I generally link to people I like, regardless of whether or not they link back to me. However, if you specifically approach me about doing a link exchange and then proceed to “misplace” the link to my site, please don’t be surprised when, after a few weeks, I’m going to take you off my blogroll. I’m not all too concerned about driving traffic to my site (it’s just a little journal of a snot-nosed, struggling writer, geez, there’s lots of us out there, I’m not special), but people who blatantly try to use my modest readership as a means of promoting themselves, and only themselves, strike me as rude, narcissistic twits. Don’t approach me about doing a link exchange if you don’t plan on reciprocating.
Monday Night Poetry Club
The Guttural Muse
Late summer, and at midnight
I smelt the heat of the day:
At my window over the hotel car park
I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake
And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.
Their voices rose up thick and comforting
As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up
That evening at dusk – the slimy tench
Once called the ‘doctor fish’ because his slime
Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.
A girl in a white dress
Was being courted out among the cars:
As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs
I felt like some old pike all badged with sores
Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.
A couple of years ago, in class, we were discussing how “the guttural muse” is “an obvious reference to Ireland,” but also how, more importantly, Seamus Heaney is feeling his age whilst he is stuck alone in his hotel room.
His muse is lovely and pedestrian. Kissing her won’t bring back his youth, but he still wishes that it could.
A couple of lines from “Station Island” carry a similar sense of sweetness and regret, but this time it’s Tom Delaney who’s prodding Heaney with:
Ah poety, lucky poet, tell me why
what seemed deserved and promised passed me by?
That one is going to end up as an epigraph on one of those books that I may never publish, or so it feels that way.
As If the Fact that it’s Monday Isn’t Bad Enough
Requiscat in Pace. He was nuts, but I adored Steve Irwin.
The Great Wall of Indifference
… Is what I’ve erected between myself and all those news stories on how Angelina Jolie lost her baby-weight.
The heavenly body of Jolie has eclipsed most real news stories, but I would like to point out that it’s been two years since Beslan, and the Russian special forces are commemorating the occasion by arresting elderly human rights activists:
Bravo, assholes. Way to go. Grab a terrified, frail old man off the street. THAT’LL show the world how much we’ve learned since those children were slaughtered.
Goddamn you.
(My mood is slightly off this evening. Perhaps it has something to do with the filth and violence of everyday life, or maybe the fact that tomorrow is Monday and I don’t even get paid until the fifteenth, and we’re almost out of beer)
“You better keep your head, little girl, or you won’t know where I am”
A dear old professor of mine stopped by to chat about this story. He had read it. He was one of the readers for the Duke contest.
He stood there, staring at me in his kindly, near-sighted manner, and a thought flashed in my head:
“He knows I was molested, and he doesn’t hate me. He doesn’t think I’m a bad person. He thinks I’m alright.”
Here’s the answer to the question as to why I submitted it, I guess. I wanted the people who taught me, some of the smartest people in this country, to know about what happened. I wanted them to know that it can happen to anyone, their student, their friend, their kid (so many of my friends, whose names I cannot name, have had similar things happen to them). And I also wanted to feel Ok about it, as opposed to constantly, bitterly, flushed-in-the-face-and-ready-to-bawl ashamed.
My first impulse, nevertheless, was to start crying and apologizing. But it passed, like a cloud passes over the sun, and continues on its merry way.
Natalia A. 