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Overview
Olivia Laing
In this, her second anthology of poetry, Maggie Nelson experiments with poetic forms long and short as she charts intimate landscapes, including the poet's enmeshment in a beloved city-New York-before and after the events of 9/11. The poems of The Latest Winter are rich with wit, melancholy, terror, curiosity, and love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786994691 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2018 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 106 |
| Sales rank: | 457,672 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and award-winning author of The Argonauts, Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Poem I Was Working On Before September 11, 2001
after Louise Bourgeois
Say something awful, say
"She leaned on the fork"
Say something beautiful, say
"Eyes smudged with soft kohl"
Now lead the way under the spiders, yes under the spiders
where a bad woman rules. Glassy white eggs in a wrought-iron
grid — she almost goes through with it. Engulfed in a perfect
day, the pressure lifts —
urban life is OK as long as
there is still wind, something new to breathe, though do you want
to know what that strange smell is Well I'll tell you it's the fumigation
of the lizards in the subway system,
KEEP CLEAR, DO NOT INHALE
O you're so gullible. But can I breathe here — where? —
in this tiny circle, where the homunculus
is hopping on the gamelan and playing the song of joyful death — just think
about that. Say something nice, say
"Your sexiness is necessarily an aporia,
but that just means nothing can ever demolish it." Now that we're grown up
and have no willpower (of all things!)
The absurdity is I hope this will never, ever end —
not the banging on the can, not the dark brown liquid in the blue glass. I love it here, on earth — I don't care a fig
for what comes next, which is exactly what the suicide bomber said of the Israelis he killed yesterday
at the discoteque. There is something bestial in me, it wants to be drunk on saliva, and
there is something ugly about me, which has to do with my fear of dying of hives. But above all
there is something very lovely about today,
the day I wandered beneath a great spider
and the city opened itself up as if to apologize for its heat and changing ways.
Don't sit there slobbering all over the thermometer! The least you could do
is try to capture an enigma with an image,
or don't sweat it — out West my mother
is fondling the stone bellies of the Three Graces.
She waters everything at night now, she is
the night-gardener, she goes out with a flashlight and looks for insects doing their deeds. Looks
for all that oozes underneath. Yesterday I saw a man burn a strip of skin off his arm —
he just threw the skin in the trash and for a moment we all stood there, staring
at the bright white streak on his arm. It didn't look like anything. Then the red blood started to perk up
around the edges, it was quite eerie and beautiful,
it was the skin under the skin, it was
the flesh. Our flesh is often so red in the photos that get taken of us, and I admit
that something about life overheats me, but nothing like the teenager who overdosed on Ecstasy and was found
on her kitchen floor with a body temperature of 104 degrees.
I saw it on the News, the News whose job it is to scare me.
It would seem by such a lead story that these are decadent and peaceful times, but there is
much else. But the rest doesn't count. The bottom half always drops out, as George W. dines along the Venice canal.
But today — just today — I felt new for the first time this century —
no one noticed me — I was unsexed! — I stood
in front of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon;
I could take it or leave it. I read Dr. Williams
in the park, he says the sun parts the clouds like labia (I guess he would know). Looking up
from my book I became momentarily afraid of the polar situations that may arise between us,
but then I let it all go. I'm tired of small dry things.
I want to nestle into the clammy crack
between conscience and id — speaking of which,
I'm so glad you turned me on to donut peaches —
they will taste like this summer until they taste like next summer, but why
think about that yet? You never let me see you naked but when you do it is like a rain of almonds, your soft spots
smell so tart and floral, and you don't pull me into you often but when you do you pull me into you. All of this
is worth fighting for. We may be called upon to do so, in which case there will be no more Ovaltine,
no therapy, no crackers. Praying is just thinking about nothing, or trying not to think about
the lines of cows, their fat nipples squeezed into the machines. (I'm surprised the milk
still comes out!) Through a hole in my head I imagine my brain seeping out, in shell-pink ribbons
as the village moderates itself into night:
bottles are getting recycled, objects are left behind
in moving vehicles, people remove their earrings and war-paint and get ready to sleep. Tomorrow is Saturday,
and the city will rise. There could be a planet out there whose inhabitants are watching our demise, but enough
already about the living dead! There may be neither space nor time in the space and time
in which I love you, and thus our love will remain iridescent forever, and have only
as much sternness as the universe has to offer
(which may or may not be much). There is a world
that I think, but it is not different from this one.
The great spider and her shadow, the clouds
moving across the mirrored Cineplex — they're real, too.
Twin of sheen
Twin of sheen Sit with me tonight Tell me all you've seen Your monsters bright Your shapely disease Stay until day Promise to be Thickest with me, bathe Me in the sea-smell Of your flood Your little hell Your little hood Your sly walk Your aching thought.
Brightness
I like a pinto bean now and then words rattling in a cage a light show in a jar
Back at the bakery they said you were bright and so you were a menu of striped sky-blue sky
Stranger in rage, shall I sweep up after the bogus orality,
the spidery rasping on my walls
As for you, you must choose the best jacket for your new life on the street
As for me, I've got to get a sense of comedy about the deep fruit in which we're living raspberries dribbled on fresh slices of paper
You just came and took it,
took it out of me like a tonsil Oh you, prodigy you, and all your sweet mashed potatoes
1999
In my dream last night I had a boob job and my nipples were pointing off in two different directions.
