Play For Today: Two Can Play At That Game

2 February 2009 | 11:45 PM

Before you give me that look, just hear me out. Sure, I did just skip several days’ worth of entries, but I did manage to concoct two bedtime stories out of thin air, as well as make seemingly my 10th and 11th billion variations on the recipe for tacos over the weekend: I’ve been creative, just not creative here. Ahem.

Be that as it may, I happened to read through Erica Jong’s newest book of poetry, Love Comes First, while slurping down a dreadfully necessary cup of coffee at the bookstore today. I’ve never been a huge Jong fan – even her fiction always seems gimmicky to me – but the woman’s an acclaimed writer so I figured it was worth a look. What I found were tons of good ideas that never bore any fruit. I once heard an American sportscaster explain why he never really took to soccer: he said, “It’s like watching a football game where every pass is just barely incomplete.” His point was, sure there’s a lot of running around, wild gesticulating and tension, but ninety minutes later you’re exactly where you were to begin with, namely nil-nil and preparing to kiss your sister. This sort of crystallizes how I felt about Jong’s poems: the concepts all seemed to be really inventive, but she was never able to draw them out into anything that made them stand up by themselves. Instead, despite the errant beautiful turn-of-phrase here or there, her poems seem to collapse onto themselves from their own weight (or perhaps the weight of her ego which, I was able to glean from her efforts, is ponderous indeed).

In any case, I came away from reading the book with a new-found sense of pride in my own mediocrity. After all, my poetry’s utter shite, not to put too fine a point on it, but my stuff’s no more treacly or self-indulgent than the all-hat-no-cattle stuff that Jong’s just published, and I don’t have the formal training, awards or confidence as a writer that she does to give me courage in the face of ineptitude. To that end, I’ve resolved to continue to write bad poems and terrible lyrics, and better yet, subject you to them. And….scene!

Fatherhood #38

There was a time,
when my children asked ‘why’,
that I would blanch and stammer,
steer them toward ‘how’ and ‘what’
and hope their curiosity
would rest its flickering gaze
on some other line of inquisition.

(After all it’s an enormous responsibility,
explaining the world to a child.
Fuck it up and its therapy and night-sweats forever.)

Nowadays, though, I’m unafraid,
and finally see that
it’s not mine
to explain the world to them,
but rather to give them a compass
and let them explore it themselves.

Now I realize that the answer
to all of their ‘why’ questions
is simply ‘why not?’

I can’t tell if it’s the wearying effect Jong’s writing had on me or the fact that I’m coming down off of about fourteen cups of coffee today, but I’m beat. G’night.

Posted by Andy in Play For Today