Why Marshall Matters

Why Marshall Matters: on word-wizardry, family values,
and why Eminem and Johnny Cash could have done a duet

What’s a nice Baptist grrrl (with dozens of twinkie friends) doing cranking up the volume on obscenity-spewing gangsta hip-hop?

I’m rapping my ass off, that’s what!

I can’t say I’ve ever identified with Martha Stewart, though I fancy myself a bit of a whiz in the kitchen. I never saw use for painting the walls in varying shades of taupe at every season’s change. But since Our Lady of Napkin Rings busted out of the joint, seems she’s been shaking it with other middle-aged ladies to Eminem. And I’ve joined right in, wondering how I failed to notice up until now that Eminem is the bomb. Not only is he kind of hot, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s a man of family values, a master wordsmith, and a storyteller in the tradition of Johnny Cash.

This linguistic contortionist is rather Seussian, but definitely not for kids.

I’m embarrassingly late to get on the Em train. Perhaps I was sleeping through his rise to fame, or perhaps I unconsciously absorbed the negative press about fag-hating and womanizing without my usual protocol of reserving judgement for work I’ve observed firsthand. Certainly the aura of negativity surrounding much hip-hop left little for me to hope for creatively and culturally, though my husband, who was brilliant, was a huge fan of Eminem. I had little understanding of Eminem’s roots, and it sure wasn’t the first on my list of things to look into while I was occupied with major events in my personal life.

I had no real opposition to the noise I heard blasting from car windows or other people’s parties, but I was never drawn in. Perhaps I’ve just never been much of a gangster, and didn’t know enough then to identify with Mr. Mathers as a poet.

My crash course was exciting: a lot of reading, a lot of dancing around the kitchen to Square Dance chopping celery, seeing his videos and concert footage for the first time, and watching 8 Mile. This guy is a creative power-horse, a supersonic rhyme machine.

The beat got planted when I found myself with an unusual and enigmatic roommate who had dreams of turning his humble roots into hip-hop superstardom. Robert kept late hours jumping around in his room with Curtain Call blasting from his 17 speakers, and I figured I couldn’t complain. After all, as an early writer, I subjected him to enough Madonna and Nina Simone during six a.m. inspirations. Fair is fair, and I barely noticed that I was starting to tap my feet in my dreams to rather nimble, perspicuous, melodic beats. I wondered how the guy could rap so fast, and though I heard plenty of expletives that reminded me of the good old days, working my first job at the small town gas station, I became curious about Eminem and his lyrical gymnastics.

Yes, Slim Shady swears a lot and goes into involved details about stuff I prefer to do privately and keep to myself. But there’s a lot more going on in the extensive library of lyrics than booty calls. As I noticed references to his daughter Hailie and his desire to care properly for the one he calls the only lady in his life, I began to surmise that Marshall is rather a bulwark of family values. I began to catch on to some of the theatre of his history, and saw that the man who claims “God sent me to piss the world off” was giving audiences a brutal but realistic glimpse into the blues of the ‘hood. 8 Mile certainly documented with beauty and precision some of the courage it took for a wimpy white boy to stand up in Detroit and start battling it out in freestyle rap, earning the respect of his peers. Actually, Eminem is unrivaled in rhyme, and some say he is the best rapper in the world, black or white.

Eminem’s personal life and the identities of his rabblerousing, hostile characters like Slim Shady overlap. While one must be careful never to believe that every aspect of a celebrity persona is true to his own life, it’s safe to assume that in an everyman kind of way, Eminem is talking about the kind of life he lived. Self-professed trailer trash, Em grew up among the poor, abused, addicted, fatherless, and lawless. He has said, “My father? Never knew him. Never even seen a picture of him.”

Besides the quicksilver, shrewd, intricate rhyming talent, the man also has feelings. “Now you’d prob’ly get this picture from my public persona, that I’m a pistol-packing drug addict that bags on his mama, but I wanna take this time to be perfectly honest, cause there’s a lot of shit, that I keep bottled that hurts deep inside of my soul.” (Hailie’s Song).

Arguments that this style of music is responsible for promoting violence have always fallen flat with me, despite my previous disinterest. I believe that violence creates violence – singing about what you know might be the best way out of the ghetto. Here I would argue that Eminem continues an American tradition of storytelling in song, and not unlike country, gospel and blues greats, he tells the stories of locale. Johnny Cash sang of bars and trains and brawls and drugs and prison and injured faith and love, and Eminem is no different. He is also similarly stoic, accepting the past for what it is without compromising his belief in a different future.

(Given my late entrance to the Rhyme King poetics train, I must acknowledge that many critics of Eminem also criticize thinkers who tout the “Mathers as Storytelling” plot line. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau wrote, “Eminem has never been the storyteller lazy defenders pretend he is. (June 11, 2002))

Though like all families, ours had its problems, I was lucky enough to grow up in a nice Christian family in rural Ontario, loved by both my parents. Still, I can relate to the soul of hope and anger in Eminem’s raps about poverty, mental illness, drug addiction, ambition, and spiritual conflict. These realities may be extreme in the place where he grew up, but there’re millions of people who share them nonetheless, and a few in those millions I have known and loved. Certainly I can relate to his horror at everyone he loves dying – perhaps the strange and only link we have besides our word-craft.

Some of life’s darker themes like loss transcend family income and personal geography and are simply human. Johnny Cash said he wore black to mourn for those in prison and those hooked on drugs, for those who never heard the words of Christ. And growing up as I did, I heard the words of Christ on a regular basis and he spoke in parables that his peers could understand. Johnny Cash told stories that spiritually bereft peers could find sympathy in, wearing his struggles on his sleeve. Eminem has the same staggering talent for stories, and it would be wrong to assume he should speak the language of people other than those he grew up with, the language of the person that he is.

And while Johnny Cash’s integrity and sainthood is now deeply entrenched in North American iconography, it must be kept in mind that in his time he was “a prototype of the hard-living, finger-flipping rock and roll hell-raiser.” Kurt Loder’s amazing article, Johnny Cash, Original Gangsta, points out that Cash was “present at the creation of white rock and roll”, similar to Eminem’s historical role in the creation of white rap. Marshall Mathers raps about addiction and alcoholism: JC was crazy from amphetamines. Loder writes eloquently, “Cash may have set up shop as “the man in black” in order to distinguish himself from the gaudier denizens of the pop-music world, but the image resonates on a deeper level in his music.

