Erica Jong
1942/American
Erica Jong—novelist, poet, and essayist—has consistently used her craft to help provide women with a powerful and rational voice in forging a feminist consciousness. She has published 20 books, including eight novels, six volumes of poetry, six books of non-fiction and numerous articles in magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times, the Sunday Times of London, Elle, Vogue and the New York Times Book Review. / / In her groundbreaking first novel, Fear of Flying (18 million in print around the world), she introduced Isadora Wing, who also plays a central part in three subsequent novels—How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses, and Any Woman's Blues. In her three historical novels—Fanny, Shylock's Daughter, and Sappho's Leap—she demonstrates her mastery of eighteenth-century British literature, the verses of Shakespeare, and ancient Greek lyric, respectively. Erica’s latest book, a memoir of her life as a writer, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, came out in March 2006. It was a national bestseller in the US and many other countries. / / Erica Jong was honored with the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature. She has also received Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize, also won by W.S. Merwin and Sylvia Plath. In France, she received the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence and in Italy, she received the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature. The City University of New York awarded Ms. Jong an honorary PhD at the College of Staten Island. / / Her works have appeared all over the world and are as popular in Eastern Europe, Japan, China, and other Asian countries as they have been in the United States and Western Europe. She has lectured, taught and read her work all over the world. / / A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University's Graduate Faculties where she received her M.A. in 18th Century English Literature, Erica Jong also attended Columbia's graduate writing program where she studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. In 2007, continuing her long-standing relationship with the university, a large collection of Erica’s archival material was acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it will be available to graduate and undergraduate students. Ms. Jong plans to teach master classes at Columbia and also advise the Rare Book Library on the acquisition of other women writers’ archives. / / Calling herself “a defrocked academic,” Ms. Jong has partly returned to her roots as a scholar. She has taught at Ben Gurion University in Israel, Bennington College in the US, Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont and many other distinguished writing programs and universities. She loves to teach and lecture, though her skill in these areas has sometimes crowded her writing projects. “As long as I am communicating the gift of literature, I’m happy,” Jong says. A poet at heart, Ms. Jong believes that words can save the world. / / Erica Jong lives in New York City and Weston, CT with her husband, attorney Ken Burrows, and standard poodle, Belinda Barkowitz. Her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, is also a writer. / ___ / Source: The author's website: / http://www.ericajong.com/ / "Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads." / -Erica Jong / /
Sometimes the poem
doesn't want to come;
it hides from the poet
like a playful cat
who has run
under the house
& lurks among slugs,
roots, spiders' eyes,
ledge so long out of the sun
that it is dank
with the breath of the Troll King.
Sometimes the poem
darts away
like a coy lover
who is afraid of being possessed,
of feeling too much,
of losing his essential
loneliness-which he calls
freedom.
Sometimes the poem
can't requite
the poet's passion.
The poem is a dance
between poet & poem,
but sometimes the poem
just won't dance
and lurks on the sidelines
tapping its feet-
iambs, trochees-
out of step with the music
of your mariachi band.
If the poem won't come,
I say: sneak up on it.
Pretend you don't care.
Sit in your chair
reading Shakespeare, Neruda,
immortal Emily
and let yourself flow
into their music.
Go to the kitchen
and start peeling onions
for homemade sugo.
Before you know it,
the poem will be crying
as your ripe tomatoes
bubble away
with inspiration.
When the whole house is filled
with the tender tomato aroma,
start kneading the pasta.
As you rock
over the damp sensuous dough,
making it bend to your will,
as you make love to this manna
of flour and water,
the poem will get hungry
and come
just like a cat
coming home
when you least
expect her.
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For Naomi Lazard
Sometimes I can't wait until I look like Nadezhda Mandelstam.
-- Naomi Lazard
My friends are tired.
The ones who are married are tired
of being married.
The ones who are single are tired
of being single.
They look at their wrinkles.
The ones who are single attribute their wrinkles
to being single.
The ones who are married attribute their wrinkles
to being married.
They have very few wrinkles.
Even taken together,
they have very few wrinkles.
But I cannot persuade them
to look at their wrinkles
collectively.
& I cannot persuade them that being married
or being single
has nothing to do with wrinkles.
Each one sees a deep & bitter groove,
a San Andreas fault across her forehead.
"It is only a matter of time
before the earthquake."
They trade the names of plastic surgeons
like recipes.
My friends are tired.
The ones who have children are tired
of having children.
The ones who are childless are tired
of being childless.
They love their wrinkles.
If only their were deeper
they could hide.
Sometimes I think
(but do not dare to tell them)
that when the face is left alone to dig its grave,
the soul is grateful
& rolls in.
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"...a frozen memory, like any photo,
where nothing is missing, not even,
and especially, nothingness..."
-- Julio Cortázar, "Blow Up"
Mirror-mad,
he photographed reflections:
sunstorms in puddles,
cities in canals,
double portraits framed
in sunglasses,
the fat phantoms who dance
on the flanks of cars.
Nothing caught his eye
unless it bent
or glistered
over something else.
He trapped clouds in bottles
the way kids
trap grasshoppers.
Then one misty day
he was stopped
by the windshield.
Behind him,
an avenue of trees,
before him,
the mirror of that scene.
He seemed to enter
what, in fact, he left.
