Becoming Light
Authors: Erica Jong
Poems New and Selected
Erica Jong
To
keeper of my flame
Time is what keeps the light
from reaching us.
—Meister Eckhart
seven lives,
then we
become light…
Alphabet Poem: To the Letter I
To My Brother Poet, Seeking Peace
The Raspberries in My Driveway
In My Cauldron Under the Full Moon
At the Museum of Natural History
On Sending You a Lock of My Hair
In Defense of the English Portrait School
The Lives of the Poets: Three Profiles
III From
Fruits & Vegetables
(1971)
Walking Through the Upper East Side
Seventeen Warnings in Search of a Feminist Poem
Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit
Dear Marys, Dear Mother, Dear Daughter
For My Sister, Against Narrowness
VI From
How to Save Your Own Life
(1977)
The Long Tunnel of Wanting You
Her Broom, or the Ride of the Witch
VIII From
At the Edge of the Body
(1979)
Self-Portrait in Shoulder Stand
House-Hunting in the Bicentennial Year
Summoning the Muse to a New House
IX From
Ordinary Miracles
(1983)
Letter to My Lover After Seven Years
Poem for Molly’s Fortieth Birthday
I
T WAS IN HONOR
of the birthday of Edward Lear that an editor at the
New York Times Magazine
asked me to write something commemorating the versifier who perfected the smile in the sneer known as a limerick. I wrote a limerick for Edward Lear and then this “Epitaph for Myself.”
A demi-young author named Jong
Became famous for reasons quite wrong.
A poet at heart, she won fame as a tart—
That mispronounced poet called Jong.
That fugitive piece of doggerel was my way of dealing with the absurdity of my public persona. I had begun literary life as a poet and poetry was still the most important thing I did—even in a world of prose. My novels and essays were essentially a poet’s novels and essays—besotted with language and filled with my visual and visceral delight in words. Somehow, in a culture where everyone is alloted no more than a thirty-second sound byte, I had become Erica “Zipless Fuck” Jong. But that never meant that
I
bought the package. On the contrary, it was my poetry that kept me sane, that kept me whole, that kept me alive.
Poetry, however, is not easy to midwife into the world. Most publishers don’t want it (I will always be grateful to Gladys Justin Carr, William Shinker, and the other true booklovers at HarperCollins for being the exceptions that prove the rule) and most bookstores and review media ignore it. Nevertheless, at the climactic moments of our lives—death of a loved one, heartbreak, new love, the birth of a baby—we turn to poetry, and nothing else will do.
“Poetry is the honey of all flowers; the quintessence of all sciences…the marrow of wit…the very phrase of angels,” said Thomas Nashe, Shakespeare’s contemporary, in 1592. And so it still remains. Every funeral, every wedding, every honeymoon (married or not), every bris or christening is an occasion for poetry—and even in this epoch of sound bytes and MTV, people dig through tattered anthologies to find the fitting words.
Why is this? Because poetry comforts as nothing else can and because, apparently, we are still a race for whom magic is a word. The incantation both propitiates and validates the event. Since flesh can’t stay, we pass the words along.
These poems are the few I have chosen to save from my five published volumes of poetry, my second novel which contains a coda in verse, and my book on witches and witchcraft. (It will come as no surprise to my readers that I have been trying to blend genres from the beginning.) There is also a large complement of new poems and a series of early, previously unpublished poems which date back to my teens and twenties. Disowned when I published Fruits & Vegetables (in part because they betray my origins as a more formal poet who loved rhyme and meter), I am now ready to own them again. I started life as a poet, and a formal poet at that. It took maturity to let me love Whitman, Dickinson, and Allen Ginsberg. At last I am ready to own both my free and my metered sides.
My deepest thanks to Jay Parini, Gladys Justin Carr, and Tom Miller for helping me edit thirty years of poetry into one manageable volume; to Lavinia Lorch for shaping my English to an Italian cadence (in
Nota in una Bottiglia
); to my parents for reading me poetry when I was little; and to my daughter for loving to have that tradition passed along.
For that is what poetry is: a passing along.
Inevitably, these poems form a sort of autobiography in verse. I hope they are the reader’s autobiography as well as the writer’s.
IErica Jong
Weston, Connecticut
May 1991
NEW POEMS
Lullaby for a Dybbuk
The old self
like a dybbuk
clutching at my heel.
She wants to come back.
She is digging
her long red nails
into the tender meat of my thighs…
She tweaks my clit,
hoping that my sexaholic self
will surface
and take me back, back, back
to the land of fuck,
where, crazed with lust
I come over and over again,
going nowhere.
The old self
does not like
her displacement.
She resents the new tenant
sprucing up
her disorderly house.
She resents
the calm woman
nourishing her roses,
her daughter, her dogs,
her poems, her passionate
friendships.
She wants chaos
and angst and
Liebestod
.
She claims
she can’t write
without them.
But the new tenant
is wise to her tricks.
Disorder is not poetry,
she says.
Pain
is not love
.
Love flowers; love gives
without taking;
love is serene
and calm.
I talk to the dybbuk:
My darling dybbuk,
I will love you
into submission.
Tweak me, I will only
caress you.
Claw me, I will only
kiss you back.
For what I have learned
lets me love
even my demon.
Demon—I love you
for you are
mine,
I say.
And demons die
of love.
(After Neruda, who left us his socks)
The poet alone
is writing an ode
to her shoes—
her shoes which