Goodbye - it's been fun!

I was hoping to be able to finish the requisite fifteen, but alas, I find other demands on my time. I leave for vacation tomorrow, starting with my first face to face LIVE Poetry workshop in Taos, N.M.! I am busily polishing a few poems to have eviscerated there - a couple rejections *sob* I just had kicked back to me from Fifth Wednesday Journal and a couple NaPo poems I am still revising - down to the wire, it is! I cannot wait to see what pearls of wisdom come from this.

It has been fun. Thanks for hosting, Featherless! Any of you on Facebook? Jee and I are.

Victoria's Secret - Peep Show

We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room - Bella Abzug

Every time I read this poem I feel dirty. Whatever else I may say about Daniels, she does have a knack for dredging up the rawer emotions. In this poem a newly married N, for whatever undisclosed reason, has accompanied her husband to a peep show and stands outside while he does what a man does at a peep show. The implication is that N is unable to satisfy him, so as "a good wife," she allows him a proxy.

So I'm standing on pavement clotted with dried up discs
of hawked-out phlegm and chewing gum, and the air
is redolent with the odor of pot and filthy, unwashed
hair, and curbed pools of human waste glistening

She does ugly well. She then goes on to describe how her mind is simultaneously forcing herself to accept and reject the image of young girls bumping and grinding adolescent hips [that] cost nothing but a quarter. These quarters are provided by N's stash of laundry money, thus highlighting her complicity in her husband's behavior. She also happens to be wearing a diamond ring that once belonged to her mother-in-law.

Finally, there is the irony in this line she stood there on the sidewalk waiting for the man inside/as if he were a prince, as if he were her One True Love...waiting and waiting for something that was promised,/but now (she starts to realize) will never come.

The poem seems to be a young feminist's struggle (it is set in 1978) between what she was raised ON from fairytales and maternal expectations of what she SHOULD be and what the coming of age expectations of what a young feminist is supposed to be with no clear understanding of who she really is or what she WANTS of herself or from a man. Or what is right or wrong. By the end of the poem her illusions are shattered but she is no closer to knowing a better way to be.

A Walk in Victoria's Secret Eschatology

And the an awful leisure was-
our faith to regulate
-E. Dickinson

This poem begins with that quote and, so, a sad poem it is. The opening lines mock and mimic death with stone imagery

The stone garden she always imagined
cultivating late in life remains buried
in the back lawn. Stones weary her
now with their secrets and their stunned
molecules, with the death they neither
welcome nor avoid trapped inside.

Daniels could have addressed the loss of the loved one directly, could have addressed grief and its impact directly, instead she never directly mentions grief, or loss, never mentions relationships. Instead the poem talks of stones, diminishment, of small meals, of the several hours of each/afternoon struggle passionately with one another, each yearning/to be filled, and if she is lucky,/the day will collapse gently in on itself/rather than quaking open and diminishing to something as compact/and harmless as a stone the size of a bouillon cube.

This is a poem of loss and deprivation that achieves its objective, quite effectively, I think, through images of hardness and smallness, quietness and shrinking, as much from what it doesn't say as what it does.

A Walk in Victoria's Secret - Scar

This poem begins with When the mirror sliced my daughter's thigh and the reader (at least this reader) suspects an accident. The poem opens beautifully, like a flower, to describe the flowering layers of blood and glass. The wound heals and leaves a scar, the girl is ashamed and at the pool she tries the hide her scar with a splayed-out hand and then we get a hint of something more sinister in the genesis of this scar with

hurts me the way her puppy's back-end wiggle
signifies a fear of men, and ignites a little narrative
in my mind: some creep with a beer in his hand
batting around a five pound pup, and thinking it's funny.

In the second strophe there are more hints, allusions to N feeling like a pervert for peeking a look at her daughter's scar when she is sleeping, N's stomach bottoming out, and the Almighty/ hung back, masquerading as a dark deity, a complicated god/who would hold a small child hostage and torture her mother./Now it will take a long time to fasten him back where he belongs.

There is just enough here, enough imagery - puppy, flowers, glass, Almighty - husband, father, lover? who turns on woman and child, to intrigue and frighten.

A Walk in Victoria's Secret - The Hatching

I found this to be a very touching poem. Again it avoids dealing with polemics directly, unlike so many of her other poems and, therefore, avoids the pitfalls of what I consider her lesser poems. While it may not achieve some of the transcendental moments of Calvin Spotswood or the title poem, still, in its desperate, poverty-stricken domestic scene it hits a chord and does so from beginning to end -

Burning in our twin scarlet fevers,
we were laid out, feet to feet,
on the worn, gold sofa, my brother and me.

