WHEN AT A CERTAIN PARTY IN NYC
Wherever you’re from sucks,
and wherever you grew up sucks,
and everyone here lives in a converted
chocolate factory or deconsecrated church
without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup
in sight, but only carefully edited objets like
the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen
that looks like an industrial age dildo, and
when you rifle through the bathroom
looking for a spare tampon, you discover
that even their toothpaste is somehow more
desirable than yours. And later you go
with a world famous critic to eat a plate
of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from
Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like
“a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is
so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself
impossible to eat. And your friend back home—-
who says the pioneers who first settled
the great asphalt parking lot of our
middle were not in fact heroic but really
the chubby ones who lacked the imagination
to go all the way to California—it could be that
she’s on to something. Because, admit it,
when you look at the people on these streets,
the razor-blade women with their strategic bones
and the men wearing Amish pants with
interesting zippers, it’s pretty clear that you
will never cut it anywhere that constitutes
a where, that even ordering a pint of tuna salad in
a deli is an illustrative exercise in self-doubt.
So when you see the dogs on the high-rise elevators
practically tweaking, panting all the way down
from the 19th floor to the 1st, dying to get on
with their long planned business of snuffling
trash or peeing on something to which all day
they’ve been looking forward, what you want is
to be on the fastest Conestoga home, where the other
losers live and where the tasteless azaleas are,
as we speak, halfheartedly exploding.
ERIN BELIEU
This poem first appeared in 32 Poems and was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2011. Poem copyright 2011 Erin Belieu, all rights reserved, used by permission of the author.
More about Erin Belieu.
More about Amy Schmitt.
This motionpoem is presented in collaboration with Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner), with thanks to David Lehman, series editor.
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Animator Amy Schmitt comments on the process of creating this motionpoem: “I’ve always had my eye on this poem and was drawn to the idea of a beat poet. I wanted the pace to be fast and to flow into a stream of consciousness. Andy’s read really lends some hardness to this film, contrasting the female character with the cynical undertone of the poem itself.”
After seeing the final product, poet Erin Belieu told us:
“What a wonderful thing it is to see my poem transformed into film! Amy Schmitt gives the poem so much grace with the lyricism of her animation. The ‘cocktail hour’ score running underneath the poem’s narration is pitch perfect. And the dog’s eyeball is 100% brilliant. Haven’t we all felt like that on an elevator in New York?
“The biggest, most pleasant surprise was in hearing how the poem is both complemented and complicated by Andrew Reynold’s hard boiled vocal performance. Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard are two of my favorite movies and I love how the actor’s voice teases out a noir vibe from the poem that I didn’t realize was lurking around in there. All this, plus my son, who’s typically surrounded by poets and generally unimpressed with us as a group, he said, ‘Hey mom, they made your poem sound cool!’ So that’s gravy on top of being a part of such a fun process.”
If one seeks hard enough, one can pawn off the fault for one’s pain on any number of exterior objects. When one is so used to that pain that the prospect of anything else inspires boundless, amorphous fear, what are the options that remain? Does one either remain a slave to the painful familiar or yield to the simple truth of the unknown’s higher value? At some point the subject must come unfrozen. For better or for worse. But will the thaw come through choice, deliberately, or be forced on the subject by the forces of the simple truth of life’s processes. Even the azaleas came to that point, just before exploding, albeit half-heartedly. Go west, young woman, that is where the middle-fingered bird flourishes like a sky-bound flower……And, where the subject finds itself free, once again, under the blood-red light of the western sun, the dragon they have slain…Fear itself.