Back to copyediting today, and then a weekend spent cleaning barns and hauling hay and stacking firewood, and then we're on the downward slide to Thanksgiving. I will be casserole-roasting chickens because I couldn't find a decent local turkey. But that's okay. My parents, who are driving up for the holiday, don't even like meat that much, so the missing turkey matters only to my younger son, who once asked why a turkey couldn't have four drumbones instead of two. In contrast, my older son was the sort of bright-eyed three-year-old who would repetitively inquire, "Does the turkey like to be eaten?," generally when both he and his conversational victim had their mouths full of food.

Perhaps you've noticed from the sidebar that I am actually reading a recently released novel: A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which so far I am liking very much. The jacket copy suggests quite a Harlequin flavor--e.g., "the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves"; "their personal struggles, their hidden desires"; "at once sweeping and intimate"--but in fact it so far seems to be an exemplary instance of what Byatt does best: mix her considerable historical and literary knowledge into a well-plotted narrative that reveals, hides, and untangles the complicated relationships among family members and friends. Sometimes I think Byatt's instructive academics can become heavy-handed, but thus far in this novel (and I'm only up to page 89) I'm happy to have her explanations, which seem to suit the style of the times (pre-World War I) and the characters (most of them Fabians, freethinkers, anarchists, storytellers . . . and, of course, their ominous children).

Here's an update for all of you 2009 Frost Place Conference participants: Charlotte Gordon is just as smart, charming, and full of vim as you remember (but what is "vim"?). Also, she has a sixth-grade boy in her house, which made my stay very homey. With 2 minutes to spare before schooltime, I found his coat, his book, and his pencil box, all of which were invisibly and conveniently located next to his feet. I was glad that my special training in this field functioned as a handy hostess gift.

I did have to drive for a hundred years in order to get home last night, but everything worked out well enough, even though I was forced into playing horrible radio music to keep myself awake. There is nothing like singing along with Foreigner's "Hot-Blooded" on the black back roads of Skowhegan, Maine. It is equivalent to swallowing a pint of day-old coffee grounds and then chewing up the paper filter, but it keeps you from plowing into trees and running over people's cats.

Okay. Got through Charlotte's very quiet class by talking a lot and waving my arms around. Am hoping this went over well. 

In other news, the sun is shining and I have nothing to do till 3:30 except to find an outlet so this computer doesn't sink into a coma.

I have not read one word of Adrienne Rich since yesterday. As a quick substitute, I will quote from "The Endicott Observer," which someone has abandoned on the table next to my chair: 

When I first started writing this column I was worried I wouldn't be able to come up with a topic every couple weeks. I mean I get annoyed a lot I thought but not enough to fill up a whole year's worth of columns.

More anon.

***

And anon has arrived. 

Having discovered an outlet and a bathroom, I feel that I have now adequately prepared myself for Adrienne Rich. The first poem I turn to is "The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last As a Sexual Message," dated 1972 and published in Diving into the Wreck.

Instantly, my reaction is: time to administer a poll. Therefore, go read this poem and then tell me if it resonates as Truth in a "maybe this didn't really happen but my heart believes it anyhow" kind of way. If you want to send me an email or a Facebook message instead of leaving an answer on the comment form, please do. I want all the answers I can get because don't you think it will be interesting to ponder the statistics? 

**

Noon, and the prerecorded bells of Endicott College are ringing out a muted and despairing version of "Stars and Stripes Forever." Meanwhile, I copy Adrienne Rich poems amid a gaggle of skinny blondes who are checking their cell phones. For some reason, the scene is beginning to feel sinister. Possibly I am gaining more sympathy for the word political as applied to poetry.  In any case, the poem I'm engaged on seems to have some good lines:

from Waking in the Dark

The thing that arrests me is

         how we are composed of molecules

        (he showed me the figure in the paving stones)

        arranged without our knowledge and consent

                    like the wirephoto composed

                    of millions of dots

         in which the man from Bangladesh

         walks starving

                                            on the front page

                                            knowing nothing about it

          which is his presence for the world

**

Have just been accosted by the librarian as if I were an honored guest. This is very flattering, and I hope I don't have any avocado sandwich fragments stuck in my teeth. He happened to accost me just as I was perusing the pamphlet I'd pulled out from between the cushions of my chair: "Getting What You Want from Relationships." By the way, "Your relationships can get better when you practice your relationship skills." 

