From an "autistic poet" (1.26.23)

This poem featured in today's New York Times, something I rarely see in that newspaper, or any daily, for that matter.  Maybe seven issues out of the year.  But isn't it good to see that some newspapers take the art seriously enough (not to mention their readers) to publish work like this for all to read and ponder?

Speaking of pondering, I am not sure what to make of the feature's repeated editorial qualifier of "autistic" poet.  I respect the multiplicity and diversity on display here.* I am invited to consider a point of view that's worth reading and reflecting on because it is other than mine.

Of course, all poems not written by me are worth reading for the same reason.

I don't get the wavy blue line that the editor inscribed through the text, looping itself around the poem's key word, "pace."  To me, that's a case of not letting the poem speak for itself, of prettifying the autonomous work of art, and worse, of edit-splaining.  According to the editorial text, the poet "collaborated with the editors" to create this visual effect.  Why?

But about the poem, or about my take on it.  "I am the pace of my body, and not language," its title and central image, means something more when I know that the author of it is autistic.  Not being autistic, I can't account precisely what the poet means by "the pace of my body"; but the image helps me consider my own body in terms of "pace" (and that word's many associations), at least as a way to calculate the author's meaning.

* I am using a loaded term here.  There is no consensus, I have read, on the proper term: autistic person, person with autism, person on the autism spectrum (I find this last one particularly awkward).  The debate has to do with whether one understands autism as "central" to a person's identity, one trait among many of a person, like a characteristic, or as a disorder or disability.  This poem suggests to me (and the editorial text reinforces the idea) that it is composed by an autistic person, not someone "suffering from autism."

A knife, a fork, a spoon, my shoes: Charles Simic - 1938 - 2023 (1.10.23)

The news today reports the death of Charles Simic, national Laureate and naturalized American poet. I saw him read many years ago, to a large audience on the campus of Cleveland State University. Do poets still fill lecture halls, I wonder? 

I was in a business suit and sat at the back of the theater. During Q&A following his reading, I managed to get my raised hand acknowledged, and asked Simic whether and how he conceived of audience as he wrote - for whom was he writing? 

"For people who read poetry," he said with that kind of dismissiveness that shuts you up and sits you back down. That's where I learned never to ask an artist a question about the mechanics or the psychology of making, especially not in a public forum. 

It might have been the navy blue suit, starched shirt and necktie there at the back of a theater full of jeans, tie-dyed t-shirts, face piercings, beards and dreadlocks that put him off.

Years after that, he signed a book of his poems for me (I never met the man or shook his hand) at a dinner party in a suburb of Washington, D.C. He was visiting a patron, a spectacularly wealthy lobbyist who liked poetry. You know, one of those people with nannies, au pairs, live-in chefs. 

A neighbor friend, who fulfilled one of those roles for the rich man's children and cooked the dinners for certain of the rich family's entertainments, got Simic to sign my copy of one of his books (I've bought a good number, not all, of his 30 books of poetry).  Just his name in an almost illegible and deeply impersonal scrawl. (I mean, what more did I expect?) My neighbor's assessment of the man of the evening? Not too different from my experience at that poetry reading at Cleveland State.

Which is all to say, people are complicated. The kitchen-sink poetry hailed in the obituary, the plain-spoken voice of the poems, the appealing melancholy . . . we are one thing in the deeper recesses of our writing, another thing in public, and still something else altogether in private company.

Sourness aside, Simic has been a guiding voice for my own development as a writer since the 1970s. Now I will reread his poems in a post-mortem frame of mind.

Beyond that, maybe a project for Wednesdays@One: a knife, a fork, a spoon, my shoes.

Greetings, 2023! (1.5.23)

Just to get us started, here's a link to short reviews of some new poetry included in a review roundup, in today's NYT.

And we're off to a new year of posts!