I am collecting some of my unsorted, unfiled, wild roaming writings here so they don't become lost to digital decay.

Strange bedfellows: thoughts on 3 of my muses

I read that Chuck Close said that amateurs wait for inspiration, and the rest of artists just get up and go to work. I admit that I am a hopeless amateur and must appeal to a power higher than myself. I have a personal pantheon of poetes maudits that I turn to in such times as muses. Some of my most reliable fans of afflatus fuming to induce me to breathe new creations out into the ether include Wanda Coleman, Henri Cole (I'm not entirely sure how Henri Cole would feel about being an accursed poet but I hold him in the same esteem as my favorite symbolists and decadents) and Sylvia Plath. I have been thinking of all three a lot lately, since I have been in therapy working on some family wounds and I've realized that these three disparate writers who I've turned to so many times all share similar themes of family and domestic life and the barbarities that partners can enact on each other and their families.

I remember reading a line by Henri about his childhood and the sink being a "dirty dish mausoleum" and it was so representative of the depression and neglect that can settle over a house when the parents are fighting; I know my mom spent a lot of my childhood being ground down to nothing by my dad, and the household chores sometimes fell by the wayside. And when I heard him read Chiffon Morning, it split me open as a young adult. The fighting parents, of whom he says: " I try to pity them. Perhaps God did/on those occasions when battle was a prelude/to sex, and peace, like an arrow, found us."

Wanda Coleman is another poet who nails the trials of domestic existence and gives me a similar kind of feeling after reading Henri's work, that of being split and banged on the brain like a pomegranate, and the feelings just fall out. Wanda in Worry Land is so relatable, and I don't think she ever got the credit she should have as a writer while she was alive, or even now...she, who wrote "all the lights are red, the poets dead/ there is no north." The first time I read that, it was just so devastating, so hopeless. If life was a game, Wanda Coleman was playing on the hardest setting possible, and still managed to produce a body of work that is beautiful and remarkable.

And I love Sylvia Plath, another poet who understands domestic enmeshment between the sexes; she uses imagery of hooks, stones, and balloons...i've always wondered if those are metaphors for the relationships in her life...keeping her hooked on/into reality, the hook as a phallic barb, the stones sometimes weighing her down, sometimes (her children as balloons) lifting her up. I know a lot of poeple think her work is often a bit depressing, but there is such joy and sensuality in her language, the mouth feel of reading her work out loud is amazing, almost an erotic experience to feel her vowels embodied by my mouth, the Orphic orifice; I guess that has always been encouraging to me, that even in the darkest of times we can still find or make our own pleasure and joy.

Of course, most people only remember Sylvia Plath for her death, not her earnest reaching for transcendence through a perfectly turned line. Sylvia has always been the Queen Bee of my pantheon of poetes maudits, I have been stung again to work on (finish? please god, finish) my hypertext bee project that has been percolating on the backburner and congealing in the glial goo...maybe it is time to finally be exorcised...

I haven't read any of the new biographies out on her yet; I wonder if anyone has wrote about how the day she died was the Feast of St. Gobnait, patron saint of bees and beekeepers. I know that for a person as smart as Sylvia, that it isn't just a coincidence, I suspect she knew it and planned it for us, one last affirmation that she offered her words as honey, as a salve that sticks in the throat and makes the indignities of the everyday a bit easier to swallow...kind of sad, that the connection is not more publicized: it would add a whole new layer of mystique to her standing in the pantheon of poetes maudits...like Alice Fulton says, of Janis Joplin (and her brass-assed language)...legend's last gangbang, the wildest lover.