Greed, Parts 5-7

This signed copy of Greed, Parts 5-7, by Diane Wakoski (Black Sparrow Press, 1971) comes from my friend Bill via his widow, Ellen. He has underlined parts in pencil and written a few marginal notes, so reading it is also reading what Bill found important, salient, about it. On page 11, the word "greed" is circled. A section beginning, "What is that greed?" is half-bracketed, with "parenting" written in the margin where Wakoski is suggesting the "greed" for "repeating ourselves" in children "could make

     these same people
     produce beautiful objects
     benevolent institutions
     or write books and religions.

But, usually, it doesn't. In this deeply confessional book she tells us she gave up her own children, in part because she was poor and had no husband and in part to pursue her poetry. She says we would understand if we gave up our sentimentality. And she likens our greed to sharks, at one point listing their beautiful names: "when I start listing beautiful names / it is because my own pain is so deep."

As this has been quite the summer of shark headlines, shark attacks, injuries, terrible wounds, I know I am reading it at the right time. Also, though yesterday's book by Shane McCrae, seemed right for a Sunday, it's fine to be immersed in one of the seven deadly sins instead. Also, like McCrae's book, Wakoski's is part of a larger, ongoing project, with other books devoted to (other parts of) greed.

Part 6, about Jealousy, adds leeches to the water creatures in the book. It is so confessional, she writes it mainly as a "Dear Diary" entry, and it explains "how goodness, or the desire for it drives us mad." Also pertinent to Sunday, but irreverent to some, she says, "I am very melodramatic. I see myself hanging on a cross..." and confesses her petty jealousies, meanness, nastiness, and hypocrisy, mainly toward other poets when they get what she wanted. It's pretty shocking! Bracketed by Bill:

     A good man is one who sees no cause for bitterness in this. Who does not find himself demeaned or hurt by such things. But what is it that protects him, keeps him whole, gives him transfusions of plasma to replace his evaportaing blood?

     Perhaps faith in himself? A belief that art or love or anything valuable and beautiful is beyond the temporal?

Yes, I would guess that's it, and in Part 7, Self-Righteousness, she blames her mother for knocking her down, jealously, for any accomplishment, with the warning, "Pride goeth before a fall." And she brings the Lion Fish, a poisonous, spiky, threatening but "magnificent creature" into the already dangerous waters of life. Wakoski continues her astonishingly honest self-critique and rescues Pride in this section--distinguishing the deadly sin aspect from the pick-yourself-back-up-and-survive aspect. She knows she tried to be a good girl growing up, and how it hurt her:

     Oh you false teacher,
     letting me think if I were honest
     and clean and straight,
     the world would just be all right,
     and that if it weren't I could sit righteously
     in my chair of innocence and look back
     at it
     and somehow triumph.
     But the world only admits it is wrong,
     when you make it admit it is wrong;
     and where is the poetry in that?

And have you ever felt like her in this?:

     My angers come from having lived as I was taught
     and not feeling the world honors or
     rewards me for any of my decency.

But the Lion Fishy response of self-righteousness cannot be the answer [as bracketed by Bill]:

     the greedy thought that when you are right
     you can burn others for their wrongness;
     it is a fire that could destroy
     the world.

If you are fascinated by Diane Wakoski, you may enjoy the work of filmmaker Jesseca Ynez Simmons, interviewed here at Escape Into Life, and her film Emerald Ice, in which Wakoski appears, discussed here, with a teaser. And now I am going to try to be a better person.

Sometimes I Never Suffered

Maybe I should have read this one on Sunday; it would have been like going to church! But I read Sometimes I Never Suffered, by Shane McCrae (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) on Saturday, Day 6 of the Sealey Challenge, and it was like going to graduate school,* re-seeing history in a multiverse, dreaming parallel universes, and visiting an echo chamber where I encountered my re-reading of Paradise Lost** this summer with an online group of white people. Shane McCrae's vision of it all is so large--Heaven and Limbo expanding, circular boundaries that aren't boundaries, train tracks/rides, ladder rungs, this book extending the large ongoing poem of his previous books--that I think/feel he would understand.

*preventing this from being a Slattern Day! 
**making it another Random Coinciday in the blog!

Sometimes I Never Suffered contains many poems about a "hastily assembled angel" shoved out of Heaven by his fellow angels--the Paradise Lost resonance (for me)--as well as many poems about Jim Limber, the mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis. History and theology collide, beautifully, making stars and circles, definitely expanding my mind. I read hungrily, voraciously (like the worst of humans), hardly stopping to write things down, but this I did write down, from "The Hastily Assembled Angel Also Sustains the World":

                                         Wanting

To be like God he thinks must be the wrong way
To be like God

Got to agree with that! And in "The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers His Own Foreknowing" the angel, like Lucifer and all the angels in Paradise Lost, "Could see through time," which makes a mess, a glorious mess, of linear narrative! But McCrae provides the excellent reason:

          except he knew he was
Allowed to see through time because he was
Not God   and could be wrong   and saw through time
With many-chambered eyes   all things that might be
And God would see   only the one thing that would

Thank you, Shane McCrae! I see that I ordered and received this book back in December, 2021, probably after reading one of the individual poems published online and clicking the Bookshop Inc button to order the book, a sort of Christmas gift to myself for ongoing pandemic reading as well as the ongoing commitment to read more books by Black authors.

