Voices in my head

I don’t know how to harmonize the jostling inner voices of the last few weeks into coherent prose, so here’s some cacophony.

• I am so nervous about Zooming with this literary agent, I could puke.
• Hey, that went fine. We agree on what revisions my novel ms needs. We agree! I’ll sign on with Arley Sorg at KT Literary! Paperwork coming soon!
• This is good, right? But is it real? I’m probably just having fantasies about my fantasy novel being repped by this fantastic person.
• In the meantime I keep hitting news sites. This administration gets more and more murderous.
• The contract looks pretty good. I ask a few questions, like the answers, and send the forms back. Done and dusted.
• The voice in my head exclaims, HOLY SHIT! It’s not that I don’t think I deserve this step forward toward possible publication (emphasis on possible), but I have known a LOT of writers who deserve it, too, and it doesn’t happen for them.
• Stunned.
• More like gobsmacked, but I’m open to suggestions on synonyms.
• Happy. With bolts of guilt.
• Get in the car to Asheville and drive to the Punch Bucket Literary Festival, where I see a few friends and make a few more. At the end of a long Saturday of multiple presentations and a wine reception, I realize I’m wearing my dress backwards. (Photos below.)
• Sciatica kicks up again, mildly. Is it the driving or the impatient way I’m racing through my new exercises? The PT person sets me straight.
• Time to clear the decks between novel revisions. I write letters of recommendation, an anonymous external review of a tenure file, and one book blurb.
• No one deserves to die that way, but this guy we’re being asked to revere like a saint: he was a charismatic white nationalist who stayed just clear of advocating violence, with tacit understanding that he was inspiring others to doxx, threaten, and worse. I do not grieve.
• An editor solicits poems. Communications at W&L publishes a piece on my recent accomplishments. A copy of the ecopoetry anthology The Nature of Our Times, edited by Luisa A. Igloria, Aileen Cassinetto, and David Hassler, arrives with one of my mushroomy poems in it. I get another congratulatory note on my Best American Poetry piece from a distinguished poet I’ve never met. During this alignment I feel visible, likely a brief sensation, but a gift. (I was going to say “a gift from the universe” but it’s really FROM EDITORS who deserve the cosmic credit.)
• Pre-birthday dinner on a friend’s back porch, watching the sun set over the mountains. Another kind of luck.
• My eldest child sends me the embroidery pictured above. Look at those mycelial threads!
• My actual birthday arrives and I attend a reading by two visiting poets, Julia Kolchinsky and Jaswinder Bolina. The reading is fire. At dinner after, Shenandoah editor Beth Staples urges me to get dessert and I sheepishly order a fruit cup. It arrives with a lit candle shoved into a slice of banana and the waiters serenade me.
• Fifty bazillion people wish me happy birthday on FB, which is so kind although I feel guilty again because I have NOT been keeping up with distant friends’ special days. I navigate to the site to finish reading the messages. I learn through the many shocked posts on my timeline that Jennifer Martelli has died.
• I think of Frank O’Hara’s elegy for Billie Holiday’s voice: “Everyone and I stopped breathing”
• I last saw Jenn in late spring, twice. First was at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival where she spoke memorably on a panel about shame. My notes don’t quote her but I think she said something about not giving shame the time of day, being done with it after a childhood steeped in it. I was admiringly gobsmacked.
• A poet who was supposed to do a reading/ interview with me in Cambridge MA shortly after the festival suddenly canceled (long story). I panicked hard. Then I thought of Jenn’s generous social media posts about my book, the kind that showed she’d really engaged with it. She lived not so far from there. I wrote and asked her if she’d be game to step in. She swiftly said yes with only a week to prepare (a week that also involved, for her, two festival presentations).
• As I wrote about that Porter Square Books event in a diary-style blog shortly after returning home: “The amazing Jennifer Martelli (who’d spoken so powerfully on the shame panel) reads with me then runs a staged conversation about Mycocosmic, having prepared spectacularly with insightful and high-stakes questions.”
• I had no idea she’d been coping with pancreatic cancer for months. In her honor, I am resisting feeling ashamed about having asked her. She seemed unburdened and 110% alive.
• I watched her post joyous pictures on social media from a trip to Iceland, and when she’d returned home I sent her a few little gifts from a local lavender farm with a thank-you note. I received a lovely message back claiming that I had accidentally discovered her obsession with tea towels.
• I was far from Jenn’s inner circle so I don’t have any right to say this, but sometimes I feel a spirit-connection with a poet when I spend time with their books. I do in her case. She wrote inventively and autobiographically about addiction, violence, and being a woman in a profoundly misogynist world–often with witchiness and references to Tarot. (Her work suggests that she was both an atheist and kinda psychic, although I’ve never confirmed either.) The poems are spare, the language tight, but they simultaneously convey a mind in the process of probing experience with self-interrogating honesty. What’s not to love?
• My Tarantella is near my desk–it was the only Martelli book for sale at Porter Square that I didn’t already own–so Friday morning, I put aside the recommendation letters and read it. In life, she had a strong and distinctive voice that tended to delight people–you knew where she was from! It’s good to hear it in my head, to know she survives this way. I often tell students that the poems that move us most say what seems scary, self-exposing, dangerous. My Tarantella probes the poet’s obsession with the life and death of Kitty Genovese. It’s powerfully riveting because it brims with risk and revelation.
• All weekend I think of what Jeannine Hall Gailey has been saying since Martha Silano died and encomia began to flow: that it would have meant a lot to her during life to hear how widely her work was esteemed. Here’s Jeannine’s latest piece about Marty, and here’s a poem of Silano’s we published in Shenandoah called “Lucky.” I never published one of Jenn’s–I was going to recruit one from her but failed to do so in time.
• It rains, finally. Chris and I walk together through a wood full of bright moss, wet spiderwebs, and fungus doing its vital, secretive work, processing and processing death.