“All of which is kind of … gangsta, in a way. Johnny Cash has drawn on a deep well of murder and mortality in American music, and everybody pretty much agrees the man’s a master, a modern icon. Today’s rappers, however — who deal with the same subjects in a, shall we say, more immediate way — get nothing but flack”

The Man in Black had some words of advice for rap artists, told to Loder before his death. “ “Ignore it,” Cash says. “Do what you do. You can’t let people delegate to you what you should do when it’s coming from way in here [taps heart]. I wouldn’t let anybody influence me into thinking I was doing the wrong thing by singing about death, hell and drugs. ‘Cause I’ve always done that. And I always will.””
(http://www.mtv.com/bands/c/cash_johnny/news_vma_feature/index.jhtml)

At least one other thinker makes the connection between these American icons. Bryan Leed, reviewing Cash’s music on Amazon.com notes, “On American Recording, “Delia’s Gone” is a misogynist song about killing your woman in various ways. I don’t like this song, but it was the biggest hit on the album when it came out in 1994, and it put Johnny back in the public eye in a big way with its MTV hit video to promote it. It is a lot like the sort of black gallows humor which rapper Eminem writes in (though Eminem gets more extreme, Johnny has been doing these types of songs since before Eminem was even born).”

Contrary to my own preconceived notion, Em is not simply blasting obscenities and spewing hatred. His twisting, twisted rhymes pulse with rhythm and texture, and they are richly populated stories. The cast of characters is wide, from hip-hop celebrities (many of whom he grew up with) to his wife and daughter, to his Mom and other family members, to journalists, musicians, and celebrities. The “plot” of said stories grows within each song, but more so, the pieces fit together as re-appearing characters start to flesh out the past events through various works. Of course, like any poet, Eminem takes poetic license and we can’t assume each player’s role is the same every time, or that he is always talking about himself. But like the personal nature of most other poetical works, and from what we know of his private life, we can conclude everything except the pillaging and killing is at least semi-autobiographical.

After spending a lot of time with the enigmatic hip-hopper, Em’s biographer, Anthony Bozza, says it better than I’m able. “His desires are simple: he lives for hiphop and his daughter, nothing more,” Bozza writes. (Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem). Describing his lyric talents, he continues, “He relies on what works for him: bending words to his will, honing double-rhymed structures to convey what life has dealt him, ultimately to undo it, at least for the length of a song. His lyrics bite, cut, jab and burn with an urgency that few artists harness. He uses rap music but he speaks a universal language, the same language of experience, hardship and humour heard in the blue, jazz, country, and folk, in literature…anywhere a story, through passion, becomes real in the retelling.”

He and I are not the only ones who see Eminem’s extremely important cultural significance as a storyteller or poet. Poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney said that no one since Bob Dylan provoked so much interest in poetry and lyrics and praised Mr. M’s “verbal energy.” Wikipedia notes that “Eminem is noted for his ability to change his vocal pace and style multiple times within one song without losing the beat, and has been praised for his skill in alliteration and assonance”. Eminem has been nominated for and won countless Grammy awards and his song, Lose Yourself from the 8 Mile soundtrack, won an Oscar. The boy was garnering these awards while some of us slept right through his talent.

With lightning speed, Eminem weaves intricate, complicated rhymes, incorporating clever wit and satire. He lives and raps by his wits, moving from the mean streets to become the biggest-selling male artist in the world by 2001. President George Bush said called Eminem the “most dangerous threat to American children since Polio.” Like too many others who haven’t walked 8 miles in another’s shoes, Georgie forgot that the real threat to children is violence, abuse and poverty. Andy Thomas, a stand-up comedian in Toronto says, “I’d like to see how many poor kids Eminem has put into a wheelchair, George.”

It’s also interesting to note that if Eminem is the hatemongering lunatic that Mr. Bush perceives him to be, then perhaps the President of the World has more in common with the rap mogul than he cares to admit. Not only does the rapper’s music appear to hate women and faggots, but Eminem clearly sings in Hailie’s Song against abortion. Aren’t these the family values that Bush espouses?

When celebrities were asked to speak out against Eminem, Madonna spoke loud and clear. “Since when is offensive language a reason for being unpopular? I find the language of George W much more offensive,” Madonna wrote. “I like the fact that Eminem is brash and angry and politically incorrect. At least he has an opinion. He’s stirring things up, he’s making people’s blood boil, he’s reflecting on what’s going on in society right now. This is what art’s supposed to do.”

And Elton John, who is as flaming as they come, was happy to perform with him at the Grammy awards. He called Eminem’s album (The Marshall Mathers LP) the “album of the year,” stating, “It appeals to my English black sense of humour.”

Fellow genius Stevie Wonder is a man everyone can agree is sweet and loving and a poster child for politeness. But he also spoke out on the rapper’s behalf. “For someone to say, this is a disgrace to the Grammys, come on. There was a time when blues was called a disgrace.” (Wonder did criticize Eminem’s Just Lose It, however, which poked fun at Michael Jackson, saying he was kicking a man while he was down.)

To ask a child from these roots not to speak or sing out about what he knows is to leave them voiceless. In spite of our personal ethics on any given topic, is it actually moral to assume that an impoverished, abused American child who sings about that life is any less deserving of fame and success than those who can sing about driving Daddy’s Porsche to honour roll meetings? Are ghetto children incapable of genius, simply because we find the topics they use distasteful? If Eminem can’t talk about the horrors of the ‘hood, of being fatherless and addicted and suicidal and abused, then we must also censor others from speaking out about things we don’t like. We can’t hear any more personal experience stories from those whose lives were shattered in any way. We can’t watch sponsorship ads for starving kids on TV. No more Holocaust survival stories, and no more newspapers.

Mr. Mathers himself said, “Saving Private Ryan was probably the illest, sickest movie I’ve ever watched, and I didn’t see anybody criticizing that one for violence.”

While women’s groups and gay activists have decried Mr. Mathers’ perceived bigotry, we would all do well to remember that poetry is about reflecting a reality, not promoting one. A thoughtful writer identified only as Dan posted an insightful piece on the Internet, reminding us of our fear of Walt Whitman’s homosexuality. The irony is that now we fear a man who raps the word “faggot”. Dan writes, “You don’t read Walt Whitman and get scared by his homosexuality or even his homosexual subtext. It is classic American poetry. Bob Dylan was born out of Guthrie, born out of Whitman. I dare propose that Eminem has been born out of Bob Dylan. He is the modern urban poet and you are burning his books.”

