From THE BOB PERELMAN QUARTETS II. OR WAS IT AQUIFER? Lagoon. Aquaphor. I made the fatal mistake of bringing two "civilians" to the reading, an anesthesiologist and a product designer, and now I am trying not to laugh, at Avik, the designer, sleeping with his head jerked back his mouth hanging open, and at Nick, the doctor getting more and more annoyed at the 20-year-old bespectacled poetry student rhythmically nodding (and not asleep) in front of him, and above all at the profound seriousness of this event, how we are all swept up with E=V=E=R=Y=S=I=N=G=L=E=W=O=R=D as an object of explosive meditation except instead of explosive its sort of a depressing deflating that makes my heart swell with pity, no never mind, that's just the beer I've been drinking since the morning, I am pretty sure I am going to get diabetes after the last 24 hours in which we've been drinking fancy coffees and eating rosemary doughnuts and doing all that stuff you're supposed to be doing in New York, taking only occasional breaks to see some pictures at the MOMA, which for me was far more poetic than sitting here with these vintage store blazers and facial hair and girls who can't decide if they’re hippy pixies or French cinema femme fatales, and I know that I look like a dentist on holiday in comparison but I can't help it, I grew up in Silicon Valley, played an instrument, did a sport, volunteered at the local retirement home, and I never did anything on the weekends because my mother was sure that if I hung out at the mall or wore shorts in public I would be raped or, worse, kidnapped by North Korean spies. No, I exaggerate, she only worried about North Korean spies when I was in college and did study-abroad in Europe. You know, the one time my father wrote to me years later when I was pregnant and again in Europe was when he saw the movie Taken and then, he said, he knew, he knew exactly how Liam Neeson felt. But now I’m ahead of myself. So my mother wasn't wrong that Kim Jong-Un was in Switzerland, but I was at Oxford, that’s where I had that cat lady as a poetry tutor, I can’t remember her name but she was championed by another poet whom I don't recall either, one of those guys the British get all excited about and the Americans feature in Ploughshares. Anyway, homegirl told me I should write about being Korean if I wanted to “market” myself as a poet, so I wrote a poem about T. S. Eliot riding the London Underground as my version of saying FUCK YOU. You can see I’m not really good at showing people what's what. Is this totally narcissistic to be thinking about my own poetic formation while being at this reading or is that what this nodding kid is doing too, composing his On-the-Road-in-“Post-Free”-Verse (“Aren’t we all post-free?”) with a section like 4. CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES ARETES on yo' ASS! but I don't think he would be cool enough to end with ASS, alas, pigeons on the grass, I think that is my beer talking again, and then the next section would be about DNA sequencing because there's, like, all these converging registers in the bureaucratically determined code of language you know what I mean? And I'm not really sure his nods are aligning with the rhythm of anything being read aloud here, and Nick is now staring into his manly cocktail drink, one of those cocktails that's just some hard liquor on top of another hard liquor, and I don’t get that because cocktails are supposed to hide what you’re drinking, right? So I had to order it for him by repeating each of the syllables I thought he said but apparently came back with the wrong thing, which he still likes. Vivisection of my rotundular enigma. I am not even sure these are words that were in the poem, I am forgetting all of them as soon as they are spoken, they are all so soft and round and abstract and don't cohere and I now think vivisection is probably too vivacious to have been there and the real problem is that I would probably like the poet if I knew her, she looks smart and earnest and not at all like these affected pixie bitches. I am even sure I just read something by her in an anthology and must have liked it because I don't remember hating it and felt a flicker of interest when I saw homegirl’s name on the program, so now I am imagining how all these words she keeps lobbing at us might be laid out in an interesting way that would make it make sense. Or maybe there's some procedural framework like she cut up Alberti's De Pictura into a bunch of triangles and threw them on the floor like an Arp collage. Yes, maybe that's the problem with me, I want it all to make sense somehow, but someone is trying to pull out their rolling suitcase from next to my leg, I think it's Jennifer Scappettone but I don't really know her, and since I am looking around I see Bob Perelman's bald head near the front of the room. Any normal person who knows Bob Perelman would just go up and say hello after the reading, but I am filled with dread, any unexpected social encounter fills me with dread, but I also know if I sneak out without saying anything I will regret it because what kind of freak who knows Bob Perelman and studies poetry and knows he is a nice man would not just go say hi to Bob Perelman? So I look over at Avik for reassurance, and he is practically snoring, and it's funny how he keeps saying "homegirl" for any woman whose name he doesn't remember and how he can pull it off even though he normally doesn't talk that way at all. I am pretty sure I can't pull it off now that I've tried a couple times. Phosphorescent illusion. Proliferate. Is summoning. Once there was a time when we were all in college that my friends thought I was as smart as them and even asked my advice on their papers, but now I am in my 30s and I am still writing those papers and watch The Office and feel jealous of these people with paying jobs and cubicles and benefits and know my friends are spending this Saturday afternoon in a small dark basement bar listening to experimental poetry because they want to show they are interested in my interests and happy to spend any kind of time with me because I just had two kids and haven't been doing any writing but managed to get out of the house for 24 hours alone in New York and now I want to cry. I want to stand up and say to the poet, It's not you. It's not your poetry. It's me. Me. Me. But everyone is clapping, and she is already gone, replaced by a girl in a flouncy embroidered blouse and blood red lipstick, the kind of girl you imagine riding through the East Village on a bike with a wicker basket, in which she stores her thin cigarettes and artfully arranged wildflowers, and Nick listens to her introduce the next poet and says, "What a bitch." Previously published in I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press). Mia You was born in South Korea, raised in the United States, and currently lives in the Netherlands. She is the author of I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Currently she is completing her PhD in English from UC Berkeley, writing a dissertation on Gertrude Stein, and teaching creative writing at the Universiteit Utrecht. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Hairpin, Jacket2, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Offing. With Chloe Garcia-Roberts, she is the co-founder/editor of A. BRADSTREET. She is also on the editorial board of Perdu, an experimental literary podium in Amsterdam, and a contributing editor at The Critical Flame. Comments are closed.
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Blog HostNatasha Kochicheril Moni is a writer and a licensed naturopath in WA State. Enjoying this blog? Feel free to put a little coffee in Natasha's cup, right here. Archives
October 2019
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