When I first started writing poetry, it was an accident. I’d always thought I was a fiction writer, but my lines on the page kept shrinking, compressing, and then one day….oooops a poem. So I figured I’d better read some poetry. I picked up A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone. Under the name of the last poet in the book, Leslie Scalapino, there was a poem titled “EPILOGUE: [anemone].” When I read the poem, a light bulb went off: I realized there must be infinite things language can do. I often go back to this book, and this particular semi-prose poem, as to a conversation with an old friend. Here is an excerpt:
I was able to describe my feelings:
by saying it was like being an insect who puts its feelers
out into the flowers of a plant, and sucks from them, as we were
(sucking) from the restaurants and bars of the city. . .
I realized later there was an odd foreshadowing in the poem of how—as if by a long seduction—I would grow into the city and the city into me, but all the time still with a sense of being outside myself.
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