Letter Home

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Dear,

There are all of these lonely people in Borders on a Thursday night. It makes me wonder why they are Here. I know why I’M here—I’m here because my legs need a rest from peddling my bike. I’m not lonely, just lacking a person to cuddle.

Today I learned that lack of a car is considered a setback on the same level as being a woman, or growing up in a rural area, or in a one-parent family. I never realized that a car could make so much difference.

I wonder what the poet Anne Carson would say about having a car. I just read her latest poem “Gnosticism” in 2004’s Best American Poetry and I was about to read Anselm Berrigan’s piece, when I realized that I was standing in the middle of the aisle, juggling the book, my bag, and two bottles of juice. So I sat down.

I like the line in Carson’s poem that goes: First line has to make your brain race that’s how Homer does it, / that’s how Frank O’Hara does it, why... and I also like: at the moment in the interminable dinner when Coetzee basking/ icily across from you at the faculty table is all at once/ there like a fox in a glare, asking/ And what are your interests?

It is so baffling and amusing to me that academics can’t get along like nice little boys and girls, but act instead like wild bears circling each other snarling before they can sit down and share the honey… I read Coetzee’s book In the Heart of the Country. It took place in South Africa and dealt with the patriarchy and colonialism. I didn’t particularly like the book because I didn’t think Magda, the principal female character, was written in a believable way.

I'm looking at a rendering of Dickinson painted on the wall above my head in a green cape and a red corset with an angry Winona Ryder expression on her face. She is the only female figure among a whole wall of figures.

Cleaning/ in the dark makes a surprise for later

is another line that would not occur to me, but did occur to Anne Carson. Julia would say that cleaning is a waste of time for busy women. I remember how my mother likes to clean, I secretly think sometimes, and how she sees it as exercise. Tell me Dear, what do you think of cleaning?

Anne Carson talks of dreaming of Wordsworth in her poem. Last night I dreamt that it was Christmastime and Ann Arbor looked like St. Petersburg and you and Codrescu were in a car filled with smoke from opium given to you from a small vase in a window of a store owned by Bulgarians. The owner recognized me as the writer who thought she was Simone Weil and said, “Who do you think you ARE?”

In my dream there was a murder with a golden gun and someone in my family died and the rest of the family was being interrogated on the top floors of a hotel with floor-to-ceiling windows. On my way up to meet them, I was in an elevator and the bellhop handed the golden gun to me, but I knew that I didn’t want to get my fingerprints on it. So I dropped the golden gun down the elevator shaft. When the detective told me they couldn’t find the gun, I told him exactly where it was.

Snow falling outside windows
of high-rise hotel;
snow globe inside.
*

Isn’t it funny the way you think famous people like Anne Carson or Winona Ryder are supposed to be able to fly or something? But when you meet them you realize that they’re just people with charisma. Not that Carson is that famous. The manager of this bookstore probably couldn’t tell me who she is. Simone Weil has something interesting to say about that: It is a mistake for the rich man to think he is something. The same for a poor man.

Music from the Mikado
over loud speakers.
Sinatra to follow. Voice of “god”?

Anne Carson:
The sublime is called a science of anxiety.

Why is it called that,
do you suppose?

Love,
Renee

PS. I just read Alice Notley’s poem called “State of the Union” in the same anthology. It was about strippers. It appeared that she was censoring herself because her sentences broke off in the middle, or stopped once enough of the sense was communicated, similar to the way Sophia Coppola abruptly ended the scenes in Lost in Translation, rather than following the scene to its conclusion… Notley also mentioned the president… Rather than think about assholes, I’ve noticed the way a thread bookmark attached to a journal can give the book a tail...