{"id":9090,"date":"2009-11-09T10:17:32","date_gmt":"2009-11-09T17:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9090"},"modified":"2009-11-09T10:17:32","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T17:17:32","slug":"richard-jeffrey-newman-on-the-power-of-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9090","title":{"rendered":"Richard Jeffrey Newman on The Power of Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

I need to do a little self-promotion. This past Saturday, my colleague and friend Marcia McNair interviewed me about my book The Silence Of Men<\/em><\/a> on her BlogTalk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Marcia is a perceptive reader and wonderful interviewer and her questions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the conversation was about the poem called “Working The Dotted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girlfriend and I had sex, and she was a virgin. What I liked best about Marcia’s reading of this piece was her noticing my mother’s presence in the poem and how that started me talking about something I often encounter but have never given much serious thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncomfortable with their mother’s sexuality, and I don’t understand it. Or, to be more accurate, while I understand intellectually, I don’t get it emotionally. As well, they often it profoundly disturbing that I am not made uncomfortable not just by the idea of my mother as a sexual being, but by the fact that, when I was growing up, I knew–that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she certainly did not rub it in my face either)–that she had sexual relationships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occasionally go to bars, or dancing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick someone up herself, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it seemed to me perfectly natural. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other single 30-year-old women did when they socialized? My mother has been a single woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expected her not to have one or to keep it hidden from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was growing up, and it never seemed strange to me or wrong or awkward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was having sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awkward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is something I want to write about, something I had never really thought to write about until Marcia brought it up. Here is the poem:<\/p>\n

Working The Dotted Line<\/h2>\n

I don\u2019t remember what vacation
\nI was home for, or how Beth
\nmanaged to be in New York
\non the one day we\u2019d have
\nthe apartment to ourselves,
\nbut I think I recall
\nmy mother\u2019s hanging crystals
\nscattering the afternoon sunlight
\nin small rainbows that shimmied
\non the walls and on our skin,
\nand I can still see Beth stretching
\nnervous along the length
\nof the daybed\u2019s mattress,
\nand my fingers tracing
\nthe ridges of her ribs
\nas she tugged at my erection.
\nI\u2019m ready. Let\u2019s do it!<\/em><\/p>\n

It was her first time, not mine,
\nbut it was my first condom,
\nand I\u2019d forgotten to read the directions,
\nso I stood there growing soft,
\nsquinting at the print on the box
\ntelling me the step-by-step
\nI needed to learn
\nwas on the inside.
\nI ripped the cardboard open
\nand sat reading on the bed\u2019s edge,
\nthumbing the foil-packed
\nlubricated circle,
\ntrying to visualize
\nwhat I had to do.
\nBeth reached into my lap
\nto ready me again,
\nbut when I tore along the dotted line,
\nour protection, like a goldfish
\ntaken by hand from its bowl,
\nslipped from my grasp
\nand landed under the desk
\nmy mother sat at
\nwhen she paid the bills.
\nWhen I picked it up,
\nit was covered with the dust
\nand small particles of dirt
\nthat settle daily into all our lives,
\nso I didn\u2019t put the next one on
\ntill I was kneeling hard
\nbetween Beth\u2019s open legs.
\nShe raised herself on her elbows,
\nsmiling that the second skin
\nwe needed to keep us safe
\nshould make me so clumsy,
\nbut once I let go
\nof what the instructions called
\nthe reservoir tip\u2014I thought
\nof the dams holding water back
\nin the mountains near where she lived
\nand what would happen if they broke\u2014
\nher smile disappeared
\nand bunching the sheet beneath her
\ninto her fists, she lifted
\nher butt onto the pillow
\nwe\u2019d heard would make things easier.<\/p>\n

I bent for a quick look
\nat where I had to go
\nand climbed up onto her,
\ntrying with one hand
\nto be graceful and accurate
\nand with the other
\nto balance over her
\nwithout falling.
\nAt her first grimace
\nI pulled back. No!<\/em>
\nShe shook her head, eyes
\nclamped shut and then
\nstaring wide, her voice
\na whisper through clenched teeth,
\nJust do it! Get it over with!<\/em><\/p>\n

So I entered her again, trying
\nfrom the tightness in her face
\nto gauge how hard not to push,
\nbut when she cried out anyway,
\nI left her body one more time
\nand crouched over her,
\nmy latex-covered penis
\nnosing downward
\ntowards her navel,
\nand I placed my palms
\nagainst her cheeks,
\nI cannot hurt you like this!<\/em><\/p>\n

Look, it\u2019s going to hurt,<\/em> she said.
\nThere\u2019s no other way.
\nAnd I\u2019ve chosen you!<\/em><\/p>\n

And since I wanted so much to be her choice,
\nI kissed her eyelids and her mouth,
\nand with my eyes buried
\nin the hollow of her neck
\nmoved slowly in
\ntill I felt her flesh
\nstop giving way. Then,
\nwith one arm around her rib cage
\nand the other around her head,
\nholding her tight against my chest,
\nI pulled down and thrust up
\nin a single motion I breathed through
\nlike I was lifting heavy boxes.
\nShe screamed into the muscle
\njust above my collar bone,
\nbit deep into my flesh,
\nand, as she bled onto me,
\nI bled.<\/p>\n

We said nothing afterwards.
\nWe didn\u2019t cuddle
\nor smile at each other as we dressed
\nor walk hand in hand
\nto the train that took her home;
\nand I did not ask her
\nwhat her silence meant,
\nnor she mine, but if she had,
\nI would\u2019ve told her this:
\nMy wordlessness was shame.
\nI\u2019d no idea how not to hurt her;
\nand I would\u2019ve told her
\nI wanted it to do over,
\nwhich is what I\u2019d tell her even now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I need to do a little self-promotion. This past Saturday, my colleague and friend Marcia McNair interviewed me about my book The Silence Of Men on her BlogTalk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}