seven lives,then webecome light . . .
Erica Jong’s novels are fearless and passionate. So, too, is her poetry. Though renowned—and sometimes vilified—for her unabashedly sensual fiction, the author considers herself a poet first and foremost. “It was my poetry,” Jong writes, “that kept me sane, that kept me whole, that kept me alive.”
Becoming Light contains poems personally selected by Jong from her complete oeuvre of acclaimed published works—poems of love, sex, witches, gods, and demons; word-songs brimming with wit, heart, bitterness, sorrow, and truth. From the earliest poetic musings of a brilliant young artist first trying out her wings to later works born of experience and maturity, unpublished before appearing in this collection, Jong’s pure artistry shines like a beacon as she writes, fearlessly and passionately, about being a woman, about being alive.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erica Jong including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
seven lives,then webecome light . . .
Erica Jong’s novels are fearless and passionate. So, too, is her poetry. Though renowned—and sometimes vilified—for her unabashedly sensual fiction, the author considers herself a poet first and foremost. “It was my poetry,” Jong writes, “that kept me sane, that kept me whole, that kept me alive.”
Becoming Light contains poems personally selected by Jong from her complete oeuvre of acclaimed published works—poems of love, sex, witches, gods, and demons; word-songs brimming with wit, heart, bitterness, sorrow, and truth. From the earliest poetic musings of a brilliant young artist first trying out her wings to later works born of experience and maturity, unpublished before appearing in this collection, Jong’s pure artistry shines like a beacon as she writes, fearlessly and passionately, about being a woman, about being alive.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erica Jong including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
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Overview
seven lives,then webecome light . . .
Erica Jong’s novels are fearless and passionate. So, too, is her poetry. Though renowned—and sometimes vilified—for her unabashedly sensual fiction, the author considers herself a poet first and foremost. “It was my poetry,” Jong writes, “that kept me sane, that kept me whole, that kept me alive.”
Becoming Light contains poems personally selected by Jong from her complete oeuvre of acclaimed published works—poems of love, sex, witches, gods, and demons; word-songs brimming with wit, heart, bitterness, sorrow, and truth. From the earliest poetic musings of a brilliant young artist first trying out her wings to later works born of experience and maturity, unpublished before appearing in this collection, Jong’s pure artistry shines like a beacon as she writes, fearlessly and passionately, about being a woman, about being alive.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erica Jong including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480438897 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 10/08/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 530 |
| Sales rank: | 332,131 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Jong followed Isadora Wing through three more novels: How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses, and Any Woman's Blues. In addition to continuing to produce poetry, Jong has written historical fiction, most recently Sappho's Leap, and two memoirs, Fear of Fifty and Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life.
Read an Excerpt
Becoming Light
Poems New and Selected
By Erica Jong
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1991 Erica Mann JongAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3889-7
CHAPTER 1
Lullaby for a Dybbuk
The old self
like a dybbuk
clutching at my heel.
She wants to come back.
She is digging
her long red nails
into the tender meat of my thighs?
She tweaks my clit,
hoping that my sexaholic self
will surface
and take me back, back, back
to the land of fuck,
where, crazed with lust
I come over and over again,
going nowhere.
The old self
does not like
her displacement.
She resents the new tenant
sprucing up
her disorderly house.
She resents
the calm woman
nourishing her roses,
her daughter, her dogs,
her poems, her passionate
friendships.
She wants chaos
and angst and Liebestod.
She claims
she can't write
without them.
But the new tenant
is wise to her tricks.
Disorder is not poetry,
she says. Pain
is not love.
Love flowers; love gives
without taking;
love is serene
and calm.
I talk to the dybbuk:
My darling dybbuk,
I will love you
into submission.
Tweak me, I will only
caress you.
Claw me, I will only
kiss you back.
For what I have learned
lets me love
even my demon.
Demon—I love you
for you are
mine,
I say.
And demons die
of love.