Peculiar, yet utterly common, this young man might be as confused by fame and the marketplace and the world as anyone, yet he accepts his place in it and keeps no pretenses. All of his anger becomes tolerable when you see the sly bent of dark humour, wrenching every drop of blood from the old hip-hop adage, “keeping it real.” I admit that it’s too dark for me, that I do not relish the violence in Shady’s stories, though guns are a way of life in Detroit, Notably absent from all of Mathers’ constructions is the affluenza of the gangster. This has never interested Em – only providing reasonably well for his family interests him financially, and creating is all he has ever wanted to do. His ideas come forth as quickly as his lyrics, driving him into a quiet madness that he has learned to harness it by freeing its aggressive, politically incorrect spirit. Ironically, for the only guy who can speak at 100 miles a second, he is a man of few words.

By unleashing the demons of a whole nation’s cultural texts, he takes the blame that belongs to all of us. It’s also empowering to not fear those texts. I don’t fear Eminem in a dark alley. We’ll likely share a joint if we met at a party, and he would cordially shake hands with my gay friends. He would not wave around a gun or get too high and plastered. He’s unrefined and uneducated, but has devastating talent and disarmingly, an unexpected modest integrity. He is a superstar, a mogul, and a god – yet his megalomania is just a theatrical construct. He’s really rather unassuming in real life. He is right to move into producing, where he can mastermind and mold instinctively other talents that follow in his wake, giving proper tribute to the talents that molded him, respect he has given from the beginning.

So I’ll defend the “lyrical arsonist” (Croal, Newsweek) for the trademark, 8 mile-a-minute, speedy voltage of quick-thinking, alliterating, logorrhea. It’s good to ask ourselves if inspiration belongs only to those who are well-adjusted, healthy, sane, and well-bred. By carefully examining history, we know that most artists, musicians, and other geniuses led upstanding lives free of abuse, bigotry and insanity. HA! Genius seldom comes from the wholesome places we would like it to, and “keeping it real” means the lower ranks of society must have equal voice. Where would music be without Mozart and his penchant for women, wine and song? And if we remove all traces of sexism and bigotry from literature and art history, well, we won’t have damn thing to read.

As Eminem raps in Bad Influence, “People say that I’m a bad influence, I say the world’s already fucked, I’m just addin’ to it.” After all, reality bites.

Because I Couldn’t Say Everything Myself:

Just How Good Is He? Giles Foden for the Guardian Online
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,434096,00.html
Focusing on the history of poetics, this is a brilliant examination of Eminem’s place in poetry by literary genius Giles Foden. If I haven’t convinced you lit-lovers to open the mind to the rapping at the door, it’s hard to argue with Foden. He has an impeccable knowledge of poetics and writes beautifully to boot.

Genius-Not! Eminem Melts in Your Hands by Armond White
http://www.firstofthemonth.org/culture/culture_white_eminem.html
In addition to Eminem’s personal responsibility for all the fag-bashing, rape and devil worship in the world, we can’t forget his contribution to oppressing racial minorities and subverting the true genius of all the black rappers he professes deep respect for. Guilty of sharing the limelight and not presenting “feel-good” rap like the oh-so-memorable Vanilla Ice, Eminem whines about his petty white shit and pisses off one Armond White, who knows that Eminem’s “industry triumph depends on asserting the privilege of being white in America.”

The Scotsman- Eminem Streets Ahead in his Art
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/s2.cfm?id=726052003
Jem Rolls writes convincingly that art can come from anywhere, if it’s good enough. “Is Eminem also poetry? Of course. It’s slickly inventive, it keeps you surprised, you can’t see all the rhymes coming. And a singular energy compels you.”

Tune Out Eminem’s Pitiful “Poetry”- Michelle Malkin for Jewish World Review
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michelle/malkin061300.asp
Michelle Malkin disses Eminem and I can’t agree with much that she says, but have to hand it to her for being nearly as clever a wordsmith as Mr. M himself. (And no, Ms. M, I didn’t have to look up logorrhea in the dictionary like you did). “Eminem is just the latest dysfunctional spawn of our Jerry Springer society. Sooner or later, he’ll self-destruct. The real threat to our cultural health are those entrenched media intellectuals, lounging backstage with lattes and laptops in hand, who sanction garbage as art, expletives as entertainment, and violent perversion as lyrical poetry.” Too bad Malkin can’t see that the only thing separating her word-works from his just might be Em’s “Dickensian childhood,” one she evidently didn’t share.

Whatever You Say I Am: the Life and Times of Eminem by Anthony Bozza
Crown Publishers, New York, 2003.

Bozza presents an interesting scope here, and shows great wit and perception as a writer.

White Noise: The Eminem Collection edited by Hilton Als and Darryl A. Turner
Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2003

A thoughtful and varied collection of writings from different media sources. These thinking reflections preceded my muses, and many show similar discoveries, but there’s plenty of intelligent fodder to refute our claims of genius as well.

Where to Start

I didn’t quote extensively from the poetics of Eminem’s vast lyric library, simply because the art form needs to be heard out loud. The way art is created is how it should be received, and Em’s rhymes twist and wiggle impossibly on the tongue, insidiously insinuating themselves into the framework of the song. But I’ll recommend a few of Shady’s most important works. Start with When I’m Gone, Like Toy Soldiers, Lose Yourself, Run, Rabbit, Run, Without Me, Mockingbird, My Name Is, Hailie’s Song, Square Dance, and Cleaning Out My Closet.

visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net
buy her book at indigo or amazon online
“The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos”

Please support my blog by shopping for books through this link:
chapters.indigo.ca

Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads 43 of the World’s Best Poems

Fans of Camille Paglia’s Salon column and her collected sex and pop culture books may have skipped this treasure. They should know better- poetry with Paglia is the class I wish I’d had. Forget about suffering through old English- this dynamo cracks the whip and gets your noggin’ into shape fast, leaving you hungry for more. Even better, you may find yourself coming up with other suggestions for the ‘world’s best poems’ and so you should. Just because we live in the age of e-greetings and celebrity gossip doesn’t mean we shouldn’t visit the panaramic backdrop of our culture’s products time to time. It all began way back when. Consider this: “My attentiveness to the American vernacular- through commercials, screwball comedies, hit songs…has made me restive with the current state of poetry. I find too much work by the most acclaimed poets labored, affected, and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets. Poetic language has become stale and derivative…(but) those who turn their backs on media…have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English.”

