Poem for the Day: December 4th, 2021

Ebb by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I know what my heart is like 
      Since your love died: 
It is like a hollow ledge 
Holding a little pool 
      Left there by the tide, 
      A little tepid pool, 
Drying inward from the edge.

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Quote for the Day: December 4th, 2021

Kathy Bates (Evelyn Couch) and Jessica Tandy (Ninny Threadgoode) in a promotional shot for Jon Avnet’s *Fried Green Tomatoes* (1991). Fair use.

I found out what the secret to life is: friends. Best friends.
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991); directed by Jon Avnet

Fried Green Tomatoes is one of my favorite movies of all time. As far as films go its got a little bit of something for everybody: adventure, romance, melodrama, and even a murder mystery! The secret’s in the sauce, or at least that’s what I’ve heard. It was made for a paltry sum of just $11 million, and while that’s quite a loot haul for the likes of Joe Schmoe on Main Street, for Hollywood that’s chump change. It grossed more than ten times that amount and proved once again that American audiences love a well-told Southern yarn, especially when the acting is as stellar as it is in Fried Green Tomatoes. I mean, talk about an embarrassment of riches, to have Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, and Mary-Louise Parker all in the same film—and as leads, no less!

And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:
Ruth 1:16 (KJV)

One thing that was never discussed among my family members when we watched the film together is the lesbian love story at the heart of the film. Now mind you, the onscreen depiction is chaste, but anyone with eyes can clearly see the sparks that fly and the deep love that grows and endures between Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker). There are even none-too-subtle nods to a queer couple from the Bible itself: Naomi and Ruth. Now, I’m not interested in getting into a historical-theological debate with anyone regarding the canonically gay biblical couple, but perhaps any naysayers reading this would like to check out this excerpt from The Children Are Free: Reexamining the Biblical Evidence on Same-sex Relationships.

…anyone with eyes can clearly see the sparks that fly and the deep love that grows and endures between Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker).

The same-sex love story at the heart of the larger narrative is frequently straight-washed and written off as simply a superlative example of a great friendship, and it is a story of a great friendship, but it’s also the story of a marriage, one that never received the validation it deserved and was never allowed the public expression it warranted simply because the married people were both women. You can call it what you want but I will call it what it is: love. No one can rightfully condemn it.

You can call it what you want but I will call it what it is: love. No one can rightfully condemn it.

The film won a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film — Wide Release, as well as Oscar noms for Tandy and the adapted screenplay written by Fannie Flagg (who wrote the novel on which the film is based) and Carol Sobieski. There’s so much inside of it (both the film and its source material) to unpack for anyone willing to search it.

I know that I frequently use these “quotes posts” as jumping-off points for whatever tangent I feel like exploring that day, and I really appreciate those of you who are always willing to follow the bread crumbs with me. You have my love and sincerest thanks forever.

Poem for the Day: December 3rd, 2021

Sylvia Plath as an Old Story Title for Learning to Fight Depression Where the Semiotics Simply Suggest That a Garden Illustrates Peace as a Foreshadow Rather Than as a Vivid Depiction of an Ancestral Society of Sad Mothers & Helpless Fathers by Nome Emeka Patrick

Tell it this way: depression is the 30cm nail driving into the walls.

If you ever read about Plath, ever kept a lantern from dying,

ever tended a garden it grew so wild to swallow god, ever kept

dressing the fire in your bones, then you must know about grief,

possibly how to end it. Maami once stood in this garden. Now,

I stand in her shadow like a sphinx in a crusade of an inferno.

In Lagos, another news says a student of microbiology, 400L, took

a nook’s way to the sky, death could not stop for him—anymore.

Let’s agree: failure is the arm swinging the pendulum across the face

of every dream. These gardens grow wild & the birds unfurl their

wings into an offering of flight. My cousin knelt in this garden once.

I kowtow into his absence, my knees—eyes dressed in dust & dearth.

In my mouth, every name glistens with a beak. I owe every wall

a shadow, every bed a midnight of creaks & crimson, every heart

an arrhythmia twice the speed of a destrier. In the library, my finger

Canterburies through The Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath, for once in

my whole life, I recite “Lady Lazarus” & remember I have a father

growing in the garden. Do I terrify?—what fear sweeps this little life?

Tainted black & bruised, a chorus lifts itself onto my mouth’s blade:

dy—dying is an art, so just like everything else I do it exceptionally well, yelz

yet even with honey disguised in holocaust, who, tell me, wants to die this young?

Quote for the Day: December 3rd, 2021

*The Book of Three (The Chronicles of Prydain: Book One)* by Lloyd Alexander

Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we can do. Our capabilities seldom match our aspirations, and we are often woefully unprepared. To this extent, we are all Assistant Pig-Keepers at heart.
Lloyd Alexander, The Book of Three (The Chronicles of Prydain: Book One)

Poem for the Day: December 2nd, 2021

Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath by Sina Queyras

If you can’t feel love in life you won’t feel it in death, nor
Will you feel the tulip’s skin, nor the soft gravel 

Of childhood under cheek. You will have writhed 
Across the page for a hard couplet, a firm rhyme, ass

High as any downward dog, and cutlass arms 
Lashing any mother who tries to pass: Let’s be frank 

About the cost of spurs, mothers like peonies 
Whirling in storm drains, families sunk before 

Reaching open water. The empty boudoir 
Will haunt, but not how you imagine it will. 

