Dear Reader,
Exciting news: I have two poems coming out this Saturday, May 11th!
The poems are “Kitchen Love No. 709,” appearing in print in Issue #3 of the After Happy Hour Review, and “On Being Told to Be Careful,” appearing online in the Rising Phoenix Review. (A third poem of mine will appear at the end of this month, also in the Rising Phoenix Review. Keep an eye out for that announcement in a couple of weeks!)
To celebrate these upcoming publications, I wanted to write a short “Behind the Monster” for yet another poem that was featured in the Rising Phoenix Review. This might be my favorite poem I’ve had published so far. It’s called “Late July, On the Porch with My Childhood Best Friend” and it came out, somewhat anachronistically, on Christmas Day of 2022.
You can read the unannotated version here and/or listen to me read it below.
Much has been written on the intertwining themes of light versus dark, sight versus blindness, and knowledge versus ignorance. In literature as in life, light illuminates. It reveals, uncovers, makes visible, makes known. It is the lightbulb of genius, the lightning strike of inspiration, the light at the end of the tunnel. By contrast, darkness is synonymous with blindness and ignorance. But darkness can also be a protector, concealing us from enemies without and within. I’m thinking of Macbeth, in which the tragic hero sees light as an enemy waiting to expose him and darkness as an underhanded ally.1
Stars, hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires; The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
As Macbeth knows well, not everything needs to, wants to, or indeed should be seen. “Late July” riffs on this concept. Rather than desiring knowledge, the poem’s speaker fears it. Light becomes an existential threat, one that exposes the (un)reality of life and disrupts the natural, darkened state of the universe.
Ever since I took a first-level religion class in the fall of 2021,2 I have been interested in the discrepancy in Genesis wherein God seems to create light before He creates the sun. Where did that first light come from? The following summer I posed that question to myself again under the eerie, claustrophobic glow of my friend’s porch light. It struck me that there was something inarticulably unsettling about “artificial” light—a light that only heightens your awareness of the dark. Did the first light create the first darkness? Or did it plant the knowledge of a darkness that was already there? Whatever the case, the poem’s speaker sees not only the light but also herself and her world as artificial. She fantasizes about gouging out her eyes, fleeing like a cockroach, escaping into the void. Yet she knows the light is inescapable. No matter where she went, it would always show her herself. Light is a thing that haunts.3
When I draft a poem, I usually have a sense of the form/shape I want it to take. I knew “Late July” would be one run-on, skinny column of text that evoked a monologue or a meltdown. I imagined unrolling it on a piece of parchment and watching the words run away from themselves. This poem has a slight journalistic element—the title gives you the who, what, where, when, and the body brings it home with the why. In writing it, I gave myself an unexpected gift: a time capsule to a night, a place, and a feeling. I hope its readers experience some of the eeriness of that night, place, and feeling, too.
There’s a stereotype of writers cringing away from their past work, so I feel weird about saying how much I like “Late July.” But it’s true! This is one of those rare instances in which I wouldn’t go back and edit a poem, not even to delete an extraneous word. I said what I meant to say. I wouldn’t change a thing.
Thanks for reading.
Yours,
Jane
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.4.50-53. Accessed via https://shakespeare-navigators.ewu.edu/macbeth/T14.html#47.
The class was succinctly called “God” and it was taught by Gil Anidjar, a scholar of religion and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies. His books include Blood: A Critique of Christianity and The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy.
It occurs to me, writing this analysis nearly two years after I wrote the poem, that there is something of a coming-of-age narrative in “Late July” as well. The speaker alludes to the idea of being an actor in a play, identifying her surroundings as “wallpaper” and “set dressing.” Once she recognizes her role, she can’t go back to playing pretend. Such is the transition between childhood and adulthood.