And if, like me, you fear you are just not smart enough to sit through John Donne or another Shakespeare lesson, let Paglia’s cadence and remarkable insight take over. Follow her through the puzzles as she unearths the most fascinating interpretations. She begins at Shakespeare and ends with a pop song by fellow Canadian poet Joni Mitchell, so the range is astonishing and lively. Yes, you will occasionally head to the dictionary, as per the usual Paglia read. But she says herself that she has tried to “write concise commentaries on poetry that illuminate the text but also give pleasure in themselves as pieces of writing.”

And that they do. Paglia never misses anything, so don’t worry if you don’t ‘get’ a poem. Just sit back and absorb her marvellous interpretations. Seeing as the woman has read and memorized every piece of literature, and knows the chronology of history impeccably, she fits everything for us into the epoch we need for context. Her enthusiasm vibrates through. Revisit Williams’ little red wheelbarrow, alabaster graveyards with dear Dickinson, and have fun saying “Bysshe Shelley” over and over.

And if you are a poet, or even if you’re not, you may find yourself compelled to get out the old inkwell. “Authors strive and create against every impediment,” Paglia proclaims proudly. “Including their doubters and detractors. Despite breaks, losses, and revivals, artistic tradition has a transhistorical flow that I have elsewhere compared to a mighty river. Poems give birth to other poems.”

And how is that relevant in the material world? “Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse… Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building. I maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object,” Paglia writes. “It is not just a mist of ephemeral subjectivities. Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.”

visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
Collage by Lorette C. Luzajic. view more art at creativityvault.net

The Aftermeth

the aftermeth

“on that morning, when this life is over, I will see your face”
in loving memory of Bobby Martin, 1978-2008

now that you have come to sort things out,
I am more confused than ever.
all hell breaks loose in
midnight
(it has been years now since I heard midnight
at my door)
I’ve made my life so

tidy

squishedit
filledit
crammedit
stuffedit

with law and order

to keep the crashing winds and waves outside my window at bay
(as if orderly cutlery and weekend yoga could possibly protect me
from the gods of the sea)

I never know if the roads will bring you home
and today the miles are written in your eyes,
the things you’ve seen, the ways you’ve tried to hide.
and you are wearing the sun and the rain
and the road and the endless prairie skies.

you are a storm that blows through here
like a pack of wild horses galloping past
you are possibly not quite human, or more than human, something else,
wilder and more compelling,
you are my family and my flesh, brother and lover simultaneously. yet nothing
can shield me from the injury of you, not even your shelter.

every time you break my heart,
I will grow another one for you to break
and treasure the hours in which it falls apart,
just to have something from you.

I cannot keep you from climbing across my roof
or crawling in my window
if you needed to get to me.

In between those times,
I do not ever know if you are dead or alive. now, I do not know again.
you disappear as you arrive, without explanation, because there aren’t any.
you leave, as usual, penniless, with nothing but the clothes on your back, a small sack, an internal map of every fucking road there is. this time you take my poetry with you,
there are poems for you in every book I write.

once you told me you would walk 1000 miles for me
and I said all I will ever ask of you is that you put down your pipe for me
and I beg you leave it down. I will never ask another thing.

You are pleased that things are all right for me,
for my new apparent equilibrium,
you show some smiles among
the new scars
of your recent hanging
and the nearly faded wounds on your wrists.

now, as if there were never years between us, and no grief,
we laugh and cry
and pretend everything is all right.
and we listen through Johnny Cash five times, and it’s an
apt soundtrack for all the we have seen, for
the people we have been

and yours is a lonely road, my friend,
but that is not why I keep your heart with me as best I can,
it is not why I pray for those dark corridors in your mind to fill with light,
which you deserve. the air here, now empty of you,
tastes like cilantro- soapy and edged with grief.
I can’t fix the things that are broken-
it is you who fixed my sink and bicycle when you hitchhiked into town.
it’s only 2000 miles, you said while repacking your backpack.
I’m clean now, woman, I’ll make it west, don’t worry.

Lorette C. Luzajic
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
There were two poems for Bobby Martin in my first book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. You can see it on my site, or check out Indigo or Amazon online.

I Hung My Head: requiem for bobby martin 1978-2008

I Hung My Head
requiem for bobby martin
1978-2008

The last memory I have of bobby is the most precious. During his brief visit passing through Toronto last summer, we shared a perfect, beautiful day. I sure wasn’t expecting his call at five am, but made breakfast when I learned he was on his way. We went to the beer store as soon as it opened, and spent the whole day on the floor looking at old photographs of loved ones we missed who were now on the other side. We listened to Elvis and to Johnny Cash’s American Recordings over and over.

Bobby Martin was my husband Marko’s ‘brother’. Bobby and I did our best to look after one another in that darkest hour after Marko passed away the summer of 2005. During the time that Bobby lived with me, he had to get used to my constant scatterbrained neuroses. I tend to flip out when I’m looking for something important that I’ve misplaced, flying through the house yelling and whimpering. Bobby Martin always told me calmly, “It’s in the place you didn’t look.” This was always true!

One of the most precious gifts I ever received was a tiny jade hand from Bobby. He noticed how often I use a hand symbol in my paintings, including the painting I made for him. I wore it whenever I missed him, which was often, after he left town to search for work in other provinces. One day, I went to put my necklace on and saw that the chain was empty. I looked everywhere to see where the pendant had fallen, to no avail. I looked for days on end, remembering that Bobby would tell me it was in the place I hadn’t looked! After several days of searching, I admitted defeat. Devastated, I began looking online to see if I could find something similar. That was how I found out that the hand symbol was called a ‘manu figa’ or fig hand. Given my love of mythological symbolism and how often I read into signs and symbols, I was thrilled. The manu figa, or fig hand, was an ancient sailor’s symbol to divert the storm god’s attention and bring blessings on the boat. Because Marko was a sailor, I found this tiny symbolic gift even more powerful. Finally, I found an exact replica of the charm I’d had, and ordered it from Brazil.

The very same day that the hand arrived, I found the original charm in my jewelry box! It had fallen behind the little drawer.

