Wompo Collaboration
Kathrine Varnes: The subtitle to “Cleanliness” could be A Crown of Infinite Delays. For several years, I’ve been organizing collaborative sonnet crowns -- or maybe it would be fairer to say that they have been organizing me. This group was one of the first to come together over the wompo listserv, all of which had the stated goal of writing a sonnet every two weeks, but this group also withstood far more than its share of bumps as we moved, traveled, and dealt with multiple life changes and – horrors! -- new email accounts. My records don’t go back that far anymore, but I did find some emails from September 2008 with the subject line: “Our Old Crown,” in which we were hammering out revisions. I wonder now if our delays contributed to pushing this crown into narrative. As a group, we seemed to agree quickly what needed changing, what needed clarifying, and what felt central to the crown. Perhaps our protracted calendar helped us see the crown as a whole rather than discrete sections written by “me” and “them.” Whatever the reason, I feel grateful for the camaraderie generated by these poets during our long collaboration. I thank them for their good ears, their patience, and their willingness to share their talents in a broader sense than monographs –or bromides – generally allow.
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Cleanliness:
A Mini-Drama Written in Collaboration
1. She Doesn’t Mind
When I kissed you on your little superstructure,
I didn't think about the mortgage bills
or payments for the catastrophic ills
insurance companies assure will rupture
life, liberty, and the pursuit of future
happiness dependent on these pills
and pills and pills. Two Cadillac Sevilles
for sale would not assist us at this juncture.
You say, Forget that crap. Hegemony
and tell me that you love me. Ideology
to show you, whispering Oncology,
I scrub the kitchen floor on bended knee.
No, no, no! You Swiffer™ me to my feet
to dust off places I shall not repeat.
2. She Doesn’t
To dust off places, I shall not repeat
myself. Instead, I'll challenge common sense
by smudging our domestic consequence.
With housework, I'll delay but not delete;
like lye soap, denotation's obsolete.
That's why I don't do windows. No offense,
but I'll exchange transparency for dense
layers of lacy grime. They're more discreet
than gleaming surfaces. Would you prefer
our lives (even our untousled bed) displayed
abroad through perfect panes? Or your hauteur
reflected fun-house style on stainless steel
fridge doors? Or for their polish to reveal
that I, no longer wife, am still a maid?
3. She Minds
That I, no longer wife, am still a maid
rankles as rankly as skidmarked boxers. Brief
though our marriage was, wrecked on the reef
of dissertative discards still displayed
post-tenure, you have yet to lift your feet
while I and Dyson do our pas-de-deux;
we suck, we three, in the vernacular
because we suffer singular surfeit
of dirty moves. Turn on, heavy-duty,
the laundry--I like it hot--agitate
my delicates; be sure the paddles' weight
in motion cleanly smacks my dormant booty,
as long as this our cycle will allow:
you put on the French maid getup now.
4. She Sees Her Therapist
So you put on the French maid getup now?
-It’s Hallowe’en. He’s dancing with the chick
in chains and leather, stomper boots, pierced brow.
They’re rubbing thigh to thigh. She bites his cheek.
She’s hot and you’re a cow, or so he thinks,
and he’s lust’s pedagogue. Just take a look:
the man you married, flushing mottled pink.
He’ll try to get her hired at Yale or Duke.
Oh, Emilia, misery everywhere-
what a shock to see you here thus mortified.
I’m mid-divorce, and you, my therapist,
you wilt against the wall, your soft teased hair
crumpling about your face, the frothy twist
of belle bonne apron strings coming untied.
5. The Therapist Minds
Belle bonne apron strings? I'm coming untied?
You read my semes, and his, and that chick cow's,
as one dirty dress. I see: you think Phallus
is the center. Droll. Please! I nearly died
scrubbing Chemo from the kitchen. He's fried
egg --- that's why I melt against the wall. Eros
three. No, four. You must be mad or very jealous
you're not at Yale. And your costume! a bride?
Poor injured brocade moan, you're appalled ---
hag of a scene, louse, cat, maid. I'm in stitches.
Sad rag we've turned to, mope mop, eyebrow, salt,
him kissing up among the dirty dishes.
