The Secret Life of This Life Now #14
14th in a series of brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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I recently snagged from my publisher the last 100 or so copies of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. I thought this series of essays might persuade 100 or so people to make those copies disappear. It’s also turning out to be a good teaser for my as yet unwritten memoir.
This is post #14 in the series. We are in the second section of the book, called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite.” These are poems about my childhood. The third poem in this section, and the 14th poem in the book, is “Imaginary Playmate.” Here is the first stanza of this ten-line poem:
My parents questioned me, suspecting you existed.
I affirmed you in a general way,
but kept the intimate details to myself—If you want to know the intimate details—and they are pretty racy—you need to buy the book.
The essays about this section of the book give me a chance to share a bit about how I grew up. I concluded the last installment of Secret Life with a poem in ten Sapphic stanzas that summarize my childhood from birth (1961) to age ten (1970).
“Imaginary Playmate” is about, to put it bluntly, the masturbatory fantasies of a small child who loved superhero comic books. There’s no poem about when the small child’s mother stole his pacifier while he slept and then lied to him about it—which I believe is intimately connected to the existence of figures like the “imaginary playmate” of this poem in the small child’s intimate fantasy life; but you can read about that in another memoiristic essay on Substack called “The Incident of the Pacifier in the Crib.”
The “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” section of This Life Now began life as a sequence of poems that appeared in Columbia Poetry Review (that’s out of Columbia College Chicago) in spring 2008. That publication included a few poems that did not make it into This Life Now, and I thought I would share a couple of those that had to do with my childhood love of comic books in their entirety here. Starting with “Coming Book Heroes.”
Comic Book Heroes
Origins reveal the thing naked and bereft:
Bruce Wayne watching his parents
crumple in the murderous Gotham night—
I think of the terror drawn on his face,
eyes wide spurting tears like drops of blood,
open mouth pink with swollen tongue,
icy cry caught forever in his black throat
by that comic book freeze frame.
And later I see him doing pull-ups, a boy
alone in the basement of his parents’ house,
his face too supple to hold the crease of resolve
that strains to leave its mark.Another poem in the “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sodomite” sequence as it appeared in Columbia Poetry Review but did not make it into This Life Now was “Metamorphoses,” included below in its entirety.
Metamorphoses
The best superheroes undergo transformations—
Bruce Banner, pelted by gamma rays, becoming the Incredible Hulk—
gimpy Don Blake striking his cane against the sidewalk—
becoming Thor, God of Thunder, with his flowing blond hair,
always saving the world from his evil brother Loki—
Why does their father, Odin, great Norse god that he is,
keep putting up with Loki’s crap?And now I’m going to let you even further behind the curtain. I was just searching my computer to find the original document containing “Comic Book Heroes” and “Metamorphoses,” and what I found along the way was an unpublished, frankly forgotten poem that I wrote for Marie Howe’s workshop in the MFA program at NYU in my first semester, fall 2003, which is to some extent a precursor to the version of “Comic Book Heroes” above. It’s called “Origins,” and displays a bit of my classical language background as well as my childhood fondness for superhero comic books.
Origins Origo, originis, feminine, from orior, oriri, to rise, like the sun in the East, a deponent verb, which puts aside its active forms but retains its active meanings. But I didn’t know then about grammar or etymology, only that I liked stories— how things started, where they came from, comic book heroes for instance— how parents crumple in the murderous Gotham night and Bruce Wayne vows revenge; how Kal El hurtles Earthward in red and blue swaddling as Krypton flails at the sun; how Bruce Banner dares the nuclear desert, sweeps insouciant Bud from the blast though he knows the countdown will overtake him, and gamma rays pelt him; how heroes and monsters— abandoned to their fates by gods, deeds of men the careless forces of the world— are born and made.
Okay, now I feel I’ve given you your money’s worth. And I did not have to go into a lot of dreary autobiographical narrative about hysterectomies and heart attacks and asthma and allergies and myopia. I keep mentioning those hysterectomies and heart attacks, but you will probably never learn anything more about them than that—until I write the memoir.
Back next time with more portraiture of the artist as a young sodomite in waiting. À la prochaine.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US.
Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:30 a.m. eastern time.
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