When Bobby Martin came to visit that summer, I told him the story and he was astonished at the length I had gone to replace the hand. I proudly pinned the duplicate to him, and he was beaming. He said he would always feel me close by, even when he was away.

I honestly don’t know how I can live without knowing Bobby Martin is out there on this vast, amazing planet. Now he can see his father again and Marko and other loved ones that we miss, but here on earth, many of us are hurting and sad. Goodbye, baby, goodbye for now, but not forever. Save a spot for me up there!

Poem for Bobby

Oh, I’ve been sad for years, my friend-
it’s a painter’s fate to feel,
anda writer’s lot to live a little lost.
Oh, I’ve been shedding tears my friend
’cause this world’s way too real
but the ticket price is truly worth its cost.

I don’t have any answers
but I know the answer’s light
truth and joy have meaning
and life’s a worthy fight.

I watch you struggle darling
I feel the bruise and fight
and I looked right into darkness
to see a starry night.

And I don’t know what to do
I don’t know where to go
but a warrior went before us
and he says, don’t let go.

I could not help falling
and I cannot be wise
It was likely angels calling
and the rain inside your eyes.

Lorette C. Luzajic
Poem for Bobby was from my collection, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, available online from Indigo or Amazon, or through my site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Art Explained by Robert Cumming

Now here’s a gorgeous, juicy book that will make us all better conversationalists at dinner. If you always wanted to know a little bit about art, but not come across looking like a pompous fool, this is the perfect place to start. If you ever wondered why certain paintings were masterpieces, soon you will know.

Each page features a full colour reproduction of a painting with explanatory blurbs that shed light on the history, era, artist’s life, story, details, techniques and so on.The language is accessible and absorbing, and the sidebar format is wonderful. It lets the painting speak for itself while illuminating details that make the work come alive. Even those already familiar with terms like ‘chiaroscuro’ or ‘pre-Raphaelite’ will appreciate this solid review. By the end of the book, you’ll definitely get more out of future gallery experiences, finding symbols and story lines you missed before. This treasure is a great general art history class, and will encourage you to participate more in art and culture with confidence and joy.

Art Explained
Robert Cumming
rev. ed. 2007

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

Incest Stories

Now here’s a little sumpin’-sumpin’ to make your skin crawl. Or maybe you’ll feel caught in the act if you were one of those sickos who googled ‘incest’ and arrived at my blog.

I had no idea when I started blogging that inadvertently, I would be peering into people’s private googling habits. But every day, I can look at my reader stats and see a list of search engine phrases that led readers to me. It’s terrific to see what topics are interesting to my readers, what books or themes they are looking for. Between my two blogs, The Literary Addict and Little Miss Chatterbox, I have dozens of lurid themes like drugs and sex and cilantro and my thoughts on Johnny Cash.

And yes, I have an entry about incest.

http://literaryaddict.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/on-south-mountain-and-other-incest-stories/

If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. In response to my reading On South Mountain, I wrote about the book and about several fiction books that deal one way or another with the theme. I hope my entry was both thoughtful and provocative. It’s just that suddenly the whole world is standing naked in front of me, because far and away this is the most-read entry in both of my blogs! It lures more people to my blog than another piece I wrote and titled provocatively quite on purpose, featuring the reading of Phil Larkin’s poetry and an imaginative description of my blonde bombshell BFF naked in the bathtub. While the piece was quite inspired by this heavenly muse, I purposely made it sexy and placed ‘naughty hotties naked’ in the title to see if ‘normal’ sexual pursuits would get the same kind of readership as a naked, festering hillbilly.

Nope. Not by a long shot.

Here are some of the terms that people typed in and by chance arrived at a photo-free literary analysis of incest literature, not exactly what they were hoping for!

• transcript of true incest stories
• incest history stories
• incest stories
• sophisticated incest stories
• consensual incest
• inbreeding hillbillies
• incest parents children

Yeah, lovely, that’s just today. Here’s a longer list:

• nova scotia clan incest
• Goler clan story
• south mountain book
• backwoods incest stories
• free abuse and incest stories
• Victorian incest stories
• in-laws incest story
• Kentucky incest stories
• vivid incest stories
• filthy incest stories
• incest stories that really happened
• inbred stories
• hillbilly incest

Fascinating, but I’m not sure I can ever date ever again.

I understand that some were researching for information on their doctoral thesis about child abuse. I know that others were seeking help and landed at my literary door, helpless. I know some can’t help their sick fantasies because they were victims of incest themselves.

And then there is, well, everybody else. And apparently, everybody is obsessed with looking for sexy grandma and nephew stories online.

And now you can be sure that this is in itself a new experiment. With that long list of keywords, my server will shut down with so many hits. But this was actually not an exercise to hang you out to dry. It was my way of luring you here to give you a list of a few places you might go for help. Perhaps it’s patronizing to assume you must need help just because you fantasize frequently about child abuse or your relatives. I’m just old-fashioned that way. Could be because the little girl down the street hung herself at age 16 when we were kids: no one had done anything about her father abusing her. But there’s lots of help out there now: go and get it.

(If you are not the victim but the perpetrator, you probably feel even more isolated and sick after my rant. So do the right thing and turn yourself in. Tell the family, apologize to the victim, confess to God, and head down to the precinct and start making things right. It’s very brave of you to face up to this. You are probably in the continuum of the cycle of violence and incest, and it’s not too late to stop hurting someone else in the future. I found few resources for you, but try starting here: http://www.way2hope.org/pedophile_therapy.htm)

Help for Victims

http://www.siawso.org
Survivors of Incest Anonymous, this is a 12-step program in the United States.

http://www.rainn.org/
Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network is a great place to start because they will help you connect with something local in your community.

http://www.ascasupport.org/
Adult Survivors of Child Abuse is helpful for people seeking healing a long time after the fact.

http://www.amazon.ca/Healing-Incest-Wound-Christine-Courtois/dp/0393313565
Healing the Incest Wound by Dr. Christine Courtois is a book I have not read but comes highly recommended by other victims.

http://www.vansondesign.com/RecoveryCanada/aboutus.html
Recovery Canada is a resource that provides supportive contact with other victims in addition to various resources.

http://www.sacc.to/
Sexual Assault Care Centre located in Scarborough, Canada.

Other suggestions:
talk to a teacher you trust, your best friend, a trusted family member, anonymously to someone in counseling at your church, local hotlines, a therapist or other counselor, etc.

