Some reading notes on Ariana Reines' Coeur de Lion

I like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath's work, but they've never been especially important sources of inspiration/influence for me in terms of my own writing for several reasons. I'm not a Boston Brahman living in the 1950s, and I don't currently face the same degree, or even kinds, of gender and class-based social and aesthetic restrains that they did. I feel trite and mean when I say this, but I don't have to marry or be in love with a rich asshole and then feel abject and bad about it.

True, my family would probably, if I asked them their opinion about it, like me to marry. And like me to marry a nice, upper middle class NPR Democrat engineer or entrepreneur or political science wonk or perhaps a certain specific sort of academic who knows a little bit about music and literature and gourmet food, but it's not like there's any money for them to threaten to cut me off from if I don't, and I don't need the protection of a husband to live without the support of my family, and I can live and work and not starve and do more than not starve on my own.

I just remembered a dinner party that I went to with my brother and sister-in-law at one of their friend's houses in Belmont. I'd not yet learned to navigate parties with confidence and charm, but I'm sure I was some combination of overly energetic, friendly, and strange. I was uncomfortable being around Belmont rich people. I remember very few specific details about the evening. We brought guacamole. Someone was trying to decide between Harvard and Yale for law school. Someone had been on the Atkins diet who got really drunk ate half a pear tart. They were talking about their trips to Europe. I tried to talk about Singapore and Malaysia, but no one had been to either of those places, and I'd only been to England and Ireland and never continental Europe. I kept thinking about Plath and eventually Sexton at McLean, and how Sexton actually kind of wanted to go there and how fucked up it was that being at a mental hospital would seem a preferable alternative to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet outside of one. I remember looking around at the women in the room, most of whom were academics, becoming academics, or married to academics (I guess there were lawyers and business women and men, too) and wondering how many of them were depressed and/or taking psychiatric medications.

I'm thinking about all of this because I've just read Coeur de Lion, by Ariana Reines. And because Plath and Sexton are thus far the only non-contemporary poets to come up in any conversation about Gurlesque that I've read. I have a lot to say about Coeur de Lion. It's good. It's maybe the best book by one of my 20-some and 30-some peers that I've read in two or three years. It's got major energy. It's a super hyper-aware love poem aware of the historical and grammatical constraints and pleasures of lyric. It's perverse.

The poem isn't attempting to represent anything like Suzanne Muzard's idea of reciprocal love: "The idea of love is weak, and its representations lead to errors. To love is to be sure of oneself. I cannot accept nonreciprocal love, and therefore I reject that two lovers might be in contradiction on a topic as serious as love. I do not wish to be free, and there is no sacrifice on my part in this. Love as I conceive it has no barrier to cross, no cause to betray."

Coeur de Lion knows that "you" is always a constructed object, and that the world comes into the poem at you's expense (both in the poem and maybe even out of it). Lyric love traditionally depends on the beloved being a distant jerk and on the poet being alienated and economically disenfranchised--Coeur de Lion knows this though, and tries to push that dynamic as much as possible.

But, but. It did make me think of the dinner party in Belmont. That says more about me, maybe, than the book, but still...

(The poem made me think of a lot of other things, too, including some New Narrative, Bataille, most of French Feminist theory, Kathy Goes to Haiti, Djuna Barnes, and Freud more than Lacan or Zizek because even though Freud is often wrong his theories of subjectivity are so much more physical and bodily than Lacan or Zizek).

Long sentence: ...Something about how the poem chooses in a totally self-aware way to inhabit a traumatic series of neurotic loops that obsess about love and loving a rich, emotionally abusive jerk who is not a very good writer and the abjection and self-hatred that come from this choice, which does, yes, remind me of Sexton's desire to be McLean.

More later.