Ode to My Shoes
(After Neruda, who left us his socks)
The poet alone
is writing an ode
to her shoes—
her shoes which
only she can fill,
her shoes of purple suede and green leather
the color of palm fronds,
her diamond-studded boots,
her feathered cowboy boots,
her flame cowboy boots,
her seven-league epic poetry boots,
her little silver haiku boots
with the tiny heels that twinkle,
her first-person platform boots
and her backless glass slippers
modelled after Cinderella's
(one lost, at midnight,
because of a running man),
her huntress boots of India-rubber,
her lover's boots joined at the ankle
like leg irons,
her pink baby booties bronzed
for posterity,
her daughter's burning Reeboks,
her lover's laceless sneakers
left in the guest room closet
for her to kiss
year after year
after year.
Darling shoes,
beloved feet,
ten toes to walk me
toward my true love,
fuck-me pumps to fuel his passion,
stiletto heels to stab him
if he strays.
Shoes tell you everything.
Shoes speak my language.
Their tap taptap on the airport runway
tells me the story
of a lovely, lonely woman flying after love—
that old, old story
in a new pair
of shoes.
Alphabet Poem: To the Letter I
I, io, ich, yo, ?,
uppercase, lowercase,
sometimes confused with love
which starts with L,
but could easily be I,
with a foot,
a pseudopod facing the future,
or at least the righthand
margin of the page—
all we know of life
and all we need
to know.
The poet must abolish I,
said Keats;
have no identity,
be as water flowing
around a rock—
a voice for all
the unsaid waves within,
antenna of the deep.
"Here lies one whose name
was writ in water,"
he would have graven
on his gravestone
had he but world enough
and time—
but the harpstring broke,
and his dearest friends
would not deny his I—
(they could not
for they still believed
themselves).
Ich, I, io, yo, ?
turned from lettres majuscules
to minuscule
by Cummings
(ee, I mean)
to droplets of vapor
condensed along a blade
of grass
(by Whitman),
to Blake's tiger,
to Dickinson's
buzzing fly?
(we so insist
on having names,
then die).
For the poet
whoever he (or she)
may be
is always
beneath the violets
singing like wind
or water.
To become a natural thing,
eye of the cosmos,
sans i's, sans teeth,
sans everything,
to see the rock,
the hand, the water,
rippling around
the thrown pebble
as part of the same art,
the art of the possible,
life passing into death
and death to life—
poetry not politics.
The abolition of the I,
eye, eye,
the end of i,
so that even the dot
becomes a flyspeck,
Morse code
of infinity?
The alphabet is
poetry's DNA;
what sperm and egg
are to our progeny,
the alphabet
is to the poet,
germ-cells,
single, yet dividing
like a zygote,
characters
encompassing
the world.
We are all one poet
and always
we have one
communal name,
god's name, nameless,
a flame in the heart,
a breath,
a gust of air,
prana whistling in the dark.
i dies—
but the breath
lingers on
through the medium
of the magic
alphabet
and in its wake
death is no more
than metaphor.
Demeter at Dusk
At dusk Demeter
becomes afraid
for baby Persephone
lost in that hell
which she herself created
with her love.
Excess of love—
the woman's curse,
the curse of loving
that which causes pain,
the curse of bringing forth
in pain,
the curse of bearing,
bearing always pain.
Demeter pauses, listening for her child—
this fertile goddess
with her golden hair, bringing forth
wheat and fruit and wildflowers
knee-high.
This apple-breasted goddess
whose sad eyes
will bless the frozen world,
bring spring again—
all because she once
walked through the night
and loved a man, half-demon,
angel-tongued,
who gave her
everything she needed to be wise:
a daughter,
hell's black night,
then endless
spring.
The Impressionists
They conspired to paint the air
knowing that art
is not only a way
of seeing
but a way
of being,
a passion for the light,
a tenderness at heart
just short
of being wounded by the air,
a toughness too.
They conspired to paint the air,
to anatomize each light mote,
to imprism each speck of dust
until the air danced with color
and every inhaled breath
became a rainbow in the lungs.
Jasmine, tea leaf, camellia,
tuberose and thyme—the air
turning to color, the color
bleeding into earth, the
earth giving forth its forms,
its fossils, its sexual smells,
then closing over all.