I do not specifically endorse any of the listed resources or know how helpful they may or may not be. It is merely a place to start looking for healing.

Reading Thomas Moore’s A Life at Work

Middle age looms astonishingly near for a writer who built a brand on the nickname ‘The Girl.” Though I do not fear the wisdom that they say will make an appearance, few would describe me as mature or settled! I often joke that my youngest brother, now 23, is ‘finally my age.’ And once again, my teacher Thomas Moore can read my every molecule with a clarity I seldom possess.

“Some people get caught up in the Icarus syndrome at one point in their lives; others are perpetually like him- full of desire, somewhat reckless, and lost in their ideals. Often, too, they crash into a depression or some failed project and become disillusioned. Then they oscillate between grand ideas and failed experiments,” Moore writes in his new book, A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do.

On and on he goes, until I feel stark naked, but I’m not alone: I’m reading aloud to a friend I’ve always trusted as the more focused and pulled-together of our pairing. I’m reading to show myself- but he is seeing his own work, his crashing dreams, his amazing heights, his perceived failures.

Moore points out the glory of thinkers like Icarus: “…the spirit of Eternal Youth may give rise to idealism, inventiveness, enthusiasm, and a strong urge to be creative.” But the pitfalls are there to smash us mid-flight: “On the negative side, it is often unrealistic and wishful. At its core there often sits a smoldering narcissism- excessive self-regard, extreme self-consciousness….(he) thinks up one project after another and rarely completes any of them.”

I guess Moore has peeked right into my obsessive ‘list journals’ that I write on streetcars, in the bathtub, in the middle of church. “A writer of this type may have a box full of half-begun projects or a list of great ideas that will never be brought to fruition.”

Aha! See, there I go thinking it’s all about me…but perhaps the writer whom Moore refers to is Moore! In every book he gives us, Moore talks from his own experiences and his heart, both light and shadow. For years, I’ve taken comfort in knowing that my teacher was also taught by the great chaos and beauty of life. By now, Moore’s early dedication to life as a Catholic monk is legendary. He moved on to study music, to teach, to work in psychotherapy, and was still looking for his life’s work this whole journey. He became a family man later in life as well. Writing was something he did as expression of many of these things, and when he put his ideas about the soul into Care of the Soul, it was a smashing bestseller. Letters and reviews from people like myself poured in, marveling at Moore’s gift to reveal their life so eloquently.

It’s a great relief to myself, and to millions, to know that a man as talented and perceptive and ‘called’ as Moore watched life unfold in the same way we all do. Everyone expects a special stamp at 18 or 20: here’s your career, here’s your family, here’s your kids, here’s your future. But life unfolds in brilliant disorder: paths veer unexpectedly into another.

While this Icarus spirit seems like an uncommitted madman, my narcissism glows after the above bruising when Moore points out, “Out of all the visionary hopes and dreams may come brilliant ideas. The lives of inventors and artists are full of the struggle to get their novel ideas grounded in real life. A youthful spirit keeps you young and flexible. It may also be the basis of a fervent spirituality…”

I have a few other teachers, and one is an old friend I used to go raving with. It’s hard now to imagine us dressing up in brightly coloured plastic baubles and hitting the trance floor amid flashing lights and candy-coloured hallucinations. This phase passed, of course, as it does for most, and my younger friend went on to a life of religious dedication and became my own personal spiritual advisor. From the underground dance halls to the monastery seems a stretch, but isn’t. Both worlds sought to transcend life in search of spirit, to wade through illusions and come out with a different heart. This friend left the underground quickly, risking everything he knew as stable to become ordained as a Buddhist monk. He studied political science and graduated very young, then went on to Tibet, Laos, India, Thailand, Taiwan and New Zealand to work and pray in various monasteries. Additionally, he had to learn something of each language in order to pray and teach where he was. This kind of devotion and dedication is way too hard for most of us. I do not possess it.

The monk’s work or vocation, his calling, was clear from the beginning, and decidedly respectable. But oddly enough, his teachings always demanded that I embrace the very chaos I kept hoping to escape. The spiritual books he recommended, by beautiful authors like Pema Chodron, insisted that the midst of chaos was the midst of reality, and in my whirlwind life of big ideas and crashing dreams, of friends dropping dead like flies, of small triumphs and major travesties, I was an honorary Buddhist! Life is unfolding, he would tell me. Accept it.

Another teacher has been with me from the beginning. My father is a man who is unwavering in his literalist dedication to Christianity. He has lived in the same house, married to my mother, and worked at one job from which he retired 40 plus years later. He is the epitome of stability. Yet he also counsels me that life is unfolding. Once, when I expressed my distress that I was not yet a famous writer, he chuckled and said, “Your life’s not over yet.”

This brings me back round to A Life at Work- where Moore gently prods us to our calling, and shows us that our calling may not be a giant, world-dominating blaze of glory, and it may not be one specific thing. He asks us to watch carefully and let it unfold instead of suppressing it, to gently coax it from the ordinary moments, to wait for it through the tragic. He reminds us never to belittle our calling- we might be very good at a perfectly respectable thing like cleaning hospitals or selling shoes. Every contribution is important.

Moore always finds a way to bring in some of his favourite topics like alchemy, and he illustrates how we mix and temper our past experiences, good and bad, with our hopes for future possibilities. He shows us how to come to terms with our work past- from the mundane to the once glorious and failed. He shows us how to remain open to the opus we may not yet see patterning in our lives. He doesn’t say a word about how to make a resume or impress a corporation we’re hoping to move into. Instead, he gently gardens through our soul and reminds us that whatever we have planted or grown or lost, our life is not over yet.

A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do
Broadway Books (Random House), New York, 2008.

Visit the author of Care of the Soul, Soul Mates, The Soul of Sex, The Soul’s Religion, and The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life at www.careofthesoul.net.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Here’s what Thomas Moore said about Lorette’s poetry collection: “Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy. I like them and thank you for sending them. Looking forward to the next book.”

You, too, will enjoy The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, so please visit my site to order, or order online through indigo or amazon.

Home Alone: thoughts on the writing life

February has just slipped out from under me, and I know sooner or later I will have to leave the house.