The poem goes on to detail the doctor's visit (yes, this was in the time when doctors still made housecalls), the family's desperate circumstances - no food in the house, the father at a bar nursing a beer and a broken furnace and it was COLD. The doctor gives them each a shot and tucks the blanket more firmly around the children's chins and then

-for reasons I cannot
conceive, and so I call it grace-removed from his car's
dark trunk, thick platters old music encased
in paper sleeves.

And he plays for them the Nutcracker Suite. And listening, N concludes of her own body

Something had once been painted there beautifully
and with care. And it had worn away over the years,
or grown encased in a kind of shell?

And N realizes, that through the beauty of music she us able to escape the small tight space and in an orgy of exit the shell will crack open.

I think this poem is the most beautiful of her shorter poems in this collection.

Walk in Victoria's Secret - Louisiana - Late Summer

This one is short and amusing. Two strophes, simple layout. There is a we, a hot summer day, because our bodies have been claimed/by humidity,we walk around in our heads and because, of course what else is there to do on this kind of a day or because even on a hot day, things must be done, the "we" are engaged in the mundane act of painting a baseboard and notice in the back of a closet, a light mold, transported here by some/primeval wind, festers on the toe/of a suede shoe. And plans the destruction of the entire world.

Daniels, in this poem, instead of taking on the large, political topics of feminism, racism, or poverty that she addresses in her other poems, has taken on a very small subject and she does so charmingly. I very much enjoyed her "small" world view and the tongue-in-cheek look at a bit of mold, that, after all, is not so tongue-in-cheek.

A Walk Through Victoria's Secret - When I Was the Muse

In this poem N becomes a nude model for an art class. She is surprised to find there is a second (male) model also present. Frankly, this second model seems superfluous to the premise and action of the poem, as he appears and then is never developed. Some interesting and startling lines, like this one

Someone fluffed/the crispy hair between my legs into a dark brown/bristling fan.

However, two thirds of the poem (and by now, this is what I am starting to recognize about much of this poet's "lesser" poems), is more about effect and set-up. The real meat of the poem, the "good stuff," as it were, is almost at the end. The lead up is N discussing why she decides to model nude and how she deals with being naked in front of strangers, then, while they take a break, she ambles through their renderings of her to see how she's been viewed and we get this

But someone serious and sad had shared a vision/of my head as a clotted orb of hair and mouth,/and brushed in underneath, a body headless/as the horseman in the myth. Then I seemed/to walk into the darkroom of my mind's own eye/and saw the disconnected self I'd always felt inside

and this makes the poem almost worth it. Almost.

Walk in Victoria's Secret - Beans on Toast

This poem talks about poverty meals. Beans on toast are compared to nasty haggis,/another meal derived from dregs my Celtic mother's kin/prepared in times long past-the boiled protuberant/stomach of a sheep stuffed with heart-and liver-studded porridge,/then oven-boiled for hours till it swelled with seasoned, gaseous pressure/and threatened to explode. Actually, this description of what (in spite of, is it Dunc's perennial claims?, is supposed to be food fit for the Gods), sounds like a truly awful meal, is one of the best parts of the poem. N goes on to muse that with prayers and toasts/ to Robbie Burns-the haggis on a bed of spud was a conquest of sorts.

Whereas,

if we had thought to serve our meager, almost-payday meal/ on our one and only silver-plated tray, we might have seen/ our lives in some kind of new relief, and bent our heads/to our beans and toast with a kind of pride,

I THINK she is trying to tie the service of the beans on a silver tray to the idea that haggis is uplifted by its connection to Robert Burns. The idea being that the beans didn't have anything similar, therefore, they were more onerous and life was more depressing. And the logical extension is, I guess that you can enjoy poverty and starvation more if you are Irish and you have romantic or heroic "stuff" to think about. Or maybe that's just the way it seems if you are a kid. Or nostalgic. Or that maybe her mother should have just tried harder to disguise their poverty. Or all the above.

Walk in Victoria's Secret - The Polack

You know, I was thinking today, that last time I participated in NaPoReMo, I picked a very difficult poet, a poet whose poems I had a difficult time parsing - Heather McHugh. I felt like I needed a magic decoder ring to crack the puzzle of many of her poems. In contrast, Daniel's poems seem deceptively, almost disappointingly "easy" to comprehend. The narrative, the metaphors, the messages are all pretty straightforward. Initially, I thought that they are so "in your face," that there were no layers to be plumbed, no messages beyond the - for want of a better term - shock value of addressing issues that few poets have dared to address in the way she addresses them. It wasn't until today that I realized, that this may very well be where the layers of her poems lie - in the readers reaction(s).

