Fantastic Essay

Currently Reading Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady By Florence King see related

I'm defending my thesis on Tuesday afternoon - so it all culminates in one presentation and a Q & A session with my committee members and whoever else decides to show up.  This will be fun in several ways.  Though my thesis is a critical look at the poetry of Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, and Paul Monette (or, rather, their works that deal with the AIDS crisis), I feel that this defense will be, perhaps, more activistic than scholarly in tenor and focus.  So much of what I'm working with deals with anger, remembrance, redemption, seeking a space to be heard in a form that is, by nature, intense. 

I begin and end the 95-page tome with personal essays that talk about my relationship to the works I am studying.  And I realize that yes, this scholarly work is a very personal work: equal parts invective, exhortation, love letter, prayer, etc.  It's been a process that demands self-actualization, especially being one who has done many, many things to forget deliberately and who then reads a Thom Gunn poem that begins "I shall not soon forget."  It's been a reminder that poetry bears witness, like Carolyn Forche says.  It's been a call to recognize human cruelty, like Miloscz did, while also celebrating an aesthetic of transgressive erotics on the path that Whitman paved for Monette, Doty, Liu, Dlugos, Gunn, etc.  And perhaps even myself. 

That idea of memory / lack of memory becomes an intensified reality as walk around my parents' house here in Jackson.  Very little has changed here since I moved to Oxford three years ago, but (in some ways) I have changed - and change need not be qualified.  So I can read myself like a text here - bringing myself to read myself.  So strange.  So interesting.  And that's what lyric poetry makes us do a lot of the time.

Working on this thesis made me do a lot of leg work in finding works to read, mainly because there really isn't anyone on campus that has studied much of what I am studying.  As a way of possibly making that community larger, I'll let you know what I read for my thesis along the way:

My Alexandria - Mark Doty; Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty; Powerless - Tim Dlugos; The Apprentice of Fever - Richard Tayson; HIV, Mon Amour - Tory Dent; What the Living Do - Marie Howe; Unending Voices - Rachel Hadas; Love Alone - Paul Monette; The Man With Night Sweats - Thom Gunn; Atlantis - Mark Doty; AIDS and Its Metaphors - Susan Sontag; Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS - Ed. Michael Klein; and more. 

I look forward to continuing to think about AIDS poetry in future years as a graduate student.  I think it's fantastic to see art humanizing those often demonized by sociopolitical discourse and institutions.  I think it's inspiring to see poetry offering alternative ways of seeing and thinking. 

Currently Reading Mississippi Sissy By Kevin Sessums see related

The thesis is drafted; that's a good thing.  It's going to be a bitch to format, though.  Seriously - ten plus pages of instructions for margins, abstracts, discussions of paper, etc.!  It feels good to have this (pretty much, at least) completed. 

So I've been accepted into the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at Ole Miss.  And that's super-exciting.  Three years of writing poems, teaching classes, and reading books.  Not a bad deal at all.  And no "getting to know you" period necessary. 

And springtime in Oxford is an astonishingly beautiful time.  Oxford Conference for the Book is next weekend.  Conference in Pittsburgh the next.  Double Decker soon enough.  New York trip to see my Suz, too.  The next two months should be exquisite.

Oh yeah, and Richard Schwartz, the illustrious Jackson attorney, now refers to himself as "The Heavyweight" in his commercials.

THE MIRROR IN THE ENTRANCE
 - C.P. Cavafy
 
In the entrance of that sumptuous home
there was an enormous mirror, very old;
acquired at least eighty years ago.
 
A strikingly beautiful boy, a tailor’s shop-assistant,
(on Sunday afternoons, an amateur athlete),
was standing with a package. He handed it
to one of the household, who then went back inside
to fetch a receipt. The tailor’s shop-assistant
remained alone, and waited.
He drew near the mirror, and stood gazing at himself,
and straightening his tie. Five minutes later
they brought him the receipt. He took it and left.
 
But the ancient mirror, which had seen and seen again,
throughout its lifetime of so many years,
thousands of objects and faces—
but the ancient mirror now became elated,
inflated with pride, because it had received upon itself
perfect beauty, for a few minutes.

Demolition - Mark Doty

The intact facade's now almost black in the rain; all day they've torn at the back of the building, "the oldest concrete structure in New England," the newspaper said. By afternoon, when the backhoe claw appears above three stories of columns and cornices, the crowd beneath their massed umbrellas cheer. Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves, atomized plaster billowing: dust of 1907's rooming house, this year's bake shop and florist's, the ghosts of their signs faint above the windows lined, last week, with loaves and blooms. We love disasters that have nothing to do with us: the metal scoop seems shy, tentative, a Japanese monster tilting its yellow head and considering what to topple next. It's a weekday, and those of us with the leisure to watch are out of work, unemployable or academics, joined by a thirst for watching something fall. All summer, at loose ends, I've read biographies, Wilde and Robert Lowell, and fallen asleep over a fallen hero lurching down a Paris boulevard, talking his way to dinner or a drink, unable to forget the vain and stupid boy he allowed to ruin him. And I dreamed I was Lowell, in a manic flight of failing and ruthless energy, and understood how wrong I was with a passionate exactitude which had to be like his. A month ago, at Saint-Gauden's house, we ran from a startling downpour into coincidence: under a loggia built for performances on the lawn hulked Shaw's monument, splendid in its plaster maquette, the ramrod-straight colonel high above his black troops. We crouched on wet gravel and waited out the squall; the hieratic woman -- a wingless angel? -- floating horizontally above the soldiers, her robe billowing like plaster dust, seemed so far above us, another century's allegorical decor, an afterthought who'd never descend to the purely physical soldiers, the nearly breathing bronze ranks crushed into a terrible compression of perspective, as if the world hurried them into the ditch. "The unreadable," Wilde said, "is what occurs." And when the brutish metal rears above the wall of unglazed windows -- where, in a week, the kids will skateboard in their lovely loops and spray their indecipherable ideograms across the parking lot -- the single standing wall seems Roman, momentarily, an aqueduct, all that's left of something difficult to understand now, something Oscar and Bosie might have posed before, for a photograph. Aqueducts and angels, here on Main, seem merely souvenirs; the gaps where the windows opened once into transients' rooms are pure sky. It's strange how much more beautiful the sky is to us when it's framed by these columned openings someone meant us to take for stone. The enormous, articulate shovel nudges the highest row of moldings and the whole thing wavers as though we'd dreamed it, our black classic, and it topples all at once.