Against a "Never Let 'Em See You Sweat" Aesthetic

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Catherine, I'd heard from some little mice that you were in recluse mode, but you know how mice are -- they tend to exaggerate. However, now that you've blown off the Joyelle McSweeney reading I think I'm going to have to resubscribe to the mice's digests. How could anyone refuse such an evening of mice? Such usual and delicate cheese? Such cautious sniffing of air? (Yes, it was every bit as wonderful as it sounds.) And all the while Joyelle just groomed herself up at the podium, tapping the microphone with an extended claw. Waiting and purring for you. And she realizing along with the rest of us that our best collective chance of spotting The Is this fall was slowly slip-sliding away in Prairie Lights.

"When will I see you again?" That's what Neil sang in my head. Jan looked sad.

Pine. Lick. Glitter a little. I certainly felt obligated to go, after cribbing all those Lit handouts of Joyelle's back in the Miriam day. "Definitions of Poetry Terms." Man, was I relentless. A machine.

"Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed"

- John Keats, "Hyperion"

The reading itself? It was okay. No Julie Englander, so the star-power of the event was significantly diminished as a result. (The room really was dimmer for some reason.) Jan filled in and was breathtaking as always (although I can't be impartial about this, as I'm secretly kind of in love with her). Joyelle laughed a lot and talked really fast, which made it seem as if she wrote really fast too; which thus made it seem like clever, well-crafted verse comes really easy for her; which at first struck me as being a little obnoxious, and I felt envy. It wasn't until the reading had ended that it occurred to me that maybe I most appreciate poetry in which I sense that a writer is grappling with something difficult. Maybe this is unbearably Harold Bloom of me (daemons and forebears and agonists, oh my!) , although I think my thinking goes back to one of those Aztec spells I was fascinated with our first fall in Iowa City. In the middle of a chant came the instruction, "Merge yourself with difficulty," and this struck me as being as apt a description of poetic/artistic aims as any I'd come across yet. Not that achievement is impossible, or that everything should be grueling, or even that facility and difficulty are diametrically opposed (I think of Emily Dickinson's excellence as being an incredible combination of her intellectual and liguistic facilities with her graspings at straws -- her genius to some degree lying in her ability to forever seek out and explore new difficulties). However, I do like the idea that at some point glibness, if pushed at, has to fall away, and at this point the Commandrine* will be at temporarily relieved of her command simply because she's as lost as the rest of her underlings. And still she has no choice but to continue speaking, and her laughter now might be the most difficult thing of all. Or not. But it does get interesting, at least for me, when everyone simultaneously asks, "Who's driving this car, anyway?" This coming from a confessed control freak who has driven countless poems off of the stupidest cliffs imaginable -- I hope at least one of you is smiling at the irony.

So I hope I run into you soon, Catherina. Don't believe the Hyperion. Don't make this any harder for us than it already is.

* (One of Joyelle's characters)