Poetry
Pencil Sketch of Self & Other
When you kissed me it was as if
some one had just stepped lightly out of the room.
How shy I was in any crowd,
and you, how adept!
How I kept you waiting
longer than any boy uncertain of his sex!
Your mother, musical, suicidal,
slept with a thread tied around her nurse’s finger
(so I learned a few details), your rich father
photographed beside his swimming pool….
How we almost ruined each other, you
with your hope of children,
I with my body which I took too seriously;
That stunned room….
A story, like The Garden party,
no longer even possible.
Yet I want to forgive us both
as if it still matters.
Contributor
Jane CooperCooper was the author of five books of poetry and a professor of Sarah Lawrence College.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
In Judy’s Room
By Ben GoldsteinMARCH 2022 | Fiction
When we first meet Michael, the narrator of "In Judy’s Room" by Ben Goldstein, he has just arrived at a hospital in the Berkshires to receive treatment for an unspecified mental illness. We learn that, to Micheal, the onset of his illness is inextricably entangled with both love and heartbreak, a memory of a violent sexual rejection that he believes led him to commit his own monstrous act. The story's tension comes from Michael's journey between the past and present, his struggle to decipher the real from the unreal. One of the pleasures of reading this story for me came from Goldstein's gorgeous descriptions of the natural world and the town itself. As we navigate Michael's emotional landscape, he simultaneously moves through a setting so idyllical that it too feels dreamlike and magical—a place where the townspeople have a “yearly tradition of recreating a famous Norman Rockwell painting” and where Judy Garland “once dressed up in a gleaming ball gown and heels right out of The Wizard of Oz.”
Joan Snyder: The Summer Becomes a Room
By William CorwinOCT 2020 | ArtSeen
Snyder wraps this body of work in an overwhelming sense of acceptance and gratitude for the cycles of nature: the seasons, life and death, day and night, morning and dusk. Overall this seems a positive reckoning; her palette is bright and harmonious, and it’s hard not to get a boost from looking at it.
Interiors: hello from the living room
By Alfred Mac AdamNOV 2020 | ArtSeen
The COVID epidemic has made us acutely aware of interior spaces and their metamorphosis from living space into working and recreational spaces. But this fascinating show also reminds us that these multi-use spaces are saturated with sin.
The Twofold Room
By Marie-Michelle DeschampsMAY 2020 | Critics Page
Deschamps’s interest in the losses and gains through the process of translation illustrated a mode of construction based on altered meanings. Just like a foreign language, the hotel is an abstract location that, through a visual and literary discovery process, becomes a familiar one.
