If everything beautiful is poetry, nothing is

On drawing letters and killing dogs

For those of you who are not fluent in kid-write, I’ve included a transcript of my best story to date at the end of this post.

This story is written in my sister's second grade notebook. Like, in the blank section left after finishing the year. She has no memory of it.

Dede’s story is written in my handwriting. No one in my family admits to helping me write it. This, also in my handwriting, on a random page at the back of the same journal:

Otessa Moshfegh, author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel beloved to me and the rest of The Bell Jar girlies you’ve had a crush on, publishes on Substack pages of her strange, brilliant, and dedicated journal entries from her girlhood. I’ve never been (and never will be) a regimented, record-keeper. Like Didion’s notebook and “That woman Estelle” I’m fond of scraps, fragmented.

This notebook I found Dede in is collaborative and conversational. Quite literally at times:

“There was a time when drawing and writing were not separated for you. In fact, our ability to write could only come from our willingness and inclination to draw. In the beginning of our writing and reading lives we DREW the letters of our name…The motions each required hadn’t become automatic yet. There was a lot of variability of shape, order, and orientation. The letters were characters, and when certain characters got together in a certain order, they spelled your name.” –Lynda Barry, Making Comics

In first grade, my best friend Ally and I got in trouble for drawing our y’s like this:

It’s strange that I've become a poet. No one in my family reads or writes poetry. I was the first person on my mom’s side to earn a graduate degree. On my father’s side, the artists have all killed themselves.

Even after getting an M.F.A. in creative writing, I really only have one friend who reads and writes poetry with fervor. My devotion to poetry has become the most intimate and consistent relationship in my life, as it is my relationship with myself.

I’m almost certain my sister drew these:

My sister taught herself calculus by mapping out the houses in our neighborhood. I don’t get it but I get it. She explains this to me like a confession of insanity, and while the mechanics miss me, the mystery of it does not.

Lady Lazarus is the first poem I remember reading. Raise your hand if Lady Lazarus has ruined your life. I could have been a homeowner by now if I stuck to novels. Really, I would have people in my book club to be mad at.

My academic career began with a night light. The first man I took to bed they call Lemony Snicket. And bending towards him, my crooked neck. Maybe I’ve always been this afraid. It’s a relief to remember how the pages turned over then, as they do now, so loud in the dark.

I read A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson biography, while I hid from COVID at my parents’ house. I couldn’t stop talking about Shirley Jackson for like an entire year and to shut me up we watched that one film where Elizabeth Moss plays her and at the end we were all quiet until my dad asked, is that why you love her? Because she’s like my mom and sister?

Women who didn’t live long enough. Poets who’ve not yet named themselves as such.

Dianne Seuss’ Library of Congress interview. Mary’s Ruefle’s collages. Ross Gay’s 2016 AWP interview or Rachel McKibbens’ Tumblr reading.

I stare at Carmen Maria Machado’s note on my wall (write your ass off) and the text, screen-shotted and printed out from my thesis director, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, “poetry is going to work out, know that.”

Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury.”

I feel real in poetry. The best of which, mercy, escapes the hyperlink.

I used to do this thing in elementary school. I would scribble in the margin of a worksheet or notebook. And then I’d erase it, hard, so that my eraser would leave behind little shrapnel, rubber bits dispersed indiscriminately within a square-inch radius. I’d then draw a line, connecting each erasure dingleberry to the next, until a recognizable shape emerged. It was like finding a bunny in a cloud except I also controlled the sky.

The point was never to produce drawings that I might show to other people. The point was that I was bored.

When I managed to turn the indiscriminate shape into a witches’ nose or a galactic turnip, I’d start again: erase it, follow the shreds of my erasure, transform far-off suns into belts and cups. Were these my first poems?

If everything is poetry, nothing is. I’m just following the familiar clumps. Before meaning, there was the sound and smell of erasure, pencil on paper, and the dents left which render the eraser useless.

There it is! Where it was not before.

Ty for reading <3,

rmb

P.S. Thank you, paid subscribers. Seriously. There are few of you, yet your support grants me the ability to send my book out to small press poetry contests which is a necessary and expensive next step in my career. I have not been able to post weekly poetry comics the way I originally envisioned this page. Is it a cop out to blame my slow thinking and writing on the natural state of poetry? Probably. I know those of you who’ve subscribed have done so not our of reliable and timely content, but out of support for me and my art and for that I’m grateful.

P. S. S. Here's the transcript (spelling errors included bc they’re fun):

“Go catch DeDe” Leminon explained. DeDe was not ordinary dog. He kind of looked like this:

Do you notice anything wrong with this poordog? Anything? Well he has 5 legs, and really only 4 paws. First DeDe, was ran over by a monster truck. That knocked off all of his hands and legs.

He had a huge surgery and only 3 legs were successful. The other was badly, horibly injured and would not come off. So the vetrinaryins replased it with an extra leg, somehow this messed up his face and now he looks like a clown, that is DeDe.

“DeDe! You need to go to bed! You are goint to the Vet’s tomorrow,”

Well I guess you learned a little big about DeDe. You could probaby guess you won't be able to go to sleep tonight. Well, here is something to chill you down, and sad you up again.

DeDe is going to die.