Sure, I’m anticipating long and curious city walks in spring’s fuzzy glow. I’m dying for midnight coffees near Bloor and Brunswick, where the conversations of the assorted revelers nearby fill my notebooks. I want to be a lady who lunches, to go someplace with Elle and our girls, to pound them back and show off our vintage clutches. Oh, yes. I can feel the thaw. I will even go dancing, I’ll wear red lipstick and a smudged mole. I could definitely enjoy something with the banjo tonight, or something with gin.

But it’s still freezing, and so it didn’t take much persuasion for me to commit to another evening home alone. The truth be told, this all by myself stuff is spectacular. This past winter has been paradise. Like most people, urban home solitude is an expensive commodity, and I’ve always had roommates. I’ve lived with the fabulous and the fey, I’ve lived with thieves and vampires, I’ve lived with people whose name or face I might not recall upon passing. I’ve lived with lovers, with squatters, with addicts and mental patients and freaks of every assortment, with senior citizens and junkies and crazy Indians. I’ve lived with the elfin, the initiated, the converted evangels, the con men. With hippies, and the pierced and the prodded and the brilliant and the travelers. I lived with prison types and with festive fags of every stripe.

And I tell you, from the banker to the monk, human beings, each in their own way, are stunningly insane.

Those who know me know I love nothing more than a crazy person, and that I use the word so liberally it’s annoying. I love people. I love crazy people. I love being a crazy brilliant writer in the big city. But in my ascent to nearly middle age, that proverbial hill that shortly I’ll be over, I’ve finally found living arrangements on my own. It’s pretty nuts, I’m telling you, because all I do is write. It’s like I’ve been waiting for this winter my whole life and didn’t know it. I’m downloading, and it’s coming through my fingertips into the keyboard.

It doesn’t matter tonight that all week long except for Thursday when I had a root canal I did nothing but write furiously and endlessly- that’s still exactly what I feel like doing tonight. Dinah Washington’s elixir diction and bell-clear blues swerve sensually through my brainwaves. I just popped open some French Cross, the cheapest pink wine I could find. There’s salami and oranges. This is luxury. My girl Maeve described it best: she said that you can’t always be spilling open and over but you have to be there if the muse appears. You had to coax it, provide it with a portal. If you were out in the middle of a crowded subway or a nightclub, you might not hear her.

Seems it works. Close the door, pour a glass, the floods rush through me. I ride the crest of that surge of confidence, that thrill in life that can only come from a sense of your work, of your contribution. It’s still tempered with its see-sawing worldview, the one that forgets potentiality and experiences fear instead. Of what possible self-indulgent use could a bunch of poetry about my weird moments possibly be to anyone else on this planet?

That’s why famous writer Ariel Gore reminded me about William Carlos Williams said: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net
order her poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife, through indigo or amazon online

The Secret in the Old Attic: Anne Szumigalski’s Ghost

When Earth Leaps Up
Anne Szumigalski
Brick Books, 2006

Browsing through When Earth Leaps Up feels like one of those afternoons spent rifling through mementoes in a dusty attic, sun streaming through cracked windows. But it’s not my attic and I feel like I’m ferreting someone else’s secrets, prying open private papers. They are so compelling that I’m unable to put these mesmerizing discoveries down even as I hear footprints coming up the old stairs.

Alas, it’s just Anne Szumigalski’s ghost creeping into the shadows as I snoop through her things. She may be a little restless about When Earth Leaps Up- the posthumous volume is something of a scrapbook put together from loose papers and thoughts left behind in her personal effects. She did not order them, select them, polish them or finish them, and indeed they have an uncensored, unfinished, private feel. Without the poet’s hands-on control, I suspect I’m eavesdropping on revelations and sentiments unintended for me, and this makes this volume extraordinary.

Mark Abley, a dear friend of the poet, and a Canadian literary staple, is responsible for compiling from her files and notebooks what fills When Earth Leaps Up. He confesses to his “trepidation” at some selections in the afterword, wondering whether he’s giving up the equivalent of a journal to the public, or if he is allowing beloved scribbles to be immortalized. He acknowledges the trickiness of the whole process, not just out of privacy concerns, but also whether the poet would have felt a piece was ready, or intended at all for the public. After all, not every note a person makes is destined for completion- we scribble random ideas and poetic thoughts that later hit the paper shredder.

“I need to come clean, and state that the book you are holding is not the book that Anne would have sent out for publication, had she lived another year or two,” Abley admits. “Apart from correcting a few obvious typos, I did not alter any of her words or play with her line breaks.” Most of the pieces weren’t first drafts, he says, but then, they weren’t edited either, and Anne liked to revise her work until it felt perfect.

The resulting collection feels like a bundle of letters with a ribbon slipping out of place. It couldn’t be any more beautiful- perhaps poets need a trusted friend to keep them from overworking or hiding, another poet to coax delicate secrets from the shadows. It’s not that Anne would ever shrink from self-revelation- she rather basked in the nakedness of poetry. It’s just that here the nakedness feels more chanced, less planned. The work is as stunning, exquisite, gorgeous as always, maybe more so. The usual themes of death and change and human longing are all present, and still infused with a ribald, humourous undertone.

The title poem opens:

when earth leaps up
and heaven descends
and the two meet like lovers
then the question is
could these flowers be stars

and is dust nothing
more than the handful
I sprinkled on your face
as you went down into the dirt
(47)

Graves and skulls and bones and the anthropologies of the human condition have long been staples of Anne’s work- what greater themes could poets ponder than love or death? An early memory of my childhood centres around one of Anne’s stunning, eerie passions. I was perhaps far too young to be voraciously reading through each Canadian poet on those musty beanbag chairs at the little library, but precociously I already identified myself as a poet and knew instinctively that to write poetry, I must read it. And I came upon Sitting Under Death’s Rich Shade, where Anne ponders the skeletal remains of a man she called Frans. I couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and knew nothing of either love or death. But when Anne wrote, “ a bit/ of me is broken/because of your memory” I knew with spooky certainty that one day it would be clear. Anne closed her poem with “damn you, I cry out/you would not take me/when I was fifteen and dangerous.” (from On Glassy Wings, 117)

How I wanted to be fifteen and dangerous: to love so freely and lose so tragically. What Anne’s poems have always shown is how time waits for no one, and now it’s poignant and painful, almost a personal loss, to shuffle through Anne’s private papers as her spectre roams, eager to divulge but censored by the gods from what the living cannot know. It seems a terrible irony that the same ‘fifteen and dangerous’ for which I waited so impatiently has come and gone two decades plus ago, as have a sadly lengthy line-up of my own Frans-ian tragedies.

