Patricia Smith TARRYTOWN, NY Gotta ask—has anyone else shoved a peppermint stick down the center of a sour pickle and eaten them both together? How about nibbled on a jellied hog’s head? Or is it just—heaven forbid—me? Friday: 12.22.06 | Permalink | Comments (40)

I love semantics—especially the relentless twisting and twirling of the language to make us feel better about that resolute, inevitable stroll toward the grave. In our desperation to turn back the clock, we’ve cornered the market on trite catchphrases. You’ve heard, of course, that 30 is the new 20. 40 is the new 30. It follows that 20 is the new 10, but that feels slimy and slightly illegal.

Well, I’m 51, and I can assure you that for most of us, 50 is—well, pretty much what it is. It’s the shock of finding yourself at the bargain rack at K-Mart, considering the merits of a pair of polyester, rubber-waisted slacks in some definitive old lady hue, like puce. It’s the horrifying realization that you distinctly remember Eisenhower. It’s having a granddaughter roll her adorable eyes while you stand in front of the mirror, rocking out to something Prince recorded before he became an unpronounceable symbol. Fifty is exactly one half century of accumulated chaos, now marked by drowsy brainwaves, silver pubic hair (who knew?), and a sudden proliferation of those slick magazine surveys where one of the first questions always asks you to check off your age group. The choices: 18 to 30, 30 to 49, and 50 to why are you still here?

Of course, the status quo gets all wiggly if you’re a poet. Once you’ve slipped behind the eyes of a writer, the world never sits still long enough for you to tiptoe delicately into your golden era. You’re too busy being buffeted about by possibilities, writing “the best first line ever” in your little wire-bound notebook and being slapped silly by potential stanzas. You want to write all the time. And since you’re glimpsing twilight (at least I didn’t say “the twilight of your years”) and the Reaper’s rancid breath is curling your neck hairs (am I being morbid, or just excessively mortal?), getting those words down is a matter of some urgency.

So I’m in an low-res MFA program, searching for an official way to be productive, surrounded for 10 days every semester by relentlessly perky co-eds fresh out of the University of Them. (More about that later in the week.) I find myself married to a man who is both astounded and amused by my frantic late-night scribblings; I’ve been known to write in three genres at once, and often wake from a sound sleep screeching stuff like “Pirates!” and “That’s it! Broderick Crawford!”

And now, poet that I am, I’ve begun to look back on my life with the pressing need to get it all down, to push it all into one big written snapshot, to find out what it all means, dammit!

Thank God I’ve got a pen.

I’ve often wondered where my rhythm comes from. And yes, I know that’s pretty close to sounding like a regrettable stereotypical blunder. (Black people. Watermelon. Fried chicken. The Chicken Noodle Soup Dance. Rhythm. Get it?) But that’s not what I’m talking about. So those of you with Al Sharpton on speed-dial, drop the phone.

How to explain it? When I sit down to write, a chord starts thrumming deep in my innards. I don’t know what it is actually, when it began, or where it came from. All I know is that it’s a constant presence, sometimes comforting, mostly insistent. And when the poem is “done” (as if any of them ever are), when the words I’ve written finally reach the open air, that thrumming is threaded through every syllable, snaking in and out of the stanzas. I feel it when I read—and when I read, I can usually spot at least one person in every audience who feels it too. That thrumming is what I’ve come to think of as my rhythm, the inner music that eventually forges a signature.

I’ve often wondered about the source of that rhythm. I want to cage it, take a hard look, write its biography. Now that I’m 50, the search has taken on a misty-eyed importance. So I’ve started rumbling around in my past, a place even my therapist feared to tread. I’ve been pulling open all the drawers, flinging open the doors (yes, my mother was behind one of them), nosing around.

That brings us to the sour pickle, the hog’s head.

I’ve realized that my incessant thrumming has a lot to do with the fact that I’m a black girl who grew up on the West Side of Chicago. I grew up listening to Tyrone Davis, Ruby Andrews, Johnny Taylor, and early Temps blaring from open windows. I thought Gwen Brooks was a colored girl’s goddess, regal in coke-bottle specs and cinnamon stockings rolled to just below her knees. I sported rapidly unraveling plaits and stiff synthetic blends from Lerner’s layaway. By the time I was 12, I’d already swiveled on a barstool, and I dutifully endured my father’s lessons in gutbucket blues. I danced with him in our kitchen, my little feet on top of his big ones. Mayor Daley (the flap-jowled daddy, not the son) walled me and my mama and my daddy into a community of planned obsolescence, a neighborhood birthed in a choke hold. I jumped double-dutch in the dirt, with my pants rolled up, Converse All-Stars tossed aside. Our choir at Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church sang with so much soul that God Himself looked down, spilled His coffee and declared “Damn!”

