Kiss Off Read online
Copyright © 2003 by Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez
All rights reserved.
Anna Akhmatova, “We Don't Know How to Say Goodbye,” translated by Stanley Kunitz, from Poems of Akhmatova. Copyright 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Reprinted by permission of Darhansoff and Verrill Literary Agency on behalf of Stanley Kunitz.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: January 2003
ISBN: 978-0-446-55534-0
Book design and text composition by Ellen Gleeson
Cover design by Janet Perr
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
HURTING: WHEN THINGS FALL APART
LOLA HASKINS: Love
DOROTHY PARKER: Fulfillment
ANNA AKHMATOVA: We Don't Know How to Say Goodbye
DEBORAH GARRISON: Worked Late on a Tuesday Night
EMILY DICKINSON: Crumbling Is Not an Instant's Act
ELIZABETH ASH VÉLEZ: Thursday, 11:00 A.M.
JANE KENYON: The Pear
MARGE PIERCY: Barbie Doll
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: The Second Coming
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: Hamlet II.ii. 270–279
DEBORAH GARRISON: Fight Song
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT: Feeling Fucked Up
STEPHEN CRANE: The Heart
HIDING: WHEN YOU SHUT DOWN
JANE HIRSHFIELD: Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk—
PHILIP LARKIN: Wants
WANG WEI: Returning to My Cottage
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE: Hotel
JANE KENYON: Summer: 6:00 A.M.
LARRY VÉLEZ: Plainsong
RICHARD EBERHART: In a Hard Intellectual Light
JANE HIRSHFIELD: A Room
DEREK WALCOTT: The Fist
BILLY COLLINS: Embrace
LOUISE GLÜCK: Mutable Earth
REELING: WHEN YOU GO WILD
VIRGIL: The Wave
ROBERT GRAVES: Down, Wanton, Down!
ANDREW MARVELL: To His Coy Mistress
CAROLYN CREEDON: The Nectarine Poem
CAROLYN CREEDON: Pub Poem
FRANK O'HARA: Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Equinox
ROBERT HERRICK: Delight in Disorder
MARK DOTY: At the Gym
DEALING: WHEN YOU FACE FACTS
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA: The End and the Beginning
CLAUDE MCKAY: The Tropics in New York
PABLO NERUDA: Night on the Island
SHAWN M. DURRETT: Lures
JOYCE CAROL OATES: Waiting on Elvis, 1956
ROBERT HAYDEN: Those Winter Sundays
ANNA SWIR: She Does Not Remember
JOHNNY COLEY: The Dogs
KIM KONOPKA: The Layers Between Me
LOUISE GLÜCK: Purple Bathing Suit
JOHN MILTON: Excerpt from Paradise Lost
HEALING: WHEN YOU FIND YOURSELF
MARIE PONSOT: Better
LINDA PASTAN: Petit Dejeuner
JANE HIRSHFIELD: Not-Yet
GALWAY KINNELL: The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students
LANGSTON HUGHES: Homecoming
LYN LIFSHIN: Navy Barbie
LUCILLE CLIFTON: why some people be mad at me sometimes
WALLACE STEVENS: The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: Danse Russe
JANE KENYON: The Suitor
DAVID GEWANTER: Chai 1924–2000
BELIEVING: WHEN YOU STAY STRONG
SADIE LISK HIGHSMITH: Sadie's Poem
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: To a Poor Old Woman
ELIZABETH BISHOP: Filling Station
JAMES WRIGHT: A Blessing
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS: Pied Beauty
SHARON OLDS: The Pope's Penis
GREGORY DJANIKIAN: Immigrant Picnic
LYNNE MCMAHON: We Take Our Children to Ireland
HANS OSTROM: Emily Dickinson and Elivis Presely in Heaven
STERLING A. BROWN: Sister Lou
GRACE PALEY: Here
Afterword
Biographies of Contributors
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
ACCLAIM FOR
The Hell with Love
“Witty and wise.”
—People
“Sassy. Certain to improve your spirits and repair your battered ego.”
—Hartford Courant
“The greatest anthology of poetry I have ever read.…It reminds me why I fell in love with poetry in the first place.”
—Andrew Carroll, director,
The American Poetry & Literacy Project
“I love this book…wise to the ways of the heart.…Whether you've been heartbroken for two hours or two months, splash cold water on your face and go…buy this book.”
—Matthew Klam,
author of Sam the Cat
“Expertly selected…an invaluable companion to the lovelorn of all ages.”
—Lucinda Rosenfeld,
author of What She Saw
“An invigorating anthology.”
—Denver Rocky Mountain News
Also by Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez
The Hell with Love
This is dedicated to the ones we love:
our friends, our families, our students,
and our teachers.
Introduction
Here's what we know for sure: Life will break your heart in a million different ways. And we don't just mean the heartbreak of losing the love of your life (although that definitely hurts). We mean nothing is as easy as you thought it would be. You were supposed to be a Supreme Court justice by now, happily married to a pediatric brain surgeon, proud mother of three kick–ass kids (all budding Rhodes scholars of course). Oh, and a really good cook, who grows her own vegetables.
