I'm laughing out loud over Julie's mention of the fact that her mother accused some of her poems of being "rather vulgar, you know." It's odd how remarks like that--the ones we swear are not going to bother us--are the ones that invariably turn up in the poems, and in our thoughts, too. Here it is in the final stanza of "Villanelle for Thiel," below, from "The Bartender Poems." Sometimes I think there would be no poetry at all if it weren't for those burrs you can't get rid of.
The night he took me up against the wall,
the veins on his neck standing out like ropes,
I learned that life is not like books at all.
I was eighteen when I started to ball
politely with poets and bookish folk,
but in my thirties up against the wall,
bashing and banging like a poor rag doll
with a candy heart and no brain or bones,
I saw that life was not like books at all,
but more like headlines--barroom brawls,
a blues song sung with flatted notes--
the night he took me up against the wall.
Uncomprehending, my mother calls
my poems "vulgar" on the telephone.
She taught me how to read when I was small.
I tell her life is not like books at all.
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