And I was fed on what God threw away. I ate pickled pig’s feet from the jar, careful to pluck any errant hairs before wolfing those babies down. I dined on deep-fried chicken necks and oxtails, and had practically everything I ate seasoned with salt pork or doused with Tabasco. Every Saturday morning, in some steamy tenement in our building, the women formed a chatty chittlin assembly line. The tangled stench rose gradually, like a derelict in an alley at dawn.

And hoghead’s cheese, or souse, was one of the delicacies my mama brought up from Aliceville, Alabama. To put it bluntly, souse is a hot mess. According to the National Center for Home Food Preservation, it’s “a home style product which developed as a means to use all of the variety meat generated by home slaughter.” The main ingredient is 10 lbs. of head meats, tongue, heart, feet, or “other.” (No, we weren’t offing porkers in our kitchen—the neighborhood butcher shop stocked all the fixins, including “other.”) The first step in the process was to “clean head thoroughly, removing all hair and scruff; skin out snout and lower jaw and remove jaw bones.” Then there was the deboning and straining and draining and grinding. In the end, it was all jellied and shaped into a loaf. I’d lop off a slice, slap it on a saltine, and experience a stellar culinary moment. And since the loaf lasted forever (it seemed to regenerate), I chalked up quite a few of those moments.

The pickle was more of a recreational, less stinky, offering. I’d stroll into the neighborhood store, which had a huge barrel nestled in the corner. The storekeeper would plunge her hammy forearm into the brine, pull out a pickle that resembled a small dirigible, and plop it into a single-ply brown paper bag. I’d work a fat peppermint stick right down the middle of the pickle while juice streamed down my arms, then slurped and chomped the creation until the crazy swirl of mint and salt and pungent pulp made me a little swirly myself. I—I think I was a little bit high.

Where does my rhythm come from? That long-ago swirliness, and then add the sweet dizzy of spinning barstools. All that doo-wop crooning laced with sweet double negatives, the glare from my father’s gold tooth. The Temps singing “Return Your Love to Me,” and me in my bedroom, smushed up against a pillow, slow dancing, kinda. Knowing Miss Gwendolyn would whisper “Lord, chile, don’t you know you got to write this?” Feverish double-dutch leaving bright scars on my legs. My bare feet pounding singsong in the dirt. Growing up on all that hard, necessary food. Eating enough of it to build hips, then swinging them like first poems. Pigging out on salt and sugar and swine noggin. And now, from a tenuous perch 50 years high, writing, writing in celebration of all that pent-up poison in my system.

Without naming any names, let’s just say that someone was a little “windy” yesterday, shall we?

I honestly don’t know where all those words came from. One moment I was seriously agonizing over how my reflections could possibly occupy this hugely public space, and I pondered the best ways to pontificate pithily (wow, I expected my spellcheck—or at least the haughty expressions police—to blow the whistle on that one). I even considered jotting off one of those posts sometimes found on the obscenely popular LiveJournal blogosphere (“Hey. Just sitting around. Ordered Chinese this afternoon. Wow. I’m bored.”) or the even more obscenely popular MySpace (“Hey. What are you wearing? What school you go to? Cool! Let’s have sex, OK?”). But just before panic set in, fully formed sentences—complete with subject, predicate, and a few nattily garbed adjectives—were dripping from the light fixtures.

I could only conclude that My Muse (who I’ve called, at one time or another, La Music, Jimmie Savannah, Her Bitchness, Ruby Begonia, Sista Sometimes, Mavis, Butterfly McQueen, M’Dear, Hot Damn, The Esteemed Imperial Inimitable Goddess Ms. Gwen, My Boo, Cleopatra Jones, Tamika, Miz Thang, and Mamie Eisenhower) was once again in residence. I always know when she’s come home. I write like a woman possessed.

