#362

p.294: https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA294&dq=I+cast+as+feminine+Miss+Shirley+Jones&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwik5JDDmoLKAhWF4iYKHSzMBScQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=I%20cast%20as%20feminine%20Miss%20Shirley%20Jones&f=false

The opening is kind of a nice couplet: “And now I meet you in the thinky place, / you & I, your good brain & hot heart.” The person this poem is addressed to isn’t named in the poem, but the dedication is to Adrienne Rich, so clearly she’s the object. Rich was supportive and helpful all through B.’s career. Her take on 77 Dream Songs is that “One is conscious, as in few other poets, of a steely thread of strength running through the dislocation and the ruin.” I’ve tried to keep something like this in mind all along, though by the end of the cycle here, the steeliness looks to be getting rusty. B.’s tribute and expression of gratitude to Rich is less fawning than some of his other addresses to women and famous poets, though his fantasy about being married to her and making a pass might make anyone uncomfortable. It’s fairly light in comparison to some of the others, though.

This is the fourth part of Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Quarto”:

            I’ll tell you about the mermaid

Sheds swimmable tail Gets legs for dancing

Sings like the sea with a choked throat

Knives straight up her spine

Lancing every step

There is a price

There is a price

For every gift

And all advice

This seems to apply to B.’s whole thesis in The Dream Songs. Rich is writing about the sacrifices women make in learning to dance and sing, which really means simply to live on terms not set by someone else, but the divisions between sexes aren’t that absolute. Guys like me do unconsciously, blithely wallow in our privilege, but some of us don’t value power and think that aesthetics matter more than wealth, which by default turns us into analogous pariahs in the eyes of the dominant patriarchal paradigm. Contemptible little poets. “Fucking liberal prick” some troll called me in an online exchange that burst into flame in the comments section of some article somewhere, before I learned to avoid such activity. The dismissive hatred dripping off of that line still stops me in my tracks, and my first response is to return the contempt until other, more sophisticated reactions elbow their way into my heart.

But I digress. Rich felt a steel skeleton running through B.’s project, and she maintained empathy for his struggle against disintegration. Whether he really struggled, or on the contrary courted the disintegration, is problematic. But the discussion is bigger than just him. I maintain that Rich’s empathy for the sinking, the struggling, the damned, even the self-damned, is the real source of power in the world.