But here you are, well past a certain age, and you still can't seem to meet a decent guy, you hate your idiot boss, and you wake up every morning asking yourself, “What's the f*?@!*ing point?”
How do you fix this kind of heartbreak, the kind that comes from losing faith in yourself and the world? And how do you figure out how to be the person you always dreamed you would be—tough but kind, honest but nobody's fool, smart but loving?
Some of us try to do that by finding a “role model” (like Catholic-girl Mary trying to be feminist theorist Elizabeth—who's trying to be grande dame Georgia O'Keefe). Others faithfully follow Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura, or Dr. Sarah Jessica Parker, thinking they'll find the secret to their authentic, morally centered, totally cutting-edge Jimmy Choo–shod selves. But we think that for direction and inspiration, nothing beats the power of poetry. So we put together a collection of poems to help you discover who you really are and guide you toward a life of joy and fulfillment.
Of course we know this is not as easy as it sounds—it's not “Take two Emily Dickinsons and call us in the morning.” It's more like: Take stock of your life, kiss off everything that's holding you back from happiness, and start the long, hard process of deciding what you need and what you truly want.
Most of us have been doing this kind of soul-searching for years, trying to find some philosophical framework, religious structure, or daily routine that will help us shape our lives. And many of us have turned to our favorite literature for some articulation of (or escape from) the vague dissatisfaction we feel. And while we (Mary and Elizabeth) have often come across a poem that hits just the right spot at just the ri
ght moment, we haven't found a collection that matches the poem with the moment the way we'd like. That's what we've always wanted, a guide-book on how to live using poetry, with sections such as “How to Talk to Your Mother” or “Being Alone and Liking It.” Wouldn't it be great, we've thought, if we had a sort of doctor's manual where you could just look up your ailment—broken heart, messed-up family, elusive vocation—and receive perfect poems to treat your pain?
That's the kind of book we attempted in The Hell with Love, a collection of literary therapy for the brokenhearted. We matched angry, despairing, hilarious poems with the various stages of heartbreak, like Rage, Sadness, or Real Hope. To our delight, the book found an audience—and not just with readers coming out of breakups or divorces. We heard from people dealing with death, illness, family struggles, and all kinds of loss. The poems offered a comfort they hadn't found elsewhere.
What really heartened us was when people told us they thought they hated poetry until they'd read our book. Putting the poems in the context of their feelings helped them “get” the meaning. Poetry no longer seemed like fancy gobbledygook to them—it was practical. Poetry was funny and naughty, stern and wise, like the best of best friends. That was one of our original goals—to get people reading poetry the way they read People magazine. What if people knew-the 50 Most Beautiful Poems by heart, the way they know every last detail about the 50 Most Beautiful People?
So we decided to bring out a new book of literary therapy, full of more poetry that we love. Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free isn't just for the newly jilted, it's for anyone suffering from loss, disappointment, or that general Hamlet-ish feeling every morning that something is rotten in Denmark. In other words, it's for everyone trying to find their way back to happiness. Kiss Off moves from poems that express loneliness and frustration, to poems that show how we hide or run from unhappiness, to poems about hard-won self-awareness, and finally to poems of acceptance and joy. And to help people relate the poems to their own lives, we provide commentary for each section.
Despite our titles, The Hell with Love and Kiss Off, we're not angry women writers. We love love! We love the world! It's just coincidence (really) that the title of our second book comes from one of our favorite songs by …well, by the Violent Femmes. It's called “Kiss Off,” and it sums up just about all the reasons we think people feel so bereft—and why they need poetry (or good lyrics) to help them through:
I take one one one ‘cause you left me and
two two two for my family and
3 3 3 for my heartache and
4 4 4 for my headaches and
5 5 5 for my lonely and
6 6 6 for my sorrow and
7 7 for no tomorrow and
8 8 I forget what 8 was for and
9 9 9 for a lost god and
10 10 10 10 for everything
everything everything everything
We believe that really great poetry can help set you free from “everything everything everything.” It helps articulate what you're feeling, lets you recognize yourself in someone else's words, creates form out of your chaos, and offers you hope. And poetry is compact and portable, but rich with meaning—it's like having a cell phone with a direct line to the Dalai Lama.
Poet Laureate Billy Collins says, “In times of crisis it's interesting that people don't turn to the novel or say, ‘We should all go out to a movie,’ or ‘Ballet would help us.’ It's always poetry. What we want to hear is a human voice speaking directly in our ear.”* And poet Deborah Garrison notes, “In poetry there's the pure essence of life distilled in a few words, and its very distilled form gives people something to hang on to.”*
We hope that you will find that pure, distilled essence in these poems, so that you'll learn to live with joy again. William Carlos Williams puts it best when he says:
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hurting
WHEN THINGS
FALL APART
One day, it just happens. You completely snap. Your last single friend announces her engagement to the schmo she met two months ago, or your married boss hits on you just when you think you've managed to impress him with your work smarts, or you're forced off the sidewalk by a J.Crew couple and their double-barreled baby stroller. It's all too much. It might not be dramatic—a sudden freak-out or breakdown. It could simply be the cumulative effect of watching the world surge past and around you—the showers, the weddings, the new houses, the better jobs, the damn baby photos. Everyone else seems to know what she wants—and how to get it—yet you consistently feel overlooked, underloved, and, let's face it, screwed, in every way except literally.
