The Kingdom of Poetry

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 33

Christian has been “off” poetry lately. He is concentrating on practical matters like staying sober and alive, but it is kind of frustrating for me.

Lately when I see him I’ve been getting him to read out loud to me a chapter from Ian Gibson’s biography of Lorca. Last night he read this except from a letter young Frederico wrote to the Andalusian poet Adriano del Valle y Rossi…

“I believe we are surrounded by the souls of those who died and it is they that prompt our sorrows and they who propel us into the kingdom inhabited by the blue-and-white virgin called Melancholy — that is to say, the kingdom of poetry.”

While I believe the influential modern poet Jorie Graham certainly entered the kingdom of Anorexia just like me, and perhaps her own personal Pan’s Labyrinth, I do not believe the woman has ever entered the kingdom of poetry except as a visitor on someone else’s punch card.

She is mad. And she has us all believing she is seeing her way to a new use of language. But she is connected and she can get you published so why shouldn’t we revere her and her assignments to have her students memorize poems each week.

I just finished reading ~gaining~ the truth about life after eating disorders by Aimee Liu. I had to wait forever to get it from the library.

I suppose it is good. She certainly did an over achiever’s amount of research, a boatload of research on what is new in the land of eating disorders but I though the book was weirdly disjointed and profoundly unlyrical.

When I first got it, I sat down and consumed the first third with a notebook in hand looking for myself, and a way to understand; as if I were having a binge. But like all binges it didn’t last. I found it full of strange digressions to personal stories at odd times. Maybe it was too ambitious?

It, in its very self, gave me some insight into why people with eating disorders might work so hard in such a driven way to meet some self imposed goal and never reach it.

Because it the end an anorexic must die to reach her ultimate goal, to disappear. And as driven as we are there is some part of us that doesn’t really want to die.

I guess I am glad I read it but I found all the inspirational tripe at the end kind of nauseating and wish that it had been less than and more than it is.

I have an acquaintance that uses the term “fluffy hair” on occasion when describing a woman she might know. This was driving me crazy, she is from Texas and I though maybe Fluffy Hair was perhaps a subgroup of Big Hair or was a description of a particular kind of unsuitable cut or perhaps even a pejorative of some type.

(This is what I am thinking about when not thinking about how many calories I ate today and what a bad gross girl I am)

Anyway I finally asked her. And she said it was purely a descriptive term for a woman whose hair had body and movement but wasn’t curly or in ringlets or straight. And she pointed out to me that most blondes have hair that is straight or doesn’t move. (Or is badly permed and colored, my addition.)

I’ve been checking this out and I think she is on to something. I love it when people use their own unique descriptors and aren’t slaves to the language police.

I wonder if the souls that surround us have an opinion on this?