JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS MAKES ME WANT TO VOMIT WORDS. That's the only way to define it, really. And that's a good thing, a very good thing. Haven't you ever wanted to vomit words, just have them all spill out of you, dirty, so fast that you can't control what's happening? That's what I want most days. Drew Perry, how could you go and give a dangerous book like this to a poet child like me? It's just too beautiful. And haunting. And every character I create in my mind now, in hopes of writing (gasp!) a story is Rayme. I cannot escape Rayme. She makes me want to lose my mind. I already love jars; I am halfway there, I guess. Also the story "Bluegill" plays a huge part in the vomit-factor. Yes, OF COURSE. I'll a stream-of-whateverness piece in which a woman speaks to the baby in her womb?! JAP will. And it will be Bluegill and it will be amazing and it will make me sick.
But, as beautiful as DP's verbal love-making to Jayne was in class, I will keep mine to a minimum. Read this book, no matter what genre you write. I can see shades of it in the sort of half real, half fantasy landscape in which I am writing for 413 right now. And I have to say that I think "Counting" is mostly brilliant. Is it legally a story? I don't know. But as someone who writes mostly poetry, this is how I see stories in my mind. Little flashes of words. Maybe that's how everyone sees stories? But no one writes them that way usually. I suppose that's kind of what happened with my poem, "Silver Season." When I first sat down with the images I thought it might be a story, but then certain sentences just started to ally themselves with others, no more than 2 or 3 together, and poof, it was a poem, as always. And yet it is a story in a way. And certainly the "widest" poem I've written. I'm feeling the wide poem right now. Feeling it wide.
So I've avoided typing out long paragraphs from the book thus far, but I'll just close with the opening lines of Rayme:
"In our student days we were all in need of fortune tellers. No one was sure what was happening in the outside world and no one thought about it much. We had no televisions and we bought no newspapers. Communal life seemed a continual dance in which everyone changed partners, a patient attempt at domesticity by children taking turns being parents. We were adrift but we were together...
...This story could be about any one of those people, but it is about Rayme and comes to no conclusions."
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