Nothing, not even death frees mothers 
From the cutting board, the balloons, their 

Lack of resistance, thoughts, he said, quick
As tulips staggering across the quad.

She heard, I like my women splayed 
Out, red. Read swollen, domesticated,

Wanting out. The tulips were never warm 
My loves, they never smelled of spring, 

They never marked the path out of loneliness, 
Never led me home, nor to me, nor away 

From what spring, or red, or tulips 
Could never be.

Quote for the Day: December 2nd, 2021

*Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog* by John Grogan

Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day. It is amazing how much love and laughter they bring into our lives and even how much closer we become with each other because of them.
John Grogan, Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog

Poem for the Day: December 1st, 2021

To the Reader by James Merrill

Each day, hot off the press from Moon & Son,
“Knowing of your continued interest,”
Here’s a new book — well, actually the updated
Edition of their one all-time best-seller —
To find last night’s place in, and forge ahead.
If certain scenes and situations (“work,”
As the jacket has it, “of a blazingly
Original voice”) make you look up from your page
— But this is life, is truth, is me! — too many
Smack of self-plagiarism. Terror and tryst,
Vow and verbena, done before, to death,
In earlier chapters, under different names …
And what about those characters? No true
Creator would just let them fade from view
Or be snuffed out, like people. Yet is there room
(In the pinch of pages under your right thumb)
To bring them back so late into their own? —
Granted their own can tell itself from yours.
You’d like to think a structure will emerge,
If only a kind of Joycean squirrel run
Returning us all neatly to page 1,
But the inconsistencies of plot and style
Lead you to fear that, for this author, fiction
Aims at the cheap effect, “stranger than fiction,”
As people once thought life — no, truth, was. Strange …
Anyhow, your final thought tonight,
Before you kiss my picture and turn the light out,
Is of a more exemplary life begun
Tomorrow, truer, harder to get right.

© 1990 James Merrill. “To the Reader” was originally published in the November 1990 – Spring 1990 issue of The Yale Review. James Merrill (1926-1995) was one of the most celebrated poets of his generation. During his lifetime, he published eleven collections of poetry as well as plays, novels, a memoir, and the trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover.

One of the things I love most about James Merrill, other than the fact that he was a wholly original and inimitable poet, was that he was openly gay in most of his circles. For someone born in 1926 to live so openly and so unashamedly despite the stigma and prejudice he no doubt dealt with on a daily basis is incredible to me. It’s truly a shame that he is not discussed more outside of the queer literati because he changed the landscape of American poetry for everyone that came after him, queer or not.

Do you have a favorite poem of James Merrill’s or even a favorite collection? Before reading today’s post, had you heard of him? Let me know in the comments.

Quote for the Day: December 1st, 2021

*Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America* (Audiobook) by Ijeoma Oluo

History is very kind to the memory of mediocre white men.
Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (Audiobook)

I’ve been listening to Mediocre on audiobook and I’ll probably be sharing many more quotes from it in the coming days. In it, Oluo flips the predominant narrative of American exceptionalism to one of American mediocrity. Throughout the history of the United States, indeed since its inception as a nation, white men have leveraged and solidified their status as members of the dominant social group (as opposed to other skills and talents they may possess) to shore up generational wealth, consolidate political power, and oppress minorities.

It’s apparent when one looks through the historical record that many white men were given status and power not because they earned it, but simply because of the fact that they were white men. Meanwhile, women, BIPOC, and queer people were pushed further and further into the margins so that their [white men’s] power and influence could be concentrated even more than it already was.

Have any of you read this book yet? If you haven’t and are planning to, make sure you have a pen and paper handy or something else you can take notes on. It’s an incredible read.

Poem for the Day: November 30th, 2021

Poem by Lucy Ives

This isn’t a great poem.
I’m not writing this to write a great poem.
I am writing this because I am one person.
I am only one.
I have a face and a front of my face.
I have two shoulders and two hips.
I’m living.
I live.
So what can I do with my face if it can’t see that person’s face?
What do I tell my eyes to see?
How do I let them know that when they see that face it is that person’s wish that they not know it?
How do I tell them we have to go back into the world where no one knows us and we don’t know anyone?
How do I tell them to stay there?
There is nothing for them to see.
How do I tell my hands they will never touch that person’s hands?
How do I tell my ears that when that person says my name it is only a word?
How do I tell my lips to make that person’s name another word so I can say it?
How do I tell my neck that person cannot see it?
How do I tell my hair that person cannot pull it?
It is my hair.
It is my head.
How do I tell my teeth they will never strike that person’s teeth?
How do I tell my thighs it does not matter what they do?
They are the tops of my legs.
They will fall apart.
How do I tell my back it must never wait for that person?
That person will not hold me.
That person does not know where I am, does not think of me.
Does not know I have exhausted every argument against him.
That person does not know I no longer love freedom.
That person does not know what it means when I ask for forgiveness.
That person does not know I beg the world to let me change.
That person cannot see my face.
Knows a woman with my name and she is a woman.
Does not know the word I hide behind my words.
Does not know this face.
Does not know this is my face.
Says my name and looks at this person.
How do I tell my feet to stand here?
How do I tell my eyes to see?
How do I tell the voice under my voice to keep on speaking?
How do I tell my mouth to speak?

© 2015 Lucy Ives. Today’s poem originally appeared on the Poetry Foundation’s website as part of PoetryNow, a partnership between WFMT Radio Network and the Poetry Foundation. You can listen to an audio recitation of “Poem” by Lucy Ives here.