I think burnt orange will do, it's Halloween.
Denouement, my dear. I'll pour the gasoline.
6. She to the Therapist
Denouement? He’ll pour the gasoline-
like liquor down his throat. It’s made from corn
and suitable for persons Iowa born.
You wear a super suit of neoprene
they say is flame resistant, but he’s mean—
a mean drunk, anyway. He surfs for porn
and speculates how I will look when shorn.
(so life goes, sans divorce to intervene.)
Instead we’ll part old friends who never speak
but check each other’s websites for white lies.
The very traits he loved to criticize
about his mother? The Parnassian peak,
soul of his “musical stylings” – that the phrase?
If lies combusted, think how the world would blaze.
7. He Doesn’t Mind
If lies combust, think how the world will blaze
when we create our louche apocalypse--
much better than those manacles and whips
and more original than corset stays
for stoking lust. Let's drop the paraphrase
(heretical, like your mother's Freudian slips)
and make our bed a pyre that will eclipse
autos-da-fe, or your last manic phase.
So here's to the Day of the Dead. Isn't suttee
a nobler fate than being ABD?
All is illusion: marriage, ambition, spite
careen in karmic circles; watch them turn
ephemeral as screen savers, and as slight.
Who needs the virtual world when we can burn?
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Wompo (aka the Women's Poetry Listerv) authors participating in this collaborative sonnet crown include (poems are not in the same order as poets’ names): Ann Fisher-Wirth, Robin Kemp, Meg Schoerke, Kathrine Varnes and Rosemary Winslow.
Ann Fisher-Wirth's third book of poems, Carta Marina, was published by Wings Press in April 2009. Her third chabook, Slide Shows, placed second in the 2008 Finishing Line Chapbook Competition and appeared in December 2009. She is coediting an anthology of contemporary American ecopoetry that Trinity University Press will publish in 2012. Recent or forthcoming poems in Many Mountains Moving, qarrtsiluni, Persimmon Tree, Blackbird, The Fairy Tale Review, and several anthologies. She teaches at the University of Mississippi.
Robin Kemp is the author of This Pagan Heaven (Pecan Grove Press, 2009). She was born in New Orleans on Mardi Gras Day. A former print journalist and CNN newswriter, she holds degrees in English and creative writing from Georgia State and the University of New Orleans, and is finishing her Ph.D. at Georgia State, where she teaches writing. Her poetry has appeared in New Orleans Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Texas Review, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Rites of Spring (Pecan Grove Press), Maple Leaf Rag III (Portals Press), and Letters from the World: Poems from the WOM-PO Listserv (Red Hen Press). She lives outside Atlanta until she can get closer to the water.
Meg Schoerke has contributed poems and reviews to journals such as The American Scholar, TriQuarterly, and Hudson Review, and her essays have appeared in a variety of collections on twentieth century American poetry. In 2001, Robert L. Barth published her poetry chapbook, Beyond Mourning. With Dana Gioia and David Mason, she has co-edited two anthologies, Twentieth Century American Poetry and Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry (McGraw-Hill, 2003). She received her B.A. from Northwestern University and earned her M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. An Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State University, she teaches courses in nineteenth and twentieth century American and British poetry.
Kathrine Varnes is the author of a book of poems, The Paragon (Word Tech 2005), a play, Listen (produced summer 2008) and co-editor with Annie Finch of An Exaltation of Forms (University of Michigan Press 2002). Her poems and essays appear regularly, the latest in Ducts, Mezzo Cammin, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days. She tends her many unfinished projects in Larchmont, New York.
Rosemary Winslow is the author of a book of poems, Green Bodies (Word Works 2007). She lives and works in Washington, D.C., (on the same street where Whitman lived for a time), with her husband John, a visual artist. Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Crux and other journals. She has received the Larry Neal Award for Poetry twice and Writer's Fellowships from the D.C. Commission for the Arts and The Vermont Studio Center. She teaches literature and writing at The Catholic University of America, specializing in American poetry from 1850 to the present. Her articles on Whitman have included the influence of Egyptology on his work and Whitman's prosodic practice and influence on the Modernists.