Like God, or Switzerland since 1815

Call me Ishmael.

Unfortunately, one of my professors once told me to choose my season of writing.

I immediately claimed fall and forsook all else. This is a great example of why poetry isn’t a real job, because not-poeming seems to be just as essential to poeming as poeming itself. Also because I can very confidently call myself a poet without having poeted even a little bit in months. Also because of the no money.

And! This is a great example of why it is the realest of jobs! Poetry isn’t some GMO-juiced winter-resistant orange, capitalistically strong-armed into time-blocks, life-hacks, and PTO. It is the hunter-gatherer of jobs. It is a salt-of-the earth Bacchanal; it is the harvest of well-tended seedtime. It is a great job for humans, provided that one is not particularly concerned with having food or housing in the modern sense of food and housing.

Anyways, as I was walking up York last night, I smelled it: coolness. Cut grass. Salt. Here she comes…

Fall.

And like Ahab lashed to the White Whale, there came in tow: Poetry.

Welcome back, poetry. I apologize, friend, for forgetting about you for the past three seasons. I apologize for avoiding readings, for snubbing inspiration, for saving word docs entitled Untitled 21, Untitled 22, and Untitled 23 to my Spring 2023 Dropbox folder* without any sentences in them at all. I apologize for not writing things down when I thought they were funny, and for—and I mean this one—not really looking at a lot of sunsets. That’s really my bad. I see you with your fiery eyes and gnashing teeth. I see you with your trident, chariots of snakes, and pack of kind dogs. I do feel bad about telling people that we have a relationship while not texting you back even a little bit. That is honestly on me. But I’m back now! We can hang out all the time, now that it’s fall! I’ll listen to the things you have to say and take so much credit for them. I’ll present little altars of ephemera to see whether you strike them with lightning. I’ll also probably douse said altars in barrels of water (which I’ll use as a metaphor for self-hatred) so you really have to strike hard to show any sort of potential. I’ll make Bible references. I’ll write down funny words and count syllables on my fingers and draw big circles in my notebook for “inspiration.” We’re good, right? We’re like super good.

Here’s what happens to me in fall:

• I start talking to strangers because I assume that they’re also high-on-fall and therefore receptive to my advances. Let me present an example. In a DC Bluebottle Coffee, a nice lady said, “I think you took my latte.” In lieu of my typical Spring-appropriate “Oops! Here you go!” I said, “You know, I made really strong eye contact with the barista so I just felt like I had to go for it.” I don’t know what weird cavern of my brain that one came out of, reader, but here we are.

• I start making fashion choices. My latest line is: Clashing is a social construct. (Nature doesn’t clash! Have you ever picked two flowers and thought, These clash? No. You haven’t. Same with clothes. To the Hot Moms of the Upper East Side, I apologize for my affront to your designer-stroller-throned toddler’s eyes. Don’t think I don’t see their grimaces.)

• I think about dating. Just kidding. Have you guys all heard about Mommunes?

• Running becomes my personality. (See Source Material A.) All of New York is training for The Marathon. Do you think I’m going to let them beat me? No. I’m like a horse that sees the herd running and assumes that I, too, am in danger.

• I start carrying around lots of books, always in strategic combinations. Right now, I’m carrying Diane Seuss’ frank: sonnets, David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, and Bianca Stone’s What is Otherwise Infinite. The combination reflects a desire for freshness, offset by quotable material and Greatest Hits. I’ll continue to document future combinations. I think this will be fun.

• I begin to nest, but like, not in my own house. ’Tis the season of me showing up at friend’s apartments and not leaving. ’Tis also the season of trekking to the Hungarian Pastry Shop every day because nothing tastes like fall more than a bready croissant with apricot jam and an iced Russian Coffee while listening to undergraduates’ amateur Tarot Card readings.

I smell writing in the air, people. Is it haunting you too?

That’s the music.

Because I have these aforementioned books next to me on this desk, I figured I’d just give you something from one of them. So imagine me rifling for a minute, and we’ll get down to brass tacks…es.

Ok.

First off, I would love everyone to acknowledge the moral fiber it took to not choose the Seuss poem that opens: “‘No need to sparkle,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room / of One’s Own.” I can talk about things other than Virginia Woolf! Look:

Thoughts

“That’s the poem.” “That’s the music.” In a dense book of anecdotes and images, lines like this stick out like road signs: “I have a point to make!” And this is my favorite point to explore: “What’s the poem?” And what a fun treat: “What’s the music?

I love this analogy here—of the words as the lacy gown, the poem as the fatal mistake. Reasons I like it include:

1. Lace is a great representation of writing. Lace is a portrait of interconnectedness, linking into patterns vertically, cyclically, horizontally**. In a poem, words are not sequential points but are stitches in small systems of loops, patterns and sections. Order is important, but not necessarily chronology. Just the way lace is beautiful no matter which way you turn it, a poem can hold structural integrity even as you read it back-to-front, left-to-right or bottom-up.

2. Lace, more than any other fabric, is about sparseness—the gaps are just as essential as the strands. Poetry has an emphasis on space: what isn’t said? How does withholding enrich the piece?

3. A wedding gown is a wedding gown because we say it is so. There is something outside of its physical existence that transforms the gown into a cultural object. So it is with poem: the words create a fabric, but the gown is made from something greater. The poem is in the spirit, not the letter.

4. We “put wedding gowns” on all sorts of things, plopping wordy significance onto them whether they deserve it or not. An exercise session becomes “a journey of self-transformation.” A large paycheck creates “a successful person.” A time of un-jobbed existence becomes “a gap in one’s resume.”*** A legal agreement becomes “a marriage.” By putting on the wedding dress of fancy labels, this speaker seems to reflect a desire to experience this cultural significance-making. We love making little poems of our lives, even if it doesn’t end well.

5. “I… saw I was making / a fatal mistake, that’s the poem”: This is the moment of truth that catches flame on the sticks of details. It shows how the “spirit” of the poem is very separate from its “letter,” where the “spirit” is “mistake” and the “letter” is “wedding.” This reflects a subjective interpretation of the moment that couldn’t exist in the details of a wedding, but only in the beholder of it. (Even the worst-planned wedding can’t be an objective mistake. It must be interpreted as so. Words don’t make a poem; the reader does.)

6. “… went through with it anyway, that’s the music”: In the music, we find emotion and momentum. Music, more than poetry, is subservient to time and rhythm. Poetry includes those things, but music doesn’t exist without them. If you want the music, you have to keep moving forward. You can’t stop twisting the handle on the music box. We like it when the music plays, so we keep doing stuff, like getting married.

“its embrace / is neutral, like God, or Switzerland since 1815” is just… such a good ending. So funny. So smart.

This is what I have for you all today. Happy almost-fall. Thank you to my friend Elias for calling me today and asking for me to write him a newsletter. Here you go! As always, please respond. Let me know what I’ve done wrong. Send me photos of your clash-liberated outfits. Send me foliage thirst-traps. I’m here for it.

May you feel the neutral embrace of silence,

Robiny

Notes

*Like an adult, I still organize my writing by semesters: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2017, and so on. The Springs are typically useless. This underlines my seasonality.

Source Material A: 

**Off-stage, I google: “how do you make lace”

***Tehe. Silly computers.