Amazing words (from her of "Red Dress") that made me sad and happy, laughing and crying. She writes with a verocity and rawness that I want to dive into and never surface.
All that year my friend wanted to kill herself. She would call me late at night, drunk and sobbing, talking about her gun. Finally I convinced her to throw it into the river. Eventually she got much better, but I still worried about her. I thought of her as the little bullet-size ballerina on my jewelry box, spinning and slowing, then spinning again. That she gave me the box was a complete fabrication. She did not give me the box. What she gave me was a picture book called Six-Dinner Sid, about a cat that goes from door to door getting fed by everyone on the block, and another one about a farting dog at a garage sale, and once, to celebrate the publication of my first novel, she gave me a plastic baby bottle with a blue ribbon on it. The truth is that she's much better now. The truth is also that I still worry.
Still, you may lay down sentence after lovely sentence and follow them for months only to find yourself, in the middle of your journey, in a dark wood. Structure can still elude you. I don't necessarily mean the structure of a sonnet or Freytag's Pyramid of the story, though they are useful to know. I mean figuring out the structure to hold what you have to say, the best structure for the material at hand. The way in, through, and finally out the other end. You must, in other words, learn how to shit flowers. A peom or story or memoir, however gorgeously written, has to be able to stand up, and it will not stand up unless you structure it, unless you give it a skeleton. If there is no patter, there is no art. Think hard about what holds your piece together, how the pieces connect, why and how each contributes. Remember that you are creating a world. Do not let it descent into anarchy. To hold anything together in life - especially oneself - is nearly impossible, but in art it is essential.
My mother dropped her spoon in her lap, mashed-potato-side down, and I picked it up and wiped it on a napkin and started to hand it back to her, but she had closed her eyes. She was shifting her shoulders a little, raising the right one and then the left, in barely perceptible movements. She lifted her hands just above the table, so they hovered over her meal like two little spaceships above a tiny city-maybe one they were planning to destory, or maybe one they had come to in peace, to teach us how to cope with the pain and loss of life on earth.
Then i saw that my mother was trying to snap her fingers and couldn't quite. But for the couple of minutes until the song ended, looking as though she were in a kind of beautiful trance, she danced.
It was a little like bear baiting. Then again, [Charles Bukowksi] seemed like someone who practiced self-acceptance rather than the guilt and self-loathing that drive so many lesse alcoholics into AA. He never quit. He went on drinking and wrote book after book.
So even though I suspect that critic was being a dick about my work, I've decided I'm going to be proud of my new nickname. If I am truly honest with myself, I have to admit that I have always wanted someone to touch my soul with his cock. Since childhood, I have wondered where my soul was, and I'm glad to discover it's up there somewhere in my lady parts.
And who knows. Maybe one day, when Bukowksi's up for a posthumous literary award, some critic will say, "Oh, him? Kim Addonizio in pee-stained paints," and then I Hope whoever said it pukes on his shoes.