They conspired to paint the air,
leaving their mark,
an obsessed life,
infinitely rich,
infinitely ripe,
tasting of peaches
and anemones,
red tile,
voile peignoirs
and air,
inhabited air.
To My Brother Poet, Seeking Peace
People wish to be settled. Only as long as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
—Thoreau
My life has been
the instrument
for a mouth
I have never seen,
breathing wind
which comes
from I know not
where,
arranging and changing
my moods,
so as to make
an opening
for his voice.
Or hers.
Muse, White Goddess
mother with invisible
milk,
androgynous god
in whose grip
I struggle,
turning this way and that,
believing that I chart
my life,
my loves,
when in fact
it is she, he,
who charts them—
all for the sake
of some
as yet unwritten poem.
Twisting in the wind,
twisting like a pirate
dangling in a cage
from a high seawall,
the wind whips
through my bones
making an instrument,
my back a xylophone,
my sex a triangle
chiming,
my lips stretched tight
as drumskins,
I no longer care
who is playing me,
but fear
makes the hairs
stand up
on the backs
of my hands
when I think
that she may stop.
And yet I long
for peace
as fervently as you do—
the sweet connubial bliss
that admits no
turbulence,
the settled life
that defeats poetry,
the hearth before which
children play—
not poets' children,
ragtag, neurotic, demon-ridden,
but the apple-cheeked children
of the bourgeoisie.
My daughter dreams
of peace
as I do:
marriage, proper house,
proper husband,
nourishing dreamless
sex,
love like a hot toddy,
or an apple pie.
But the muse
has other plans
for me
and you.
Puppet mistress,
dangling us
on this dark proscenium,
pulling our strings,
blowing us
toward Cornwall,
toward Venice, toward Delphi,
toward some lurching
counterpane,
a tent upheld
by one throbbing
blood-drenched pole—
her pen, her pencil,
the monolith
we worship,
underneath
the gleaming moon.
My Daughter Says
My daughter says
she feels like a martian,
that no one understands her,
that one friend is too perfect,
and another too mean,
and that she has
the earliest bedtime
in her whole class.
I strain to remember
how a third grader feels
about love, about pain
and I feel a hollow in my heart
where there should be blood
and an ache where there should
be certainty.
My darling Molly,
no earthling ever lived
who did not feel
like a Martian,
who did not curse her bedtime,
who did not wonder
how she got to this planet,
who dropped her here
and why
and how she can possibly
stay.
I go to bed
whenever I like
and with whomever I choose,
but still I wonder
why I do not
belong in my class,
and where my class is anyway,
and why so many of them
seem to be asleep
while I toss and turn
in perplexity.
They, meanwhile, imagine I am perfect
and have solved everything:
an earthling among the Martians,
at home on her home planet,
feet planted in green grass.
If only we could all admit
that none of us belongs here,
that all of us are Martians,
and that our bedtimes
are always
too early
or
too late.
Driving Me Away
Driving me away
is easier
than saying
goodbye—
kissing the air,
the last syllable
of truth
being always
two lips compressed
around
emptiness—
the emptiness
you dread
yet return to
as just punishment,
just reward.
Who
loved you
so relentlessly?
Who lost you
in that howling void
between infancy
and death?
It is punctuated
by the warm bodies
of women,
who hold you for a while
then run
down that echoing corridor,
doing
as they are told.
The Land of Fuck
Here I was begging the Muse not to get me in trouble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those "filthy" words?pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon?I would have to write my books in Jail or at the foot of the gallows?and these holy cows deep in clover render a verdict of guilty, guilty of dreaming it up "to make money"!
—Henry Miller
The land of fuck
is not for sale.
Caught between
the muslin curtains
of the nursery
and the red damask
of the whorehouse,
the gambling den,
the mafia chieftains'
restaurant
(in whose backroom the big men
with big bellies,
big guns,
and little dicks
gamble lives
away
on a flipped card
or a throw
of bones)—
the land of fuck
is not for sale.
You can steal it
if you dare.
