Happy Mother’s Day. OK, that’s out of the way. Here’s more important stuff.
I’m not a big poetry person. Maybe I’m not intelligent enough to read the writers’ tea leaves. Maybe I ask: why did they chop up the lines like that? It all could’ve been just one paragraph and c’est ca, you know?
But. I read Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss, a writer from nowhere’sville Michigan. Just like I’m from nowhere’sville, NYC. And I have to say: whoa!
Read this interview with her by my friend and uber-talented poet, William Lessard.
She reminds me: just keep writing. Full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes. It’s work. Hard work, and hard work is honorable.
A remembrance: one day I was old enough to earn my adult library card. I was a punk kid, but no longer confined to the tiny children’s book section of the shoebox that was the Jerome Park branch of the New York Public Library.
It was one flight up from a dry cleaning store on University Avenue and the place smelled like Perchloroethylene (PERC). This is the most common solvent used for dry cleaning in the United States. PERC is a reproductive toxicant, neurotoxicant, potential human carcinogen, and a persistent environmental pollutant. In other words, it’s poison.
I LOVED the scent of PERC. It was sweet and soft and I equated that sensation with the safety, warmth, and value the library afforded me, during my chaotic (ha! understatement of the year) early childhood.
And that first day, with my new adult library card, I — a pitzl — picked out the biggest, thickest, heaviest book — WITH NO PICTURES — and checked it out. When I got it home, I started reading it, and quickly realized I had no idea what it was about.
But I knew it must have been important, for it to warrant all that weight.
In time, I checked out more books, six at a clip — the maximum allowed by NYPL rules at the time — and began to digest the words. My brain was a python eating a goat. The process was slow, but it did happen.
I cherished the after-school time in that poisoned, PERC-scented, library. That space kept me safe. And provided a soft place to hear myself.