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Ars Poetica

I

Last week I applied for a poetry fellowship. The application was due in three days. I wrote it

quickly and sent it in. Then I forgot about it. I forgot about the whole thing.

 

II

A few days later, I received an email. Congratulations. You have won a second place fellowship to attend the so and so writers conference..…

I was thrilled. After the initial high, I checked the agenda. Because of Covid, the workshops would be virtual. Zoom workshops in the morning; zoom workshops in the afternoon; zoom workshops in the evening. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Zooms loomed over me. How would I zzzzz (sleep), another problem. Also, what about all I had to do at home: shop; cook; clean; work; visit my elderly parents, and things I enjoy, like riding my bike?

 

III

That night I dreamed I was at a walk-in clinic. The nurse held out a stick. The thin, liquid line was blue.

I was pregnant.

I wanted an abortion.

I called my uncle, the head of OBGYN at a major New York hospital.

This certainly was a dream because my uncle had been dead for 30 years ago and fifteen years earlier, I’d head my ovaries removed.

 

IV

When I was young, I felt frightened. A cousin’s I.Q. was twenty points higher than mine, he told me. How could I compete?

I was a girl, I had other ways of getting noticed.

I became perfect.

I studied perfectly.

I sat in perfectly uncomfortable positions like  Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man.

I solved quadratic equations perfectly, which, according to my own accounting system, made me a perfect human being, a superhuman.

I read in Nietzsche that a man could become a superman by murdering someone, like Roskalnikov in Crime and Punishment did. If you wanted to become a superwoman, you would starve.

I ate half a cottage cheese sandwich a day.

I lost my period.

I lost some of my hair. At college one night, I left my eyebrows in a pile at the library.

 

V

When I awoke from my dream, I understood its meaning at once. I didn’t want to go to the poetry conference. I did not want to give birth to this new baby, poetry. I did not want to push and writhe and agonize. I did not want to produce, create, live large. It was all the old anorexic crap: “A Lesser Life,” the title of a book I once read called it.

 

VI

Soon, I fell back into a light sleep. In my half-waking state, I imagined myself dialing an 800 number (or was it 911)?

I wanted to register a poem. (How do you register a poem?)

No one answered.

A taped message then said "Your call is important to us."

But when I got up to scribble down some notes so that I would remember this dream, I wrote:

Your poem is important to us.

 

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