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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=577818" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am A Poet</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Jill's a good kid who's had some tough luck. But that's <br>another story. It's a day when the smell of fish from Tib's hash <br>house is so strong you could build a garage on it. We are sit-<br>ting in Izzy's where Carl has just built us a couple of solid <br>highballs. He's okay, Carl is, if you don't count his Roamin' <br>Hands and Rushin' Fingers. Then again, that should be the <br>only trouble we have in this life. Anyway, Jill says, &quot;Why <br>don't you tell about it? Nobody ever gets the poet's point of <br>view.&quot; I don't know, maybe she's right. Jill's just a kid, but <br>she's been around; she knows what's what.<br> So, I tell Jill, we are at Izzy's just like now when he <br>comes in. And the first thing I notice is his hair, which has <br>been Vitalis-ed into submission. But, honey, it won't work, <br>and it gives him a kind of rumpled your-boudoir-or-mine look. <br>I don't know why I noticed that before I noticed his face. <br>Maybe it was just the highballs doing the looking. Anyway, <br>then I see his face, and I'm telling you--I'm telling Jill--this is <br>a masterpiece of a face.<br> But--and this is the god's own truth--I'm tired of<br>beauty. Really. I know, given all that happened, this must <br>sound kind of funny, but it made me tired just to look at him. <br>That's how beautiful he was, and how much he spelled T-R-<br>O-U-B-L-E. So I threw him back. I mean, I didn't say it, I say <br>to Jill, with my mouth. But I said it with my eyes and my <br>shoulders. I said it with my heart. I said, Honey, I'm throwing <br>you back. And looking back, that was the worst, I mean, the <br>worst thing--bar none--that I could have done, because it<br>drew him like horseshit draws flies. I mean, he didn't walk<br>over and say, &quot;Hello, girls; hey, you with the dark hair, your<br>indifference draws me like horseshit draws flies.&quot;<br> But he said it with his eyes. And then he smiled. And<br>that smile was a gas station on a dark night. And as wearying<br>as all the rest of it. I am many things, but dumb isn't one of<br>them. And here is where I say to Jill, &quot;I just can't go on.&quot; I<br>mean, how we get from the smile into the bedroom, how it all<br>happens, and what all happens, just bores me. I am a concep-<br>tual storyteller. In fact, I'm a conceptual liver. I prefer the<br>cookbook to the actual meal. Feeling bores me. That's why I <br>write poetry. In poetry you just give the instructions to the <br>reader and say, &quot;Reader, you go on from here.&quot; And what I like<br>about poetry is its readers, because those are giving people. I <br>mean, those are people you can trust to get the job done. They <br>pull their own weight. If I had to have someone at my back in <br>a dark alley, I'd want it to be a poetry reader. They're not like<br>some people, who maybe do it right if you tell them, &quot;Put this<br>foot down, and now put that one in front of the other, button<br>your coat, wipe your nose.&quot;<br> So, really, I do it for the readers who work hard and, I <br>feel, deserve something better than they're used to getting. I <br>do it for the working stiff. And I write for people, like myself, <br>who are just tired of the trickle-down theory where some-<br>body spends pages and pages on some fat book where every-<br>thing including the draperies, which happen to be burnt orange, <br>are described, and, further, are some metaphor for something.<br>And this whole boggy waste trickles down to the reader in the <br>form of a little burp of feeling. God, I hate prose. I think the <br>average reader likes ideas.<br> &quot;A sentence, unlike a line, is not a station of the cross.&quot; I <br>said this to the poet Mark Strand. I said, &quot;I could not stand to<br>write prose; I could not stand to have to write things like 'the <br>draperies were burnt orange and the carpet was brown.'&quot; And <br>he said, &quot;You could do it if that's all you did, if that was the <br>beginning and the end of your novel.&quot; So please, don't ask me <br>for a little trail of bread crumbs to get from the smile to the <br>bedroom, and from the bedroom to the death at the end, al-<br>though you can ask me a lot about death. That's all I like, the <br>very beginning and the very end. I haven't got the stomach for<br>the rest of it.<br> I don't think many people do. But, like me, they're either <br>too afraid or too polite to say so. That's why the movies are <br>such a disaster. Now there's a form of popular culture that <br>doesn't have a clue. Movies should be five minutes long. You <br>should go in, see a couple of shots, maybe a room with orange <br>draperies and a rug. A voice-over would say, &quot;I'm having a <br>hard time getting Raoul from the hotel room into the eleva-<br>tor.&quot; And, bang, that's the end. The lights come on, everybody <br>walks out full of sympathy because this is a shared experi-<br>ence. Everybody in that theater knows how hard it is to get <br>Raoul from the hotel room into the elevator. Everyone has had <br>to do boring, dogged work. Everyone has lived a life that <br>seems to inflict every vivid moment the smears, finger-<br>ings, and pawings of plot and feeling. Everyone has lived un-<br>der this oppression. In other words, everyone has had to eat <br>shit--day after day, the endless meals they didn't want, those <br>dark, half-gelatinous lakes of gravy that lay on the plate like <br>an ugly rug and that wrinkled clump of reddish-orange roast <br>beef that looks like it was dropped onto your plate from a <br>great height. God what a horror: getting Raoul into the ele-<br>vator.<br> And that's why I write poetry. In poetry, you don't do <br>that kind of work.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Lynn+Emanuel">Lynn Emanuel</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=577818" data-title="The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am A Poet de Lynn Emanuel" data-description="Jill's a good kid who's had some tough luck. But that's 
another story. It's a day when the smell of fish from Tib's hash 
house is so strong you could build a garage on it. We are sit-
ting in Izzy's where Carl has just built us a couple of solid..."></div>
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