It was disorienting and the photographer was disappointed.
But later he turned into the best lay of my life He was so huge to get inside me he had to hoist himself onto a sort of cross-country skiing Nautilus machine,
at which point I was part new boob girl,
part Christina Ricci.
Upon penetration everything exploded —
he exploded, I exploded the dream exploded I didn't even remember it until you grabbed my breasts in the living room and said What kind of bees make milk? (Boo-bees.)
Why is that joke always funny to me,
as is the one about cheese that's not yours (it's Na-cho cheese!) but that one needs Pookie to say it out loud. But back to my main concern:
what are academic thoughts and how do you know if you have them?
Everyone at the lecture was talking about the Gerty chapter in Ulysses
while I was spacing out,
trying to remember if I'd seen it illustrated or just dreamt it — either way I can still see the sketch clearly, looking up her blue dress, a red band of elastic stretched taut across her crotch. It would be just like someone to illustrate that scene. Thanksgiving is almost here, what shall we eat? My mother is coming over for dinner but sometimes we don't agree on things, for example she says when I was growing up I wasn't pretty, I was distinctive.
But everybody knows distinctive is code for ugly. The thing is,
I wasn't ugly, though an oral surgeon once told me so, but now I know he just wanted to rearrange my mouth.
Train to Coney Island
This time I'm going all the way to the Mermaid Parade, I only wish I were a photographer! It's late, I hope the floats won't be dismantled.
Last night I dreamt that L. and I got married but our audience was not behaving — Jennifer Miller the bearded lady kept yapping. In real life I splintered up and asked M. for a second chance: "I'll change," etc.
We are all equally deceived, perhaps, by ourselves. One thing I know for sure:
it's pointless to hope I have an encyclopedic mind. All it ever retains is the bare-bones sentiment of the thing, the hiss of information rushing off into the canyon. I don't really mind, words chip off the block and float in summer air. They're nothing compared to the buttery rings of Saturn! & I have always been a sucker for mystification. Here we are at Neptune Avenue! It's funny and a little sad that I've written such a chatty,
prosy sonnet, as all I wanted was to take the train to its final destination and write a teeny chiseled poem, some perfect illumination
Blockbusters
for L. Menand
Blockbusters are only blockbusters if we go see them, so let's go, let's make them what they are, let's pay for them.
the future of poetry
the poetry of the future has got to have a lot of nerve. it's got to come from at least three brains: the brain in the head, the gut-brain, and the brain in the ovaries. it will wax red and rise bone-white. the poetry of the future will be nutritious and opulent. justifications for its existence will no longer be interesting: lenin loved beethoven. the poetry of the future will glitter like a scimitar. the poetry of the future will be unabashedly adolescent. it will get younger as it gets older.
it will reflect the interests of both carnivores and herbivores.
it will be as heterogeneous as it is misguided. the poetry of the future will watch blue branches shaking in winter and red canyons gaping with sun. it will send a space shuttle full of representative poems to a gaseous planet where upon exiting the shuttle the poems will turn into gorgeous multicolored rocks that can live without water. the poetry of the future will wear squeaky shoes in the vatican. it will say where we work and who we love and what we eat. sometimes it will be hungover and desperate. it might bite its nails. tired of being on the lam, it might have to choose between giving itself up to the authorities or going out in a blaze of glory. the poetry of the future will be so enormous that it will only be visible from an aerial perspective. many will believe it to be a message from aliens. the poetry of the future will be so expensive and in demand that it will disrupt the global economy as we know it. as no one will ever be fully awake to the miracle of our existence its work will never be done. sometimes the poetry of the future will have to put on a silk kimono and sigh.
sometimes it will need to fuck like a bunny. other times it will have to walk 29 miles to visit a grave. it will have bones to excavate and houses to rebuild. the poetry of the future might worry it will die from weeping. it might have to send a root down to come up. sometimes it will put on a head-lamp and go looking for urchins. at times the poetry of the future will be nothing more than red eyes caught in a flash photograph or the memory of percussion. the poetry of the future will compete with advertising and lose. it will then be run by a secret society of cave-fish that have never needed to develop eyes. it will retreat to a hearth made of mud and eat beans with its family in a comfortable silence. the poetry of the future will be the last sad sack to leave the party. the poetry of the future will be written by women. it will accept chance as its engine. it will have a front row seat at the cinema. it will be vigorously imperfect. the poetry of the future will live in a redwood tree for 2 years if it feels it has to make a point.
it will understand that seeds must stay scattered. the poetry of the future will say, last stop, everybody off! once we get off the poetry of the future will set us on a scavenger hunt in which the first thing we have to find is our own idea of utopia.
the poetry of the future will come home sopping wet after thinking things through and ask for a second chance. the poetry of the future might take a vow of silence. the poetry of the future will know everything there is to know as soon as it is born. above all, the poetry of the future will do whatever the hell it wants.
my life as an exchange student
for puri y las gemelas
teenage girls in the style of "heavy"
dance with their faces an inch from the wall
I am a virgin in the way that hurts, and life feels consistently
intense: the tan face of danny at la cuadra, he seems so worldly
the streaked hair of the town slut who is on "la pastilla"
I am not on la pastilla but all the same they will eventually call me una desgracia
(how would he know, my spanish father who worked all day at renault)
those were the days of pepper trees, when I was unsure if anyone would ever love me
and afraid I would die of acne in a foreign country. each dusk I waded
in the ankle-high cotton that floated in from portugal across the fetid river
where we weren't allowed to swim
(it had something to do with franco).
