Word: poem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...miserably obese childhood. Both are telltale signs of a temperament too florid to suit the doctrinaire, modernist tastes of the men now in her life. One day, seized by a fit of automatic writing while staring at herself in a three-way mirror, she turns out a surreal prose poem called Lady Oracle that becomes a bestseller. Sudden celebrity as the author of Lady Oracle -which publishers promote as an irresistible blend of Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran-brings a blackmailer into Joan's life. Rather than face exposure of her multiple lives, Joan plans a fake accidental death...
Wolff, generally quite sympathetic to his subject, drily places this poem "among the most comical ineptitudes in the language." Crosby was, in literature as in other things, a man of great enthusiasm and little discrimination. He approached his reading with the same naivete apparent in his writing, accepting the literature of decadence as a manual for living. His bible for many years was Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. That Crosby's life of debauchery and despair was inspired by books rather than authentic feelings is effete in itself. And many of the maxims he gleaned from Dorian Graywere...
...Never feared the ultimate fate/ Now that our country has become red/ Who will be its guardian? Our mission, unfinished/ May take a thousand years. The struggle tires us, and our hair is gray/ You and I, old friends, can we just watch our efforts be washed away? (Last poem...
...dreamy, love-struck manner of a man talking about the sloop he is going to buy when he finishes putting his kids through college. To honor death, he wore a black carnation in his buttonhole. He saw suicide as a triumphant adventure, as a poet's most splendid poem, as a giggle, as a glorious stunt and especially as an explosive union with the godhead...
...into a poem...