Poem of the Day: 3 Jun 2006

I’ve recently acquired a style of writing (burnished it into being) that snakes like a twisting serpent down the page: aided by parenthesis and semicolon, disappearing for a moment

when the paragraph changes like some great jungle cat that slips behind a tree. It never quite goes where you’re expecting; a skip’s inserted like a linebreak

so that I’m still not sure whether to call this prose or poetry or something in-between (a teacher of Greek who once taught me—and will again this summer—had a word for it,

or rather for the great, sprawling poems of Hesiod and Homer: proem, and may its coinage bear us both to sit among the Muses as the ancient poets do). It is more modern a form than not,

however classical its content, natu more machina than dea (alas for Vergil): hand-crafted in that quintessentially modern way that took the verb rescribo out of language, or would have

if the Romans (eheu fugaces labuntur anni, labuntur Romani) had not been dead ten centuries, ten score of centuries; instead we have the word rewrite which has come to mean

that essentially artistic process of adding a comma here, a synonym there: deleting even entire paragraphs because thank the Lord (Bill Gates) you can do that now

without the theft of secretaries from their crying, imperious children and crease-faced husbands and footbaths filled with steaming water (and if that order’s off, the bath stays at the end:

longest-deferred, most eagerly-awaited) to retype the last damn sixty pages of your doctoral thesis: and your career in academia’s been saved (by Mr. Gates, that college drop-out),

because if it had meant any more work at this point, you would have said to Hell with it, all of it, and tossed the whole damn ream-and-a-half in a convenient trashcan—

and Sesame Street, you think, had one thing right: if anything’s going to come popping out of that trash can later, to talk back at you, it’s a hell of a lot more likely to be Oscar the Grouch

than your thesis, though god knows it has a (grouchy-enough) voice of its own by now, nasal and New-Jersey accented and just. You hate people from New Jersey, you tell me,

inimitably, cheerfully and perennially a snob: and I realize that Oh god—not le bon Gates this time—it’s me, this is who I’ll be in twenty years—no, ten—no, five—talking to myself, the Ghost of Christmas Past,

watching my (former) self with the bitter eyes of a hungry tiger, the tiger who stalks up and down between, behind, in front of the concealing tree-trunks of the jungle, the menacing foggy blankness

of the paper, which swallows both you and I and we and me and myself, all one of us, and (once again like Homer) I am blind before it, catching blindly to the beast

of my subconscious (to its tail) and trusting it to blaze me a trail, make tracks of ink-black impeccability around the trees outlined in white upon this pristine wilderness. Let us make a song,

let it wind around itself, its listeners, like a fugue, and delineate by its absences the long white rows (tall white columns of birches) upon the paper, draw us a map

of the no-man’s land that you and I and we all strive to avoid, writing (and running away from) our theses and essays and poems whose contours must all be drawn upon, drawn from

the pristine wilderness (a sheet of paper) in (my finest hand, Joni Mitchell sings, that golden child of Woodstock: too golden-young to ever have known white, that paralyzing white

like snow, snow that never dared show its face while those ephemeral perennial days lasted and lasted on) some style of writing or another; anthropomorphize that how you will.

Katie B. (High School, 2005-6) (p#2447)