Advice on Hots for Married Men

on edibles, gratefully

i miss you
etc

Dear etc,

1. You don’t have to begin writing poetry.

You’ve written poetry before. You just have to do it at least one more time, which is simple enough. Write “ONE MORE POEM” on the top of a piece of scrap paper, write the numbers 1–5 below it, jot down five things the poem could be about, take out a very nice piece of paper, rewrite “ONE MORE POEM” beautifully at the top, write a different list of five things with a blue marker. Now you have written two poems, which means you have done it one more time twice and have created a habit.

Now, friendship (2): in addition to being generous with drink, edibles, and talk, you can make friends by humiliating yourself and/or making yourself vulnerable to new people in a way that does not go so far as to turn them off, but makes them feel comfortable humiliating and/or making themselves vulnerable to you.

Do this until you fall in love, then run.

Before we get to three and four, I should warn you: Anna Akhmatova does not have kind words for those who leave: “I am not with those who abandoned their land,” one translation titles it, “I’m not one of those who left their land,” “I’m not one of those who left their country.” If you read her Poetry Foundation biography, you’ll learn how she struggled as her friends left Russia for safety; this longing for her friends made her nostalgic and too focused on personal ties in a way “at odds with the upbeat Bolshevik ideology.” The biographer implies that Akhmatova’s “anachronism” was not just a product of a different aesthetic, but also of being put in a position to miss.

There is a chance that your writing, in this time, because you miss your friends, too, will also find itself at odds with any ideology that scoffs at the value of friendship. But there’s good news in paragraphs ahead:

Despite the virtual disappearance of her name from Soviet publications, however, Akhmatova remained overwhelmingly popular as a poet, and her magnetic personality kept attracting new friends and admirers. The help she received from her “entourage” likely enabled her to survive the tribulations of these years. Occasionally, through the selfless efforts of her many friends, she was commissioned to translate poetry.

Obviously, I do not wish to imply that your anonymous situation truly resembles Akhmatova’s. If you have edibles, and used to be in NYC, and seem to know me personally, your lot is not that of a poet who feels only able to write in the context of home, a home that has made that writing a crime, a poet who has lost most people close to her in a series of ongoing political struggles, deaths, imprisonments, forced emigration. And she stayed; you left.

That said, you can read Akhmatova because 1. reading good poems always helps and 2. it sounds like you’re asking about writing in the context of loneliness, and she does a lot of that:

I thought: you’re doing this on purpose—
You want to be like the grownups.

Whatever you do to make friends, beware wanting to be like the grownups. Even Akhmatova makes it an accusation, and she can seem pretty grown up herself when she writes:

My breast grew helplessly cold,
But my steps were light.
I pulled the glove from my left hand
Mistakenly onto my right.

You know what Frank O’Hara said about chilling away from the city (“I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life”), but we also don’t entirely believe him. How did he wind up in a dune buggy on Fire Island if he didn’t have the kind of relationship to cities that makes being outside of them a pleasure, knowing the subways and the lack-of-regret are still yours, even in the context of trees and the regrettable decisions of those who insist on “working” rather than “making new friends” and who think “making art” isn’t compatible with “making new friends and then talking until morning, the time when some idea for a poem comes up and one or both of you decide to execute it later.”

Since Shiv Kotecha moved in, I mean, I write so much more than I used to. He comes home at 11 p.m.; I say, “I can’t hang out, I have to get a lot of writing done tomorrow, it’s my only day to write this week.” He says, “Let’s have one beer on the stoop.” By 1 a.m. we have realized that Deleuze’s account of masochism’s relationship to literature—in that writing is better able to sustain the suspension of the pendulum mid-swing in a way necessary for a fantasy of frozen motion, statues of furs, contracts, decency, etc.—extends not only to writing style, but also to the way we both fall in love IRL, such that we’re looking for the moment where other brief “positions” get sustained longer than should be possible: the swing between love and friendship, for example, the re-reading of the best love letter in the book, on the stoop, as if reading for the second time even when reading for the sixth, etc., the re-reading of “Meditations in an Emergency;” by 2 a.m., we are both crying about having underestimated the effect some childhood experience has had on each of our later senses of self; by 11 a.m. the next morning, we have both written five pages of long poems to each other, which we will read aloud on the stoop later that night.

(But really, just share the edibles, and ask someone to read an O’Hara poem aloud to you. Friends are easy enough to make.)

On the most practical note (5.): Brandon Brown does not drive. Why should you? “Florida Georgia Line ft. Nelly, Cruise” begins:

Never having driven a car, I have to project how much pleasure they must offer my sisters and fellows when they motor.

It must be a wonderful thing to do, a marvelous aesthetic practice.

For in Cruise, Brian Kelley, Tyler Hubbard, and Cornell “Nelly” Haynes, Jr. all share that the sight of a beautiful woman inspires in them one common desire: to roll down the windows of their respective cars, and drive them very fast.

[ . . . ]

Okay, I lied, I have driven a car two times.

The first was in high school.

I was secretly dating my sister’s best friend, one night they were sequestered in the bedroom talking and I snuck a note into the front seat of her car with instructions to park up the hill, and meet me by the door of my basement room.

My lust was poltergeistal, sifting through walls and settling like a horny dust all over the room.

When I heard them emerge, airily suggesting a drive into town, I panicked, raced her car down the street, stashed the note, returned to a trio of wtf.

I think this conditions my present disinclination to learn how to drive. (23–24)

See, not-driving could help you write a poem this good. Or it could disappoint your partner, as Brown recounts later in the poem, knowing that he won’t be able to drive her to the hospital should an emergency occur. Or it could put you in a position to “project,” as Brown puts it, the pleasure of driving into a space of fantasy that allows you to realize that “maybe if I start to drive, I too will start to associate the sight of beautiful bodies with the desire for the open road” (25) in a way that you wouldn’t if you actually had a car, if you were just cruising around thinking about hot chicks.

Either way, not having a car won’t stop you from making friends, might help you write poems, and certainly allows you to eat more edibles.

Ask a friend to give you a ride home to us for the weekend.

Love,
Diana