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I was sick of being a woman,
sick of the pain,
the irrelevant detail of ***
my own concavity
uselessly hungering
and emptier whenever it was filled,
and filled finally
by its own emptiness,
seeking the garden of solitude
instead of men.
The white bed
in the green garden--
I looked forward
to sleeping alone
the way some long
for a lover.
Even when you arrived,
I tried to beat you
away with my sadness,
my cynical seductions,
and my trick of
turning a slave
into a master.
And all because
you made
my fingertips ache
and my eyes cross
in passion
that did not know its own name.
Bear, beast, lover
of the book of my body,
you turned my pages
and discovered
what was there
to be written
on the other side.
And now
I am blank
for you,
a tabula rasa
ready to be printed
with letters
in an undiscovered language
by the great press
of our love.
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You open to me
a little,
then grow afraid
and close again,
a small boy
fearing to be hurt,
a toe stubbed
in the dark,
a finger cut
on paper.
I think I am free
of fears,
enraptured, abandoned
to the call
of the Bacchae,
my own siren,
tied to my own
mast,
both Circe
and her swine.
But I too
am afraid:
I know where
life leads.
The impulse
to join,
to confess all,
is followed
by the impulse
to renounce,
and love--
imperishable love--
must die,
in order
to be reborn.
We come
to each other
tentatively,
veterans of other
wars,
divorce warrants
in our hands
which we would beat
into blossoms.
But blossoms
will not withstand
our beatings.
We come
to each other
with hope
in our hands--
the very thing
Pandora kept
in her casket
when all the ills
and woes of the world
escaped.
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Spring, rainbows,
ordinary miracles
about which
nothing new can be said.
The stars on a clear night
of a New England winter;
the soft air of the islands
along the old
Spanish Main;
pirate gold shining
in the palm;
the odor of roses
to the lover's nose. . .
There is no more poetry
to be written
of these things.
The rainbow's sudden revelation--
behold!
The cliché is true!
What can one say
but that?
So too
with you, little heart,
little miracle,
but you are
no less miracle
for being ordinary.
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People who live by the sea
understand eternity.
They copy the curves of the waves,
their hearts beat with the tides,
& the saltiness of their blood
corresponds with the sea.
They know that the house of flesh
is only a sandcastle
built on the shore,
that skin breaks
under the waves
like sand under the soles
of the first walker on the beach
when the tide recedes.
Each of us walks there once,
watching the bubbles
rise up through the sand
like ascending souls,
tracing the line of the foam,
drawing our index fingers
along the horizon
pointing home.
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After the first astounding rush,
after the weeks at the lake,
the crystal, the clouds, the water lapping the rocks,
the snow breaking under our boots like skin,
& the long mornings in bed. . .
After the tangos in the kitchen,
& our eyes fixed on each other at dinner,
as if we would eat with our lids,
as if we would swallow each other. . .
I find you still
here beside me in bed,
(while my pen scratches the pad
& your skin glows as you read)
& my whole life so mellowed & changed
that at times I cannot remember
the crimp in my heart that brought me to you,
the pain of a marriage like an old ache,
a husband like an arthritic knuckle.
Here, living with you,
love is still the only subject that matters.
I open to you like a flowering wound,
or a trough in the sea filled with dreaming fish,
or a steaming chasm of earth
split by a major quake.
You changed the topography.
Where valleys were,
there are now mountains.
Where deserts were,
there now are seas.
We rub each other,
but we do not wear away.
The sand gets finer
& our skins turn silk.
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the sky sinks its blue teeth
into the mountains.
Rising on pure will
(the lurch & lift-off,
the sudden swing
into wide, white snow),
I encourage the cable.
Past the wind
& crossed tips of my skis
& the mauve shadows of pines
& the spoor of bears
& deer,
I speak to my fear,
rising, riding,
finding myself
the only thing
between snow & sky,
the link
that holds it all together.
Halfway up the wire,
we stop,
slide back a little
(a whirr of pulleys).
Astronauts circle above us today
in the television blue of space.
But the thin withers of alps
are waiting to take us too,
& this might be the moon!
We move!
Friends, this is a toy
merely for reaching mountains
merely
for skiing down.
& now we're dangling
like charms on the same bracelet
or upsidedown tightrope people
(a colossal circus!)
or absurd winged walkers,
angels in animal fur,
with mittened hands waving
& fear turning
& the mountain
like a fisherman,
reeling us all in.
So we land
on the windy peak,
touch skis to snow,
are married to our purple shadows,
& ski back down
to the unimaginable valley
leaving no footprints.
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Smoke, it is all smoke
in the throat of eternity. . . .
For centuries, the air was full of witches
Whistling up chimneys
on their spiky brooms
cackling or singing more sweetly than Circe,
as they flew over rooftops
blessing & cursing their
kind.
We banished & burned them
making them smoke in the throat of god;
we declared ourselves
"enlightened."
"The dark age of horrors is past,"
said my mother to me in 1952,
seven years after our people went up in smoke,
leaving a few teeth, a pile of bones.
The smoke curls and beckons.
It is blue & lavender
& green as the undersea world.
It will take us, too.
O let us not go sheepishly
clinging to our nakedness.
But let us go like witches ****** heavenward
by the Goddess' powerful breath
& whistling, whistling, whistling
on our beautiful brooms.
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