[1236] Self-Improvement
Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi <sashi@>
Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:
Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.
Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.
Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.
Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.
Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, apres-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.
Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.
Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing
is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.
The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.
So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.
-- Tony Hoagland
|
This poem is from a book of poems I was reading two nights ago, called
Donkey Gospel. And I was rolling in the aisles and speaking in tongues
when I was done as it was just a magnificient take on living (perhaps
living in America), full of humor and irony.
And Self Improvement speaks volumes of a lot of things: relationships
atleast the pathetic aspect of them, the whole self improvement creed,
hidden talents and the need for zany poetry to illumine all of these.
Run this!
Sashi
Other Details:
TONY HOAGLAND's first book, Sweet Ruin, won the Brittingham Prize in
Poetry and the Zacharis Award from Ploughshares at Emerson College. Donkey
Gospel was the recipient of the 1997 James Laughlin Award of The Academy
of American Poets. Hoagland currently teaches at the University of
Pittsburgh.
for a few more poems from the same book:
http://www.graywolfpress.org/resources/excerpts/excerpts-donkeygospel.html
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From: Bhandari Vidur <Vidur.Bhandari@>
Amusing. But hardly a poem - more like prose with a generous sprinkling of
line-breaks.
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Amusing. But hardly a poem - more like prose with a generous sprinkling of line-breaks.</FONT>
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--Boundary_(ID_IdSygH2yk1f3kHF5/DCOOQ)--
From: Beth Gourley <bag@>
This works as a poem for me--stong imagery is there, nice examples of
alliteration.
Thanks for the graywolfpress site--some other good excerpts from
Graywolf publications can be found there.
--beth
From: "Alan Kornheiser" <akornhis@>
Such a great poem. Immediately followed the link and read the other poems.
Immediately followed THAT link and bought the book. (Actually, tried to buy
the book...university/whatever publisher was closed on Saturday.) Went to
Amazon and bought the book. Wanted free shipping so also bought new
micro-choir version of Bach's St Matthew's Passion which was out of stock in
record store. Will probably now go to read Bach biography from large pile of
unread books. Will probably get distracted before then.
Is this a great list or what? Thanx for introducing me to Hoagland.
Alan
_____________________
Alan S Kornheiser
"That thing you're doing...don't do that."
From: "matt chanoff" <mattchanoff@>
Reminds me of one of the great JV Cunningham's epigrams:
Lip was a man who used his head.
He used it when he went to bed.
With his friend's wife or with his friend.
With either sex, at either end.
JV Cunningham
From: dmpalond@
The poem was sent along to me as a gesture of understanding and compassion.
Through its humor another of life's paradoxes, absurdities if you will, becomes
more tolerable.