I didn't die there, though I could have or later swirling underwater in the dirty
mediterranean, all fucked up on sherry after giving first fellatio by a hotel pool
(not our hotel, we'd hopped the fence)
we woke up on lawn chairs in the mist
I don't really know if any of this actually happened or who those guys with the self-inflicted tattoos were, anyway
ever since then I'm a little afraid of madrid I was jealous of all the girls, their beauty
the brunette from L.A. and my botticelli angel, amy I thought a lot about free will and siouxsie
who would have thought my future friends would be
so percussive, that I would live so long in one american city, or that I would learn to like
the dick stuffed in my face.
Holed Up
Holed up in my room with the Puritans They woo me with their vigor and eye for detail
but still I schlep Roman for icons of cloud out my window, ominous gray then shouting gold
then dispersed into an archipelago of dust As night comes and closes the shops that sell
cashmere scarves outside my price range strollers roll by stuffed with extra children
Everyone is stocking up at the deli, there's a certain piracy to it I think it's the streets that first make the sound of rain
Unbridled honesty, is there any other kind? Oh yes I used it yesterday, when I half-told you something small
Juliet
(after Eve, with a last line by Lee Ann)
I am lying on the bed which is really just a mattress on the floor that smells like incense and like Berkeley
Glass sliding doors lead out to a stone patio and a kidney bean-shaped pool that glistens in the early evening light, he is standing
to light a candle and find a condom, he is short and white and Irish with freckled shoulders and long hair down his back like red wheat
What he doesn't know is that I'm on a mission and he's the one I've chosen, this time I'm quite ready after spending the afternoon
lying around like cats in the sun his breath hot behind me
Do you like it like this, I like it like this
You see he was teaching me, we had the same size bodies but I was sharper around the edges due to my critical eye
It was crucial that he had both a verbal and visual imagination His skin so blotchy red color rising
in his cheeks in patches, his eyes an astonishing blue and always red-rimmed because he was such a stoner I lay on my back amazed and perplexed
especially by his urging You've got to find the rhythm
I don't know if it felt good it felt like young animals thick in red and gold and darkness
Afterwards we went swimming and then sat in the hot tub where he said he was hard again and I was sore and steaming and we did it again
and then again. Later I would let him videotape me masturbating but I would only do it under the covers
so all you could see on tape was a moving mass of white comforter. In another part of the tape I am sitting naked, looking shy and giggling uncomfortably
as he sprays water on me from a spray-bottle probably just trying to get me to move around but I couldn't move, I was too excited and too sad
and too anxious to see what would happen next which was that his father drove me to the BART station winking the whole time, saying Now I know
to leave my boy alone when I see your bug parked outside
A few days later I have to go visit my sister at a reform school in Idaho and end up spending Christmas in a teeny rural hospital
with what I suspected was a punishment from God, so much red blood in my urine and pain in my abdomen, but it turned out to be what my mom later called "the honeymoon disease." And while I was gone
he fooled around with my best friend, and thus I was betrayed by the boy who never loved me the way I wanted to be. Still it was my mission, my wetness, and my sadness
My fifteenth year, drunk on the drug of love
Excerpted from "The Latest Winter"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Maggie Nelson.
Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
I.,
The Poem I Was Working On Before September 11, 2001, 3,
Twin of sheen, 8,
Brightness, 9,
1999, 10,
Train to Coney Island, 13,
Blockbusters, 14,
the future of poetry, 15,
my life as an exchange student, 17,
Holed Up, 19,
Juliet, 20,
Lucia, 22,
Poem Written in Someone Else's Office, 23,
Goodbye to All That, 29,
II.,
29, 33,
Imagine, 35,
Birthday Poem, 36,
Anatomy, 41,
Love #1, 43,
Julie, 44,
Aubade, 47,
Love #2, 48,
Words to a Woman, 49,
Sunday, 54,
Maine, 56,
Valentine, 58,
Death Canoe, 59,
III.,
The Latest Winter, 63,
Last Day at the Office, 69,
Motor Inn, 70,
Walk on Campus, 71,
5 Huber, 73,
The Earth in April, 74,
Spring in the Small Park, 75,
Goodbye at the start of summer, 76,
July, 77,
Summer Rain, 78,
Kaspar Hauser, 80,
*, 81,
Report from the Field, 82,
Dear Lily, 85,
The Future, 87,
December 23, 2001, 89,
In a war, 90,
Silence, 91,
Dailies, 93,