Behind the Monster: "On Being Asked To Be More Specific When It Comes to Longing" & "Loneliness is like glitter"

Poem Annotations & Analyses by the Author

“Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself.”

—Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

“I want a sunburn / Just to know that I’m alive / To know I’m alive”

—Thriving Ivory, “Angels on the Moon”

Dear Reader,

In life, there are beach bums and there are beach bummers. Guess which one I am.

What is it about the beach that gets me down? I suspect it has to do with heightened expectation. I grew up in a landlocked state, so going to the beach was and is a big deal to me. Like Christmas or my birthday, I want it to be perfect. Which is a lot to ask of any occasion, no matter how special. When something inevitably goes wrong—inclement weather or an ill-fitting swim suit or sand getting somewhere that sand shouldn’t be—high-highs crash into low-lows.

I wrote “On Being Asked to Be More Specific When It Comes to Longing” this August, but the pieces of it had been percolating for much longer. A writing friend of mine, Claire Shepherd, brought the eponymous Carl Phillip’s poem to one of our workshops in Colorado, suggesting that we write our own poems based off the title.¹ I loved the prompt, but it didn’t actually click for me until a melancholy beach day this summer, when I was reminded of my favorite lines from Shauna Barbosa’s poem “GPS”.²

Author’s annotation of “On Being Asked to Be More Specific When it Comes to Longing,” paper and pen.

I drew asterisks under each instance of phonetic alliteration, enjoying the rhythm it lends to the piece. I circled every use of the word “love” or “lover,” one in every stanza but the final two. This was a point of consideration when I workshopped the poem: is it too repetitive? I decided that a) yes it is, and b) I would keep it that way, because it demonstrates the speaker’s obsession with love, in its presence and its absence.

A contradiction is at play here. The poem is about loneliness—a lack of love—yet look at the fourth line: “Everyone you love is worried for you”. The speaker is surrounded by loved ones—who are tuned into enough recognize that something is wrong. How can someone be surrounded by love and still feel lonely? One answer, of course, is that there are different kinds of love. The presence of one does not necessarily fulfill the desire for another. Another answer is that loneliness is inherently contradictory. It is a self-perpetuating condition. It convinces you that its cure is to pull away, to draw further into yourself, to stop trying to connect and therefore stop hurting. It’s a fascinating phenomenon; there is nothing quite like it. Loneliness is a self-swallowing snake.

Author’s annotation of “Loneliness is like glitter,” paper and pen.

Though written far apart from each other in time, these two poems make a great couple. I wrote “Loneliness is like glitter” after reading excerpts from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, a collection of essays about her experience with loneliness in New York. She writes,

“This is what's so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required.”³

I started thinking about loneliness as something visible. Loneliness a contagion. Loneliness as an aposematism. Loneliness as a day at the beach. Loneliness as the feeling that everyone else is having the time of their lives, unburdened by whatever the hell is wrong with you.

Someone on Tumblr posited that poets write from a central emotion. (E.g. Richard Siken writes from panic, Mary Oliver writes from relief, etc.) Lately, I’ve been writing from the central emotion of loneliness. So, that kind of sucks. It would be nice to be able to write from the emotion of being totally cool and fine. Loneliness feels gross and embarrassing, but I think writing about it takes the edge off the shame I feel around it. As Laing says,

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?”

Reading Laing’s work helped me feel less alone in my loneliness. If either of my poems did that for you, I will consider them a success.

Thanks for reading.

Yours,

Jane

Read the unannotated poems below:

1. Claire read her beautiful version of “On Being Asked to Be More Specific When It Comes to Longing” at Ignota, an event that I wrote about below:

Commonplace: Mountain Musings

2. Available in her collection, Cape Verdean Blues.

3. Emphasis mine.