Dear Megan,
on love and other mysteries
Today I finished reading your new collection, Love and Other Mysteries. And somehow the experience brings to mind a little poem of mine from Love, Etc. …
Shoot, girl,
where the hell
did you get all these poems?
Have you been hiding them
in your attic,
down your shirt,
beneath your tongue
below your pout?
Hasn’t it been hard
to keep them all in
everywhere they’ve been
flinging off their underthings,
trying to get out?
Sorry (not sorry) to talk this way about your new book, but you do know that your collection has a certain … flirtatiousness to it that is quite delicious, even as it somehow makes a person want to cry. (Because there are sad parts, too. Often right next to the sensual parts.)
I was reading the collection because we had promised to review it at Tweetspeak (which we did) and feature some of the poems in
(which we will).It is rare that I do an Amazon review, but I had to. The poems were that surprising to me. Not like I don’t know you and what you are capable of. You worked with me for years at Tweetspeak, and I watched you grow into the poet you are today.
Except?
I didn’t either.
I don’t know when you wrote the poems that are in Love and Other Mysteries, but they feel new. They feel you, in a way that you haven’t accessed as fully before this collection. Maybe you were keeping them in the attic (are there attics in Texas?), but I also think you had to leave. Leave Tweetspeak. Leave your life as primarily an editor. Jump, like you did in the poem “The Window” where you note, “for 127 minutes I straddle choices until / a deluge unlocks me and I take the plunge.”
It is always hard for me when people leave. I like to work with people forever, if it can go that way. But I know that sometimes there’s a need for space in which something different can grow—and I don’t get to be part of it. And I don’t even get to know there’s an attic. Or that poems are piling up in it.
No matter.
Because, I eventually get to be surprised. I get to catch my breath. I get to say quietly between sips of my peppermint tea… oh wow, wow, wow—oh.
Your poems do what I think the best poems always do. They give forth, while they hold back. And they feel original and fresh. I mean, who can just pass by a line like “Where whispers the peony wind”? I couldn’t.
Sometimes the poems have deceivingly simple moments like this one…
“I am looking. I am lost. I am open
to almost any suggestion.”
It’s the sound. It’s the cumulative effect of “I” (cataloging!). It’s the rhythm. It’s the feeling of forward motion. It’s the tension of mixed states of being: looking, lost, open. And I just always love the word suggestion—and all it suggests.
There is more I could say about the poems. Mostly I look forward to letting them speak for themselves in the ✨ Every Day Poems features coming up. But I do want to say one more thing before I go silent…
I shivered when I read the last portion of the last line of your last poem…
Tell us your mysteries. Start with joyful.
Never before (and never since) have I worked with an author who worked as hard as you did to entirely revamp a manuscript. Remember? The Joy of Poetry was a completely different book when you first handed it to me. I still recall where I was standing (outside, near the bottom of my hedges) when I was on the phone with you—and we agreed you’d go back to the drawing board and find your mother and make the book a memoir with her and poetry in its pages.
In the case of that book and its process, I think you more ended with “joyful” than started.
Which means that The End has inexplicably become The Beginning (your new collection does indeed begin with the “Joyful Mysteries” of the rosary—thus picking up where The Joy of Poetry left off… yet also being entirely its own thing).
I don’t know where you will go from here. Closet, basement, cabin in Canada? Wherever you travel as a writer, keep the mysteries, Megan. They make for great reading, as Love and Other Mysteries proves.
Nostalgically,
L.L.
Photo by Vasilina Sirotina, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.