What does that mean, exactly, to write like someone possessed? If your eyes are on this and you profess to be a wordsmith of some sort, you’ve probably been there. You mutter every word you write, and every time you write a word you mutter all the words that came before that word, just to make sure they belong together. The UPS guy taps on the door to announce a package and you answer with goop in the corner of your eyes and your left breast hanging out of your shirt because—to quote Yoda—a damn you do not give. You call up relatives you haven’t spoken to in years because they simply have to hear that stanza, experience that volta, or marvel at that brilliant rhythmic shift. Eventually those you live with start pinching their noses and cutting a wide, wide path around you because—well, hygiene is way down on your list. You don’t brush, bathe, douche, purge, or exfoliate—in fact, you’re considering a catheter—because you’re terrified that when you come back from your toilette, Mamie Eisenhower will have taken her leave.

La Music, she’s a fickle one. In the middle of a poem, she’s been known to rise up in a huff and desert me in the dead center of a syllable. Then, sometimes a week later, sometimes a month, she turns up again, contrite and droopy-eyed, clutching her toothbrush, a Luther CD (the one with “Superstar”) to re-woo me, and an overnight bag that’s always too small.

And of course I take her back, trying my best to ignore the fact that she smells vaguely of some other writer’s funk. ‘Cause by that time, I’m jonesin’. I need her too bad. Like Dubya needs language. Like Michael Jackson needs a nasal passage. Like Nicole Richie needs a hamhock. OK, two hamhocks. Deep-fried.

What does your muse look like? I imagine mine as the love child of Mona Lisa and James Brown. And not the “Please, Please, Please” James with the regal cape and immobile pompadour. And not the battery-powered “Living in America” James, surprisingly limber and dressed discreetly in the American flag. I’m talking the James who has done it and is dying to do it again, the James with absolutely none of himself being played on the radio, the pissed-off, butt-whupping James immortalized in the now-classic mug shot, the one taken a short time after he inexplicably pumped bullets into the chassis of his wife’s car, killing it instantly.

And I’m not talking about the Mona Lisa gazed at and revered by everyone, hanging royally in her own little room at the Louvre. Perhaps you didn’t know—but a short time before sitting down to pose for Da Vinci, Ms. Mona had her left nipple pierced, broke a stranger’s heart, bought her first thong (she’s wearing it, and it’s a little too small, can’t you tell?), puffed some killer weed, hit the gym, and made urgent love against a brick wall. Gal’s got a past. Plus, she snarls, sucks her teeth, and adjusts the friggin’ thong when nobody’s looking. That’s My Muse’s mama.

Once you get past the slightly disturbing image of the Godfather of Soul and La Gioconda gettin’ busy, close your eyes, and keep them closed until you can picture My Muse, Ms. Ruby Begonia. Consider her cool, startling parentage. Don’t forget that she has dusty copper dreadlocks as thick as tree trunks, tiny porcelain hands, and a mole she’s been thinking of having removed.

See her? That’s the temperamental diva who runs my days and fills me with fever. She’s the reason I found myself up one night at 3 a.m., desperately needing to know the name of Quick Draw McGraw’s sidekick. (Don’t think on it too long, it’ll make your head hurt.) She’s got me locking doors and nailing shut the windows so she can’t get out. She’s got me afraid to go the bathroom. Ain’t she a peach?

So if you had a hard time wading through my acres of prose yesterday, blame her. She knows how much I like an audience. I suspect she shares my addiction. And you guys are no ordinary audience, squirming in your folding chairs during stanza 12 of some poet’s masturbatory musings. You folks are out there doing stuff—considering omelets, picking your nose, dressing for work, listening to Nina Simone—and I can’t see you. I can’t see if what I’ve—we’ve—written is making you cringe, yawn, or laugh. For Jimmie Savannah and me, you’re the ultimate challenge.

So here’s a challenge for you. Ship me a comment. Introduce your muse to the world.

Once you’ve discovered the word “ghazal,” heavily throating that surprising h and liking the way the z sets your tongue abuzz, there’s no way to staunch your curiosity about just what such a delightful word could lead to. Introduced to poetry by getting up on stage and flinging it into the open air—usually minus any conscious semblance of formal cadence and form (free, free, free!) but constantly reminded of the story the poem was telling—I was understandably intrigued by a poetic device which seems to be heavily structured while demanding very little in the way of a narrative thread.

I crave chaos.

