a note on similes: At last week's reading, Billy Collins poked fun (a la Shakespeare) at the Petrarchan conceit. He noted that what such poems (old and new) assume that what women really want is a good simile. His comment started me thinking about the few men in my past who wrote me poetry. These men were not poets (not even in the unobtrusively poetic Writer's Digest sense), so I never could understand why they chose to wrote me poetry ("I am like a moth to your flame," "I am left in the desert without food or water") instead of making me dinner or some other more pragmatic gesture of love. They must have held to this notion that women are in want of similes.
a note on metaphor: Listening this week to the John Roberts' hearings, I realized how quickly metaphor can go awry. Early in the week, one senator (can't remember who) and Roberts himself talked about how judges were umpires. For the next few days, the umpire metaphor came up again and again (umpires are just calling the game, but everyone knows they have different strike zones; a different umpire=a different game; an umpire is only an intepreter, not a participant). I was half-expecting (and hoping) to see Roberts show up in a striped suit.
a metaphor of my own: Recently, on my semi-daily run I have noticed that the pathwaysd above Memory Grove are being transformed into some soft of Oly-promenade. There are new black lightposts with the SLC 2002 logo emblazoned on them. The new concrete sidewalk has a full-cover logo embedded in the cement. This perpetual focus on the olympics troubles me. SL is becoming one of those old Hollywood startlets who tries to hold onto fading beauty with too-bright hair dye and carefully pencilled eyebrows.
further evidence that I am aging: Yesterday, someone at the literacy action center made a comment that was delightfully funny and insightful and I was going to post it on the blog, but 10 minutes after I heard the comment, I forgot it. Not just the details--but the entire context within which it was offered. Had I remembered it, I am sure you would have enjoyed it. Sorry!
and a bit of blog cross-promotion: This week, I canned fruit!--which you can read all about at Three Tarts. I only bring this up because I am so proud of my domestic efforts.
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On men writing us poems: Mr. Tart, who had never tried to be a poet, received a challenge from his men's group to write one poem a morning for 30 days, first thing in the morning, to keep him from thinking like an engineer every waking moment. This took place right around when we met. The second component of the challenge was to read a few of them at an open-mic night, which he did, in front of all of us. One was about me.
As lovely as it might be for a poet to write a poem to his girlfriend, is it perhaps more striking when a non-poet does so?
Would you have us buy you shoes instead? Although I have never written a girlfriend a poem, I think it is a lovely throwback to a time when words mattered, when poetry mattered, when the Beatrices and Benedicks of the world could spar and profess love thru sonnets and not be laughingstocks and mocked for their poetic ineptitude.
How awful is this world if one would NOT paint a picture for his artist lover, or cook a meal for his chef girlfriend, or write a poem for his writerly friend...for fear of being held up to ridicule, public and private?
oh, now I feel mean and heartless. I'm going to have to do some penance or something. (and no, I would not prefer shoes) What I should have explained about the hopeful poets I mentioned is that we didn't have much of a relationship to speak of when these poetic efforts were offered up to me. I think sincere poetry as an offering of love (like Sarah's Mr. Tart) is a good thing, a lovely thing, in fact. As would be a painting for an artist lover, etc.
With the men I mentioned, however, they were offering me poetry in an attempt to woo me, which struck me as odd, as if the poetry itself would do the trick.
Now that I've been scolded for my snobbery, I promise I will be more receptive to future offerings of poetry.
You know I've written poems about relationship and during relationships but I can't say I've ever really given one to a woman. I did have a woman give me a poem once. Its in a frame on my dresser still.
When my mom and her sister were in college they worked fire watch out in the hills of eastern Washington. Apparently my uncle had met my aunt and they had just started dating when he came up and visited her up in the lookout one night...They are both very shy and conservative people, but the legend is at some point he had her stand on a big piece of paper. He was too shy to kiss her so he traced around her socks then took the paper into town the next day and bought her a proper pair of hiking boots. I can hardly believe this is true, coming from them, but it seems to have actually happened. So the act of buying shoes can be sublimely romantic also...anything can, I guess, in the proper context.
I had repressed this memory until this very moment, after having read your response to sleepy-e about heartlessness, no shoes, etc. When I was a freshwoman at BYU, and a music major, with a homemade dulcimer in tow that my boyfriend had made for me, a guy who heard me play it wrote me some pieces of music, classical-style, for the dulcimer which (a) was meaningful to me because of my boyfriend and because of (b) Joni Mitchell. He clearly liked me, and I felt bad, but I didn't like him at all, at least not in the "he wrote me music" kind of way. He wrote me music, and I didn't like him. It was one of those "try to be friends" things, exquisitely awkward, and the awkwardness lasted for more than a year because I kept seeing him around. Yikes. I wouldn't have liked shoes from him, either, just for the record. Or candy, or anything.
While driving to work and listening to NPR I swore I would puke if I heard the umpire metaphor again.
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