While I was in Honolulu last December for work, I spent most of my time off tooling around town with one of my colleagues, who is somewhere in the progression of her creative non-fiction MFA. There seemed to be two recurring themes in our conversations: whether or not irony was still a valid mode of communication, both in writing and in ordinary conversation... and the fact that she's rather ecstatically in love with a new-ish boyfriend. And then, this Saturday morning, I made coffee and then got back into bed to read Anna Moschovakis' incisive and remarkable book, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, and I found the following excerpt from "The Blue Book" section, which I felt like conflated those two strands of conversation. And she's masterfully crafted it, as well. Enjoy!
Many people change their names.
Afterward, they are not seen as different by most people.
They may have private or public reasons for changing their names.
They may change their names to buck or bolster tradition, for example.
(The change may or may not, in fact, buck or bolster tradition.)
Some people change their sex.
They may have private or public reasons for doing so.
Afterward, they are seen as different by most people.
Some traditions only become buckable with progress.
Sex is a noun that can be both active and descriptive.
A view of sunlight filtering through trees can seem corny or kitsch.
Sex seems to retain the ability to be experienced non-ironically.
This may be due to the doubling inherent in sex with another person.
Irony may be inherent rather than apparent in this doubling.
Heterosexual couples may experience a stronger/weaker doubling than homosexual couples.
Couples in which one person takes on the other's name seem to be addressing this doubling.
I wonder what it does for them.
Name is a word that can be both active and descriptive.
Like many people, I like hearing my name spoken during sex.
A feeling of intimacy after sex can often be mutual and sincere.
This can be true even in a setting of filtered sunlight.
Intimacy is only possible because people are seen as different.
My name comes from my father's side of the family.
I sometimes wish I had a different name, or no name at all.
I sometimes imagine what sex would be like in a world without names.
I really love the way Moschovakis is able to make these assertions without doubling back on herself, questioning herself, but, in the same space of this poem, leaves herself plenty of room for theorizing. I'm not entirely sure how she does that. And the seams between each line are so logical! And there are seams that connect different, non-adjacent parts of the poem together in a masterfully-planned sort of way. She is god to this poem in a way that I don't really see too often. And if you were to read the whole "The Blue Book" section, you being to notice that her clarity of thought and organizational structure emerge in a way that feels a little foreign and very exciting, when pushed into verse form. She is an algebrist (my spell-check makes me think I just coined that word) to this poem as well.
To anyone familiar at will with the lingo of the enneagram, I think I might characterize this poem as rather 5-ish. Its tone, I think, seems to be trying very hard to establish an intellectual distance between the speaker and the subject matter of sex... yet there is this just-below-the surface, powerfully emotive yearning for sincerity and connectivity in the context of the sex act itself. The reason this seems 5-like to me is because 5s are often characterized as being all head, no heart-- which I think is a pitiful misrepresentation of 5-ishness. It's just that, because big emotions often leave a 5 feeling drained, they have a difficulty processing them without establishing the aforementioned emotional distance. But that certainly doesn't mean that heart isn't thumping away under the nerdy surface, right? Anyway, perhaps this is part of why I've been so suckered in by the cool, aloof tone this poet adopts here. How does she do it???
The question we always asked in poetry workshops, when something really great turned up in class, was "Do you wish you wrote it?" And about this poem, and this book, really, I would say, unequivocally, yes. Apparently, she's giving a reading in Brooklyn as part of Sommer Browning's reading series at Pete's Candy Store at the end of the month, and oh, how I would love to go. I may, however, have to settle for going to hear her when she's in Baltimore in May. I found my voice getting tired as I was reading this book, the desire to hear them aloud was so great. Surely, she'll do a better job of it than I.
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