My own work seems mired in narrative, a result of an inherited penchant for storytelling and the presence of my mother’s flat Alabama drone—which has been a resident in my left ear ever since I can remember—firmly insisting that nothing has worth unless and until it “makes sense.” (Yes, this is the parent who still begs me to abandon the flighty pursuit of creative writing for a much more predictable and grounded position—at the post office. She never fails to remind me that they are “always hiring.”)

The penchant for storytelling, and some sense of order in the tale, comes from my father.
A grizzled little guy with a marquee gold tooth, Otis Douglas Smith was what happened to the country when it hit the city. Part of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern cities in the early 1950s, he found himself not in the Mecca of financial and racial equality he’d imagined, but in a roach-infested tenement apartment on Chicago’s West Side. There he crafted a life along side the bag boys, day laborers, housekeepers, and cooks who dreamed the city’s wide, unreachable dream.

Many of those urban refugees struggled to fit, but my father never really adopted the no-nonsense-now rhythm of the city. There was too much of the storyteller in him, too much unleashed southern song. From the earliest days I can recall, my place was on his lap, touching a hand to his stubbled cheek and listening to his growled narrative, mysterious whispers, and wide-open laughter. He turned people we knew into characters and, through his stories, moved the boundaries of our tiny part of Chicago farther and farther apart. There were tales everywhere, and my own personal griot knew just how to infuse them with life.

Because of him, I grew to think of the world in terms of the stories it could tell. From my father’s moonlit tales of steaming Delta magic to the sweet slow songs of Smokey Robinson, I became addicted to unfolding drama, winding narrative threads, the beauty of simple words. But these tales were always grounded in the real, with one step neatly following the other. There was a beginning, a middle, a decisive end, and yes, a moral. When I began writing poetry, I wrote it the same way—although I was careful not to make the morals too evident or heavy-handed. Before I knew it, that style had become my “signature.”

How I envied the innovators, the Language poets, the lyricists, the visionaries who so often veered from the narrative line to find themselves in sticky, yet exciting territory. I loved the ability of those who had given themselves permission to play with words, to celebrate their jazz, to set the discordant words beside each other and watch the birth of something new. Try as I might, I couldn’t pull away from the “common sense” of my poetry, its righteous and relentless march forward. I couldn’t make it misbehave.

Then I encountered the glorious ghazal, the perfect combination of structure and giddiness. In fact, my introductory readings into the form revealed it to be an unbridled wordplay that basically doesn’t know where it’s going until it gets there—and even then, it’s not sure. And the ghazal’s fans and practitioners don’t pretend to have the answers. In her introduction to The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz translator Elizabeth Gray admits, “The poems do not seem to go anywhere: there is . . . no ultimate resolution or answer. The couplets seem unrelated to one another. And everything seems ambiguous . . .”

Indeed. Consider this opening duo of couplets from Robert Hastings’ “Ghazal” :

Trying to fly in the meantime
Ready to dry in the meantime

flocks of turds have fun with words
Wanting to rely in the meantime

What fun. Imagine being the person responsible for introducing the phrase “flocks of turds” to the American lexicon. My mind, scrambling furiously to find the poem’s order and moral, blew a fuse in the process. At that point, I just decided to read these lines out loud and delight in what they brought to the air.

In his book Ravishing Disunities, an anthology of contemporary poets working in the form, Agha Shahid Ali seems to be smiling mischievously throughout the book’s intro: “The thirst for unity haunts the ‘Westerner’ . . . So . . . Is there no unity? The answer: Well, no.” Then he insists that we take this unserious form seriously because of its underlying cultural relevance and because it is—well, incredibly old. (In fact, ghazal groupies are in a perpetual tiff because the sonnet—that lush and lyrical masterpiece infused with Shakespeare’s spirit and blessed by his hands—touts itself as both ancient and revered. However, the ghazal beat the sonnet to market by six centuries at least.)

Finally, I didn’t have to line my metaphors into neat little rows. I didn’t have to worry about the narrative arc of my poem. I didn’t need to hurtle toward a moral. All I had to do was worry about that tight little radif ( “in the meantime”) and its qafia (“fly,” “dry,” “rely”). That was all the structure I needed. And with the entire English language open to me (after all, the ghazal’s couplets didn’t have to connect thematically or otherwise), I was ready to go.

Not so fast. I had no idea how deeply the idea of “order” had been ingrained, how insistent my mother’s voice was in my ear. Like it or not, I was headed for the post office.

