rayon planes of his brother’s sports jacket. Sweat and desire ran
down his body to pool
in the crotch and behind the knees. He had been standing against the wall
for three and a half hours in a casual pose.
His eyes ached from the effort of trying to see everything without looking at it.
Other boys stood beside him
on the wall. The petals of their colognes rose about them in a light terror.
Meanwhile music pounded
across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being
a self in a song.

“What is time made of?” Geryon asks frequently.

Fear of time came at him. Time
was squeezing Geryon like the pleats of an accordion.

And:

…A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,
like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

What does this thoughtful young artist have against time? We might think it’s his death — we all know his demise is assured before reading the book, or at least once we find out he goes up against Herakles:

on the other side of the world somewhere Herakles laughing drinking getting
into a car and Geryon’s
whole body formed one arch of a cry — upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love.

But here Carson has turned the story around — it’s not death Geryon waits for, but heartbreak. And heartbreak, as we all can’t help but know, is red like thunder.

View all my reviews.

…own a bookstore located on their farm in Wisconsin. It’s not marked; it’s not centrally located. They never advertise, and their only regular hours are 9-5 on Saturday.

They have more than a million titles, which is many more than a shopping center chain store.

This inspiring couple will amaze you.

Lenore says that the most important book of all is Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes:

“If a child knows eight nursery rhymes before the child is four years old, that child will be an excellent reader when he is eight years old.”

(The video is a little slow to start, since there are a couple of intros edited in. But it’s worth it.)

[via My World... My Perspective...]