Still, as somber as death may be, there is buoyancy in these poems that transcends the morbid subject matter. Perhaps Anne glimpsed prophetically a comfort that she reveals from before she went beyond: penning her thoughts, which included the admission that “for the living/ there is nothing worse than death”, she writes: “When I think of him I say/’He is lost to me.’/I should say perhaps/’He is found to himself.’”(Untitled, 48)

The poems here are so stirring because Anne is no longer metaphorically Sitting Under Death’s Rich Shade, but actually buried in it. The ghostly feeling is nothing more than the fulfillment of Anne’s poetry. For all her life, she wrote carefully the questions that haunt the human heart, poetic longings for the dead, for those left here, for what we may encounter after. Now that she has slid into forever, she would have to revise this and every other volume with the answers she has found. But the human plight remains that we must wait out our own curiosities and see for ourselves this mystery. No one states this more beautifully than Anne herself in To a Friend Dying:

“this is only the beginning
of change” I shall say
as I bury your pupa
into its mound of dirt

“on the day of wings
something shall certainly emerge
perhaps not flesh
perhaps not what you expect.”
(54)

Visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at her web site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
Her poetry collection The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos is available on her site, or through Indigo or Amazon online. You should order it: it’s a damn good read!
xo Lorette

Two Naughty Hotties Sipping Wine in the Bathtub while Reading Philip Larkin

Imagine a six-foot blonde with power curves – the most buoyant breasts ever made- curled up on a small couch, pulling a thin white lacy sweater against herself. She stares up at you through smart and sleepy baby blues and purrs out: “You know, I just love Philip Larkin.”

She says it casually, but there’s an appetite there, not hunger, really, perhaps desire. I’m mesmerized, I lower my eyes and my cheeks are flushing. I’ve never heard of Larkin. No, not true. Heard of, probably. I can’t think at all right now. Whatever: it’s not too familiar. I’m hearing it now, and when Maevey mews like this, musing, you do what she tells you. You want it too, whatever it is.

“There is not one word out of place. He uses exactly the right words, and you need each one of them wholly,” Maeve is saying. “There are only enough, no more.”

The room is fuzzy, like a pale pink sweater enveloping me. The chaos of strewn clothing, dog- scattered debris, boxes packed and unpacked, and books all fades into a dizzy glow. The candles flicker. Maeve begins to read aloud.

“This was your place of birth, this daytime palace,
This miracle of glass, whose every hall
The light as music fills, and on your face
Shines petal-soft; sunbeams are prodigal…”

The first time I saw her, she was answering the door at my neighbour Crazy Paul’s house. How I was protective of him, asked her to explain herself. And so was she: who was I? Then we giggled, immediately recognizing maternal, sister things. Crazy Paul is another story. Suffice it to say just for some imagery that he fancied suit jackets cluttered with rhinestones and vintage doodads, cowboy boots and things of gold or burgundy tassel-ry.

Another time: with the insistently bright summer sky blazing blue behind her at my husband’s funeral. We all had huge sunglasses on. Tears on every girl’s face under those shiny glasses. Zoë. Maeve. Crazy Paul! So many widows.

“And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars…”

There are times when Maevey seems unsettlingly like Anna Nicole Smith. The generous buxomry, the warm yet bossy grip, the reckless parts of her, the breathy muchness. But she evades flakiness and that deadly brand of ditziness, in favour of dizzying study and work and play. She’s got the sugar of Marilyn Monroe, but is not nearly so tragic and could never have been her. Still, her lovers would say she exudes something of that beauty, there’s a way about her, and her smile is deep and generous. She is demanding, but loyal, blonde but dark, paler than white yet still a woman of blues.

For her birthday, I bought her a gorgeous tiara. (I must borrow it for my book launch!) My heavenly and infuriating Maevey. Infuriating because once I took her for the finest Indian cuisine in Toronto and she demanded to know why there were bones in the chicken. Heavenly because we share a few secrets that I’m sure someone somewhere would pay a lot of money for if we were even remotely famous! Heavenly because her favourite poem by me is “with all due respect Mr. Thompson”. This year, a Valentine, in the mail, how old fashioned and precious, because a friend is a forever Valentine.

“Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace…”

Once upon a time I called Maeve on a Friday night and asked what she was doing. She said, “I’m soaking in a steamy tub sending dirty text messages.” Maeve always asks how I’m doing. On that particular night, I was as fabulous as she was. I had just devoured a generous dish of grilled octopus in lemon and wine, and was sipping peach tea and reading. Reading in the bathtub! Oh, with wine, there is always wine. Oh, the oblivion you can fall into, this Larkin-tinged hypnotism. The oblivion of the beautiful, stunning, astonishing momentary lapses of reason. The flit of meaningful meaninglessnesses that alight and fade without our intervention. The poet, too, writes only of the extraordinary within ordinary things.

I pour the wine, I’m guzzling, Maevey’s sipping. Always the lady, which seems hilarious to those who know her. The lulling rhythms of Larkin’s enjambment and rhyme roll like marbles through the caress of her voice. Fittingly, some jazz flits lightheartedly in the background- Larkin wrote about jazz, as well as his poetry about death. Though he occasionally sounds Yeats-y, he swears liberally and has a caustic and bitter side. Maeve brings him alive, and I’m stunned at how many she has memorized, at this committed passion she carries. Writer Maevey. How she can study risk management and know insurance law inside out, memorize sonnets, and wear Hello Kitty pajamas when curling up with her enormous canine child. Maeve and I wouldn’t agree on any of the same TV shows or clothes or heroes or menus or cocktails or boys, not in a million years, and we don’t give a damn.

“The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough
To have the blind persistence
To upset an existence…”

When I stumble into the snowy night outside, the cold is bracing, alive. I weave merrily along until a taxi comes by. Maevey and I like our late night taxis, that’s for sure. We might not see one another without them! Like I’m 18 again, I’ve got half a bottle of cheap rose sloshing around in my giant it-bag, and I’m clutching The Collected Works of Philip Larkin in my hand. When I steal inside, it’s after two in the morning, but I pour a huge glass of vino and pretend I could still smoke cigarettes, and I read without ceasing.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
You can order her book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, at her site, or through Indigo or Amazon online. Take a chance: you’ll love it! It’s one of Maevey’s favourite books!