I sat down to write ghazals “about things”—about the gentle rain that trumpeted Hurricane Katrina; about past sexual partners; about the hips of black women. Once I’d chosen a topic, I envisioned a story. Once I envisioned a story, I decided the way that story should be told. Once I’d made that decision, I was doomed.

All that preparation clashed with the ghazal’s touted resistance to preparation. I agonized over just the “right” words, and struggled to draw a thick narrative line right now the middle of each poem. The qafias were torture, because I wouldn’t just let them be what they were. There wasn’t a flock of turds in sight.

When I read the resultant pieces to my husband, usually an extremely tolerant and thoughtful man, he gave me the noncommittal hum and then declared, “I don’t like them. It sounds like you’re trying too hard.”

I knew exactly what he meant. I was trying too hard not to try too hard.

Instead of giving up, I’m throwing down the gauntlet. I want my voice out of its girdle. Eventually I will write a ghazal that takes me nowhere at all. And damn it, I’m going to enjoy the trip.

So . . . did anybody write a ghazal yesterday?

I coulda woulda shoulda, but I didn’t. Instead, I was reflecting upon an absolutely wonderful Tuesday evening out on the town, reading at the inimitable Bowery Poetry Club in New York.

For those of you who live in towns that aren’t here, please be aware that there are roughly 8,356 ½ places to see/read/hear poetry at any given hour. Every bar and bookstore has a secluded, slightly moldy corner reserved for sonneteers, slammers, and versifiers. The Bowery touts a sunup to sundown roster of rhyme. Streetcorner pundits abound, especially at this time of year, when poetry is the only thing keeping so many of us from a determined waltz into oncoming traffic. Yusef Komunyakaa reads at KGB, for free. Young boys in drooping denims heft lyrics larger than they are. Storekeepers chirp in rhyme. Martín Espada rips it at Acentos in the Bronx. Look, there’s Sharon Olds! Even the waiters at Applebee’s occasionally break out in spontaneous verse, spouting couplets between the quesadillas grande and nachos nuevos.

Poems scribbled on cocktail napkins, $50 bills, taxi receipts, journal pages, and sweaty forearms all qualify for the light of day. You can’t take two steps in this city without stumbling into a stage and a hot mic.

On stage, you can hone your real-world voice. You can learn how to lift that voice over the machinations of a raucous drunk or a whirring cappuccino machine. You can lock eyes with an audience member and know, without a doubt, that the hours you’ve spent toiling in virtual isolation—revising, rearranging, sweating the poems out—were well worth it. Most importantly, you can find a reason to keep going.

On Tuesday, my reason to keep going was waiting for me at the Bowery.

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a poem temporarily titled “34,” a tribute to the 34 nursing home residents left to die while Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. It wasn’t necessarily a poem I wanted to write—in fact, I banged it out in a kind of fever, desperate to placate those 34 insistent voices, each rhythmed with its own terror. Come. See. The darkness, whimpering, water’s rude whisper. The floodwaters rushing through the rooms, swallowing lives, creeping relentlessly toward the roof.

When “34” was finished, I fooled myself into thinking that I had done what was demanded of me. I slapped a padlock on the poem and hoped that it would rest behind the door I’d closed on it. But I was nowhere near done. What followed—squelching other projects, disrupting my home life, keeping me up long into many nights—were other stories from Katrina searching for a way into the air. There were families forced to bury their own after graveyard workers declared themselves overwhelmed. Ninety-one-year-old Ethel Mayo Freeman wanted to talk about being left to rot in her wheelchair under the ‘Nawlins sun. Voodoo priestesses had theories about how it all went wrong. Even Katrina, the bitch herself, came alive. Even she had things to say.

Have you even been thrown head-first into a project that you didn’t ask for, one that seemed to choose you, one that’s at best vaguely defined? Even calling the Katrina poems a “project” seemed somewhat exploitative, as if I’d simply hit on a hot topic and decided to roll with it. Only after realizing that I’d written over 30 poems did I begin calling it a “manuscript,” because somewhere along the line—probably immediately after being told “I wouldn’t waste my time . . . people are forgetting about Katrina already”—I knew that I wanted this to be something solid, something that could be held in the hand and passed on to other hands.

Because people want to, and don’t want to, remember. They don’t want to, and want to, forget.