In a dream
you can ascend
to that special room
above the shadowy El
where, amid the rattling trains
carrying bug-eyed
exhibitionists
and drooling
adolescent boys
with perpetual
hard-ons,
the students of Fuck
go to spill their lives away
and the semen pools
under their luminous chairs.
The land of fuck
is not for sale
any more than
the sea is,
and it smells the same.
Ocean wreckage
at low tide: salt and rot
and sea meat left in the sun
too long,
sweet slime
between epochs of bone
and dust.
The land of fuck
is not for sale—
which does not mean
it has no price.
The tax
is tranquility, calm,
and the stillness of life.
The land of fuck
has a price.
Middle Aged Lovers, I
Unable to bear
the uncertainty
of the future,
we consulted seers,
mediums, stock market gurus,
psychics who promised
happiness on this
or another planet,
astrologists of love,
seekers of the Holy Grail.
Looking for certainty
we asked for promises,
lover's knots, pledges, rings,
certificates, deeds of ownership,
when it was always enough
to let your hand
pass over my body,
your eyes find the depths of my own,
and the wind pass over our faces
as it will pass
through our bones,
sooner than we think.
The current is love,
is poetry,
the blood beat
in the thighs,
the electrical charge
in the brain.
Our long leap
into the unknown
began nearly
a half century ago
and is almost
over.
I think of the
amphorae of stored honey
at Paestum
far out-lasting
their Grecian eaters,
or of the furniture
in a pharaoh's tomb
on which
no one sits.
Trust the wind,
my lover,
and the water.
They have the
answers
to all your questions
and mine.
The Rain Is My Home
All my life
I have resented
umbrellas:
middle child
defying the rain,
seeing rainbows
in the parachutes of grey
that collapse over our heads
on rainy days,
I skip in the shiny streets
hearing the songs in the tires,
and loving the sound
of the rain.
Long before I surrendered
to my fate,
I surrendered
to the rain—
a fugue by Bach
raining softly on my head
teaching me fearlessness.
Reader: I give you
this rain.
The Raspberries in My Driveway
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eyes level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
—Thoreau
The raspberries
in my driveway
have always
been here
(for the whole eleven years
I have owned
but have not owned
this house),
yet
I have never
tasted them
before.
Always on a plane.
Always in the arms
of man, not God,
always too busy,
too fretful,
too worried
to see
that all along
my driveway
are red, red raspberries
for me to taste.
Shiny and red,
without hairs—
unlike the berries
from the market.
Little jewels—
I share them
with the birds!
On one perches
a tiny green insect.
I blow her off.
She flies!
I burst the raspberry
upon my tongue.
In my solitude
I commune
with raspberries,
with grasses,
with the world.
The world was always
there before,
but where
was I?
Ah raspberry—
if you are so beautiful
upon my ready tongue,
imagine
what wonders
lie in store
for me!
In the Glass-Bottomed Boat
In the glass-bottomed boat
of our lives, we putter along
gazing at that other world
under the sea—
that world of flickering
yellow-tailed fish,
of deadly moray eels, of sea urchins
like black stars
that devastate great brains
of coral,
of fish the color
of blue neon,
& fish the color
of liquid silver
made by Indians
exterminated
centuries ago.
We pass, we pass,
always looking down.
The fish do not
look up at us,
as if they knew
somehow
their world
for the eternal one,
ours for
the merely time-bound.
The engine sputters.
Our guide—a sweet
black boy with skin
the color of molten chocolate—
asks us of the price of jeans
& karate classes
in the States.
Surfboards too
delight him—
& skateboards.
He wants to sail, sail, sail,
not putter
through the world.
& so do we,
so do we,
wishing for the freedom
of the fish
beneath the reef,
wishing for the crevices
of sunken ship
with its rusted eyeholes,
its great ribbed hull,
its rotted rudder,
its bright propeller
tarnishing beneath the sea.
"They sunk this ship
on purpose,"
says our guide—
which does not surprise
us,
knowing how life
always imitates
even the shabbiest
art.
Our brains forged
in shark & seawreck epics,
we fully expect to see
a wreck like this one,
made on purpose
for our eyes.