I have noticed my own tendency in many of her poems to kind of do a flinch and a gasp, a half turn away with, then like a guilty bystander at a particularly horrific accident, or a conservative Christian at a peep show, I will sneak another peek. At her best, her poems make me, at least assess my own reaction, then assess what it is about the topic, the approach to the topic, the language she uses, what she says or doesn't say that causes the reaction.

This next poem, is loaded from the title and moves into a beautifully loaded line filled with rejection

a big boy, always fighting, growing into the shape/of his father's despisal-the best part of you, kid,/ran down my leg-and hulking down, ashamed/inside his own body as if something essential/had been carved out of him and carried away,/and was moldering now, undiscovered,/in the decomposing garbage

and the boy goes to war and it really isn't all that different, he becomes an excellent soldier, blowing people he doesn't care about, losing count, while Around him, the jungle steamed fragrantly, indifferent/as a whore rising to bathe in the Quonset brothel outside Da Nang. And this, the jungle, the poem implies, is his understanding of the feminine.

Later we learn a different meaning, perhaps, to what his father said, in

And there he was, too, laboring on into the night/hunched above the body of the boy's own mother,/and pulling out, the son realizes now, to confound/conception, and rolling off and over in the dark/just a few feet distant from the body of his boy, curled/

then

his hands cupped on his groin to form a little sacramental space/devoted to the only place in life that gave him any pleasure.

Certainly, the boy, now a man and war-hardened, sees his father's insult as a bit more nuanced, though hardly as a compliment. But, on the other hand, perhaps, he no longer equates himself with the refuse. Quite.

A Walk in Victoria's Secret - Square Egg

The poem starts out with an e-mail from an old lover

there/you were:your e-mail style as distinctive/as the smell of your mouth I still recall,

an arresting and, perhaps, not altogether complimentary memory. I kind of like that normally, we don't think of mouth smells as a good thing. Perhaps, in N's world of resurrected young love, it is different. Perhaps not. The thing I think I love most about this poem is she uses the quirky gift of

a silly, orange-tinted,/plastic cube, trademarked Square Egg Maker,/and how perverse it felt to press the still-warm/ peeled-clean, hard-boiled egg inside, and close/the top, reshaping something as elemental as an egg.

to segue into

I called it Humpty for those few, brief weeks-/the little egg we turned, together, into a child. And N goes on to describe her abortion, musing

A Square Egg Maker might have saved our tiny egg/from Humpty's fate, and set it upright safely on the rim/

and

But it remained itself, /our little egg: unsquared and rounded, so elliptical and slick,/it could not resist the steep, declining edge of great, failed love.

I enjoyed, for once, reading a unique take on abortion that was all at once, nonjudgmental, private (I felt, as I feel with many of her poems, like a voyeur), regretful and self-aware. When she hits the high spots, she hits them well and truly.

A Walk in Victoria's Secret - The Pedicure

This is a poem, that while it had its moments, I felt those moments did not compensate for what was often an overwrought, overly fanciful, OTT, WTF? rendering of its subject. N is given a pedicure as a birthday gift from her husband. We get this

Perhaps it was for him, then, hoping to revive that long neglected (notice the purple ink?)/garden of our early love, that I ascended a seat as elevated/as a throne, on the morning of my 50th birthday,/at Womanly Illusions

from there, noting that a woman is then "crouched beneath me," N cringes at the subservience and is reminded of her mother and other members of her family taken brutal advantage of. Then we have

Yet here I was/with my sympathy for the workers, my love of Marx, my hatred/and fear of the bourgeoisie, the robber barons, the planter class,/all kings and queens, the Ferdinand and Imelda Marcoses, the Richard Nixons and George Bushes of the world. Here I was swooning/
(not too strong a word) at the pricey ministrations directed at my feet. Can you hear me gag?

And on and on. It was partially mitigated by a very frank and intimate portrait of her father massaging her mother's work worn feet.

I see him starting to massage them both,/uncrimping her toes, and threading his fingers in between/to excavate the sweaty, fragrant nits of hidden grime./Now, he is kneading her swollen soles until she groans and leans back, closing her eyes, as relaxed and open/as if she's lying there alone.

This is it. Wading through a lot of purple prose to get to this. Several pages. Even a good writer hits a clunker, sometimes.

