Time for self to tackle all those books and journals she ended up lugging home from the AWP conference in Seattle!
Not to mention the two she added on the plane back to San Francisco: a poetry chapbook by Karen LaLonde Alenier, who sat directly across the aisle from self; and a book called Galerie De Defformité — should she call it hyper-text? Or Trans-Genre? — by the woman seated directly behind self, Gretchen E. Henderson.
(Oh, AWP. You are so wonderful. Self can’t, she can’t even. Stop talking now, self. Just Get On With It)
Self will start with Karren’s book, On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles (which Karren calls a kind of “biography in poems”):
“Chasing the Fox: Jane Bowles Visits Her Injury”
My mother Claire wore fox
fur and Shalimar for my
Stoneleigh boarding
school interview. She sat up
straight, patted my thigh,
“You see my daughter is
special,” Eyes narrowing
and nostrils glistening,
the headmistress unfurled
her rolled handkerchief
and leaned close
to hear Claire say,
“Jane is a Jewess.”The agony
I felt riding the pedestal Claire built
for a princess. When I fell from my mount,
the horse, whiter than a WASP in winter,
looked as surprised as the little girl
dusting off her habit and clutching
her throbbing knee.As for the fox,
red as fever, she winked at the dogs
that had lost her scent. Woof! I barked
when I should have howled.
A brief note about Paul and Jane Bowles (from the back of Karren’s chapbook):
Paul Bowles was born December 30, 1910, and died November 18, 1999. He was a composer, fiction writer, and poet. He grew up in the Jamaica Queens neighborhood of New York City. He married fiction writer and playwright Jane Auer in 1938. She died May 4, 1973 in Malaga, Spain. Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco in 1947 and made Tangier his home until his death. In the early 1950s, he wintered in Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka).
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