But the fish swim on,
intimating death,
intimating outer space,
& even the oceans
within the body
from which we come.
The fish are uninterested
in us.
What hubris to think
a shark concentrates
as much on us
as we on him!
The creatures of the reef
spell death, spell life,
spell eternity,
& still we putter on
in our leaky little boat,
halfway there,
halfway there.
Pane Caldo
Rising in the morning
like warm bread,
from a bed
in America,
the aroma
of my baking
reaches you
in Italy,
rocking in your boat
near the Ponte Longo,
cutting through the glitter
of yesterday's moonlight
on your sunstruck
canal.
My delicious baker—
it is you
who have made
this hot bread
rise.
It is you
who have split the loaf
and covered it with the butter.
I prayed to the moon
streaking the still lagoon
with her skyblue manna;
I prayed for you
to sail into my life,
parting the waters,
making them whole.
And here you come,
half captain, half baker—
& the warm aroma of bread
crosses
the ocean
we share.
Nota in una Bottiglia
Mandando una lettera
da New York a Venezia
da amante ad amante,
da Inglese Americano
ad Italiano Veneziano,
e come mandare
una nota in una bottiglia
da un mare
ad un altro,
da una galassia
ad un altra,
da un epoca
ad un altra,
scirolando per creppacci
nello spazio.
Mio amante
così lontano
eppure. Qui
dentro alia mia anima,
quando respire
al telefono,
un canale
si apre
nel mio cuore,
un canale chiaro
in quell mondo scintillante,
dove ci cullavamo
in una barca
amandoci,
sapendoci parte
della danza
del mare.
E tutt' uno.
La barca
abbracciata dall' acqua
e i corpi nostril
abbracciati l'uno
all' altro,
e la luce del sole
strisciando il mare
finchè il plenilunio
lo colma,
e nel tondo della luna
nasce il nostro amore.
L'amore ci guarisce
perchè ci ricorda
l'integrità
che abbiamo perso
nella nostra lotta
contro noi stessi.
E in questa bottiglia
ti mando quella integrità
e il mare la solleva
e la lascia cader
giù.
La luna e la nostra postina
Porterà il messaggio.
Io aspetto sulla spiaggia
il suo sorgere.
Rendo questo scintillio
nelle sue mani
capaci.
To a Transatlantic Mirror
When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door?
—Suzuki
Sick of the self,
the self-seducing self—
with its games, its fears,
its misty memories, and its prix fixe menu
of seductions (so familiar
even to the seducer)
that he grows sick
of looking at himself
in the mirrored ceiling
before he takes the plunge into this new
distraction from the self
which in fact leads back
to self.
Self—the prison.
Love—the answer and the door.
And yet the self should also be a door,
swinging, letting loves both in and out,
for change
is the world's only fixity, and fixity
her foremost lie.
How to trust love
which has so often
betrayed the betrayer,
seduced the seducer,
and then turned out
to be not even love?
We are jaded,
divorced from our selves
without ever having found
ourselves—and yet we
long for wholeness
if not fixity,
for harmony
if not music of the spheres.
If life is a flood
and there is no ark,
then where do the animals float
two by two?
I refuse to believe
that the flesh falls
from their bones
without understanding
ever coming,
and I refuse to believe
that we must leave
this life entirely alone.
Much harrumphing
across the ocean,
my brother poet coughs,
clears his throat
(he smokes too much),
and gazes into the murky
depths of his word-processor,
as if it were a crystal ball.
I do not know
all that hides
in his heart of darkness
but I know I love
the thoughts
that cloud the surface
of his crystal ball.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Becoming Light by Erica Jong. Copyright © 1991 Erica Mann Jong. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,I New Poems,
II Early Poems,
III From Fruits & Vegetables (1971),
IV From Half-Lives (1973),
V From Loveroot (1975),
VI From How to Save Your Own Life (1977),
VII From Witches (1981),
VIII From At the Edge of the Body (1979),
IX From Ordinary Miracles (1983),
A Biography of Erica Jong,