A Walk in Victoria's Secret - Homage to Calvin Spotswood

I have decided to indulge myself and meander my way through this book, picking and choosing whatever strikes my fancy. So, in no particular order, this next poem. Actually, I encountered this particular poem a few years ago, in, I believe a Best of American Poetry Series and it captured my attention in quite an arresting way. It is another long poem, in long lines.

The narrator is a young woman who takes a job as a nurse's aid on an oncology ward. Calvin is a difficult patient - a black man pre Civil Rights. He has colon cancer. He is still hungry, in the literal and metaphorical. He has two huge wives, one black, one white who guard his room. They are loud and gaudy. N is scrawny, timid and raw. Calvin does not intend to bow to the white man nor does he intend to go gentle into that good night. On the other hand, he has his delicacies. He says f---ing.

Some excerpts:

Like Lucifer, Calvin was a troublingly complex/antihero-a horrible person in many ways, stubbornly stupid,/had abused his nurses and cursed the doctors, refusing/the surgery that might have prolonged-or saved-his life./He wouldn't be unmanned, he said, shitting in a bag. No f---ing way.


and


still whined for pussy, porno mags,/and chicken fried in bacon grease. A third-year resident,/Harvard, M.D., wrote an order for the supper Calvin thought/ he craved: mashed potatoes and buttered bread, a chicken-battered/ deep-fried steak. Beaming, our man consumed it while his doctor lingered /outside his door to await the inevitable result of the natural process/

and then there's this

Night after night, wrist deep in the tepid water I bathed him with,/I stood at the bedside and tried to change him from hot to cool/and listened to him discourse maniacally on the mysteries of gender:/born again, he'd be a woman in slick red panties, a streetwalking/whore in high-heeled sandals and torn, black hose, opening his legs/for paper money, filling his purse with bucks to spend./How anyone was granted a life like that he could never comprehend.

and especially this

At the end, cupping his withered, hairless testicles/in my cool, white palm because he asked me to, it wasn't anything/like witnessing a death. More like the birth of a new world, really,/he was entering alone.

And that isn't the end. Daniel's treads in all the uncomfortable places. I can't say that all of her poems were well done and I will get to some of those, later, but when she nails a poem, she nails them well and truly and these first two are prime examples.

June 15, Title Poem

The title poem is a poem of several pages composed of several parts and written in long lines. It begins In an hour, I'll be lying on the worn-out, mauve-colored couch/in the 30th month of my psychoanalysis, free associating/on the tables of brassieres in Victoria's Secret, & how/I love to wander there, touching the puce-colored slips of silky polyester,

N spends some time in the lingerie, then her Super-ego rudely jerks her back to the dusty-smelly couch and she claims her feminist persona. Her psyche then wanders over the psychological and historical landscape, musing about breasts in quite startling sensual language. Some examples:

And then there's the miracle of lactating breasts with their stretched nipples/and swollen globes of succulent flesh, the skin thinned at the sides,/raising the blue veins to the surface so it looks like a map./I love breasts fastened into nursing bras with their flip-down/cups, facilitating a jutting-out as hilarious as coarse characters/in a Vegas strip show.

And this:

I loved the mounting. My baby mounting the objects of his desire,/and making them run with milk, sucking out the cream, raising the heat and falling back, drunk and gluttonous,/ almost post-coital, on the sweaty, smelly pillow of my flesh.

Or this:

In her barely literate way, my mother's mother must have meditated/on the dual mysteries of every woman's breasts that Freud, in his genius,/almost ruined: the sweet delight of a baby's nursing, and the harder edges/of the pleasure delivered by a moaning lover's sucking mouth.

It goes on like this, sensually, specifically, pulling no punches for pages. It is highly Freudian, highly oral stage, vacillating between the feminine and the feminist, the psychoanalytic and the psychoanalytically critical throughout. Naturally, I love it.

Kate Daniels - A Walk in Victoria's Secret

The author of this book of poetry is described as a "feminist" poet. I don't know how to describe her writing other than is from what little I read from excerpts I saw on the web a few months back, is I was utterly enthralled and this book has been on my wish list since. I ordered it yesterday and it is now on my brand spanking new Kindle. I can't wait to start! Her poems are mainly in prose from what I can tell so far. She blends Freud and sexy lingerie with early mother-child experiences, including breastfeeding, growing up, a white girl in the South and a unique take on all of it. It seems very readable, as well as the sort of thing you can't put down and then want to return to again and again to take in the subtleties of what you missed the first, second and third time around.

Now, I will hope I didn't screw this post up. Here is hoping for the best.