I read Tender Buttons as an undergrad at UCLA, and I loved the way Stein used each word as the start of an equation of sorts—make sense? So each word always equals at least another and then one more because that's what language is: the start of something, part of a symbolic system—a bit like math—and so within this system of symbols individual words can have multiple meanings, but also mean no one thing, which makes accurate language so difficult to achieve. So I think of each poem as a project in trying to find the exact way to express something. This is probably why I am a better writer than talker.

 

In graduate school I read Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely and realized I had been writing the wrong thing all along. I wanted to write something like that—there is such preciseness in her voice.

 

 

I am a very slow-one-painful-word at a time kind of writer because I am still learning not to be afraid—and accept that everything I say is not going to be what I want, so I might as well say it, even though I want it back as soon as I’ve said it.

 

Because I am always trying to disappear or take back something as soon as I’ve said it—it  sounds weird, but some of the most devastating losses in my life have been the stories or words I’ve shared with people who didn’t deserve them. There are also all these rules to language and conversation and who gets to say what and what gets to be said and the most important conversations always end up being the most heavily edited. And so “lid” is cast-iron and heavy but it is also protective.

 

Pyrrhus was the king of Epirus and during the Pyrrhic war, he would win these battles against the Romans, but it cost him so many men; in the end the Romans had a bigger supply of men to replenish their armies than did Pyrrhus, and so his victories ultimately lead to his defeat, hence the phrase “pyrrhic victory.” Also, a pyrrhic foot in poetry is a foot made of 2 unaccented syllables. It was a way for me to express my real relationship with words. That poem is really about me trying to come to terms with the fact that I will lose my hearing at some point in my life. I have been losing it slowly most of my life and at 32 I was told I did not need a hearing aid “yet,” but would soon.  This was devastating to me because I love music and language and the thought of not being able to hear it one day frightened me (it still does). And so do I throw myself into language?

 

I am finishing up a chapbook that looks at the nature of desire and space.

 

 

 

I papered my walls and windows

with them, these neglected selves

turned outward—and then

a piece of green thins

into the blue.

 

I rub it between my palms

turn it, fold it;

I flick it down

and write. I call

it “lid.”

 

 

Learning to Hear with My Head Voice

“An aging woman finds no shelter in language.”

—Eavan Boland, “Anna Liffy”

 

1.

 

Words drop

on Pyrrhic feet,

murmur and wilt

before I can wrap

them in meaning.

Whispers swish

past me and I am

only thirty two

writing beneath

the speakers

on karaoke night

at the Tipsy Bull

because the silence

is spreading.

 

 

2.

 

I

was dropped

became dropped

it couldn’t be helped

the slipperiness

of self

stripping

and flopping

onto an endless

page of question

and faint reply

and I’s

hiding

because grin

is Steining

the disparity

of writing