the Corner in this one is mildly unhinged but I am legally bound to put in whatever its curator sends me
take it up with him!
Yo La Tengo - You Can Have it All
“They have to do with sex. Everyone knows a recipe for something, / for example,”
Hello:
I haven’t written one of these for a few weeks! There is a reason, but first I want to talk to you about the title of this newsletter. I am not too big to admit that Apartment Poem is kind of a bad name for the email newsletter you send out during quarantine when you’re a poet. Not the worst, but a little on the nose, yes?
It’s from before lockdown, though. I’m historically bad with titles. At them? I appreciate a good one when I encounter it, but I think that title people are also pun people, or at least cousins, and that’s never been the way my brain works. It’s a bit of poem instinct and a bit of advertising, right? You find the idea at the centre of the idea and you distill it, make it rhyme with the text. A good title gets you in the mood for understanding its subject. Puts the reader where you want them to be, or at least nudges them in that direction. (This, by the way, is the kind of writer I am: one who could talk to you for hours about the purpose of a good title but I would be very comfortable living in a world where I could just call it Diatribe #23 and move on with my life.) It is simply and plainly a talent I lack. Like a guy who needs to come up with a fake name in his office, panics, and ends up calling himself Chair Staplerton, I usually just kinda scan my immediate surroundings and pick out whatever’s closest.
When I started doing this newsletter, I had just a few weeks earlier put up this banner over my desk that said APARTMENT POEM. It was the photo for the first newsletter, if you want to see. I’d been organizing my office instead of working on my book (still no good title for that either, a fact that has frustrated every professional trying to help me finish and sell it) and anticipating the frustration that happens when I get stuck in the middle, where in an attempt to articulate a concept or thought I just keep dissecting the same three sentences over and over and over and over until they crumble to dust in front of me.
The solution to this problem is almost always the same. I figured it out a few years ago when I was at my friend Jack’s cottage for my friend Tess’s birthday weekend. You know when you have a single project, a single day of work, a good five minutes, that is so satisfying it accidentally keeps you wedded to a career any sane person would have abandoned years ago? I have maybe three revelations that have powered me through the past decade, or maybe honestly more like two and a half, and this was the most recent.
I had been trying to write a poem about this house I’d lived in, this beautiful ancient crumbling mansion that felt like it was only half situated inside our dimension. For a year of my time there, our landlord was actively trying to sell the place, but it was so haunted and unreal no one wanted to buy it. Everything that happened inside that building felt like a story. A dream. The house was owned by an exterminator who slept in a cot in the back of his office like Better Call Saul, who had won it in an extremely bitter divorce from the former love of his life back in the ‘80s. After he’d gotten it back, he immediately started renting it out because he could not countenance the psychic pain of living there again. The deal was that the rent was cheap and he wouldn’t really bother you too much, but in exchange you had to fix everything yourself and never ask him to come by for anything. He wore a tool belt that held multiple beers and a life that would have made me feel sad for him if he hadn’t exercised the kind of power over us that he had.
When I thought about that year, with a little distance, I had the poem instinct that beeps like a metal detector when you run your mind over something that has something else hidden inside of it. But I had been trying to write this apartment poem for months and the thing kept beeping but I couldn’t quite access it, dig it up. How was I going to capture the swirling melancholy hilarious surreal of this place, this year, these people, this life? How could I convey a sense of its significance? These are the humiliating concerns of the poet. It was making me fucking crazy. I tried over- and underexplaining. I tried prose-poem fictionalising. I tried and tried and tried to talk about how it felt, and everything I wrote had this melancholy try-hard ring.
My plan at this cottage birthday weekend was just to take a couple days off thinking about it, even though I was already late getting pages to my editor and I was kind of always late getting pages in and being a poetry editor he was not really used to having to demand new pages on a regular basis and I felt guilty and delinquent but still I just could feel myself hammering and hammering on this subject and not getting anywhere and I didn’t want to give up yet or send him the trash that I had. I spent like maybe 20 hours successfully ignoring the poem and then at some point we were in that sort of group afternoon lull that can happen at a cottage and this single thought dropped into my head. Are you ready for this mindblowing advice-to-self? That changed my life forever? The greatest gift my brain has ever given me? Here it is:
Just say what happened.