Those of us who take the stage with our work are pretty adept at “reading” rooms. We can walk into a poetry venue and immediately begin to formulate a set, deciding which pieces we’re going to read based on a strong but inexplicable vibe. Taken into consideration: noise level, the availability of alcohol, lighting, seat arrangement, the presence or absence of a mic stand and podium, the enthusiasm of the evening’s host, the ratio of newcomers to regulars in the audience, whether you’re feeling relaxed or stressed, how folks are dressed, age/gender/racial mix, even the news of the day. For instance, you probably wouldn’t read the same poems on the day Britney Spears dumped K-Fed as you would on the day two planes took down the World Trade Center.

On Tuesday at the Bowery, as I sat through the open mic that precedes the feature, I decided to abandon my plan to debut a “set” of the Katrina poems, reading them for the first time in a rough chronological order, beginning with the voice of the burgeoning storm. I decided against this because a) the night began with a darkly humorous dirge by Shappy, the Bowery’s deft-handed bartender and self-proclaimed resident nerd, and the place roared with laughter; b) it’s almost Christmas, and I didn’t want to be accused of “downing” the season; and c) I was pretty damned scared.

Writing these poems wasn’t simply a matter of getting them out, tapping the Print button and moving on to the next thing. If I couldn’t transport everyone in that room to New Orleans, couldn’t pummel them with a whipping rain, couldn’t trap them in a room in that nursing home waiting for the water to overwhelm them, then I’d done nothing at all. The point was not death. The point was resurrection.

I reverted to my original plan after someone (hi, Jessica Elizabeth!) read her own charged, confrontational poem, inspired by hearing “34” at another venue. I realized that this was not a time to surrender to the room, but to try and change its energy. Sometimes no matter what your reading of a room tells you, you have to speak the poem that’s first in your throat.

And poets know that you can’t wait until people come up to you with response and feedback. You have to know while you stand there behind that crackling mic. You have to know as soon as the words hit the air whether they have weight and worth. You have to spit those words out into the dark and pray that some heat comes back to you.

Here’s a secret: What I listened for was a small, involuntary sound. It could be called a moan. It could be the loud release of a held breath. What it meant was that at least one person in the Bowery Poetry Club on Tuesday night heard something they’ll never be able to shake, like 34 frantic whispers in a room.

First of all, since this is my last missive before the big day, listen up: MERRY CHRISTMAS.

That’s right, I said it: Merry Christmas. Not Happy Holidays, Best Of the Season, Cheery Holly, Have a Pleasant Yule, Season Greetings, Fantabulous Frosty, Bestest Wishes, Happy Times of Snow and Ice, Sweet Season, or any other of those wimpy little politically polished sentiments that have found favor nowadays in an attempt to kick The Big Guy out of the equation. Sorry . . . but while I respect all realities, I am a colored girl, born and reared rigidly Baptist, and if I don’t give big public ups to God, I will be summarily booted out of the club.

That’s my reality.

And it explains why glittery-grilled rappers, hefting their trophies on televised music award shows, always blow solemn but juicy kisses to heaven before thanking any of the 6,521 people responsible for the success of their latest joint, “Baby, Your Booty Makes Me Want to Pop a Cap in You.”

That’s their reality.

Whatever you want to call the day of You-Know-Who’s birth, for me it’s always been more of a time for reflection than the traditional Remorse-arama of January 1. There’s something decidedly melancholic about sitting in front of the telly as the final seconds of the year wind down, contemplating a sad feast of tepid champagne, praying that Dick Clark makes it through to the commercial break, and joining roughly a universe full of other folks to wallow in regret and pen empty vows onto Page 1 of brand spankin’ new journals. Ah, hear our collective sigh.

I’d rather experience my revelations, ask myself the huge why-am-I-here questions, after some typically joyous holiday experience, like fighting an 80-year-old woman for the last $29.99 cashmere sweater in a plastic bin at Filene’s Basement. Roughly three seconds after clocking her with a swift right to the jaw and watching as she crumples to the floor with her walker and writhes pitifully under the florescent lights, I’m pretty sure I’d say You know, maybe I oughta rethink my life.

But I haven’t been rethinking my life so much as retooling it, giving it what it needs to flourish, finally.