I love this cover art by Toyin Ojih Odutola. I love Jim Limber's view of God in "Jim Limber on the Gardens of the Face of God":

     For me   God is a woman   and Her face is
     Black as a bright black stone

The title of the book comes from a riding-the-train poem, "Jim Limber on Continuity in Heaven," and here is its beautiful last stanza:

     But I mean share like prisoners
     Share loneliness   I ride the train now like I never suf-
     fered on a train   sometimes I never suffered in my life

You hear the folding of time, the immensity of compassion. And at the end is a long poem that climbs the rungs of the ladder to Heaven.
   

3Arabi Song

This one is a beautiful, lyrical--truly, as it captures many singers and songs!--chapbook that won the 2016  Rattle Chapbook Prize: 3Arabi Song by Zeina Hashem Beck, a Lebanese poet. Its lyric poems include ghazals and pantoums in many voices; we hear the favorite singers and songs of her generation, and more. There is lament, there is gratitude, there is joy, and more lament.

God--
is sometimes a camera,
sometimes has a nom de guerre...

I learned that 3Arabi is the Arabizi way of writing "Arabic." Arabizi = Arabic + Englizi, and this is a whole language rendition out there in the world, especially the online world, that I knew nothing about before and am grateful to discover.

I am also grateful to discover this book in August, where, in the poem "Listen," I read "Viscous, this August heat..." and, right now, it is!

The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep

I sleep when I can, including on the couch, sitting up, mid-reading, with the light on, in the middle of the night. Not that these gripping, wise, clear-eyed, unflinching, masterful poems would put me to sleep. No, but they greeted my wakened self when most needed to re-direct my jam-packed mind in the wee hours. The cover is Portrait of a Woman (c. 1480) by Hans Memling. The title, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, found again as the title of the last poem in the book, refers to a photograph by Jeffrey Silverthorne. The amazing poet is Linda Gregerson. I'm glad I didn't die in my sleep, last night, but, otherwise, it might be the best way to go...

These poems look at the world, the body, the individual, the wars of the time (1990s), the personal difficulties, the global woes, the fleeting joys. "For the Taking" is a devastatingly honest poem (that reminds me of Yvonne Zipter's poem, "Daddy," from yesterday's reading) about a sister whose "bad uncle" abused her, from eight-and-a-half years old on, "for years, in the back of the car,

in the basement where he kept his guns,
          and we
     who could have saved her,...

                     ...we would be somewhere mowing the lawn

or basting the spareribs, right
          outside, and--how
     many times have you heard this?--we

were deaf and blind
                         and have
     ever since required of her that she

take care of us, and she has,
                          and here's
     the worst, she does it for love.

"Salt" shows us a botched suicide in a barn and a broken collarbone in a hammock. But "With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath" gives us the surprise of a pond in the woods, and, as the title promises, ladies swimming, safely, alone. "Target" returns us to fears for the safety of our children, via Medea, car crashes, the Serbian war. "Fish Dying on the Third Floor at Barneys," at first about a dramatic department store fashion display, compares the dying fish to a dying father. "Bleedthrough" compares menstruation to art, as when, in a painting, "we say // that the surfeited pigment 'bleeds.'" And "Luke 17:32" reminds us of Lot's wife and "the rigors of the backward look." How do we start over?! Get out of the basement with the guns?! Change course?! "Who // cannot read shall not / be saved."

The Patience of Metal

Two things to start off: 1) I can read poetry in the middle of the night 2) today's immediate coincidence is tools. In my first two Sealey Challenge blog posts this year, I've mentioned the men working in a neighbor's back yard, and here on the cover of The Patience of Metal, by Yvonne Zipter (Hutchinson House, 1990), are tools: hammer, saw, ax, and awl (?), in a photograph by Patricia Bechdolt. But I think the patience of metal might be how hot it can get waiting to be what it really is.

     And I am white hot,
     malleable,
     aching
     for a smithy,
     the careful taps and blows
     that leave me ringing...

I can't believe I hadn't read this book until now, as I am an admirer (and previous reviewer) of Zipter's work. True, in 1990, when it was published, I was busy having a baby. And I love the poems about various children in the "Learning to Dare" section of this book. So much joy and hope. Elsewhere, there is so much loss and grief, and a devastating "Daddy" poem of early trauma. And such beautiful poems about the death of a beloved mother. In "Oral History,"

     I hate talking to you like this,
     death between us like a stuck door.
     We should be sitting at a kitchen table,
     cups of hot coffee (decaf), steam
          curling across your dry cheek, you
     telling me about my childhood, yours,
     talking about operations, lovers, scars,
     asking questions
     we never dared or didn't know
     to ask. This is a tradition
     among women: oral history.
     So much irreplaceable
     has been lost.

What has been lost is somehow found in the poem "That Much," a happy memory that might be mostly imagined, a "frozen moment that most likely / never happened.

          ...We are smiling, silent
     except for love. That much
     is real.

And, speaking of reality, Zipter's poem "Reality" is a wonderfully prescient and pertinent philosophical ramble on it: "Reality / is as hard to pin down as a politician / or an angry kid."

I love this book, and love reading it late, as I know the newfound love, patiently waited for, was real, has lasted, has lived many anniversaries beyond its charming, goofy one-year "Anniversary Waltz." And I love how the last poem, "Loss," turns about to be a funny, sweet poem not really about loss!

     I don't want to lose you, I whisper.
     "Like at the mall?" you say,
     infusing the dark with light.
     Yes, at the mall.

I'll leave the rest for you to find.