I remember most vividly the lilacs that spring, the spring of my MA year at Hollins. I remember those lilacs more than the lilacs of any spring of my undergraduate years. I also remember most vividly the dogwoods and the dark cuts of midnight blue in the furrows of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the cows on the hills and valleys formed by those mountains. I remember my thesis advisor, Cathryn Hankla, trying to break me of the habit of always using the present perfect progressive tense in my poems, but I didn’t want anything to end. I didn’t want anything to be ending. I remembered everything so exceptionally well that spring because my heart was breaking, and I carried that heartbreak with me for a few more years until I didn’t know what else to do with it. It was then that I realized what I wanted more than someone to love were those lilacs, those dogwoods, those curls of wisteria, the fat bumblebees, the air and scenery of southwest Virginia, a place that Kathy Acker, when she was writer-in-residence my junior year, called heaven on earth.
In Thailand, the summer after I earned my MA, I watched dragonflies and butterflies and birds pair up and mate in the very air. I dipped orchids in holy water and folded myself at the feet of Buddha.
I waited tables while I applied and waited to hear back from MFA programs in poetry. One of my fellow waitresses interrogated me daily about my fake MA. She did research. She wanted to point me out as a fake. I carried drafts of things in my pockets. The cops I served burgers to asked me what good was learning anything if I couldn’t help people.
Although I got into my dream school, I didn’t accept the offer. I was still feeling sad and didn’t feel worthy of getting things that I wanted. So I said no and went to another school instead. There, at the University of Notre Dame, my professor made us study the modernist poets so thoroughly and scan their poems even. It was quite the opposite of what I would have had to do at my dream school. I was oftentimes quite angry. I was working on a book of footnotes, and my resistance to breaking the line was already making everyone quite uneasy.
I moved to New York to follow a boy from Notre Dame, a new boy, a new heart. I had only two hundred dollars, but I was in the city of my dreams. My roommate made dolls, and she made them talk to her and to each other, and she made me one and told me to keep it in my room. I’d come home some days to find them eating supper or watching TV. Once, there was an invasion of flies. Jenny, do you think something is rotting? She began searching behind the fridge and stove. On the counter was her Thanksgiving turkey from a week earlier, where it had sat since Thanksgiving.
I took a course in Dante; I took a course in Ancient Greek. I temped for Avon and Sotheby’s and a woman who funded her Village apartment and upstate home on million-dollar grants from a shady nonprofit she was running. I worked as the lowest rung on the ladder in publishing. I began work on my PhD at CUNY’s Graduate Center.
Doing my coursework, I tried to fill in gaps that I saw in my poetry education. I studied Victorian and metaphysical poetry. I took literature and arts of the 1850s, fin de siècle literature, and many courses with my dissertation advisor. I wrote a dissertation not on poetry but rather on the entrapment of girl children through enchantment, focusing on J. M. Barrie’s Wendy, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Henry Darger’s Girls.
I tell my students, at the end of the term, that they must have hobbies, because if they don’t have hobbies, then that means writing is their hobby, and it shouldn’t be that way; writing should be their life and not their hobby. I tell them to learn new things, different things, things that have nothing to do with writing. And not just learn them, but be good at them; master them; impress others with them. What I have learned about great writers: they were always obsessed with something, but they were very seldom obsessed with writing.
Writing Betwixt-and-Between
In J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird (1902), Peter Pan is referred to as a “betwixt-and-between.” It is in this book that Peter makes his first appearance in the works of Barrie. We will see him again, each time a bit different, in several more texts. How Barrie delivers the Peter story to us is already, in its nature, hybrid: Peter exists as a beginning in The Little White Bird, a play in Peter Pan (1904), a new beginning in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), and finally as a novel in Peter and Wendy (1911), which happens to be my favorite.
In all these Peter texts, what I adore is the intermingling of fact and fantasy, real and pretend. Dream-life, death, existence, play, and make-believe all comingle, and one’s position in any of these existential states is of grave and serious importance.
In Neverland, death can be performed, but it is also very real. By way of illustration, the narrator of Peter and Wendy reminds us that Hook can kill a pirate just to show us, the readers, how easily death is done on the island: poor Skylights hardly lives through the span of a sentence. And so many other deaths abound. Tinker Bell will