Penning these blog entries at the close of the year has been an invaluable “See ya, 2006,” but now I find myself in a quandary (quandaries are nice, by the way—mine has two bedrooms and an attached garage). I began the week in a mild panic, wondering if I’d be able to fill this space everyday. Then, as you know, My Muse took care of that—The Esteemed Imperial Inimitable Goddess Ms. Gwen showed up with her suitcases and a tasteful little whip.

As this stint nears its end, I find that my head is crammed with ideas, probably enough blog entries for another year at least. I love this talking out loud, and then hearing from the folks I most love to talk to. It’s funny how I never feel this inspired when I sit down to pen an entry for LiveJournal or MySpace. Maybe it’s knowing that practically everyone here shares a passion for words and the magic they’re capable of. I don’t have to introduce the concept. And we don’t have to wallow through candid snaps of Jake Gyllenhaal’s crotch (LiveJournal, yesterday) or the gushing, exclamation point-ridden prose of pimpled preteens from Idaho (MySpace, damned near every day) to find each other.

The fact that we all gather here just proves how much we crave community, a place where we don’t have to explain just why we’re so quirky, driven, bellowing, shy, cocky, depressed, goofy, distracted, manic, or weepy. Because there’s just one answer to practically every question: Hell, we’re poets.

So, how to say goodbye? (There’s a languid Sinatra ballad revving up in the background right here, one that will play softly until the end of the entry . . . )

I know . . . I forgot to talk about my MFA program, and I think somewhere along the line I said I would. So:

I’m at Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine, and so far it’s been an absolute marvel. (Maine, of course, is where quite the other states go to learn how to be white and quaint, but since it’s a low-res program, I’m only there for 10 days at the beginning of every semester.) I’m contemplating the intricacies of the ghazal, wrote my first villanelle, intend to master sonnetry (a word I made up—like it?). My first semester mentor, Dennis Nurkse, is partly responsible for my poetry becoming tighter and more concise while managing to convey more. I’ve always wondered how that worked.

The faculty is stellar, I get to hang out with Tim Seibles, the place looked like Norman Rockwell painted it, I’m writing more than I ever have, I’m constantly discovering new poets, creative souls surround me 24-7, and I’m soaking up all that knowledge I missed out on while I was—uh, writing and performing poetry. But not officially. Not academically officially. Not legally. Not in a legally official academic way. Oh, pshaw—I’m having a blast.

And, speaking of MFAville, I’ve pretty much gotten past the nightmare of waking up in my dorm (!), grabbing a card key to go out into the hallway to use the loo (!), and encountering a row of annoyingly perky early-risers lined up at the mirror of a communal (!) bathroom that’s equipped with one toilet (!) and one shower (!). Let’s just say that when I rise to greet the world, I am nappy, crusty, old, and evil—and ill-prepared for perkiness.

I’ve also managed to move past a curious incident, when another student, offering me a ride, slid open the door to her minivan and said, “We’re going to put you in the back of the bus!” Ahem.

Like I said, the place is perfect for me. It’s pretty much like the real world. Who knew?

Why, you may ask, am I in an MFA program? It’s all because of Cave Canem, and if I sign off on this without mentioning the extreme wonderfulness that is CC, I’d deserve to be—well, booted out of the club.

It was at Cave Canem that I learned that the key to being a good teacher is to learn all you can from your students. And the classrooms at CC’s legendary summer session are filled with folks for whom the term “sheer brilliance” falls woefully short. I entered my first semester at Stonecoast immediately after leaving there, and I was buoyed by the confidence (not to mention the many hilarious practical suggestions); I needed to ace my re-entry into academia. Because of my CC chillun, I am blessed to know exactly what I wanted to do with the second half of my life.

Cheesy it may be, but I want to take this line, this time, to kiss every one of them and thank them for throwing my life into such sweet chaos.

(Heads up . . . Cave Canem is also the home of the only poet I’ve seen who has the chops to step into Gwendolyn Brooks’ shoes someday. Don’t tell anyone . . . but her initials are Remica Bingham.)

OK, this is running long (again) and at the Poetry Foundation office in my chill hometown of Chicago, the very patient and charitable Nick T. is drumming his fingers on a desk. I’ll end by saying that this is the first year in a long line of years that I am doing exactly what I want to do exactly all of the time with exactly the people I want to be surrounded by. The demons are at rest.

And because my husband—the best poetry editor the world has ever produced—has been begging for his own entry all week, I saved the best for last.

Boof, you rock.