Looking at this sentence now, it is not a particularly flashy piece of insight, but it instantly reorganized my life and mind. No kidding. I had to excuse myself from the group and go lie down on a big overstuffed couch with my laptop and spend the next like 5 hours totally missing out on fun group cottage time while I wrote this very long poem that was also maybe the best one I’ve ever written. Just say what happened! This idea is so valuable to me that I still feel a little weird about sharing it with you here, like I’m dumping something precious into the water supply. Or, I guess, exposing myself - like once you know what I am doing the amazing illusion of my work will be revealed and you will have no use for it, or me, anymore. But the instinct to hoard is bad, I think, and also if I am being honest with myself this is probably not particularly revelatory or even maybe good advice for a lot of people.
Still, it made me feel like the world’s coolest genius, figuring that out. I marvelled at what the brain can do: generate these types of revelations all on its own, out of thin air. Just say what happened carried me through that poem and nearly all the way through a whole next book and it is also the guiding principle of this newsletter, which I started writing because of my desperate need for an anchor in an entirely untethered time. What happened keeps you in the present; it’s always one thing, then the next thing, then the next. It shrinks the incalculable vastness of everything down into a size that fits inside your life. Not just a writing technique. Survival.
This revelation and the poem it generated are fused together pretty good in my mind. When I hung that APARTMENT POEM banner up above my computer it was in January or February. I had made it so that anytime I got stuck working on my dumb book, if I rolled my eyes upward I would be reminded that that was really all I needed to do, was plenty, was more than enough.
A couple of weeks ago, not long after Carlo got home from the hospital, my grandmother had a heart attack. My mother was with her when it happened. When she called me from the hospital and said She’s in surgery right now, I was supposed to be working on a little essay type thing I had due that day. It wasn’t a particularly long or complicated piece, but I’d been having trouble with it - there was a lot I wanted to say, and I was trying to sift through my impulses, determine which ones were actually useful. After I hung up, the world telescoped. I sobbed into Carlo’s chest for a minute or two, and then my mind snapped shut like a steel trap. I remembered the feeling from two weeks earlier, when I had watched him slump through the doors of the ER and realized I did not know when I was going to see him again. I did not know what to do so I went downstairs and made a peach crisp, which turned out okay. A crisp is supposed to be easy but I can never quite get the hang of it - my topping always turns out a little too compacted. I think maybe the butter’s supposed to be colder? But then how are you supposed to cream it together with the other stuff? I walked around the house, adjusting things. I dusted the shelves. I picked up the cat and inhaled his fur until he wriggled out of my arms. He is an excellent holding cat, extremely soft and pleasantly weighted, and usually he’ll kind of just let you do it for as long as you need. But all living beings have their limits.
When my mom called again to say she had made it out and was awake and talking like herself, we both breathed out and out and out. Then she told me the story, detail by detail. The direction she sat in the back of the ambulance, the note in the doctor’s voice when she came out of the OR. She keeps saying to everyone, “Can you BELIEVE I had a heart attack?” I knew my mother had been telling this story to people on the phone all day, would continue to do it for weeks, for everyone who asked. When I spoke to my grandmother later, it was the same. When I asked her how something had felt, she would tell me what she’d seen or heard instead. It sounded like she was reciting a dream.
The other thing a title can do is reveal something about the text it belongs to, long after you think you know everything there is to know. Sometimes it’s the writer’s note to self as much as anything; sometimes you can use it as a map. I had been saving the explanation about the name of this newsletter for a week when I did not have anything else to write about. I thought I would be telling you about this cool revelation I once generated for myself, dreamed up out of thin air. But obviously, like almost everything else of importance in my life, I got it from my mother, who got it from her mother. We teach it to each other every time we talk the way we do, in a chorus, in a round. Survival, art, survival. First one thing, and then the next, and then the next.
I hung up the phone, and then I went to pick up two pizzas and a vegetable thing from the fancy place around the corner. A guy ripped past me on an ebike wearing insane goggles and blasting “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now.” I stepped over a dead bird and whispered sorry. I made unsettling eye contact with a guy squatting down on his lawn in red bike shorts, picking out individual blades of grass from his lawn. The neighbours’ tomatoes were ripening a little faster than mine. I watched a young girl dancing for her parents on their front porch. The grass on their lawn was so green it was almost vibrating. It was just about to rain, I could tell; the air had that feeling, but it hadn’t started yet.
Something longer to read:
Jay Caspian Kang’s review of Robert Scoop Jackson’s The Game is Not A Game, which I missed when it originally came out, just in case you did too.
&&&:
A poor quality video of my genuinely brilliant friend and favourite poet Mike Chaulk reading at the launch of his new book Night Lunch, which you can order here, and which I think you will really love
Carlo’s Basketball Corner
Winning Basketball with Red Auerbach & Larry Bird 1987 (Full)