I'm heading south this afternoon, first to Charlotte Gordon's house, then tagging along this evening to a book group, then tomorrow morning to one of her classes at Endicott College, and finally a reading at the Endicott library in the afternoon. Between the 9 a.m. class and the 4 p.m. reading, I have time to kill. Salem wax museum? Scenic Gloucester fishing boats? Falling asleep in my car? I have no idea what will ensue, but I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, here's a taste of Adrienne Rich, plucked from the anthology at random.

from Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

she shaves her legs until they gleam

like petrified mammoth-tusk

Oh dear. I see this immersion in Adrienne Rich's poetry will be a difficult undertaking.

I am trying to invent this post while simultaneously making fried rice, so bear with my flightiness. But I want to at least mention the book I quoted from yesterday, the one I never look into but opened at random. It's a Norton critical edition of Adrienne Rich's poetry, and I should say at the outset that Rich is a poet I have never cared a speck about. This is not to imply that I actively dislike her work, just that I've never craved it, or puzzled over it, or felt the need to reread even a single poem. My detachment from Rich is odd, I think, because she is often bracketed with the generation of women poets that includes Sexton and Plath: poets who have mattered to me greatly at certain points in my life. These women are (or would have been) roughly my mother's age, and I have watched them with the sort of intensity that a daughter gives to eavesdropping on her mother, learning, in bits and pieces, fits and starts, what she thinks might be the Real Story.

Plath and Sexton have given me all kinds of angles onto the Real Story. Rich has never given me a one. But I don't necessarily blame that on either of us so much as I do on the word political, which critics are always using as a label for Rich's work and which, as soon as I hear it ascribed to a poet, makes me want to walk straight out the door. The term leads me suspect I'll be reading a Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan polemic instead of poetry; and frankly, I don't go to poems for feminist reassurance or camaraderie or outrage, even though I may well vote on those platforms. This is not to say that politics should be separated from poetry. What is Hayden Carruth's poem about Eichmann if not political? Yet he comes to the politics backwards, as it were, through the window of himself.

And maybe Rich is doing that as well, so I think I owe her the chance to show me what she does. In other words, expect some blat about Adrienne Rich this week. I'll bring her along to my Massachusetts gig, and we'll see what happens.

Feeling melancholy, and lonely, and useless, as one does, often enough, I opened at random a book I never look into and found this.

from This Woman's Movement (1975)

Nancy Milford

Believe me when I tell you that there have been so few women who wrote and who continued to write and did not fall silent. . . .

         Still, lists don't mean much. It is only that there have been so few women who wrote well. And why is it that among them there are certain limits of range--or at least recognizable types whose critical reputations seem to me to exceed either their abilities or their voices? . . .

          Where is that woman in the prime of her life, telling us what she sees and feels and dreams of? She who has has found her own voice and permits us to witness not only the finding as an act in itself--within the poems--but gives up to us what she has found?

With regret, I have rewritten the "Autobiography" on the sidebar of this blog so that it makes me sound more like a careerist and less like a philosopher. Yesterday, as I was setting up the Milly Jourdain archive, I realized I needed to make the author of that commentary appear to be at least somewhat professionally qualified; and changing the profile on one blog changes it on all of them. Nonetheless, I feel bound to reiterate to you that neither my job title nor my publication record has much to do with the essential burden of art--and that itself is a stuck-up way of saying that what I really am is a middle-aged woman sitting at an elderly Formica kitchen table, drinking strong coffee with milk and waiting for the woodstove to light. Upstairs her husband is coughing. Down here the dog is scratching and the parakeet is biting the bars of his cage. This woman, bundled up in her white bathrobe, is not reading because the thought of opening a Henry James novel at 7:30 on a Saturday morning makes her want to go back to bed. She is not feeding her livestock because her boots are too cold to put on. She is not doing anything yet except to pay attention to herself not doing anything because writers are solipsists and her material is meager. More it's as if the words need to come out, and once they're on the page they turn into something, assume the shape of their own swimming life. Poetry as a pond full of tadpoles: today's arty metaphor. And with that she stops writing.