You know you shouldn't feel this way. You don't want to become some whiney malcontent. But you can't shake this unresolved restlessness, this nameless dissatisfaction with your life. You've tried to put it in perspective—there's real tragedy in the world, real crisis and pain—you know, you know, you know. You know Fran the receptionist still aches for her husband, dead ten years, and you watched your friend Meg fight a brutal, losing battle with cancer. You've seen what illness and death and estrangement can do. You carry all sorts of loss within you.
That's why the baby stroller people or the smarmy boss or the schmo-marrying friend put you right over the edge—you're tired of losing people and losing hope. You feel a great longing for companionship and connectedness, for knowing that what you do means something, for gratification and peace of mind, but it keeps eluding you despite your best efforts. And every reminder of this longing cuts into your spirit again and again until you just can't take it. When will you stop feeling so bereft, mourning what you've lost (friends, true loves, your mother's approval) and what you've never had (the little household of your dreams, a soul-fulfilling vocation, your mother's approval)?
One way to start feeling better is to give yourself permission to kick and wail and grieve. Let the poets in Hurting help you express all of it—the rage, the despair, the what-am-I-doing-with-my-life agony. Think of this section as one big scream of frustration. All we know is that we just feel pain, the kind that comes from being scraped in the same place over and over again. Like the speaker in Lola Haskins's “Love,” we're raw with feeling, oversensitized to everything that's ever hurt us. We don't know quite what's hit us, we just feel our skin's been ripped off.
But deep down, we really do know what's hit us—crushing disappointment after disappointment. Some, big (your parents were supposed to stay together forever), some small (that cellulite was supposed to disappear after you went off the Pill), and some that we try to say are small when we know they're really big (we were supposed to have snagged The One, flex-timed The Job, and delivered The Kids before The Fertility Plunge). Tack on general injustice, poverty, and terror, and you feel too bruised to bear it.
What gets us is the “why” of it all. Why us? Did we ask for any of this? Weren't we entitled to something else? The speaker in Dorothy Parker's ironically named “Fulfillment” seems incredulous that this kind of pain is her reward for becoming a reasonably well-raised adult. “For this my mother wrapped me warm …And gave me roughage in my diet”? she asks. All so I could “grow to womanhood” and “break my heart to clattering bits”?
Talk about roughage in the diet—when you feel this forsaken, every disappointment seems too tough to digest. And we make matters worse by chewing each one to death! Somehow, perversely, we feed our own despair. We keep careful track of every little thing that has hurt us, we nurse our grudges, we stay in the very situations that bring us down.
Look at the lovers
in Anna Akhmatova's “We Don't Know How to Say Goodbye.” The two of them are a picture of gloom—he's moody, she's his shadow, and they're sitting on a frozen branch in a graveyard outside a church where masses for the dead are being said. Not exactly a Harlequin romance! So why are they still together? If she wants to stop feeling “so different from the rest”—if, like a lot of women we know, she wants a sunny bungalow of family happiness—then why is she willing to settle for his stick picture of a mansion in the snow? Why can't she find a way to say goodbye?
Maybe it's because she can't conceive of any identity for herself outside of him. Maybe it's because some relationships are just too difficult to sever—you can't just cut your father or your boss out of your life, no matter how “moody” (try “abusive”) they are, can you? Or your oldest friend? Sometimes staying stuck in misery seems easier than razing your old life and building a new one.
Perhaps that's why the woman in Deborah Garrison's “Worked Late on a Tuesday Night” is alone and forlorn in the deserted streets, trying with no success to hail a cab home. This is not the first time she's been here, cold but “too stubborn to reach/into [her] pocket for a glove.” Seems she's too stubborn to reach, period. For protection from the cold or for a better life than what she's got. She knows she's “not half/of what [she] meant to be,” so why doesn't she change her life instead of just “cursing/the freezing rain”?
Why? Because of a little thing called pride. Who wants to admit, “My life is a disaster, and every little part of me feels broken!”? We made the choices that led us here. We never meant to be alone and heartsick, but we did choose this job, this city, these relationships. We thought we were building a life for ourselves; now we're supposed to realize that instead we were slowly crumbling inside, helping along the decay of our ovaries and the dilapidation of our souls, à la Emily Dickinson's “Crumbling Is Not an Instant's Act”? That's outrageous and unfair and infuriating. How could we have known it would all work out this way? What should we have done differently?
And even if you do swallow your pride, even if you do admit you feel used up and useless, like the gum-decayed mother in Elizabeth Ash Vélez's “Thursday, 11:00 A.M.,” or smushy and rotten like a pear spoiled “from the inside out” in Jane Kenyon's “The Pear”—then what? You're supposed to have the strength and wherewithal to just chuck everything and start over?: “Okay, this life sucks, so hmmm, I know what I'll do—I'll just quit my job and move somewhere perfect and do something much better, never mind that I haven't a clue where to go, what to do, or how to pay for any of it! Yippee, it's a plan!”