Far and away, this is her most controversial poem, shocking in its admissions, even after a whole year reading her other poems.
I’m not going to say this poem vindicates my early reactions to her – because the poem is far more than just an admission, it is a testimony to new found freedom and an outpouring of relief that should not be judged by any outsider, especially me.
For this reason, I am going to do my best to refrain from editorializing and do as straight an analysis as possible, letting her own words explain her logic – which may or many not fit with my sometimes too straight morality.
(It would be unfair – if I can use that word in this contest – to pass judgement, especially at time has largely proved my previous judgments wrong.)
Oddly enough, as shocking a poem as this is, it is not an indictment or a confession, but a celebration, an coming out in poetry that she has largely resisted in the past. Previous poems like the one about trickling up or even about changed priorities hid behind complicated metaphors that only the savvy could unencrypt. There is very little encryption here.
She opens the poem telling about a woman she spent an hour with “Who made my everyday reprise of wantonness and regret a breeze,” she writes.
The implication is that she has lived her life to this point feeling guilty about her “wantonness,” a word that describes lascivious and other excessive behavior, especially in regard to sex.
Who this woman is, she does not say. I might be her drinking buddy from our office, but possibly not.
The poem calls this woman “a seed of change,” blown in on some breeze and grew into a rare flower” that turned into reality and stopped our poet’s constant self-reprisals – this rare and wanton flower reminding the poet that “fair” and “unfair” are just words, “not the way things are.”
The poet refers to this flower as a pure spirit, a miracle that jolts the poet out of her “older, time-worn ways” and into liberation.
The world does not revolve around guilt and perpetual penance, nor does life follow the prescribed rules of merit in which talented people who work hard will succeed and get their just rewards. There is no karmic light around the concept of “doing the right thing.”
“This is wrong,” she writes.
The key to happiness is not to base your worth on “right and wrong,” “fair or unfair,” which ties you to a kind of life that makes you bleed while you sit patiently waiting to serve.
“Life is, it is simple,” she writes.
In other words, if you buy into the bullshit people tell you about doing the right thing then you’ve waited the beauty of what is.
The idea is to live life without regret or guilt, and not to try to make it make sense.
Essentially, the poem says do whatever it takes to make yourself happy and do not bind yourself with outmoded morality that only brings you guilt and pain.
This is a poem of liberation, the culmination of a number of poems over the last month that seem to be building to this idea of an unfair world and that by obeying rules you are holding yourself back – and if you are made unhappy by obeying other people’s rules, then to hell with the rules.
The shocking aspect of the poem is the fact that she finally opens up about things she previously kept quiet or disguised in complicated poetic metaphor, alluding to a robust sexual life style and her ambitions for advancement as she struggled with resulting guilt.
The joyous tone of the poem comes from her throwing caution to the wind and proclaiming in a loud voice she won’t be ashamed any more of doing things that make her happy.
In some ways, this is a lot like a long-closeted gay finally coming out, no longer having to live with guilt and fear.
And as shocking as it is to read how openly she professes her life style (and how shocked I would have been and was a year ago by it all), the poem is a declaration of independence, and at the same time, defuses everything her enemies might use to discredit her.
